"Philosophy of Time Travel" at the Studio Museum

[twinkle]

this is an interesting artwork that, while not exactly inspired by Donnie Darko, was influenced by the artists's discussion of some of the concepts in the film.
it involves Brancusi's "Endless Column" (a World War I monument) and imaginary travel through space and time, along w/a familiar crash through a ceiling.
it shares its title w/the Roberta Sparrow book in the film.


Sun Ra’s ideas about space exploration (he claimed to have been descended from the inhabitants of Saturn) led them to “Donnie Darko” (2001), a film that involves giant rabbits, hallucinatory travels through time and space, a plane crash in which an engine falls out of the sky and lands on the roof of a house, and a book titled “Philosophy of Time Travel.”
www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/arts/design/20harl.html

www.studiomuseum.org/pr/int03b.pdf

Some viewers may recognize the project's title from the 2001 sci-fi/horror film, Donnie Darko. With its 'tangent universe,' 'artifacts of time' and atmosphere of apocalypse, the movie indeed sparked the artists' initial dialog on Philosophy as a simulated collision of art-historical assumptions and ideas. Since then, the project has taken on a life of its own, becoming a kind of declaration of independence from museological fashion as well as an investigation into the function of form.
channel.creative-capital.org/project_881.html



The crash is part of the impossible narrative that we wished to convey. How can the past itself crash into the present? How can time itself travel? What happens when time and its elements travel and regroup in another space and time? Those were some of the questions which drove our creation of the project.
www.artslant.com/ny/artists/rackroom/2657

[Twitchmonkey]

I'm not getting that "Donnie Darko feeling" out of this stuff, but they are interesting in their own way, and a little bit of DD recognition never hurt.

[twinkle]

^ i agree: it isn't "Donnie Darko Art" (which may be a good thing).
yes, nice tip o' the hat that these people, familiar w/the film, incorporated ideas/title from it.

[that last link has an interview and comments from the artists. the quote posted could apply to the movie itself, especially "impossible narrative".]

from the site:
The installation brings the outside in, the past into the future, and the still into sinuous movement, shattering the walls of the museum space and the present alike.

The five artists involved in the project, Edgar Arceneaux, Vincent Galen Johnson, Olga Koumoundouros, Rodney McMillian and Matthew Sloly, studied together at CalArts and have been involved in a wide range of solo and group exhibitions around the world. They work in different media, from sculpture to photography to digital technology, but often find common ground. In this case, the 2001 cult film Donnie Darko, which features an imaginary book called The Philosophy of Time Travel inspired them to think about how art history bends back on itself.