The Olympic Sculpture Park takes the landscape and molds its shape to create an experience for the viewers and explorers visiting the Elliot Bay area of Seattle. Landscape is shaped to guide and direct pedestrians to participate in the landscape, view individual sculptures, and experience them in contrast with the surrounding city structures and bordering of ocean water. All of the elements hold a separate idea, while combining to create a beautiful conglomerate of images and structural elements within the park. The sculptures here embody time kinetically and the sculpture becomes a subjective work. The process of walking through the Olympic Sculpture Park helps in how we one might come to understand the time-based elements of art and art-making and to think of how artists use time and what they intend to communicate by doing so.
The manmade elements of the park enclose the viewer and space how each part of the park is experienced, so that whichever direction a pedestrian starts in, the elements of their surroundings are gradually pointed out. Just as each viewer is meant to experience and build an understanding of each sculpture individually, so are viewers of all time based art meant to experience those changes in time, or embodiments of time in visual movement or elements. A prime example of kinetic art which is also an embodiment and representation of time, both subjectively and objectively, is the work The Way Things Go by Peter Fischli and David Weiss.
The Way Things Go, 1987, Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The piece incorporates materials such as tires, trash bags, ladders, soap, oil drums, and gasoline. Fire and pyrotechnics are used as chemical triggers to set off chain reactions. The artists use these elements as embodiments of time and representations of time through kinetic energy and time-based experience for the viewer. The viewer is given almost a full half hour of suspense through waiting to see how one object will affect the next into motion or how chemical reactions set objects in motion.[1]
Fischli and Weiss use this physical experiment to embody time in process artwork. The work itself consists of numerous chemical reactions, including fire and air pressure, to set objects in motion as calculated by scientific methods and through physics to create a piece of performance art which last for nearly a half of an hour. The artists make a work which asks the viewers, and themselves, to wait and watch and listen in order to experience the piece fully. By watching this chain reaction the viewer starts to gain a feeling of suspense waiting to see what will happen next in the process and transition between objects. As a chemical reaction catches fire, it burns a rope which in turn affects another object making this contemporary time-based art spur the viewer to think about the value of time and what amount of action can take place in only a few seconds.
Other contemporary artist use time and its effects on change to strengthen their artistic messages. For example Rebecca Horn’s work Les Amants speaks directly to the sexual interaction between two people and alludes to the many contexts of human attraction through time-based visual elements, both time embodied and time represented. The piece is time-embodies because the liquids are being mixed live in front of the viewer and the images changes as time passes. It is also time-represented based on the evidence of what time does to the piece. Without the live mixing of liquids to make one explosive mark when combined, her work would lack in effectiveness of communicating her message. Artists who use time-based works are after a certain type of message and often indulge in the process of making that work or creating the artifact of their process.
Artists who work in time-based art are relying upon the physical representation of time as well as the measurable actions of time-embodied to communicate their ideas or create living works of art. In most of these cases the work itself is temporary or performance art which leaves behind an artifact or image which is representational of the ideas time creates within the work. Usually capturing a moment which evokes feelings and ideas concerning the fleeting moments in life or the climax and peak of points in life which cannot be repeated exactly, making them what they are in our memories.
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