New Haven Independent

If so, at this very moment, while you are spending your precious passing time reading this, there’s a serious attempt being made at finally arresting The Master Perp.

The action’s unfolding right now near the corners of Chapel, York, and High thanks to two new and absorbing exhibitions in town. Perhaps you should visit. That is, if you have the time.

If this sounds like chronological or metaphysical heavy lifting, the wonder of it is that both exhibitions, Yale University Art Gallery’s Continuous Present and Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill at the Yale Center for British Art’s, are so delightful it makes one of the many cliches about Time simply true: it flies.

The 11 contemporary artists in Continuous Present deploy repeating but slightly varied, prints such as Dieter Roth’s fascinating 6 Picadillies, photographs, painting, sculptures, and, most movingly, video loops of the same or different scenes and actions to slow, slice, dice, undermine, laugh at, and call attention to Time’s inexorable flows.

Sound, which is, if you will, the bloody finger prints that the Perp leaves behind from all the chronological carnage, is haunting and particularly powerful in Rodney Graham’s “City Self/Country Self. “

It’s a four-minute DVD loop that gives you a movie-theater screen-size greeting of stop watches, clocks, and much else as you enter the ground floor gallery. The clip-clopping of a horse’s hooves, the sound of heels on cobblestone, and bristles on a boot toe being polished repeat and repeat even as you move to explore the other artists’ work. The wonder of it is that you keep listening for them, cannot keep from listening for them, like staring, perhaps, at a crime scene.

The same holds for Francis Alys’s “Song for Lupita.” This is a color video animation of a woman pouring liquid from one glass to another. In the conceptual installation you view it from a low couch, where you are invited to sit, as in your, pardon the expression, recreation or activity room.

Yet of course nothing happens. Or everything does, that is, depending on your outlook. Lupita pours a little more slowly, then picks up the pace, then repeats. Her pouring is accompanied, again, by a sound of mysterious cooing that just about made this reporter set down his notebook and try to meditate.

On the other hand, one of the guards listening to all this day in and day out from his nearby perch said it was driving him absolutely crazy.

Alys, a Belgian-born artist working mainly in Mexico, completed a previous project that included his pushing an immense block of ice through Mexico City for nine hours until it all melted, and there was no trace of the ice, the labor, or of anything what had passed.

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill

It’s likely the curators did not intend it, but this historical exhibition is different in every way, and yet is utterly complementary to Continuous Present.
The vast collections in this great English 18th century aesthete’s famous house, Strawberry Hill, became a kind of pioneering early museum or vast cabinet of curiosities.

Walpole (in this portrait by Sir joshua Reynolds, courtesy of Marquess of Hertford) collected suits of armor, antiquities, furniture, magnificent miniatures, and wrote about all of them, painstakingly ordering and cataloging them, a kind of art historian avant la lettre.

In effect it’s also an attack on Time: not by conceptually examining, analyzing, and undermining it, but rather by gathering humans’ most beautiful attempts at beating time at its own game through the creation of beauty, love, and perfection, and bringing the entire arsenal all under one roof. In effect, Walpole was sleeping with the Enemy.

According to guest curator Michael Snodin, “He wanted his house to look old and fresh and modern” at the same time. One of the results is that Walpole created the neo-Gothic revival in everything from architecture to literature.

Walpole is perhaps most popularly know as the author of The Castle of Otranto, arguably the first Gothic novel, which was inspired by Strawberry Hill. The creaking doors and swinging shutters and scary rainy, wind-driven nights were wittily parodied by Jane Austen in her Northanger Abbey.

With suits of armor, manuscripts containing charters for forests, for example, dating from the era of the Magna Carta, or a clock that Henry the VIII gave to Anne Boleyn. (She had precious little Time to enjoy it before her head was chopped off.) The curators say that Walpole was the first person in England to assemble systematically the visual evidence of English history.

In going back to the past with a look that had a modern feeling, Walpole, according to Snodin, “commissioned new/old stained glass” and other items such as this gothic lantern designed in 1755 by Richard Bentley. Strawberry Hill’s stained glass was so notable and now fragile that it was the basis for the World Monuments Fund to list the house among the most endangered of world heritage sites.

Taken together as a fine opportunity these two exhibitions inadvertently offer, it’s as if Art and Art History, finally seeing a chance to nab Time, have called in all the back-up available, to thrilling effect.

Continuous Present was curated by Jennifer Gross, Nancy Nichols, and Elisabeth Thomas. Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill by Michael Snodin, Cynthia Roman, and Eleanor Hughes. Both exhibitions run through the end of the year. A must-see, but only if you have the time.