The Guggenheim Circular Takes on "Time"

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, known for its famous spiraling central gallery, faced some challenges of recent events as other museums, galleries, and institutions. The Guggenheim Circular is the museum’s new online series that reviews themes gaining attention because of the relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic such as time, home, embrace, and community. This platform of the circular presents artworks and resources from the museum’s collection and its previous exhibitions to bring new interpretations and connections to the work. Presented in an easy to follow and accessible format, the Museum has made up for the hiatus in foot traffic up their circular ramps.

Time is the Circular’s most recent edition, featuring sixteen still images of artworks that relate to the “nature of time” and question time standardization and its fluidity. Included are pieces of varying media like video, photography, objects, and installation images. All of these pieces were presented as images that could be enlarged accompanied with a description. For an exhibition that reflects time so mcuh, the viewer cannot fully embrace the time aspect of certain media like such as Marina Abramovic’s performance Cleaning The Mirror #1, a film duration just shy of 15 hours. The Guggenheim Circular is a great tool for reviewing pieces in the collection, but fully experiencing the artwork requires a physical visit to the museum. The Guggenheim Museum is set to reopen October 3, 2020. The online platform is enough to help us get by, but the full experience is still in the museum.

Mythological Time : An animated film by Sun Xun

Sun Xun’s animated film Mythological Time is installed as part of the group show Tales of Our Time, currently on view at the Guggenheim. It is a mesmerizing expression of memory, time and space. Xun, who originally trained as a painter, builds his animations from large-scale paintings in black ink on white paper, and carved woodcuts that create a popped-out three dimensional feel. 
The renderings are sketchy and impressionistic, resembling the style of the early 20^th century painters. The whimsical images seem carefully selected to convey underlying symbolic meaning towards a political, historical and cultural context. 

Xun mixes memorable images from his own life, such as the view from a favored childhood fishing hole, and carousel horses, with well-known political images and cultural symbols such as the famous Mao Zedong statue in Shenyang and the totems of the Chinese zodiac.  Enigmatic figures populate the film as well, such as fossils depicted within crystal boxes, with which Xun makes a clever connection to the Chinese coal industry.

Xun does not offer explanations through exposition, but rather lets the scenes flow into one another. Like the scenes, the images move and morph into other forms, giving the animation an unpredictable and interpretable narrative. A layer of black scribbled lines is laid over the scenes behind so that even still scenes have the feeling of constant movement. These images, paired and morphed together, take the mind on a journey through space and time. Like an exquisite corpse, the pairing of opposites provides an opportunity for the mind to make new and unexpected connections.   

The film's ever changing form becomes a metamorphosis that speaks to the way memory can bend our perception, and that this change can be unpredictable, sometimes deceiving, and difficult to interpret. Watching Mythologica Time felt like slipping through the cracks between reality and memory, like a journey through the space in-between, which seems to be the place Xun is most interested in exploring.