“Stephen J. Kaltenbach:
TIME CAPSULES (1967 - present)"
September 13 - October 17, 2008
Artist Statement
TIME CAPSULES
The idea for these works was generated without apparent conceptual lineage while I was a grad student. Like a number of subsequent works I didn’t start making these objects until I had developed some understanding of what I was doing with them and how they linked to other works with similar dynamics. This was a year or so later after I had moved to NYC.
At the time I made the first capsule I had begun working on pieces that were each targeted at a specific group. Some of these groups were artists, art writers and historians, my students, museums or collectors, and sometimes those who were literally “the man on the street,” the unprepared viewer, a person who was not aware that they were looking at art.
This idea of the “target audience” was part of my interest in pushing minimalism to the limits of what I could imagine. I sought to increase the involvement of the audience, or receiver, of conceptual information. By doing this, it made it possible to decrease the work done by me, the artist. For example, “Modern Draperies,” a soft sculpture, left my studio with instruction that it was to be arranged and installed by the curator/gallerist/collector as they wished. By relegating and delaying the complete picture of what the work was about, I made it possible for the viewer to increase his/her involvement with the work. The hidden part, the potential, of what was there would be supplied by the viewer’s imagination.
For the Time Capsules, there were several target audiences. First was the curator or collector. They were and still are faced with the choice of having minimal information about the work or of having to go against everything their training and good sense has always dictated: preserve the work; basically, never saw it in two.
The second target group was the writer/historian. They were encouraged to do what they like to do best: mount investigations into the probable dynamics and content of these pieces. But for them, in a sense, history would be running backwards. Instead of artist’s motives and intentions fading through time into the past, this information was waiting to be discovered in the future by simply following the artist’s instructions.
Certainly art viewers would be at the receiving end of this secretive work as well. My thought was that they would be given free rein to use their imagination to complete the work; a minimal piece indeed.
I and my reputation were the last perceived targets of the work because of the possible actions, or lack thereof, elicited by these pieces. I was interested to see whether a work, which maintained secrecy over time, would hold its interest until it was opened or if it was never opened. I also wondered if it would look like a dodge of art criticism. Then there was the question of how the content of each capsule would affect others. If one were opened what would it do to the perceptions of others?
These time delay works were all in agreement with a protocol I was operating under which I referred to as “opposite actions”. Obviously, one of my primary interests was to initiate original movement in the flow of art world ideation. One of the most likely ways to cause this, I decided, was to isolate natural actions, and then try to find a way of doing, making, or being that was most unlike that; for example, hiding instead of showing.
The Time Capsules fit that very well.
- Stephen J. Kaltenbach
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