Art reviews: Timecode | Life is Over if You Want It

Published on Thursday 5 February 2009 19:41

TIMECODE **** DUNDEE CONTEMPORARY ARTS LIFE IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT **** DUNCAN OF JORDANSTONE COLLEGE OF ART, DUNDEE

I'VE BEEN full of good intentions for the past few weeks about seeing the new group show at Dundee Contemporary Arts, so the irony wasn't lost on me when I got there and discovered it includes a sound work by Canadian artist Kelly Mark all about good intentions. "I really should redecorate," she recites. "I really should try to control my temper, I really should do something about the homeless…"

This is just one of the perspectives in a wide-ranging show, Timecode, about how we perceive time, a clever way of kicking off DCA's tenth anniversary year. Curators Graham Domke and Judith Winter have devised a show that feels busy without being over-burdened and which makes good use of both the large and small spaces in the galleries.

There was never going to be a shortage of material for a contemporary art show about time. It is a theme – even an active element – in so many practices but Domke and Winter have created one of the most accessible group shows I have seen for a long time.

Time is contradictory because it is both precisely measured and deeply subjective: time to a rock operates on a very different scale than time to a mayfly. Ugo Rondinone's painting of the stars, 13 September 2008, is anchored to a unique moment while depicting a world that, to us, is as good as timeless.

Glasgow-based Ilana Halperin, who started out as a stone carver, has always been interested in geological time. Her work here is a maquette for a more ambitious project, Physical Geology, to create a limestone cast made by natural processes (and time) in a cave in the mountains of the Auvergne.

Ross Birrell has a more playful take on a similar theme with Rough Diamond, a lump of coal that is insured as a diamond and exhibited along with its insurance certificate. The implication is that the coal is a diamond in potentia: just add a few billion years. Appropriately, as you look at it, you can hear the patient voices of On Kawara's sound work One Million Years counting down from one million BC, while Douglas Gordon's phone call text work on the window pane reminds us: "It's only just begun."

Swiss artist Christian Stock creates works over a period of years by layering monochrome acrylic paint on small square canvases to make cubes, the sides of which are layers like geological strata. As practices go it must be pretty tedious, which is perhaps why he needs an antidote: speedy spontaneous wall paintings.

Every minute in the second gallery, the silence is broken by the clack of the railway station-style signal board by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead. Wired to an internet search engine, it fires off a random list of preoccupations: "nanny agency in Illinois", "Nostradamus complete predictions", and (perhaps inevitably) "tits with big nipples". A second work, Horizon, shows live feeds from webcams around the world, charting the changing levels of daylight.

At the other end of the room, Tatsuo Miyajima's Counter Void is counting down from nine to zero on a large white LED box, ending not with zero but with blank whiteness: a glimpse into the void. Meanwhile, Ceal Floyer's 1 to 25 counts upwards, pausing for one second on one, two seconds on two and so on, and Kelly Mark attempts to stare us out from a video screen.

Mark's works perhaps come closest to probing the notion of time and the human condition: life as a decreasing number of hours, days, years, with so much to do in them. To explore the theme on a more warmly human scale, it's necessary to head up the road to Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art.

Life is Over! If You Want It is the strangely jaunty title given by artist partnership Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen to a show which explores the complex ethical issue of assisted suicide. It is sparked by very personal events: Janssen's Dutch father was helped to die after being diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2000 (assisted suicide is legal in The Netherlands), while Mackenna's father died a very different death in a Scottish hospital a couple of years later.

The major works here are a series of three slideshow presentations under the overall title Life, Death and Beauty, which bring together words, phrases, images and art works on the subject of mortality, some universal, others highly personal. The Invisible Looks Back is particularly effective; the changing images are inside a photo frame within a still life scene influenced by 17th-century Dutch painting.

The aim of the show is to open up discussion – quite literally. The artists, both senior staff at Duncan of Jordanstone, are using the space as their studio and are often in situ discussing the subject. When I visited, a masters student was reading aloud while others were making sculptures in response to the show.

Apart from the artists' ongoing poster series inspired by John Lennon & Yoko Ono's War is Over! (Life is Over!, Death is Gentle!), there are traditional paintings borrowed from various collections and pinboards full of postcards. "Here's what resonates with us," they seem to say. "What resonates with you?"

In the hands of a lesser artist this might seem like laziness. But this is a thoughtful, open-hearted show which will reward openness in the viewer. The more prepared you are to explore and consider the issues it raises for you, the richer your experience of it will be.

&149 Timecode until 8 March; Life is Over! if You Want It until 14 February