Real Time

Sasha Pirker's Real Time is concerned in a two-fold sense with recording artistic creative processes. Shooting with a Bolex camera, the filmmaker documents the form-finding creation of a drawing in real time. Line follows upon line only to reveal, by the end of the film, what film normally conceals: the woman with a movie camera ­– as well as the artist Gerlind Zeilner who has captured their mirror image in her collective portrait drawing. While Pirker explored the relationship between film and polaroid photography in Closed Circuit, 2013 (2013), mechanical reproducibility is the topic of Real Time in terms of the hand as expressive means of artistic creativity. Without a doubt, Pirker's work can also be seen as referencing and paraphrasing films in which the camera centered upon the creative act in terms of the spontaneous expressive power of the artist. But while Hans Namuth's Jackson Pollock ’51 (1951) and Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le mystère Picasso (1956) decisively contributed to sustaining the myth of (masculine) artistic genius, Real Time reveals the inextricable link between technology and the body as well as the gaze of the artist and the observer, central to artistic production.

A pivotal role is also played by Pirker's Bolex camera and its specific material and technical characteristics. On the one hand, it heightens the potential to reveal the analog work processes: The filmed image is rhythmically interrupted by black leader when the camera motor requires to be manually wound up every 30 seconds. On the other hand, the temporal structure of the film finds its material basis in the three-minute duration of a single film roll. This in turn also influenced the genesis of the drawing which was bound to the time-frame of the filmic production. (Bettina Brunner)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt