ICA Boston

All In Good Time

by Conrad Solomon

At the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, William Kentridge, renowned contemporary artist from South Africa, presents The Refusal of Time.  In this piece Kentridge draws on the conception of time and how it has changed throughout history with metaphors that allude to ideas like globalization and science. The live-action piece, The Refusal of Time, illustrates these ideas through Kentridge’s many different forms of visual art, as well as Philip Miller’s brilliant music composition and soundscaping.

The first thing to be said about Kentridge’s piece is that it gives you a lot to think about. As the piece goes on you may find yourself trying to pick up on every single fragmented piece of information that is thrown at you from literally five different projections. For me at least, the frantic and constant firing of fragmented information from nearly every side of the room served to immerse me into the conundrum of the concept of time throughout history. 

As you walk into the room where The Refusal of Time is presented, you are met with a grand contraption that quietly spins and rotates and seemingly breaths. After a few brief moments of watching the mechanical creature breath in the middle of the room, you are suddenly surrounded by five unrelenting metronomes projected on the walls of the room, each one following it’s own tempo. Soon enough, each tempo receives it’s own sound like the deep, percussive beating of a drum, or the loud and often violent droning of a trombone. Although it is impossible to notice at first, what starts out as utter cacophony comprised of instruments all following a different beat, seamlessly composes itself into a song. Philip Miller assigns each instrument to play to a different tempo, and ultimately what is created is one song that serve to illustrate each country’s conception of time that is unable to find harmony with one another.