Time Without End

Klaus vom Bruch has been investigating how media affect and shape social conditions and the representation of (historical) events with his artistic practice since the 1970s. Applying methods of subjective appropriation, deconstruction, and collage of found material from film and television, he interacts with the mediatized environment and its semantic systems in a humorous tone. In the video work Time Without End, which lends the exhibition its title, Klaus vom Bruch draws on a film sequence of only a few seconds from the 1945 Hollywood melodrama and book adaptation Leave Her to Heaven. It depicts a woman sitting in a comfortable train compartment, her face initially obscured by a book entitled “Time Without End.” Becoming increasingly drowsy, she gradually lets the book sink into her lap and finally fall to the floor. By rhythmically shifting individual frames exact to the second, Klaus vom Bruch breaks with causation, which is fundamental to classic Hollywood cinema narratives: conventionally the plot discloses itself to the viewers successively with a beginning, a middle part, and the end. In Time Without End the linearity of time engrained in the film is itself manipulated as artistic material in order to hypnotically expand the moving image and break it down into its individual parts. The staccato like back and forth of images, in conjunction with the ever-delayed soundtrack, helps the narrative develop a new rhythm that transfers the viewer into a trance state removed from time.

While time on board the “Santa Fe Super Chief”—which was also known as the “Train of the Stars” beyond fictional film narratives in the 1930s to 50s for driving famous actors and actresses across the U.S.—briefly submits to new rules, the barren landscape in the background passes by swiftly and undisturbed. The fact that Klaus vom Bruch chose a scene on a train for his work is no coincidence: In reference to Paul Virilio’s deliberation that speed has become constitutive in the development of the latest technologies, including film techniques as well as vehicles, for society in and from the 20th century onwards, Time Without End also brings our contemporary habits of perception into focus with a wink.