11 SECONDS
About ten seconds, that’s all the time an average museum visitor has for a work of art. In 11 SECONDS, Charlotte Bouckaert joins her audience to look at one single picture for the entire duration of the performance: a photo of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In different quantitative studies, scientists have examined how much time visitors in museums spend. The average time spent with an artwork lies between 10 and 15 seconds.
In 11 SECONDS, Charlotte Bouckaert wants to study 1 photograph with her audience for 1 hour, the duration of the performance. That photograph shows the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. A generic exterior view of the museum on a clear day, photographed from the opposite side of 5th Avenue.
On stage there’s a worktable with clippings, paper, scissors, paint, etc. A video camera projects what’s happening on the table on the back wall. An artisanal workshop, the studio of a handyman.
The Guggenheim New-York is the starting point for Charlotte Bouckaert to talk about art and the way we look at it, about art traditions and conventions, about the relationship between art and reality, about the museum as an institution, the commercialisation of the art world, woman in the arts, photography and transience, etc.
11 SECONDS is an ode to art itself, too artists and to the laborious attempts to say something meaningful about art.
CREATIVE TEAM
- Concept & performance: Charlotte Bouckaert
- Dramaturgy: Bart Van den Eynde
- Sound design: Benjamin Dousselaere
- Music composition: Nicolas Roseeuw
- Technical execution: Christoph Donse
PRODUCTION / COPRODUCTION / SUPPORT
- Production: Platform 0090
- Coproduction: C-Takt, Toneelhuis
- Supported by: Workspacebrussels
- Thank you: Zsenne Art Laboratory, De Grote Post
MEDIA
- Trailer [mp4, 1’39”]
TECHNICAL DETAILS
- Duration: 55 min
- English spoken – Dutch surtitles/captioning
- Technical rider [PDF, 145 kb]
UPCOMING DATES
PAST DATES
- Opening night at TONEELHUIS, Antwerp (B)
- Theater aan Zee, Oostende (B)
- C-TAKT C-MIne, Genk (B)
- Brakke Grond, Amsterdam (NL)
- Playground, STUK, Leuven (B)
- Théâtre de Gennevilliers, Paris (F)
- Kaap, Bruges (B)
- De Spil, Roeselare (B)
- KVS, Brussels (B)
- IFT, Istanbul (TR)
PRESS REVIEWS
‘The theater and photography seem to be opposites. They embody a tension between life and death, stillness and movement, past and present. In 11 seconds, however, Charlotte Bouckaert closes the gap by extracting a performance from one snapshot. It’s a nice gesture: at a time when everyone is so compulsive about recording everything, Bouckaert tries to free the image from the clutches of representation, to trace it back to a material experience.’
Etcetera: Charlotte De Somviele
‘You have to hand it to Bouckaert: she makes the audience look at that one image with attention for an hour, and she raises a lot of questions’
Pzazz: Pieter T’Jonck
A photo stops time. Charlotte Bouckaert gives the photo back time in her performance. 11 seconds have become a fascinating search ritual for different ways of looking and experiencing.
According to studies, we look at a work of art for an average of ten to fifteen seconds in a museum. Charlotte Bouckaert stretches the viewing time for one photo to fifty minutes. She entertains us with tidbits, she analyses details, asks art questions, seeks answers from artists and philosophers, projects translations of English quotes, from Bob Dylan over Gerhard Richter to dialogue fragments from films by Woody Allen. Very intriguing.’
Theater newspaper: Tuur Devens