Ceramic Figurines (A), video still. File Holder (B), video still. Ceramic Figurines (B), video still. File Holder (C), video still. Ceramic Figurines (D), video still. Pocket Tray (C), video still.

phyllis baldino at lauren wittels gallery by Catherine Morris "For television, time has an absolute existence... It is television's only solid, a tangible commodity... The smallest salable piece turns out to be the ten-second spot, and all television is assembled from it." --David Antin, "Video: The Distinctive Features of the Media" 1976. In Anthony Asquith's witty and sardonic film The Woman in Question (1950), a murder investigation hinges on the dissection of a series of widely varying descriptions of the personality and character of the victim of the crime. As each potential suspect recounts his or her memories of the woman and her last few days, the viewer jumps from portrait to portrait, comparing details and nuance--making evaluations of each character. Impressions, conversations and scenarios are introduced, some are repeated, altered and recast, while others never appear again or metamorphose into entirely new events and interactions. As an exercise in assessment and appraisal, The Woman in Question entertains; as a challenge to the viewer's memory and attention to detail, it provokes. Phyllis Baldino's exhibition "In the Present" at Lauren Wittels Gallery has affinities to The Woman in Question, and engages the viewer in a similar pursuit for information that defines and characterizes a series of events that may or may not be related, but which constitute a body of evidence. In Baldino's case, however, the artist's performances and video documentation require the viewer to track a series of modified objects rather than an a duplicitous persona. And, instead of solving a murder, the process culminates in a humorous and frenetic display of the psychosis of the assisted ready-made and its insidious hold on current art-making. The formal construction of "In the Present" originates from William James' temporal definition of the present: experience, unimpeded by memory, which can only occur in a span of time ranging from three to 12 seconds. Within these guides Baldino ties time to perception by offering 50 discrete experiences of information given in the present--her videos range from three to 12 seconds each--but which use the viewer's memory and recollection to elucidate the associations that link the pieces. Installed as two simultaneous projections, each displaying half of the videos, "In the Present" requires the viewer to track the narrative history of 15 found objects on both screens as they appear and reappear in different guises and in various locations. Often little more than a blip or a flash of activity and sound, each piece seems to slip away just as you begin to comprehend the image and the context. Baldino's sculptures undergo a variety of modifications during the course of the projection, which lasts 11 minutes and 40 seconds. A file holder, a giant spatula, a shower caddy and a hamper are worn, lived in by cats, used to display pies at a diner, and enlisted as snow shoes. Each video captures an action or a moment with one of the objects present--usually in use, but occasionally unidentifiable. In the series called "Ceramic Figurines," for example, video A takes ten seconds to show the artist decapitating a group of ceramic figures using wrench and a hammer. "Ceramic Figurines B" runs for 12 seconds and places the residual stacked heads at the extreme left in a tightly framed shot of a foot dancing and stepping among votive candles. "Ceramic Figurine C" offers a six-second glimpse of the stacked heads adorning the rearview mirror of a delivery truck and "Ceramic Figurines D" end the series with ten-second shot of a beach scene in which the artist extracts the heads from the sand with her foot. Two of Baldino's earlier bodies of work, the "Unknown Series (excerpts)" and "Gray Area" are comprised of groups of videos shot in one take and presented without editing "in real time." Each of the pieces in these series showed the artist in the act of constructing something from a found object whose original use may or may not have been related to the final form created by Baldino. Clock/Not Clock from the "Gray Area" series or Candle Thing from the "Unknown Series (excerpts)" invoke performance, sculpture, utility and the absurdity of objects, all in unedited time. Both of these bodies of work introduced Baldino's ongoing concerns: "In the Present" abstracts and condenses them in cohesive and elusive installation. PHYLLIS BALDINO, "In the Present," at Lauren Wittels Gallery, Nov. 15-Dec. 21, 1996, 48 Greene Street, New York, N.Y. 10013. CATHERINE MORRIS is a New York writer and art historian.