There is a ratio I used to hear a lot as a student, that what you put in is what you get out. In this metaphysical bank where effort is deposited and results get withdrawn nobody ever mentioned the possibility of accruing any interest, but it is possible. Interest, I learned on my last trip to the bank, grows in proportion to the amount of risk one takes. This updated ratio—(Effort + Risk) / time = Interest rate on Results—is helpful to keep in mind when engaging documents and vestiges of durational action and live events.

The group exhibition One Minute More, at The Kitchen, is a veritable bank breaker with seven artists presenting performance-based work in a variety of formats. There is a pair of environmental installations, photographs, videos, projections, ephemera, and a dainty white curtain, all of which display tremendous efforts—be they physical, emotional, or psychological—expended with no meager amount of risk.

In Oliver Lutz’s latest performed video, The Behavioral Subject, the psychology of focus group research gets a brush of the absurd and grotesque, while directly across the gallery Josh Tonsfeldt’s video and wall mounted ephemera, Gallevia,takes as its subject the humdrum affairs of daily routine. Aki  Sasmoto’s Secrets of My Mother’s Child presents itself as an identity piece that jumps from mathematical formulas into second hand furniture, which is arranged in a tidy manner that juxtaposes the installed board imbroglio of In the Red, a labor intensive physical artistic feat. Clifford Owens’s Photographs with an Audiencedocument an intimate occurrence, while Jamie Isenstein’s curtain installation,Untitled (curtain), alternately teases the paranoid with a pair of shoes or gives a time of return. Georgia Sagri’s double projection, The Invisible Ones, plays on the necessary presence of an audience to document a man receiving blows from an assailant that can’t be seen.

It takes time to see everything, time and a concentrated effort. People came and went in the time it took me to watch a complete loop of one video. You just can’t rush durational work. So if you start to think you’re risking a waste of time, be reassured, you’ve just put yourself in a position to make bank on your return.

--Charlie Schultz

(Image: Kate Gilmore, In the Red (2009), mixed media installation. Courtesy The Kitchen.)