Clock Wise

How much time is enough time to spend looking at a painting? I've come to the NGV:I for the first time since it reopened after being renovated in 2003. (Have I been that busy, that more than four years have passed between visits?!) I'm standing in front of Jorg Immendorf's Electric Painting. It's an enormous, almost garish, work that hangs hard left of a doorway. Walking in to the Contemporary Art Collection room, I had to look behind me to see it. With just a cursory glance at its Teutonic totems and flaming Fuhrer, I probably would have kept walking away from it. But it's one of the few things I recognise about the Gallery, having written about the painting for an exercise while at photography college more than a decade ago.

So, how long should I spend with it? Nothing I wrote about it is coming to mind. I read the blurb provided by the Gallery, which gives it a time (1985) and a place (Germany). I look again at the painting segment by segment collecting pieces of visual information. There is no seat in this room and I'm standing in the thoroughfare; here comes the Gallery attendant again. Am I spending too long?

I think of the time that went into this painting. Not just the physical craft of rendering the work, but the time in composing it: in Immendorf's mind and on his practice sketches. And the time he spent living in a divided Germany, studying painting (under Joseph Beuys), the hundreds of paintings he painted before this one that were necessary stages in his getting to here.

Here comes another wave of people. I don't know how many waves that makes. And I don't know how long I've been standing here. But it feels like a long time: I've been to post-war Germany and back. And I guess that's the point: when it comes to time it's quality over quantity that's owed to art.

By guest: Alex D