A moment of silence for the victims of 11-M.

In my neighborhood there’s a cultural center called the Conde Duque that has an art gallery with free admission. My friend Matt and I were walking by the gallery yesterday and I noticed a new exhibition was up, so we decided to stop in and take a look.

The exhibition, Fast Forward: Media Art from the Goetz Collection, lived up to its speedy name–a maze of dark rooms cluttered with television screens and projected images, all a bit chaotic, a bit stressful, a bit out of control, like someone’s thumb was on the fast forward button.

Matt and I rounded a corner in the exhibition, and I was surprised to find one of my favorite pieces from the Tate Modern in London mounted on the wall. It’s a piece called Still Life by Sam Taylor-Wood.

I was surprised, I suppose, because a piece called Still Life didn’t seem to fit in a collection that felt more like a discoteca than an art exhibition. In contrast to the two televisions stacked in the opposite corner of the room, tangled up in shop lamps in plastic yellow cages, one screen scrolling numbers, the other frenzied with highway traffic, Still Life was simple and modest, an image of a traditional Dutch still life: apples, pears, peaches, and grapes in a wicker basket on a wooden table, framed in a flat screen television.

Matt took a closer look, staring at the image on the screen, which looked more like a painting than a digital projection. “What is it?” he asked.

“Just wait,” I said.

And as if the image was waking from sleep, coming to life, the fruit began to move, carefully and deliberately. A fur of white mold fuzzed a peach, then spread like sunlight from one pear to the next, covering each fruit with graceful efficiency. Grapes shriveled, a pear browned, an apple collapsed, the whole works slumped. The basket was blanketed with snow. The mold settled and crusted over in yellows and greens, then browns, and finally black. Fruit flies specked the screen like noise on an old film reel. Time had come and gone.

Most art captures a moment, but Still Life seemed to capture motion, a playing out of life. The piece danced around a long tradition of paintings with the same title, those who had chosen to represent a still life as life at a standstill, not as life that is still alive.

The piece only made sense in its entirety, from beginning to end. The sequence finished in an unflattering basket of mush. Only in the process, the movement of the piece itself, was there a beauty and a familiarity that seemed to suggest that the very act of living is something beautiful.

As the video sequence came to an end, I felt as if I had experienced the whole of my life in the last four minutes, ironically enough, in fast forward. Life was not summarized by individual events, but by movement. Just as photos in an album are not life in and of themselves, individual moments are reminders of the defining characteristic of life: movement–growing, maturing, ripening, dying.

Get information on Gallery 98’s latest exhibition at the Conde Duque:
medialabmadrid.org

See a clip of Sam Taylor-Wood’s Still Life online:
zkm.de/goetz/static/qtsamples/Taylor-Wood%20-%20Still%20Life_256k.mov