Libidinal temporalities.

This essay was one of two commissioned texts (the second by Dr Trish Lyons) in a monograph that explored the video work of the artist Michael Curran. It drew on Mooney's longstanding research into questions of time, Eros and death in art practices, which proposes that a major function of the work of art is to produce an acute awareness of time in one or many of its various guises and manifestations. Mooney's research proposes that the intersection of praxis–ethics–erotics provides the potentiality for the emergence of the work of art.
The philosophical issue addressed in ‘Libidinal Temporalities' was art's ability to make invisible time visible, analysing Curran's work through Catherine Clement's concept of ‘syncope' as a cut in time when the subject disappears. The essay reflected in particular upon Curran's video Amami se Vuoi 1994, and proposed a relation to questions of Eros and Thanatos. The prospect of reliving time that has disappeared (a notion Gaston Bachelard elaborated in The Dialectic of Duration) through the medium of video-tape, was argued and demonstrated through a reading of Amami se Vuoi, proposing that through this work Eros is desexualised and humiliated for the sake of a resexualised Thanatos.
The monograph was launched at the National Film Theatre to coincide with the premiere of Curran's Love in a Cold Climate, a 60minute film based on the story of the Snow Queen, screened as part of the Artist's Film and Video Season at the NFT, April-July 2003.
The monograph was supported by the Arts Council of England and National Lottery Fund. Michael Curran was part of the Minigraph series showcasing some of the UK's most prominent and innovative video artists, including Jane and Louise Wilson, Isaac Julien, Smith/Stewart and Dryden Goodwin.