拍品專文
A time element is essential to all of De Maria's works. In some, he is dealing with perceptual time; in others, with a real time continuity as in his movie Hard Core...In these...works, De Maria has created a very slow progression of intensity, which is boring enough to loosen one's defense mechanisms until the intensity suddenly becomes unbearably strong. In Hard Core, De Maria starts with very common scenes of country life, such as shots of cows, to bring us into the desert. From then on, the film consists of slow pannings of the desert and of the mountains in the background, taken at different times and from different locations within the same desert. The spectator gets progressively used to this landscape. He is forced to look closely at the earth, the arid vegetation, the colors of the sky. A few very brief shots of hands, feet with cowboy boots, and guns, serve as transitions betweeen the different pannings without breaking the slow unfolding of time in the desert. Guns, all at once, start shooting; two cowboys are killing each other. The face of an Oriental girl appears on the screen. This is a typical example of De Maria's time strategy, which essentially consists in hypnotizing the spectator with slow information in order to make him receptive to the violent reality that will bring him out of his stupor.
Mller, G., The New Avante-Garde: Issues for Art in the Seventies, New York 1972, pp. 28-29.
Mller, G., The New Avante-Garde: Issues for Art in the Seventies, New York 1972, pp. 28-29.