Guido van der Werve’s “Nummer Negen (#9) The Day I Didn’t Turn with the World.” Installation photo by Pat Padua.

The Hirshhorn Museum recently installed pieces by Guido van der Werve and Hiroshi Sugimoto from their permanent collection in adjacent galleries on the third floor. These pieces offer a monochromatic counterpoint to the color field work currently seen in the museum’s other exhibits, ColorForms and Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers. The Hirshhorn suggests that the installations by van der Werve and Sugimoto “quietly create synergy, harmoniously exploring concepts of time, space and solitude, while highlighting the formal and conceptual interplay between cinema and photography.” The interplay between the pieces clearly works. What is less clear is is whether the interplay between cinema and photography works for or against the art.

Dutch artist Guido van der Werve’s video installation Nummer Negen (#9) The Day I Didn’t Turn with the World is made up of more than 14,000 stills taken while the artist stood at the North Pole for 24 hours, on April 28 and 29, 2007. Van der Werve rotated slowly clockwise, opposite the Earth’s rotation, and was photographed every six seconds. The resulting montage is obviously about the passage of time; the unforgiving landscape marks this as a work of what might be called abstract adventurism.