halftime, of what? If Matt Bollinger’s previous exhibition for mother’s tankstation | Dublin, Off Peak [i] , suggested the necessity of research regarding the etiquette or socio-politics behind the timetabling of bus and train tickets, the current body of work on show at mother’s tankstation | London, encourages a similar itch-to-scratch-factor, regarding time intervals in sporting fixtures… Do we bring sandwiches or buy beer and snacks onsite? For starters, what is the correct semantic form, “halftime”, “half-time” and/or half time? Apparently all valid, equally linguistically acceptable, but with the only difference being (as far as I can see) “a kind-of...
halftime, of what?
If Matt Bollinger’s previous exhibition for mother’s tankstation | Dublin, Off Peak [i], suggested the necessity of research regarding the etiquette or socio-politics behind the timetabling of bus and train tickets, the current body of work on show at mother’s tankstation | London, encourages a similar itch-to-scratch-factor, regarding time intervals in sporting fixtures… Do we bring sandwiches or buy beer and snacks onsite? For starters, what is the correct semantic form, “halftime”, “half-time” and/or half time? Apparently all valid, equally linguistically acceptable, but with the only difference being (as far as I can see) “a kind-of state of mind”, in relation to the ideas of the late Hungarian-American psychologist, Mihály Csikszentmihályi, regarding “Flow State” and hyperfocus. Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being “in the zone”, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is so fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, that it results in a transformation in the sense of time. Amongst other things, flow is employed as a coping strategy for stress and anxiety when productively pursuing a form of leisure that matches one’s skill set. Hence “halftime” emotionally continues engagement more than “half time”, and positively, rather than negatively, privileges the enforced pause between battle states[ii]. Even if we might be unfamiliar with Csikszentmihályi’s name, we will all be unwittingly familiar with his ideas and the lexicon of sports analogies, metaphors and stock phraseology derived from his work in performance psychology, that has subsequently, (almost on a comparative level to Shakespeare) entered the popular domain since the 1970s.
If we are all good with that, and as the theories of flow suggests, we can now “…focus on the task at hand”[iii], as Matt Bollinger ambiguously messes with the subtleties of this close-focus detail, by using one form for the exhibition title, (consciously all lower case); halftime, and another for the title of the large-scale painting, Half Time, that does a considerable amount of the exhibition’s heavy lifting. We are left to pick the bones and figure out intent, park the brain orkeep it ticking.
