The seminal artistic problem of the last half century has been how to represent time. Attempts to solve that problem have altered and expanded our aesthetic universe. Two new exhibits, each culled from the permanent collections of their respective institutions, take the temporal as their measure.

The Metropolitan Museum has shown individual works of video art before. Still, there will be those who feel “Closed Circuit,” its first multi-artist exhibition of video and new media, is somehow an assault on the integrity of the museum’s mission, while others will feel the show is long overdue. In fact, it seems to be a tentative step in the right direction.

It is a small — only eight pieces — and quirky show, reflecting the fact that the museum, under the auspices of the department of photography, began collecting video art a mere five years ago. And what unites these works and distinguishes these “new media” pieces from those in other media, is that they unfold over time.

German artist Wolfgang Staehle renders the temporal explicit in “Eastpoint (September 15, 2004),” a view of mountains and river in the Hudson Valley, composed of some 8,000 still images synched to play over a single day. However, the visitor sees only one, changing incrementally over the course of a 24-hour period. It’s a sort of breathing photograph, a photograph expanded.

On the other hand, “Closed Circuit” (1997–2000), Lutz Bacher’s single-channel video, represents the contraction of a year. It is a 40-minute edited loop of 10 months of footage from a surveillance camera mounted above the late art dealer Pat Hearn’s desk, just after she was diagnosed with liver cancer. What I found most surprising in this engrossing experiment was that, while I expected people to change — hairstyles, clothing — I did not count on inanimate objects having a life, too. Pictures on the wall appear and disappear; chairs arrive and leave; stacks of paper on the desk grow and then disappear, as if imitating the lives of the people who inhabit the office.

If time is inexorable in Ms. Bacher’s work, it is reversible in Anne Hamilton’s “abc” (1994/1999), where a fingertip slowly erases letters seen backward on glass. And then, simply, the film reverses, and the fingertip appears to wipe the letters into existence.

Of course, not all the pieces here address time so explicitly. The British artist Darren Almond has made a sort of 12-minute-long music video with “Schwebebahn” (1995). Using a hand-held Super 8mm camera, he followed the course of a suspended railway in Wuppertal, Germany, later altering the footage and adding bouncy techno music, which is delivered to the viewer by a large speaker hung from the ceiling in front of the video screen.

The room and screen begin in darkness in David Hammons’s mesmerizing “Phat Free” (1995/1999): We hear only traffic and what sounds like a can being kicked along a city street. Indeed it is. The video snaps on, and we follow, in unfocused sepia, a black man in a baseball cap as he kicks the can through urban streets until, eventually, he picks it up and walks away. It describes a narrative arc of sharp amplitude, and beautiful timing.

At the Museum of Modern Art, Connie Butler, the chief curator of drawing, has organized the intriguing “Live/Work: Performance into Drawing,” an exploration of, to quote the wall text, the “relationship between the time-based medium of performance and the more conventionally inscribed practice of drawing.” In effect, this means she has chosen works that foreground the process of getting marks on the paper (when it is paper); the finished drawing is less the goal the vehicle that conveyed the artist there.

It begins — spiritually, though not physically — with an untitled ink drawing by Jackson Pollock (c. 1950), the drips and splatters of which were meant to fuse action and end product. From there we dwell briefly on process-heavy experiments (for some reason, mainly with fire) of the 1950s and early ’60s.

An untitled sheet by Lee Bontecou (c.1958) looks remarkably like the scaled-armor plating of one of her sculptured works, although here she has used a blowtorch on paper and then scraped and polished various areas. Otto Piene also made soot drawings during this period, and Yves Klein used charred pigments to make his “Untitled (fire-color painting)” of 1962.

But the truly conceptual pieces dominate here. In addition to notes for, as well as interpretations of, performances and dances by Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Vito Acconci, Christo, and others, one finds numerous drawings that function both as records and representations.

Robert Morris’s “Footprints From Traveling. Limit of Reach” (1976) consists of actual overlapping footprints, in powdered graphite and plate oil, arrayed on a long scroll. More recently, David Hammons, in “Out of Bounds” (1995–96), bounced a dirty basketball on paper, creating a circular image embossed with the horripilations and creases of the ball’s skin, while Nancy Rubins assembled torn pieces of heavily pencilmarked paper to make an affecting, untitled wall sculpture.

The sole videos included, by Paul McCarthy, reverse the order of operations: performance as drawing rather than drawing as a record of performance. In, for instance, “Whipping the Wall With Paint” (1975), Mr. McCarthy uses a canvas dipped in paint to “draw” on walls and columns.

Both of these quiet and comely shows look to the recent, and not so recent, past to demonstrate how the application of the temporal to the once-static realm of visual art results in an expanded field. And as the visual-art corner of time-space is expanding ever more rapidly, it seems there is no better time to see these exhibitions.

“Closed Circuit” until April 29 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710);

“Live/Work” until May 21 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).