Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art

Kate Bretkelly-Chalmers

Description

Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art presents a major study of time as a key aesthetic dimension of recent art practices. This book explores different aspects of time across a broad range of artistic media and draws on recent movements in philosophy, science and technology to show how artists generate temporal experiences that resist the standardized time of modernity: Olafur Eliasson’s melting icebergs produce fragile temporal ecologies; Marina Abramović’s performances test the durations of the human body; Christian Marclay’s The Clock conflates past and present chronologies.

This book examines alternative frameworks of time, duration and change in prominent philosophical, scientific and technological traditions, including physics, psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience, media theory and selected environmental sciences. It suggests that art makes a crucial contribution to these discourses not by 'visualizing' time, but by entangling viewers in different sensory, material and imaginary temporalities.

 

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I: Time

Chapter 1: Marking Time in Conceptual Art

Chapter 2: Around the Clock: 24/7 Times

Chapter 3: Dust and Duration: Timing Women’s Work

Part II: Duration

Chapter 4: Temporal Fever: Archive and Database

Chapter 5: Duration and Endurance: Minimalism and Performance

Chapter 6: Microtemporality: Time Perception in Film and Video

Chapter 7: Accumulative Art and the Time of Stuff

Part III: (Interregnum): Relativity

Chapter 8: Special Relativity: Time and the Art of Instability

Chapter 9: Cultural Relativity and the Time of the Other

Part IV: Change

Chapter 10: Beyond Our Time: Entropy and Icebergs

Chapter 11: Speculative Time and Contemporary Art

Stone in Hand: A Brief Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Neurosciences
• Science
• ART
• Relativity
• Technologie
• General
• Design
• Entropy
• Media studies
• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Physics
• Technology
• General officer
• Phenomenology
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 07 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783209200
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image : Toril Johannessen, Mean Time, 2011. Courtesy of LAUTOM, Randi Thommessen.
Production manager: Naomi Curston
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-919-4
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-921-7
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-920-0
Printed and bound by Bell & Bain, UK.
Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Time
Chapter 1: Marking Time in Conceptual Art
Chapter 2: Around the Clock: 24/7 Times
Chapter 3: Dust and Duration: Timing Women’s Work
Part II: Duration
Chapter 4: Temporal Fever: Archive and Database
Chapter 5: Duration and Endurance: Minimalism and Performance
Chapter 6: Microtemporality: Time Perception in Film and Video
Chapter 7: Accumulative Art and the Time of Stuff
Part III: (Interregnum): Relativity
Chapter 8: Special Relativity: Time and the Art of Instability
Chapter 9: Cultural Relativity and the Time of the Other
Part IV: Change
Chapter 10: Beyond Our Time: Entropy and Icebergs
Chapter 11: Speculative Time and Contemporary Art
Stone in Hand: A Brief Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements

In 2015, I was awarded a Kate Edger Trust Post-Doctoral Research Award to complete the final manuscript of this book. I am grateful for both the support of the Kate Edger Trust and the University of Auckland’s Art History Department, which hosted me during this time. Dr Gregory Minissale has been especially inspiring – his generous discussions have been the motivating force behind this study of time and art. Thanks also go to my friends Helen and Anna whose own intellectual engagements with the world have sustained me through writing this book. My partner Chris McDowall has been a wonderful source of energy and love. Lastly, I am grateful for the support of my parents, Gabriel Brettkelly and Paul Chalmers. They have taught me the real worth of quality time. Thank you, always, Mum and Dad.
Introduction
I n December 2011, I spent some weeks away from my computer walking in the Himalayas. Not the high-octane, adventurous Everest trails, but the quieter Annapurna circuit – a dry, tree-bare landscape without the rhododendrons of spring or the avalanches of winter. A few days into the walk, I found myself at the bottom of a small gully next to a frozen stream, absent-mindedly picking at its surface with the point of my walking pole. Under the ice and amongst the pebbles I noticed a set of patterns, striations in stone, a sequence of geometries, lines and repetitions. I found an ammonite: a mollusc from the Jurassic age about 140 million years old. Stone in hand, time split open. It unfurled into durations greater than the colossal mountain range that had once been a sea – waters that had once held a shell-less creature, now hardened in stone. I was just a speck, a body, a set of patterns, human striations, in the vast, dusty histories of time and space.
Time is a notoriously expansive subject. It is both a physical dimension of our universe and a dynamic, fluctuating process of change. Time is a fixed and quantifiable form of measurement and a fleetingly nebulous impression. While the clock looms especially large as the arbiter of daily schedules and working lives, time also accumulates as dust on the mantelpiece, wrinkles on the skin and sedimentations in earthly strata. It magnifies in periods of boredom and contracts in moments of excitement. Time flies, time marches, time is spent and time heals. We kill time, we do time, we waste time and we give time. The times are changing; time is running out; times are hard. Time is on our hands, but also by our side. Time is fast, slow, delayed, suspended, swift, sluggish, frantic, deliberate, nostalgic and leisurely. Time is measured in quantities and it is lived in experience, just as it unfurls beyond the narrow confines of human consciousness.
This book explores time as a central feature of the contemporary art practices that emerged in the wake of mid-century modernism. In gauging time’s prominence within this field of aesthetics, we need not look further than three significant works of contemporary art. Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) is a 24-hour montage of filmic scenes of clocks, watches and timekeeping. Carefully edited into a single cinematic stream, Marclay’s onscreen clocks are matched to the global standard – the same time that ticks away on watches and digital devices of its viewers. Marina Abramović’s performance The Artist is Present (2010) was a feat of prolonged endurance in which the artist sat in the foyer of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art during the three-month tenure of her eponymous exhibition. Museum visitors were invited to sit in a chair facing the artist’s own, establishing an open-ended encounter of two bodies in, with, through and over time. In Olafur Eliasson’s Your waste of time (2006), large chunks of ice harvested from the waters near the ancient Icelandic glacier Vatnajökull were exhibited in public spaces. Their glistening, crystalline surfaces were brought into fragile proximity with the faster, warmer and more destructive durations of the human body.
Given this diversity of temporal registers and expressions one might ask: what is the time of contemporary art? The answer is that it is many times, durations and processes of change. In these works, time emerges as the variable condition of encounter with a body, a chair, a chunk of ice and stream of moving images. Where recent art historical studies have focused on time as an attribute of specific artistic media or modalities, 1 this book expands the aesthetics of temporality to encompass a compelling diversity of global art practices. Time in art is not a unitary subject or theme, but a multidimensional phenomenon that is entangled in the variable temporal textures of contemporary lives, duly shaped by techno-scientific evaluations, sociopolitical regimes, psychological conditions, shifting sands and changing environments.
This book shows how contemporary works of art make a critical contribution to philosophies and sciences of time that conceive of countervailing temporalities unfurling beyond the rigid divisions of the clock. Over the course of the twentieth century, time’s divergent rhythms and local tempos have been meticulously regulated; chiselled down to a fine, singular point in a chronological sequence. The 24-hour time standard is a remarkable universal measure that underscores most global exchanges – economic, political and social. The works discussed in this book, including those by Marclay, Abramović and Eliasson, do not offer a temporal salve or escape from the strictures of modern numerical time, but they do generate durations that are divergent and multiplicitous.
Key here is the premise that these works of art actually ‘produce’ time, or many times, rather than representing or visualizing its attributes. Marclay’s 24-hour film is a functioning clock, not a pictorial representation of one. This work draws the numerical time of modernity – the incessant tick of the clock – into the much more complex and critical folds of contemporary art. The task here is to recognize the same critical insights in works of art whose times and durations are not so explicit, less crisply numerical and overt: the elongated encounters of Abramović’s performances and the trickling thaw that befalls Eliasson’s icebergs. Such works are not neatly bundled symbolic representations or archetypal models of time so much as they are time itself. Art’s capacity to solicit and produce variable ‘textures’ of duration presents an important challenge to the disinterested authority of modern clock time. Contemporary works of art solicit an interested time – one that is amplified, heightened, divergent and confronting. It is a time pulled out of joint; a time split open, fractured and crystallized; it is a time, not of numbers and measures, but of dynamism and becoming.
Time and contemporary art history
In recognizing art’s important contribution to the philosophy of time, this book pursues two primary art historical aims. First, it seeks to overcome the categorical distinction between time and space that still persists in some fields of art history. Second, it is motivated by the philosophical ambition to expand upon the aesthetic possibilities presented by the eminent work of French thinkers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, whose respective philosophies of time emphasize temporal becoming over measured certitude.
The Enlightenment thinker Gotthold Lessing’s categorical division between the temporal arts of poetry and the spatial arts of sculpture is a touchstone for assessing the fortunes of time in western art history. 2 In his essay, ‘Laocoön’ (1766), Lessing argued that time was an inherent attribute of the arts of poetry and literature, while sculpture was intrinsically static and spatial. 3 He insisted that poetry was temporal because it unfurled in a succession of sonic utterances, whereas sculpture’s voluminous components were thought to be simultaneously and materially ‘present’. These categorizations persisted in the work of the influential modernist critic Clement Greenberg, whose own essay ‘Towards a newer Laocoön’ (1940) sought to underscore the ‘timeless’ autonomy of the painterly medium. 4 Lessing’s Enlightenment distinctions and Greenberg’s modernist dictum ef