Amelia Groom (ed.),Time

Amelia Groom (ed.), Time. Whitechapel Gallery/Cambridge: London, The MIT Press: MA, 2013, 240 pp. ISBN 978-0-85488-215-1 (Whitechapel Gallery)/978-0-262-51966-3 (The MIT Press)

In 1980–1981, the New York City-based performance artist Tehching Hsieh punched a clock, every hour, on the hour for a whole year. He documented his performance by taking hourly pictures of himself. Time Clock Piece was the second of five One-Year Performances that Hsieh completed between 1978 and 2000. In her brief essay When Time Becomes Form (2009), Marina Abramovic ranks the performance among the most demanding pieces that Hsieh made. ‘You can’t go further than one hour from the location, you can’t sleep more than an hour. There is an incredible restrained geometry around this piece, and a discipline, which is just phenomenal to me’ (p. 94). Commenting on Abramovic’s work and her own durational performance The Artist is Present in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2010, writer, activist and curator Nato Thompson claims that the ‘dematerialized, agitated nature of the current era’ explains the recent popularity of artists who embrace ‘all things slow, endless and tedious’ (p. 93).

It is through the work of artists such as Hsieh and Abramovic that we acquire new understandings of time, however difficult it may be to express these understandings in words. Time is the deceptively simple title of an anthology of texts on the concept of time in the arts, more specifically the visual and performance arts. It covers the many ways in which artists have explored temporalities and questioned sequential and linear temporal orderings and chronological perspectives. The book is part of the Documents of Contemporary Art Series co-published by Whitechapel Gallery in London and The MIT Press in Cambridge, MA. Other edited volumes in this series have focused on concepts such as Colour, Nature, Ruins, Sound and The Sublime. Edited by London-based critic and curator Amelia Groom, who wrote a doctoral dissertation on time in art, Time presents a selection of texts written by artists, curators, critics, art historians, philosophers, theorists and writers. Contemporary artists whose work is surveyed include Francis Alÿs, Olafur Eliasson, Janet Cardiff, Katie Paterson and Sylvia Sleigh, and there are texts from writers such as Henri Bergson, Jorge Luis Borges, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Doreen Massey. Most of the texts are short excerpts, sometimes no longer than a page.

Amelia Groom starts her introduction to the collection with the observation that the concept of time cannot be defined precisely. Instead of trying to give definitions, art has the potential to ask new questions about time:

Wasting and waiting, regression and repetition; non-consumation and counterproductivity; the belated and the obsolete; the disjointed and the out of synch – these are all familiar tropes in the work of contemporary artists, and point to a widespread questioning of the idea of time as an arrow propelling us in unison from the past into the future. (p. 12)

Even though the distinction of past, present and future might be illusory to some of the artists in the book, Groom loosely structured it in three sections titled Before, During and After. In the first section, questions concerning the non-linear character of art history are dealt with. Instead of a single canon of works and styles that can be traced back to shared origins, the history of art shows ‘symbiotic relations between artworks from dramatically disparate times’ (p. 15). The section called During presents artists and writers who have worked with notions such as the ‘Contemporary’ and what Benjamin has called Jetztzeit, or ‘now time’, a way to destabilize teleological time and the implicit causality embedded in the continuum of history. The last section After deals with issues of futurity and change.

At first sight, Time gives the impression of being a rather rhapsodic collection. Most of the texts are written in the past decade, but some are older, with Augustine’s Time and Eternity as the extreme. The book can be read in many ways, from beginning to end or vice versa, or by just picking random texts. It is only after one starts reading, that the seemingly random juxtaposition of texts and topics reveals a subtle ordering. Every text follows up on aspects of the previous one, and already precludes hints at what will follow. The reader is invited to create his or her own trajectories in the book. One such trajectory renders insights in synchronicity and simultaneity, or even the ‘folding’ of times. In her reflections in response to Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 installation The Weather Project in the Tate Modern in London, geographer Doreen Massey describes a train journey where moving through time means transecting millions of local and ongoing stories. In his art, she argues, Eliasson challenges ‘the static, given, implacable “objecthood” of art’ (p. 117) and in doing so shows how ‘space has time/times within in’. Space cannot be revisited. Like the Heraclitan river it will have changed, in the same way the train station you left a few moments ago has already changed. This reflection on simultaneity across times is taken up in the next text in which Timothy Barker refers to Michel Serres’s idea of a car as an aggregate of problems and solutions from other times, a ‘multi-temporal assemblage, taking form in the present’ (p. 123). Barker recounts how the Canadian sound artist Janet Cardiff plays with this notion of multi-temporality in Her Long Black Hair (2004), a project in which participants wearing headphones walk a directed route through New York’s Central Park, and listen to the sounds of past moments at these same places. The reader who continues to read the texts in their printed order will remember Serres’s car when getting to his conversation with Bruno Latour in which he explains his ‘folded’ topographies of time. Serres: ‘An object, a circumstance, is thus polychronic, multitemporal, and reveals a time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats’ (p. 164).

A second example of a reading trajectory could be the notion of the contemporary. Here, we could start with the text by Dexter Sinister, the working name of New York-based designers, publishers and writers Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt. They vividly describe the ‘Ponzi scheme’ in which computer networks communicate and coordinate the correct time, using the time-sharing conventions of the Network Time Protocol (NTP). The origin of this protocol is the Caesium Atomic Fountain Clock at the NIST laboratories in Colorado. By technologically enabling the communication of the ‘now’, NIST could be said to define the contemporary in a practical sense. Art critic Boris Groys points out a different and more political meaning of ‘contemporary’. According to him, it does not necessarily mean to be in the here-and-now, rather it means to be ‘with time’ instead of ‘in time’. To be contemporary, Groys argues, is to be a ‘comrade of time’, to help time when it has problems. ‘And under conditions of our contemporary product-oriented civilization, time does indeed have problems when it is perceived as being unproductive, wasted, meaningless’ (p. 154). To be a comrade of this unproductive time is what time-based art can do, Groys claims – as art-based time.

It is clear from these exemplary trajectories that Time does not provide understandings of time along the lines of disciplinary conventions. It is also not a book that gives a systematic overview of the use and relevance of the concept of time in the contemporary art, or even of the relations between art, historicity and the temporal. Yet, the book is certainly of value for scholars of time in society. When it comes to the relation between art and science, we are often trapped in dualisms: words and worlds, art practice and art writing, discursive and embodied knowledge, original art works and their representations. We often find ourselves rehearsing clichéd notions of what characterizes art as well as science. Art becomes a paragon of unmethodological, autonomous and intuitive work, while science appears uncreative, methodological and articulate. One can read Time as an attempt to transcend these dichotomies. It creates space for a notion of arts-based research as a productive middle ground. It does so by opening up a plurality of times. Even in the one-year long performance of Hsieh, we can distinguish between measured clock time, the timing of repetitive action, the disciplining of these actions through time, the experience of the passing of time, time as minute change that can be traced on the hourly photographs, and more. Merging form and content, the main quality of the book is that it encourages the reader to travel along with these times, taking unexpected routes, asking new questions.