Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art: Beyond the Clock

Part I

Time

Part I explores works of art that embrace, scrutinize and subvert the time of numbers. For those who contribute to today’s globalized capitalist economies, the 24-hour clock and the twelve-month calendar are all-too-familiar systems of temporal measurement and standardization. From the monotonous factory work of the industrial age to the lightning-fast exchanges of the digital era, numerical time has become an essential scheduling force in workplaces, home life and leisurely activities. The time of the analogue clock or its glimmering digital counterpart is the time of emails, airline timetables, exercise regimes, school days and childcare, military campaigns, financial trading, commissioning deadlines, factory systems, call-centre operations and a multitude of online exchanges.

The time of numbers may very well be the time of our everyday lives.¹ In Chapter 2, I quote the media theorist Robert Hassan who writes that today’s citizens are thoroughly conditioned by numerical time ‘so practiced are we at synchronising our lives to [its] tempo that we can roughly guess the time without needing to glance at a clock’.² The prominence of temporal descriptions such as ‘time poor’, ‘time-pressure’, ‘time famine’, ‘flexi-time’, ‘quality time’, ‘real time’ and ‘24/7 time’ suggests that the experience of clock time (as opposed to seasonal time or emotional durations) is a particularly pressing contemporary concern. While much of this book is dedicated to exploring timescales that exist outside the singular capitalist tempo – including different philosophical, scientific, social and cultural understandings of temporality – it is important that we do not underestimate the remarkable prominence of numerical time in contemporary life. The very premise of its all-encompassing universality is that it can be measured and valued in exactly the same way across borders, boundaries, societies and cultures: the time of the clock is ultimately indifferent to difference.

The following chapters explore the work of contemporary artists that have embraced this temporal regime, but also twisted and subverted its strictures. Each of the works discussed here reconceives of the conventional relationship between the standardized time of numbers and the activities of the human body. Of special interest is how numerical time has become intimately implicated in work practices and industrial regimes. Chapter 1 discusses significant conceptual projects by On Kawara, Hanne Darboven and Roman Opalka that each involved marking incremental units of time over extended periods of days, weeks, months and years. These remarkable long-term projects critically embraced time as a seemingly neutral, objective and absolute means of measuring the labouring activities of the artist’s body. They challenged the Enlightenment premise that the orderly time of numbers must maintain a cool abstraction from the more irrational and capricious human activities that it seeks to measure.

Chapter 2 explores works by Christian Marclay, Toril Johannessen, Raqs Media Collective and Felix Gonzalez-Torres that actually take the form of functioning clocks that solicit the viewer’s temporal gaze. It considers the premise that the ordinary time of clocks is being transformed by the fast-paced temporalities of digital technologies and computational systems. Contemporary media theorists and philosophers Manuel Castells, Paul Virilio and Jonathan Crary are critical of the near-instantaneous speeds that have come to drive financial trading, online exchanges and a multitude of workplace activities. The fear is that the sequential time of the industrial-age clock is fast giving way to what Castell calls the ‘perennial simultaneity’ of the digital era – a timeless time that makes no room for the sluggish pace of the human body. In assuming the clock’s ‘face’, works by Marclay, Johannessen, Raqs Media Collective and Gonzalez-Torres disrupt our habitual visual deference to the 24-hour temporal cycle as the universal measure of all worldly activities.

Finally, Part I closes with a crucial feminist assessment of the relationship between time, gender and the labouring body. This chapter compares works by Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Tracey Emin that explore the time of women’s labour through the domestic activity of cleaning. Where Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Performances of the 1970s engaged in public acts of dusting, mopping and scrubbing, Tracey Emin’s infamously dishevelled 1990s work My Bed (1998) completely rejected the labour of domestic housework. While they take altogether different forms, these works each engage the conceptual legacy of artists Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol in putting pressure on orthodox discussions of time and work. Clean or dirty, each of these works of art reveals the seemingly invisible hours and efforts that contribute to maintenance, sanitation and care – activities that have traditionally been nominated as ‘women’s work’. This final chapter considers how the durations of dirt, dust and detritus might be thought of as messily subversive temporalities that upend the crisply demarcated time of the clock.

Chapter 1

Marking Time in Conceptual Art

On 4 January 1966, the Japanese artist On Kawara made the first work of the Today series: a simple, monochromatic painting that declared the day’s date. That year, the German artist Hanne Darboven began annotating a chain of mathematical permutations that were also based on the divisions of the Roman calendar. Her drawings would become part of the Konstruktionen series: thousands of handwritten calculations collated into annual volumes. A year earlier, in Warsaw, the Polish artist Roman Opalka created the first painting of what would become a decades–long series. This painting begins with the number 1 inscribed in white paint in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and ends with the number 35,327 in the lower right corner. Opalka would continue to paint numbers in strict sequential order, filling hundreds of canvases with linear inscriptions. This remarkable conceptual art project, and those by Kawara and Darboven, would continue for the next 40 years, each concluding in the first decades of the twentieth century.³

This chapter explores the significant artistic commitment to observing the time of numbers in works by Kawara, Darboven and Opalka. Their conceptual projects are important because they offer a means of scrutinizing the global prominence of time as a numerical system of measurement – the great universal gauge of all worldly activities. While many of the artists discussed in this book have sought out durational alternatives to the strictures of this temporal standard, Kawara, Darboven and Opalka each adopted the time of numbers as the abiding logic of their works of art. On a daily basis, these artists created paintings and drawings whereby time was marked in numerical increments – temporal values that are, in turn, given to describe the notable longevity of their respective conceptual projects.

Like many conceptual artists of the 1960s, Kawara, Darboven and Opalka established artistic systems and procedures that challenged traditional western artistic conventions, such as pictorial representation and precious material value. Their works communicate information, not through figurative means, but through officious and seemingly bureaucratic systems of numerical measurement. Stepping away from these important art histories, this chapter considers what the long-term conceptual works by Kawara, Darboven and Opalka actually say about time itself. It explores how these projects contribute to the Enlightenment principle that mathematical time should stand apart from the world as a solid, reliable measure of change and activity and its techno-scientific legacy: the remarkable global standardization of time across the industrial era.

Works by Kawara, Darboven and Opalka are especially compelling because, while they truly embrace numerical time as an authoritative measure of their own activities, they also ‘take’ time itself. The act of artistic measurement is never far removed from the artistic activities of the body that it, in turn, seeks to measure. Marcel Duchamp’s critique of spatial standardization in the work Three Standard Stoppages (1913–14) offers a useful point of comparison in considering how the tautological procedures employed by Kawara, Darboven and Opalka cast doubt on the objective authority of universal time. While they lack Duchamp’s satirical bite, their conceptual projects sustain an important critique of the time of standardized numbers and its relationship to the labouring activities of the body.

Absolute time, mathematical and true

The history of seventeenth-century scientific and philosophical transformations is certainly well-known, but is worth reiterating here because the temporal principles introduced by thinkers such as Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant continue to shape the modern understanding of time. The great inventor of calculus, Newton famously conceived of a ‘River of Time’ that stood as the reliable measure of all people, properties, objects and events. While the scientific description of time as an independent dimension would be entirely undone by Albert Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity – a subject discussed in Part III of this book – the philosophical premise of a universal timescale still underpins the contemporary authority of the 24-hour time standard. Time exists like a great ‘clock in the sky’ that unites all differences and divergences under a single temporal umbrella.

In the late seventeenth century, Newton’s major achievement was to overturn the prevailing scientific wisdom in positing ‘absolute time’ as a fixed mathematical entity. The dominant Aristotelian belief was that time was not a separate and distinct dimension, but the measure of physical motion: a derivative of the movement of worldly objects and events, natural rhythms and changeable phenomena. By contrast, Newton famously insisted that ‘absolute, true, mathematical time’ existed for and of itself; flowing ‘equably without relation to anything external’.⁴ Unfastened from the seemingly capricious and unpredictable rhythms of the natural world, Newton’s absolute time stood as a temporal ‘container’ – one that was fundamentally indifferent to its own contents.

At the very beginning of his celebrated book on time and film, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze acknowledges Immanuel Kant’s role in completing this philosophical and scientific transformation. He writes: ‘from the Greeks to Kant, a revolution took place in philosophy: the subordination of time to movement was reversed…’⁵ Kant did not entirely oblige the autonomy of Newtonian time because he could not conceive of a temporality that was independent of the human perceptual capacities to grasp it.⁶ But he did embrace the application of a strict mathematical time to the objects and events that do appear in phenomenal experience. Kant’s philosophical position is well known: time maintains a special status as an ideal and transcendent dimension that, while not directly given in human experience, exists as the universal condition of all experiential appearances. These conditions are fundamental inasmuch as they transcend historical, cultural and social contexts. In short, the Kantian subject can experience objects and events ‘in’ time, and organize these activities according to mathematical intervals, because this time is already ‘hardwired’ in the brain as part of its inherent cognitive architecture.⁷

Ultimately, the legacy of Kant and Newton’s thought is a time of rational certainty that structures both human experience and the world beyond it.⁸ This time presents an unequivocal and reliable standard that consists of a past that does not change, a present that is quantifiable and, most importantly, a future that can be predicted. What is lost to this determinist picture of the universe is a time of movement, change, dynamism and becoming – a subject that will become significant for the artists discussed in Part IV of this book.

Modern time, standardized and universal

Beginning roughly in the middle of the nineteenth century and drawing to a close with the First World War, the great social and technological transformations of the industrial era were underscored by the rationalist temporal ambitions of the Enlightenment. In the ever-expanding imperial territories of Europe, Great Britain and Northern America, time was established as a universal standard that regulated both labour practices and the exchange of goods and information. While the 24-hour timescale and the seven-day week derive from the Babylonian sexagesimal system and Gregorian calendar, the global time standard is a relatively recent temporal convention. At the International Meridian Conference of 1884, a quorum of world powers agreed to measure time at the point at which the sun passed the Prime Meridian marker in Greenwich, England, thereby establishing a global standard that united a variety of independent and local timekeeping systems.

The social geographers Jon May and Nigel Thrift offer one of the most comprehensive and nuanced accounts of how the industrial era shaped basic understanding and experiences of time.⁹ They write that the swift expansion of railway networks allowed for hugely dispersed territories to be traversed, occupied and settled at a pace not seen before.¹⁰ Similarly, the exchange of information along telegraphic wires meant that systems of communication became detached from the physical journeys and concrete geographic borders to which they were once bound. Simply put, the world was seen to become faster and closer – a technocratic transformation that Karl Marx famously described as the ‘annihilation of space by time’.¹¹

Such changes are understood as a source of both wonderment and anxiety: a transformative means of cultural ‘advancement’, but also a machinic framework of control and coercion. New technologies of exchange aided in the modernist progression of ‘advanced’ societies, but they were also seen to hasten the seemingly natural speed of both work and life in a way that put acute pressure on the individual who simply could not keep up with the pace of change. That time and technology are ‘too fast’ for our lives is a key narrative of modernity. Charlie Chaplin’s aptly named Modern Times (1936) offers the perfect cinematic image of this sentiment, in which the iconic figure of the Little Tramp is pulled through the rotating cogs of a giant factory conveyor belt – a clock-like mechanism that appears to squeeze his small and comically floppy body.

A number of media theorists and historians have drawn a special analogy between this sense of technological acceleration in the industrial age and the temporal values of our digital era.¹² The social theorist Judy Wajcman writes that the telegraph in particular caused ‘people to wonder, much as the Internet does today, about the rapid and extraordinary shifts it wrought in the spatial and temporal boundaries of human relationships’.¹³ Modern time has since lost its geographic and solar markers in favour of atomic measurement that completely exceeds human observational capacities altogether. The fiercely precise atomic clock defines a single second as the ‘time it takes a Cesium-133 atom at the ground state to oscillate exactly 9,192,631,770 times’.¹⁴ Imperceptible to the human eye, these microscopic vibrations offer a system of measurement that will only deviate one second every twenty million years.

How and why the time of modernity and the time of the digital era are related is the subject of some debate that is explored in greater depth in Chapter 2. For the art historian Charlie Gere, the emancipatory promise of modern technological change has ultimately become ‘the means by which the human element was – and indeed still is – being increasingly marginalized by a system which is too complex and operates too fast to tolerate such elements’.¹⁵ For other thinkers, including May, Thrift and Wajcman, this picture of technological change is not nearly as singular or determinate. These social theorists understand technology not as an external force, but a social practice that is shaped by cultural and societal conditions – an idea also pursued in the following chapter.¹⁶

At face value, the meticulous and somewhat austere systems of Kawara’s Today series, Darboven’s Konstruktionen project and Opalka’s Infinity series do embrace the modern, technocratic authority of numerical time. Day in and day out, these artists steadfastly marked time by applying paint to canvas and ink to paper. In some sense, their bodies could be seen to assume the mechanical ‘tick’ of the machine: repetitive, numerical, highly rational and