TIME

Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art

by GROOM AMELIA

What does 'contemporary' actually mean? This is among the fundamental questions about the nature and politics of time that philosophers, artists and more recently curators have investigated over the past two decades. If clock time -- a linear measurement that can be unified, followed and owned -- is largely the invention of capitalist modernity and binds us to its strictures, how can we extricate ourselves and discover alternative possibilities of experiencing time?

Recent art has explored such diverse registers of temporality as wasting and waiting, regression and repetition, deja vu and seriality, unrealized possibility and idleness, non-consummation and counter-productivity, the belated and the premature, the disjointed and the out-of-sync -- all of which go against sequentialist time and index slips in chronological experience. While such theorists as Giorgio Agamben and Georges Didi-Huberman have proposed "anachronistic" or "heterochronic" readings of history, artists have opened up the field of time to the extent that the very notion of the contemporary is brought into question. This collection surveys contemporary art and theory that proposes a wealth of alternatives to outdated linear models of time.

Artists surveyed include Marina Abramovi, Francis Alys, Matthew Buckingham, Janet Cardiff, Paul Chan, Olafur Eliasson, Bea Fremderman, Toril Johannessen, On Kawara, Joachim Koester, Christian Marclay, nova Milne, Trevor Paglen, Katie Patterson, Raqs Media Collective, Dexter Sinister, Simon Starling, Hito Steyerl, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tehching Hsieh, Time/Bank, Mark von Schlegell

Writers include Giorgio Agamben, Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Hans Belting, Walter Benjamin, Franco Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Georges Didi-Huberman, D gen Zenji, Peter Galison, Boris Groys, Brian Dillon, Elena Filipovic, Joshua Foer, Elizabeth Grosz, Adrian Heathfield, Rachel Kent, Bruno Latour, George Kubler, Doreen Massey, Alexander Nagel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Daniel Rosenberg, Michel Serres, Michel Siffre, Nancy Spector, Nato Thompson, Christopher Wood, George Woodcock

Genres: Art, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Art History

240 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 2013

Reviews

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘It’s time. It’s about time. In time, on time. Time by our side, time on our hands. Take your time, take time out. Tell the time, time will tell. Spending time, timing it. A long time, a lot of time, the whole time. In my time, at time, at times, for the time being, all the time. Having time, keeping time. Killing time, wasting time, doing time. For a time, from time to time, at the same time, some other time. Time and time again, in no time at all. Turn back time, this time around. Set a time, serve your time, give someone the time of day. Work against time, be behind the times, fall on hard times. The times have changed, the time has come. Time passing, time running out. Time’s up. Time’s out…’ from ‘Introduction’ by the editor, Amelia Groom.

Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series never seem to disappoint? The uncertain tone only because I have not read them all – a blessing and a curse, but much more the former. The upcoming publications are no less enticing – Oceans, and Speculation in particular, which I need to get my hands on soon.

What I enjoy most, or least appreciate a great deal about these kinds of essays is that I don’t ever feel like I have to finish reading them all at once; and ultimately I can always get back to them anytime I want to. Groom did a fantastic editorial work with this one especially. I don’t keep up with ‘art’/’artists’ as much as I used to when I was studying it. But the collection is a mixed lot not limited to just artists and alike, there are contributions by Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges in it as well. It really feels quite ‘rewarding’ as a reader to read these essays.

‘‘Right timing’ is another way the Greeks referred to kairos. For them, qualitative time can only be achieved through human intervention. The power to act and take advantage of a special event or action that appears over the unfolding of things is crucial to the nature of kairos. But this cannot happen at any time. Only at opportune moments, when time holds the most potential for change, is kairos possible. Bug again, only if the opportunity is seized and acted upon. Kairos is that critical point in time when a crisis or rupture opens up and is catalysed with human will to create new potentials.’ from ‘A Time Apart’ by Chan.

Some stood out more to me than the rest, but regardless, I fully appreciate how well-organised the entire collection is – separated into three sections – ‘Before’, ‘During’, and ‘After’ which is not only pleasing to ‘look’ at, but also makes one’s reading experience so much nicer.

‘Space has time/times within it. This is not the static simultaneity of a closed system but a simultaneity of movements. And that is a different thing altogether. It means, for one thing, that you can’t go back in space: the myth of the return. But the time you get on the train again to go back home that night, disentangling yourself – physically at least – from those Liverpudlian trajectories, the Manchester you left will not be the Manchester of now (just as you yourself will have changed). Space has its times. To open up space to this kind of imagination means thinking about space and time together. You can’t hold places and things still. What you can do is meet up with them, catch up with where another’s history has got to ‘now’, and acknowledge that ‘now’ is itself constituted by that meeting up. ‘Here’, in that sense, is not a place on a map. It is that intersection of trajectories, the meeting-up of stories; an encounter. Every ‘here’ and a here-and-now.’ – from ‘Some Times of Space’ by Massey.

Like the other books in the same series, this is definitely a book worthy of future re-reads. But for now, if I may just bring to attention, and in an almost irrelevant way, my affinity for Marina Abramovic’s essay, ‘When Time Becomes Form’ (in which she applauds the ideas and work of another artist, Hsieh Tehching). I suppose that if you just want a quick taste of Groom’s beautiful curation, I would recommend this one. A highly biased opinion probably, maybe I just miss ‘seeing’ her work in art galleries.

‘In the old Tibetan Buddhist tradition the disciples make little Buddhas pressed in clay moulds. They are given a big pile of clay and they have to sit there. It takes about three months to make a million of these little Buddhas. It is a repetitive action and also a meditation. But what happens with this kind of repetition is that you start to get attached to the result: your ego goes up because you can say: ‘Look, I have made half a million. I have achieved something.’ So, after their training of three months they do another three months training, the same mode but sitting in the running river, where you don’t have a result and you can’t build this attachment because the result isn’t visible.

In art we have the great example of Walter De Maria, who wrote a short text in 1960 in which he talks about the actions that are useless being the most important actions in art today. The idea of spending time and not making a result, this is really essential, and it is so difficult to talk about it. It is like a soft matter that we can’t explain. Something else takes place.’ – from ‘When Time Becomes Form’ by Abramovic.