Time anxiety
A few months ago, I managed to see The Clock, a 24-hour video piece by the artist Christian Marclay. Having its first exhibition in London last year, The Clock has already had overlapping exhibitions in different cities around the world and it won for Maclay the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale where I saw it.
The work has been acutely described as “mesmerizing.” Consisting entirely of clips from movies, The Clock features compiled excerpts of scenes related to time and in which clocks are present. In a feat for its editing and in the maintenance required for its exhibition, the time displayed on the clocks in the video is actually synchronized with the real time in the place it’s shown. A worker at an office looks up at the clock from his desk. The clock strikes from 5:19 to 5:20 p.m., which is also the present time in Venice. The video then cuts to a movie which shows Meg Ryan and two kids talking and walking into a house. A grandfather clock at 5:20 p.m. sits unobtrusively in the background. Then it’s actor Andy Griffith being shown into an office, a clock at 5:20 sitting on the middle of a desk. Immediately after, another scene — a man climbing onto a building ledge from a window. Creeping carefully around the building, he goes around the corner revealing a large clock. The time on display: 5:20.
In a few seconds, as the work signalled, actual time would be 5:21 p.m. I remember then being uncomfortably conscious that I was dangerously breaching the time I had alloted for myself to see this work. That at 6 p.m., the biennale closed for the day and I would be forced to leave. That I hadn’t seen so much of the biennale still. That I had to meet soon with my friends. That I only had two days left in Venice. Of course, it is certainly not unusual to be short of time. Yet, the work makes hyperaware the frequent confrontation we have with it, hence clocks’ perennial presence on our wrists, in our homes, in schools, buildings and outdoors. As Marclay noted in a video interview posted by the Venice Biennale: “Everyone’s concerned about time.”
Time, however, is relative. It could be argued that the anxiety over time is a recent phenomenon or at least, that the contention with time has amplified in the last century or so. Due to modernity and the developments in technology, our experience of time is quickly changing. The art historian Pamela Lee points to the special relationship of time in the art of the 1960s in her book Chronophobia (2004). She writes, “Time and technology, I want to argue, are twinned phenomena in that decade; and works of art provide special insight into this relationship as much as they model that relationship in turn.” She contends “this preoccupation illuminates the emergence of new information technologies in the postwar era, offering a historical prelude to our contemporary fixations on time and speed within digital culture…. This book understands the chronophobic tendency in much of that decade’s work as the projection of a liminal historical moment, for which there was no clear perspective on the social and technological horizon yet to come.”
It is that uneasy uncertainty of impending historical change and being amidst it which echoes in today’s times, in the world’s current age of hackers, genetic research, climate change, economic collapse and protracted war in a post 9-11 world. Much to do with political and economic tension, and in tandem with rapid scientific and technological research and advancement, the present moment is filled with the relentless doubt and insecurity of this leading to a forthcoming era — of what exactly is unknown. This anxiety is aptly demonstrated in another work which also collaged video excerpts from cinema. The piece made by artist Marjolijn DIjkman collected visions of the future culled from 70 science fiction films, together exposing apocalyptic predictions and trepidation of the time to come. It presents projections of future time chronologically spanning from 2008 to 802,701 A.D., rolled into a tight 60 minutes. Titled Wandering through the Future, the work was commissioned and shown in the 2007 Sharjah Biennale that was themed “Still Life, Ecology and the Politics of Change.” It was noted by Sabine Hillen, who wrote for its exhibition in Germany, that the utopic perspectives of earlier science fiction films eventually gave way to increasing threats of fear and possibilities of disaster. It offers a powerful, haunting and even chilling portrayal of how we try to envisage the forthcoming and distant time, when instantaneous news alerts, warnings and even contradictory information seem to act as triggers to obsessive paranoia.
While in chronic company but especially in times of precarity, time becomes a powerful subject and medium.
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The author may be e-mailed at letterstolisa@gmail.com. Her blog of art writings and projects is at http://writelisawrite.blogspot.com.
