Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art (Book)

Beyond the Clock

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.  

Edition

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.  

Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers is a contemporary art historian and curator based in Auckland.

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

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