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