‘Would anyone by chance have the sheet music for this? I’ve been looking to learn it.’
‘The worst point is, the orchestra needed six weeks of rehearsals to get it right.’
‘Somebody should have let out a big fart.’
‘White people are fucking crazy.’
Then there is One Year Performance 1980–81 (Time-Clock Piece) by Tehching Hsieh, a six-minute film in which the Taiwanese artist reflected on his inability to obtain a work permit in the USA. Every hour for a year Hsieh put on a silver-grey factory uniform and punched a time clock but did no work: this activity thus became the artwork, and the film consists of 8,627 still images compressing his endeavours.8 Hsieh’s stamped time cards showed the passage of time, but he also had another method: he shaved his head at the beginning of the year, and as the time-lapse film progresses, it grows.
In the catalogue to the show, Marquard Smith explains that the subject of art and time is one whose time has come. He refers to a survey by Christine Ross called The Past is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art, which notes that between 2005 and the book’s publication in 2012 there were at least 20 exhibitions on time. In 2014 Marquand kept his own tally, adding shows in Harlem, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Barcelona and Zagreb and a couple of conferences too. He has no answer as to why this should be, other than the fact that the subject is exciting, multifaceted, ever-present and insistent. Displayed together, Marquand has detected a rhythm to his disparate selection of work, noting how they challenge and fold back on each other, and how, by playfully recreating the natural order of past, present and future, they all serve as time machines. And some of them are just plain funny, such as Martin John Callanan’s Departure of All, an airport departure board listing 25 flights – Amsterdam to Gran Canaria, Melbourne to Dubai, Paris to Riyadh – with all the flights leaving simultaneously at 2.11. And Mark Wallinger’s Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, a full-scale rethink of a London police box and Doctor Who’s Tardis, but in silver, suggesting infinite possibilities for adventure inside, but on the outside only reflections of ourselves.
The cyclical nature of time tends to make artists obsessive, but you’d have to get up very early in the day to be more obsessed with the passing of time than On Kawara. Not long after he moved to New York from his native Japan in 1965, Kawara began his Today Series, a collection of paintings consisting only of the day’s date. Most were the size of a laptop, exquisitely executed in several layers of Liquitex acrylic, white on a dark background, the letters and numerals arranged in the style favoured by the country in which he was painting that day. Most were painted in New York, so appear as APRIL.27,1979 or MAY.12,1983. The one at Milton Keynes was painted in Iceland, so reads 27.ÁG.1995. On completion, each painting would be put in a box with a local newspaper clipping displaying the date, but if Kawara failed to complete a painting in a day, he would destroy it. Looking at his work had an energising effect on me – one of those things, like a close shave on a bike or recovery from illness, which makes one appreciate how many days one has left. I didn’t feel nostalgia; I felt release. Can one place a spiritual value on this kind of singular and possessed art?9 Before he died in June 2014, Kawara had painted – and thus completed and perhaps owned – around 3,000 days.
One of my favourites in the Milton Keynes show was, predictably enough, a film called Safety Last by Catherine Yass. The film lasts just over two minutes, but consists of just one 12-second clip repeated on a loop (the clip, of course, is Harold Lloyd on that clock, the bit where his weight tips the minute hand from a quarter to three back to half past two). But in Yass’s version, the clip disintegrates as it plays, each time becoming grainier and scratchier, until at the end, by its tenth appearance, it is just a storm of static ribbons. Yass re-filmed the original version using colour film, so that the disintegration on the emulsion is both more effective and more beautiful. Or, in the artist’s words, ‘setting up a space of dream and memory that works against the descriptive linear perspective of the monochrome image’.
I’d known Yass since we were teens. But until I visited Milton Keynes I had no idea she was so interested in Harold Lloyd. She told me she was attracted to Safety Last! by its combination of comedy and potential tragedy. She liked the idea of time being pulled backwards, and the disintegration of the image was also a comment on the materiality of film as it became eclipsed by newer technologies.
I asked her why time was such a popular subject for artists and creators. Many artists are now looking back at Modernism, she said, and the artistic focus on time certainly stretched as far back as Futurism, Vorticism and Cubism (what was Cubism if not a single plane with several viewpoints considered all at once?). And of course before that there was photography and early film, where time could be frozen and reversed. To a modern artist, the explorative possibilities of time were practically inexhaustible.
A few weeks after How to Construct a Time Machine closed, the artist Cornelia Parker made her own contribution to the crowded field. Parker had been approached by HS1, the company that runs St Pancras International Station, in collaboration with the Royal Academy, to make an artwork for a series called Terrace Wires. She could do whatever she wanted, so long as it would make travellers arriving and departing on the Eurostar look up at the station’s magnificent ironwork roof. Her work would be suspended above the passengers, but what would she put up there? The two previous participants in the project had put up a rainbow wall of Perspex (David Batchelor) and clouds (Lucy + Jorge). Several of Cornelia Parker’s witty and challenging works had asked abstract questions about deep time and gravity, not least her famous frozen-in-the-moment blown-up shed (Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View) and an event in Boston called At the Bottom of This Lake Lies a Piece of the Moon in which she had thrown a lunar meteorite she had bought on the Internet. ‘Instead of us landing on the moon it was the moon landing on us.’
‘I think my first thought [when asked to put up work at St Pancras] was no. There is so much going on in the station – how can I compete with that?’ But then she had a vision of how it might work. ‘I’d just come back from France on the Eurostar, and I was walking down the station, and David Batchelor’s piece was up, and it was blotting out the clock. I thought that I could do a piece that blocks out the clock. What was good to block out the clock? Another clock.’
Parker was speaking to about 60 people by the St Pancras champagne bar, near the statue of John Betjeman, and because it was a normal weekday evening the station was busy and loud. We seemed to be the only still thing in the place. The artist explained how she had decided to make a replica of the white clock affixed at one end of the station, but hers would be black, its negative, and it would seem to float. It would be the same size as the original (5.44 metres in diameter, 1.6 tonnes of steel) and hang about 16 metres in front of it, floating directly over passengers’ heads. Both clocks would tell the same time, although the time may read slightly differently – give or take half a minute – depending on a passenger’s viewing angle. And at another vantage point, the original clock would be entirely eclipsed.10 Parker wanted her piece to reflect the rarefied nature of time in a train station – the constant rushing, the anxiety of being late – the idea that time hangs above us like a perilous chandelier, a sword of Damocles. She was also keen to introduce the notion of a slower time reference, a deeper psychological or planetary time. And she wanted to pose a heady astronomical question:
‘What would eclipse time, if not time itself?’ Parker called her clock, or at least the conceptual idea for the piece, One More Time. She said she wondered about having the French time on her clock, an hour ahead of London, but was concerned that this would confuse the passengers, who would assume they were an hour late for their trains. A deliberately wrong clock, especially an authoritative one at an international terminus, was clearly taking the artistic interpretation of time too far. But what if the time on the clock was turned back instead of forward? Perhaps only th
e future king of England could pull off a trick like that.
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1 The first two are from Dose.com, which calls itself ‘Entertainment. Nerd. Style. Hollywood. The World. More.’ The ‘8 Clocks’ list is from the list maniacs at BuzzFeed, compiled by a man named Justin Abarca.
2 Technically, Big Ben is the nickname of the largest bell in the clock tower rather than the four-faced clock itself. And the clock tower is now officially known as Elizabeth Tower.
3 See theclockmarclay.wikia.com. Judging by the full and empty slots, the film has been watched and noted extensively between 10 a.m. and 12.30 p.m., and between 1.30 p.m. and 7.20 p.m. But from 7.20 p.m. to midnight (with the exception of a busy patch from 10.15 to 10.45) there’s a barren spell. Did people just not visit during this period? Did they visit and fall asleep? Were they so entranced that no one took notes?
4 We have long appreciated how technology has dictated the duration and consumption of our entertainment. While cinema has offered us many options to watch (multiple screenings over several weeks), television and radio have been the restrictive mediums. Programme length was dictated by the ease of scheduling in half-hourly slots (few programmes begin at 8.55 p.m., fewer still at 9.17), and by what was once considered to be the length of our attention spans. But then two things happened to wrest time back from the scheduler. The video recorder and Internet streaming seemed, for a while at least, to free us from the tyranny of the screen; we could master our own lives without having to worry about missing the outcome of a cliffhanger. Watching streaming programming today is much like reading a book – the viewer decides on the pace and duration, with binge-watching the equivalent of the ‘couldn’t put it down’ novel. Indeed, in many households, the box set has replaced the novel. The result may be that we watch more than ever before, the next episode rolling on automatically almost before we have the chance to turn off (‘it’s their fault!’). The 8- or 10-hour series being released all at once on Netflix or Amazon Video has changed the programmes too, and likely for the better: a series no longer has to grab the viewer in the first episode to ensure they return the following week, and the narrative may enjoy a slower burn (unless it is a series like 24, in which the intense temporal premise is built into it like an overwound spring). Increasingly a channel will just veg out, especially during holiday periods: 24-hour Family Guy and 24-hour Friends rolled out like half-hour bulletins on CNN or Sky News.
5 A film of Beckham sleeping after a training session at Real Madrid, made by Sam Taylor-Wood, was shown at the National Portrait Gallery in 2004.
6 Tellingly, when the film was shown at the 2014 Fringe Film and Video Festival in Shenzhen, China, it was in a dramatically shortened version: nine days.
7 The title comes from an essay by Alfred Jarry published in France in 1899: ‘Commentary and Instructions for the Practical Construction of The Time Machine’. It was a cod-scientific examination, couched in the newly emergent language of modern physics popularised by Lord Kelvin, of how the fantastical time machine proposed four years before by H.G. Wells might become a reality.
8 For those unfamiliar with the phrase, ‘punching the clock’ should not be taken literally. The action involves inserting a time card into an electronic stamping machine, thus denoting the time a worker arrives for and leaves work.
9 The monetary value is easier. At an auction at Sotheby’s New York in 2001, one of his days (FEB.27,1987) sold for $159,750. But some days are worth more than others: in June 2006 at Sotheby’s London MAY.21,1985 and JULY.8,1981 each sold for £209,600. In October 2012, also in London, JAN.14, 2011 went for £313,250. And in July 2015, Sotheby’s London sold OCT.14,1981 for £509,000. Put the increases down to time, inflation, the growing reputation of the artist, the artist’s death in 2014, and craziness.
Kawara’s interest in mortality and our temporal span had other outlets too. For a number of years he would send daily telegrams to friends with a simple message: ‘I AM STILL ALIVE’.
10 Parker’s replica was made by Smith of Derby, whereas the original was made by Dent of London, the same company that made Big Ben. The original clock was not, however, the original at all. This had been sold by British Rail in the 1970s to help fund station renovation (reportedly to an American collector for £250,000) but had been dropped during its removal. The fragments were bought for £25 by a retired train driver named Roland Hoggard, who spent more than a year reconstructing it and securing it to the side of a barn in his garden in Nottinghamshire (the barn had once housed a steam engine). Dent subsequently built a replacement modelled on Hoggard’s reconstruction, and improved its accuracy. Its gold-leafed slate hands are now controlled by GPS and checked every minute.
Walking back to happiness: Alice Waters and Prince Charles in an Edible Schoolyard.
Chapter Fourteen
Slowing Down the World
i) A Place Where Time Stands Still
At some point towards the end of the twentieth century, Prince Charles had another one of his bright ideas. Disillusioned with the urban sprawl of the 1980s, the prince announced that callous modern architects had done more damage to the country than the Luftwaffe, and he had decided to do something about it. So he drew up a plan for a community that would combine beautiful dwellings with nearby workplaces and shops, a place where council tenants would mingle with the more prosperous, a place where traditional values would be upheld and kids would play hopscotch in the spotless streets. A powerful man does have that rare and enviable ability to turn back time.
The prince chose a plot of land he owned on the outskirts of Dorchester in Dorset. The patch is part of the Duchy of Cornwall, which consists of 126,000 acres in 22 counties, with the primary function of providing an income for the prince. He called his new town Poundbury, or New Poundbury (there was already an older Poundbury nearby, full of the stuff Charles disliked; the associations with chains Poundland and Poundworld, which sprang up after the new town was christened, are just unfortunate). The place would cover 400 acres and house 5,000 people. If you wanted to stop the world, or at least reduce the speed at which it was changing, this was the place you would put down your deposit.
Poundbury has been open for sneering ever since planning consent was granted in 1989; cynics just arrived on the train from London have a field day. There were no television aerials (ugly), no front gardens (divisive), no front-of-house parking (obstructive), nothing at all unsightly or untidy. There were so many rules that a visitor dropping a sweet wrapper might fear arrest by swooping helicopter.
It is a mistake to think of Poundbury merely as a model village or a new small town. It is also intended as an urban utopia, a vision not just of the Prince of Wales, but of ambitious town planners, fogey architects and all the respectable inhabitants who were slightly fearful of headlines involving pit bull terriers. But it was a hard concept for the media to get its head around. It was not intended as something off the grid like Hebridean or Austrian utopias from the 1930s and 1960s, it was not anti-progress, it was not antisocial or supercilious like the deliberate living of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and there was no cult attached to it (apart from the Cult of Charles). Instead it sought to combine the best of all worlds – the lofty moral compass and manicured decency of herringboned Englishness with the eco-efficiencies and agri-advantages of the Internet age. Rooted in classicism and goodness, the architecture was to be organic. Poundbury had nothing against technology, so long as the cables were hidden from view, but there would be none of the dehumanising froideur that digitisation normally imbues. Instead, Poundbury would be warm and welcoming, and celebrate all those values considered lost to the mad pace of the industrial world. The attempt was a restoration of decent community under blue skies. Whether such a world ever actually existed in Dorset or elsewhere remains open for discussion.
I first visited in the spring of 2001, after it had been habitable for six years and about 500 people had moved in. It was certainly a novel place, and the novel it most resembl
ed was something by Thomas Hardy. The prince’s dream was first drawn up on paper by a town planner from Luxembourg named Léon Krier, who was a connoisseur of the design and planning principles of Albert Speer, chief architect of the Nazis. (He has written a book about Speer, and analysed his cleansing theories of postmodern classicism; rotten modernist buildings, he believed, would produce rotten modern citizens.)
Walking around Poundbury at the beginning of the new millennium was an eerie business, and I wasn’t quite sure why. Many of the houses were occupied, but there didn’t seem to be many people around. It reminded me of the gated ‘communities’ I had seen in Florida, except in Poundbury there were no gates and no visible security presence. The architectural principles of this new town reflected the American New Urbanism movement, a high-density enclave designed, as its development director Simon Conibear told me, with the intention of ‘rehumanising the domestic environment.’ In part, this meant living with less dependence on the car and a renewed trust in public buses, although a survey conducted a few years after it opened found that there were more cars per household in Poundbury than in neighbouring towns. To its credit, Poundbury has little superfluous street furniture, and despite the huge amount of rules imposed on the town at the planning stage, there are few road signs telling you to keep to a speed limit or watch that child, because the roads are themselves rules, with blind corners ensuring that no one can go over 20. And you don’t hear much hooting of horns from cars, partly out of politeness, one imagines, and partly because there isn’t much to hoot at. Besides, a driver might wake one of the inhabitants, at any time of day.
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