Inventing Time

Architect Davidson Norris has designed four Heliotropes. They all very accurately tell civil (solar) time. But their deeper purpose is to migrate the observer's understanding of time from "arranging days and weeks and months in a definite order" to the observation of plant life in order to better understand the "manifestation of life ruled by the time and climate".

(via Silent Agitator – Ruth Ewan)

I was speaking to a German curator who complained about the trains not being on time, as they were in Switzerland. I said – ‘You should come to England!’ But that gave me the idea of the station clock being broken. So I started to collect the same clocks, but pulled all the blades out, jumbled them up and reassembled them so they all kept time in perfect harmony and had this metronomic unified sound – but the display was this gobbledygook of abstraction. Then I started to distil that look down into paintings, initially in black and white.

Darren Almond: ‘Life Line’ continues at White Cube, Mason’s Yard to 4 May

(via Standard Time) by Mark Formanek

Standard Time is a performance lasting exactly 24 hours and recorded on film. However, this film is much more than just the recording of an action, the recording of something that has taken place in the past; it is also a clock. A clock for use right now and in the future which, as each day goes by, extends further into the past, but is still up-to-date and punctual”.

This book examines contemporary artistic practices since 1990 that engage with, depict, and conceptualize history.

Examining artworks by Kader Attia, Yael Bartana, Zarina Bhimji, Michael Blum, Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Omer Fast, Andrea Geyer, Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno, Hiwa K, Amar Kanwar, Bouchra Khalili, Deimantas Narkevičius, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Walid Raad, Dierk Schmidt, Erika Tan, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Art, History, and Anachronic Interventions since 1990 undertakes a thorough methodological reexamination of the contribution of art to history writing and to its theoretical foundations. The analytical instrument of anachrony comes to the fore as an experimental method, as will (para)fiction, counterfactual history, testimonies, ghosts and spectres of the past, utopia, and the "juridification" of history. Eva Kernbauer argues that contemporary art—developing its own conceptual approaches to temporality and to historical research—offers fruitful strategies for creating historical consciousness and perspectives for political agency.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, historiography, and contemporary art.