How do you write about the concept of time and how it affects our lives? Why is it time flies by when we are absorbed in making and at other moments it slows?  How do you feel about the theory that time is not linear or that it is a man-made concept?

"We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass."

Karl Marx (1976). “Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Marx and Engels: 1845-48”

This month our artists and writers explore Time, and what it means to them, whether that is through memory, nostalgia, process, or methods of tracking moments.

Time to pay attention by Resident writer Michaela Hall

When we think of time, we think of something certain, something numerical, and something sure. Time has a positive connotation in terms of how we organise our daily lives. It helps us structure our existence and gives us a sense of security that we’re in the right place at the right time. It’s not uncommon for time to be referenced in artworks, take the most famous example of Salvador Dali’s melting clock. However, our attention is normally drawn to time with the visual cue of a clockface. So, what happens when artists draw our attention to the ticking of time itself and use this as a medium to highlight their ideas?

One artist who isn’t afraid to explore this is Olafur Eliasson who in 2018 placed 24 huge blocks of ice in front of the Tate Modern as part of his work ‘Ice Watch’. Along with the help of geologist Minik Rosing, Eliasson was desperate to express to his audience the urgency with which we should treat climate change and the rapid warming up of our planet. The mini-iceberg structures were actually the real thing – blocks of ice captured from the Nuup Kangerla fjord in Greenland. These blocks of ice had separated from the main mass of ice there and represent the huge number of icebergs being created as a result of global warming. Of course, from a quick glance to those who visited the installation as soon as it opened, these ice blocks could be deceivingly received as a decorative ice sculpture. However, over time the ice inevitably started to melt more rapidly and what viewers were faced with was a time reliant spectacle that forced them to pay attention to why someone would make the effort to bring these chunks of ice all the way from Greenland to London, to allow people to watch them melt. What Eliasson did here was use the passing of time as the main medium of the artwork itself, relying on it to demonstrate his portrayal of what’s happening around the globe.

(Installation shots of ‘Ice Watch’, 2018, Tate Modern.)

In the same way that Eliasson forces us to focus on a somewhat sped-up version of climate change over a period of time, Douglas Gordon also forces us to concentrate on time. However, what Gordon does is force is to focus on slowing down, a sensation that plays with the idea of timescale and that is unfamiliar to us. In his installation ’24 Hour Psycho (1993) the artist takes Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1960 film ‘Psycho’ and slows it down to an almost static two frames per second with little, delayed, and painfully slow movement for those who are a fan of the film. As the title suggests, this alteration of timescale makes the piece now 24 hours long in total. This completely knocks the idea of a familiar timescale on its head. When we think of a film we think of it perhaps being three hours max. In this usual scenario, we might clearly remember some key details but the majority of it will be a blur or generalisation. What Gordon is doing here is playing with the medium of time itself as a tool to force the viewer to focus on all of the details we might usually miss, sending out a message about how much we pay attention to the things we consume.

(Screenshots from 24 Hour Psycho, 1993.)

By highlighting their ideas through the ticking of time itself and the viewer’s newfound focus on this, what both artists manage to achieve is a level of engagement that is unrivaled and disorientating. As comforting or uncomforting as the ideas may be to viewers, they find themselves trapped and confronted by this chunk of time over which they have no control, something that is completely alien when we are taught to navigate life with this reliable and static measure of time that doesn’t play tricks on us. Whether we like it or not or do it voluntarily or subconsciously – the works force us to pay attention, creating an experience in which the ideas of the artwork are ingrained in our memories and much harder to overlook.

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Artist - Anna Goodchild

Description

This poem is part of my prison project which is shaped by Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia: a world within a world to which people are sent, like a prison or a care home. Unlike the abstract utopias or dystopias, heterotopias are real, physical places.

The project documented the correspondence I had with Ian, a friend who went to prison on his fiftieth birthday for a crime he had committed when he was fifteen. Ian's letters, written from the inside, recount the many courses he did in HM Prison Dartmoor, and paint an underrepresented picture of UK prisons to the outside. His learning and personal development reveal not only a particularly acute sense of place and time., but also an awareness that the world outside the prison was changing.

Ironically, the prison walls which separate also unite the inside with the outside – in this case, through letters and cards.

Instagram account anna.goodchild

One Year - 2016

Agapé called out
to a world within a world
of separate but silent
citizens,
and chatty leaves floated back
over giant prison walls.

They filtered through
what seemed a solid interface
on a queen's head,
on a bell thread,
on a Berners-lee info-wed
sliders home.

A paradox emerged:
all that separates connects:
that grey, gossamer granite
cannot block the writing
of projects, losses, courses,
aspirations, fears and conquests.

Simply, on a line,
just images tumbled,
political bastions crumbled,
repentant inmates humbled,
and seasons mumbled
their good-byes.

© Anna Goodchild 2019

/Users/annagoodchild/Documents/One Year 2016 .odt

 Time & the elusive moment

by Emma Dolphin

https://www.instagram.com/dolphin9730/

My practice frequently examines the elusive and the illusory, through the investigation of memory, absence, dreams, and what is referred to as reality. It often presents the viewer with traces or a depiction of events. These events take different forms, describing a subject that may be current, previous, or have the potential to be experienced as an ‘elusive moment’. By which I mean, the fleeting moment of transition between the conscious and subconscious thought. With all its elusive and ethereal aspects, ice is a dynamic medium that captures both time and temporality in a visual nexus.

The frozen form hangs, suspended, seemingly by an invisible thread.

Often, depending on the scale, the sculpture moves or slowly rotates in any gentle movement of air. It possesses an ontological presence. Inside the ice structure is another object, frequently obscured, which only fully reveals itself as the external form melts away. 

I have used ice as a medium on many occasions primarily as a metaphor but additionally, for the inherent properties it offers as an analogue time-based media. As it melts it leaves traces of its existence and only over a period of time is the interior object fully revealed. Thereby introducing the fourth dimension of time into the three dimensional work. 

The period over which it melts is dependant on the external factors of climate conditions and location. It is almost impossible to accurately predict when the ice-form will be fully converted back to its liquid state. Additional moments of drama are often introduced by the sculpture breaking free from its suspension system. Time frozen in an apparently static structure, the work performs as an analogue time-piece.

The ice is also an agent for further concealed layers of information, which have the promise to be revealed - if the viewer has the patience to remain. (However, much of my work incorporates events that are missed or those which are encountered by chance.)

 The ice-works also explore the themes of absence and presence, life and death. The process of melting (the ‘death’ of the object) is then recorded. 

“Birth was the death of him” 

Time in an analogue form is captured in digital form both as a moving image and still photographic images. A digital time based testament of its existence. (The photographic images and details within them, are frequently selected, rescaled and processed - via printmaking and photography, to create a new series of work.)

Through the selection of ice as a medium for the sculptural form and installation, the viewer has an opportunity to closely examine the aesthetic and physical properties of the medium, in addition to its metaphorical and temporal attributes. If sometimes a difficult, unpredictable and even dangerous medium , ice also possesses extraordinary and exquisite qualities and often has theatrical and performative dimensions.

Through its change of state, ice entombs time and temporality, ‘being in time and of time and within time’. It is time made physical. It offers the viewer a glimpse of now and then, previous and present - an organic capture and framing of time.

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Artist -Jeremy Gluck

Plan for a Performance is a meditative, performative exposition of inner dialogue and landscape as expressed minimally. In evoking the passage of time through simple, plain imagery, and with a spare, repetitive narrative it captures life as a moment.

Instagram account

@nonceptualism

Plan for a Performance

After a long period of stillness, in the evening light, he suddenly stood up from his seat.

He took everything on the walls in the front room off them and placed them into

cardboard boxes, arranging them according to a secret code, shut the boxes, and then

repeated the process with every other wall in the place where he lived. His many books,

some yet unread, he boxed. He placed all his food into boxes and shut them. In his

kitchen, he lined up a series of boxes and placed in them all his crockery and cutlery. All

other remaining kitchen items, including for cleaning, he likewise boxed. He stripped his

bed and boxed the bedding, layering it carefully, symmetrically, and shut the box.

Throughout his flat, all incidental items on shelves and in drawers he then likewise

arranged into boxes, shutting them. With tools he took special care, lining them up in a

box in order alphabetically. He boxed his clothes, including his shoes, arranging, and

layering them all carefully, symmetrically, according to size and colour. Mounting a

stepladder, light bulbs he removed and systematically smashed with his heel, leaving the

shattered remains - "Filament people" as he then saw them - filaments of light: aliens.

The lampshades he left. All electrical items, including devices, he boxed. Items too

irregular or outsized to be boxed he set against the walls, in series. Carpets were rolled

and propped against the fronts of doors; rugs and mats were stacked in the centre of the

room. After laying his mirrors against a bedroom wall, he shut the door and stood in the

hallway, confused by his clarity. "Everything is the way it always is," he thought, and his

interest in his life, the contents of his life, of his home, of his mind, removed from time to

space.

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Artist - Craig Sinclair

Description

'Remember When' is a short film piece exploring themes of memory, decay, and the sweet poison of nostalgia. In it, two dolls struggle to overcome self-imposed inertia brought about through constant reminisce.
I'm very interested in the theme of nostalgia and memory, particularly how it can be a kind of collective societal sickness as well as comfort. In my practice, I seek to question and upend this in order to discover ways to move forward. My influences are wide-ranging but in this instance, I was thinking of Douglas Sirk, David Lynch, and Samuel Beckett.

I seek to question and upend this in order to discover ways to move forward. My influences are wide-ranging but in this instance, I was thinking of Douglas Sirk, David Lynch, and Samuel Beckett.

Instagram account - @mistercraigsinclair

Remember When

Craig Sinclair, 2022

Short film (4m 12s)

https://youtu.be/FBXlANIkwf0

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Artist - Julia Chwascinska

Description

This poem has been written in the time of feeling overwhelmed, of feeling like time is running away from me. Naturally an overachiever, I sat down and I released, I released all the anxiety I had towards time. I expressed the need to live in the present, to tune into the moment I'm living in right now. Quite fairly, most of us are living in a race nowadays, we rush towards our next goal and we forget what it's like to enjoy the process of getting there. I always desire to stay completely and utterly involved in that process, to see the joy and the pleasure of floating in time, of it slowing down and engulfing me into its endless duration. I hope that every person who reads this poem finds some sort of ease in it, a relief that they're not the only ones feeling this way about time. I also want it to be a realisation for its reader, where they see that it's okay to just enjoy the moment they are in right now, there is no rush, time will catch up with us so we might as well sit back and appreciate the present.

Instagram account - @juliass.art

A RACE

 Minutes passing me by like seconds

A week feels like a day 

My head is spinning by the fact that tomorrow only feels like yesterday 

I can’t quite comprehend how I’m missing life through the time that doesn’t quite want to slow down

 Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one trying to catch up but I’m unable to move, have no choice but to be swallowed by those seconds and minutes that engulf me into their run 

Run for the future

Run for the forever that will be over before I have the time to blink

Before I have the time to realise that I’m living in the present

That I’m ignoring the moment that’s right in front of me

Or more like that’s right in me

 I find myself over worrying about what’s to come

What’s planned ahead for me

That I forget what’s right now

 Then I go back to my nostalgia

Back to the memories of the past that feel so utopian, so great

Make me want to live in them

When in fact it’s all so great because it’s gone 

Once it’s gone, we want it back

Once it’s gone, we realise we missed it at the time

We missed it because we were so focused on the next thing that we forgot to live the one we were in at the time

Memory is a fog

Time is a race

Life is an experience

 An experience needs to be lived

It needs to be breathed through

And in order to breathe, we need to be conscious

Be conscious of the present moment

That will be over

 Before we even have the time to blink.

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Artist - Anna Goodchild

Description

This poem is part of my prison project which is shaped by Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia: a world within a world to which people are sent, like a prison or a care home. Unlike abstract utopias or dystopias, heterotopias are real, physical places.
The project documented the correspondence I had with Ian, a friend who went to prison on his fiftieth birthday for a crime he had committed when he was fifteen. Ian's letters, written from the inside, recount the many courses he did in HM Prison Dartmoor and paint an underrepresented picture of UK prisons to the outside. His learning and personal development reveal not only a particularly acute sense of place and time., but also an awareness that the world outside the prison was changing.
Ironically, the prison walls which separate also unite the inside with the outside – in this case, through letters and cards.

Title

One Year 2016

Instagram account

anna.goodchild