The Past is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art 9781628928433, 9781441116048

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List of Figures

Figure 0.1 Craigie Horsfield, Broadway, 2001/2006  1 Figure 0.2, 0.3 Melik Ohanian, Hidden, 2005  9, 10 Figure 0.4 Tacita Dean, Fernsehturm, 2001  11 Figure 1.1 Stan Douglas, Overture, 1986  46 Figure 2.1 Tatiana Trouvé, Bureau of Implicit Activities (Bureau d’activités implicites), Reminiscences Module, 1999–2003  54 Figure 2.2 Tatiana Trouvé, Bureau of Implicit Activities (Bureau d’activités implicites), Administrative Module, 1997–2003  55 Figure 2.3 Tatiana Trouvé, Bureau of Implicit Activities (Bureau d’activités implicites), Waiting Module no. 1, 2002  55 Figure 2.4 Tatiana Trouvé, Model of the Bureau of Implicit Activities (Bureau d’activités implicites), 2007  58 Figure 2.5 Oscar Muñoz, Project for a Memorial (Proyecto para un monumento), 2005  62 Figure 2.6 Francis Alÿs, Rehearsal I (El Ensayo), 1999–2001  68 Figure 2.7 Francis Alÿs, Politics of Rehearsal, 2004  69 Figure 2.8 Francis Alÿs, The Collector (Colector), 1990–2  70 Figure 2.9 Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis I (Sometimes doing something leads to nothing), 1997  71 Figure 2.10 Francis Alÿs, The Green Line (Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic), 2004 72 Figure 2.11 Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains (Cuando la fe mueve montañas), 2002  78 Figure 2.12 Francis Alÿs, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (working title), 2008  79 Figure 2.13 Francis Alÿs, A Story of Deception, 2003–6  81

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Figure 2.14, 2.15, 2.16 Guido van der Werve, Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright, 2007  89, 90, 91 Figure 2.17 Nicolas Poussin, The Shepherds of Arcadia (Et in Arcadia Ego), c. 1638–40  93 Figure 2.18 Nicolas Poussin, The Arcadian Shepherds: ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, c. 1628  94 Figure 2.19 Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967  98 Figure 2.20, 2.21, 2.22, 2.23 Guido van der Werve, Nummer negen. The day I didn’t turn with the world, 2007  100, 101, 102 Figure 3.1, 3.2 Mark Lewis, Spadina: Reverse Dolly, Zoom, Nude, 2006  112, 113 Figure 3.3 Mark Lewis, Nathan Phillips Square, A Winters Night, Skating, 2009 125 Figure 3.4 Mark Lewis, Tenement Yard, Heygate Estate, 2002  126 Figure 3.5 Mark Lewis, North Circular, 2000  130 Figure 3.6, 3.7 Mark Lewis, Queensway: Pan and Zoom, 2005  130, 131 Figure 3.8 Mark Lewis, Downtown: Tilt, Zoom and Pan, 2005  132 Figure 3.9 Mark Lewis, Willesden Laundrette; Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday Prayers, 2010  133 Figure 3.10 Mark Lewis, Airport, 2003  139 Figure 3.11 Mark Lewis, Bricklayers Arms, 2008  139 Figure 3.12 Mark Lewis, Golden Rod, 2006  148 Figure 3.13, 3.14 Mark Lewis, TD Centre, 54th Floor, 2009  153, 154 Figure 3.15 Mark Lewis, Willesden Laundrette; Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday Prayers, 2010  162 Figure 4.1 Tacita Dean, Kodak, 2006  167 Figure 4.2 Tacita Dean, Disappearance at Sea, 1996  169 Figure 4.3 Tacita Dean, Teignmouth Electron, 2000  170 Figure 4.4 Tacita Dean, Darmstädter Werkblock, 2007  170 Figure 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4 33  with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances, six films), 2008  176, 179, 183 Figure 4.8, 4.9, 4.10 Tacita Dean, Alabaster Drawings, 2002–5  187, 188 Figure 4.11, 4.12, 4.13 Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4 33  with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances, six films), 2008  192, 198, 204

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List of Figures

Figure 5.1 Melik Ohanian, Peripherical Communities, (Dakar), 2005  214 Figure 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 Melik Ohanian, Seven Minutes Before, 2004  215, 218, 219 Figure 5.7, 5.8 Melik Ohanian, September 11, 1973 _ Santiago, Chile 2007, 2007  241, 242 Figure 6.1 Harun Farocki, Deep Play, 2007  263 Figure 6.2, 6.3 Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, 2006  266, 267 Figure 6.4, 6.5, 6.6 Nancy Davenport, Workers (leaving the factory), 2007  271, 273, 275 Figure 7.1 Stan Douglas, Overture, 1986  284 Figure 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5 Stan Douglas, Klatsassin, 2006  289, 290, 294, 298 Figure 7.6 Stan Douglas, Der Sandmann, 1995  300

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Acknowledgments

This book took a long time to write: its orientation was regularly redefined throughout the years and the question of “time” kept expanding as I engaged in the different disciplines investigating issues of temporality, history, and temporal passing. It was initiated by a small colloquium, The Dyschronia of the Image, which I organized with Johanne Lamoureux for the 2006 edition of the Association francophone pour le savoir (ACFAS) annual congress. It evolved quite dramatically in the following years through my graduate teaching. I am therefore clearly indebted to my students who have accepted to follow me in and respond to this research project. It is also vital to specify that this book would not have been possible without the generous funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture. I want to thank especially Craigie Horsfield, Melik Ohanian, Mark Lewis, Nancy Davenport, and Guido van der Werve for making the time to meet and correspond with me—I learnt a great deal from these generous conversations. I send my inmost appreciation to my McGill research assistants, for their patience, thoroughness, and hard work: Karen Judge, Natalie Bussey, Reilly Bishop-Stall, and Anne-Sophie Garcia. John Hall has provided me critical feedback and support: these have been invaluable to the maturing of this book. On the Continuum side of things, my deepest thanks to my editor, Katie Gallof, for having accepted and defended the project; and to copy editor Dawn Booth and Project manager Kim Storry. For the excellent indexing, Laura Bevir. Finally, thanks to the art galleries and museums—they are the caretakers of the priceless documentation without which no art history publication can ever materialize.

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Introduction

The four-screen video installation, Craigie Horsfield’s 2001/2006 Broadway (Figure 0.1), immerses the spectators in abstract, slightly muffled sonorities of city noise and sporadic bangs between what sounds like metallic beams. On the screens are projected close-up and slowed-down images of crowd fragments— crowds composed of individuals looking out at or taking photographs of something located outside the frame, something invisible to us but intensely visible to the viewers in the image, to the extent that their sole activity consists in this very activity of looking out, attentively. These are crowd segments. Yet, although they share the act of looking at a same scene, although that scene has incontestably brought them together, individuals come, stay and go; they are endowed with their own emotions, their own movements. The installation is 5 hours and 15 minutes long; it keeps unfolding images of an observing crowd. No telos or dénouement here, no sudden rupture in

Figure 0.1   Craigie Horsfield, Broadway, 2001/2006. Installation, video projection from hard drive, four cinema screens, 8-track soundwork over 8 speakers, and benches, color, sound, 5:15 hours. © Craigie Horsfield/SODRAC (2011).

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The Past is the Present; It’s the Future Too the story, only observers observing something we can’t see, which we don’t necessarily need to see. In many ways the installation provides an image of us; it is also the case that we become a bit like them: like the viewers in the image, we observe, move, and stand still; we are mostly silent. Though there is a significant difference between us and them—the observers in front of the screen are certainly more removed, more detached, less emotionally involved than the observers on screen—observation is deep on both sides. Observation is inseparable from duration understood as a continuance in time. The whole setting of the installation endorses that temporality. The use of slow-motion; the continual relay of observing observers within each screen and between the screens; the consistency of the observational activity for each unique observer; the murmurs of the environment; the connectedness between just-passing images and just-coming images which extend the present of these images from one screen to the next; this very attentiveness; the overall sense that, both within the image and in front of the image, observation stretches out the present of what is seen: all of these properties support a type of observation that performs and seeks duration. Horsfield is right when he suggests that his work involves the difficulty but also the possibility of engaging in the ‘duration of the present’: ‘[It is] very difficult actually to articulate the present, as we know, and much of modernity appeared to separate us from the present. So … notions of duration …, of the present having something which I would call duration, which you can consciously inhabit, be aware of inhabiting, give attention to, seem to me important.’1 We observe observers observing something we will not see. The framing of the scenes keeps the object of sight out of sight. Yet, the title “Broadway” suggests a particular site, related to an event which may well have changed something of the world order: Ground Zero in New York City, the ruins of 9/11 resulting from the terrorist attack against the U.S. which led to the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. This historical reference sustains the emotions of loss and grief that sculpt most of these observing expressions. The observers are concurrently mourners and witnesses. (1) Mourners, they grieve what has been lost (loved ones, ideals). This mourning lets death— what Jacques Rancière calls the founding narrative of history—be not a bygone event but a non-erasable event, an event that can be recalled as one attentively observes the ruins. Death, Paul Ricoeur suggests, is always a threat coming from the perspective of the future, an “Other” that moves towards me, a form of assassination. Even though the observer or the historian cannot undo death, its meaning is not necessarily fixed once and for all. (2) Witnesses, they witness not the original act of destruction but its remains. What the installation discloses and upholds is neither the traumatic event nor the testimony

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of the witnesses, but the very act and necessity of witnessing. Viewer, listener, mourner, witness, relayer: this texturing of the observer is a key aesthetic decision, for it is this very thickness—the attentive quality of observation combined with the durational quality of temporal passing—that turns the work into a historical installation of a special kind. Ground Zero (death or destruction in general) occurs as a past to mourn and a future to fear. It is even more so a present to extend by an observation that has the capacity to retain remnants. Involved in this observational act, the observer acknowledges responsibility in the present for past actions, in light of a future whose modern progressiveness is fundamentally questioned. By elaborating this unique phenomenology of enduring perception as a modality by which history can be rethought, Broadway crystallizes Eugene O’Neill’s luminous insight: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.” Since Lessing’s Laocoön (1766) the question of time in visual arts has been presented as a problem to overcome through a variety of aesthetic strategies that sidestep art’s alleged inability to represent the temporal deployment of bodies in space. From Enlightenment aesthetics well into 1960s modernism, a painting or a sculpture (in contrast to literature and poetry) was predominantly assumed to be tied to the representation of a “single moment in time,” a singularity best produced from the perspective of the “single vantage point.”2 According to this aesthetics, the artist’s sole hope was to induce time by selecting the most pregnant moment in a given narrative. Such a selection, when successful, promised to give “free reign” to the spectator’s imagination, allowing him or her to see, through infinite extrapolation, all times at once.3 Ever since the artistic practices of the historical avant-garde (dada, surrealism, constructivism) and the artistic practices of the 1960s, western art has challenged this enduring rule by widening the restrictive register of the meaningful moment. Refuting the Lessing-inspired time code of formalist modernism—what Michael Fried called the grace of presentness in his opposition to the phenomenological deployment of endless duration in the experience of the Minimalist artwork4—contemporary aesthetics has generated pictorial, sculptural, installational, and photographic as well as time-based practices (performance, film, video, and new media) that inscribe the spectator in different experiences of time: not only endlessness, but also entropy, ephemerality, repetition, and real time; contingency and randomness; the unproductive—unrecognized—times of modernity (“women’s time,” the time of the “other”); the slowing down, condensation or acceleration of the

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photographic, cinematic, electronic, and digital image that extends, abbreviates, or speeds up the perceptual experience of the artwork. It has also questioned the linear time of the narrative. In the fields of art history and aesthetics, a whole repertoire of concepts sustain the historical and philosophical development of this postwar critique: the crystal time-image of neorealist and new wave cinema (Deleuze); the anti-monument (Huyssen); post-memory (Sturken); time in ruins (Augé); chronophobia (Lee); eventfulness (Badiou); anachronism as “an opening of history” (Didi-Huberman); anachrony as a means to define new temporal switchings (Rancière); the returns to the baroque (Bal); the archival impulse (Foster); the affective body as what enframes digital information and allows for the generation of time-consciousness (Hansen); the u-chronic time of digital figuration (Couchot); relational aesthetics (Bourriaud); the archaic dimension of contemporariness (Agamben); and contemporaneity as what discloses “the multiple ways of being with, in, and out of time, […] with others and without them”.5, 6 Contemporary art is thus a pivotal site of temporal experimentation. Especially during the last 20 years, it has become commonplace to state that aesthetics is now fundamentally temporal. But what does this exactly mean? Although art exhibitions of the last decade strongly manifest art’s exponential concern for time (the list is impressive; let us name a few: Re:Thinking: Time, 2004; Expérience de la durée, 2005; It’s About Time, 2006; Measure of Time, 2006–7; Taken with Time, 2006; Passage du temps, 2007; In the Mean Time, 2007; Take Your Time …, 2007; Moving through Time and Space, 2008; Mapping Time, 2008; Synthetic Times, 2008; Time as Matter, 2009; The Immediate Future, 2009; Living Time, 2009; Past Present Future, 2010; Territories of Time, 2010; Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is Mystery, 2010; Yesterday Will be Better—Taking Memory into the Future, 2010; Dump Time …, 2011; Out-of-Sync: The Paradoxes of Time, 2011; Spare Time, 2011; Passing Time, 2012),7 time is more often than not brought in as an intangible thing; a celebrated yet vague coordinate indistinctly attached to the exhibited artworks. Introducing the Measure of Time exhibition held at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2006–7, curator Lucinda Barnes, for example, writes that the exhibition allowed spectators to “experience time and motion compressed, fragmented, mechanized, sped up, and slowed down to an almost imperceptible pace.”8 Yet, she leaves no hypothesis as to how such temporal operations unfold aesthetically, and why time is being explored through these specific processes of compression, acceleration, and depression. Despite the insightfulness of the shows listed above, time is surprisingly

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dis-historicized. It is argued to be a genuine part of art, but in ways that consistently isolate it from other contemporary disciplines highly mobilized by crucial debates on time and temporality. In most cases, it is impossible to know what types of time (cosmic, objective, subjective, phenomenological, physical) are being solicited by the exhibitions; why time is being solicited; why temporality is momentous; and how the artworks perform it. Questions as to what it means to contest the Enlightenment prerogative of the single yet expectant moment and as to what is unique about contemporary art’s treatment of temporality remain unuttered. Barely accounted for is the persisting recurrence, in time-based arts, of aesthetic procedures that seek to make time palpable in the moving image (by holding the image, aging it, or recombining it, for example); procedures that concur to phenomenally suspend the moving image to promote anachronism in ways that offset and transform unsatisfying deployments of historical time. In so doing, contemporary artistic practices are not only reclaiming what has historically been refused to visual arts, they are questioning their own historicity—their own condition of being historical. This book claims that one of the most pivotal temporal investigations of contemporary art lies in its development of an aesthetics which brings together time and history, contemporary experiences of temporal passing and modern historicity. Contemporaneity here strives to transform modernity. It does so by instilling in the artwork contemporary experiences of temporal passing, of what philosopher Yulav Dolev has called “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past,”9 that confront the futurism of the modern regime of historicity—modernity’s progress-oriented articulation of past, present, and future, in which the future is constituted through the devaluing of the past and the erasure of the present. In these temporal investigations, aesthetics suspends the forwardness of the moving image, the forwardness of moving bodies (toward a position in front) and the forwardness of narrative linearity to explore image-making, performance and narrativity as an interface—a surface of exchange of temporal information—even more so as a site of transmutation between temporality and historicity. In this process, even Dolev’s useful yet universalizing conceptualization of temporal passing is reformulated to account for contemporary experiences of temporal passing moulded by unproductiveness, fissuration, extendibility, ruination, equalization, unframability, and interminability. As it injects contemporary forms of temporal

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passing in the artwork, art endeavors to presentify the modern regime of historicity. Not in the sense of making history present or of constructing an absolute “present” (beyond objects and events). Rather, in the sense of freeing the three categories of time (past, present, and future); of complicating their connection; of activating the past in the present and allowing it to condition the future in that very process. This activation is never guaranteed or simply achieved: the impulse is to activate the past in the present as much as possible. What is at stake here is the realignment—the temporal reordering that is specific to every epoch— of past, present, and future in relation to each other. This remaking is driven by a concern for the future in light of the present and the recent past, a concern that comes about once the modern idea of progress has been hollowed out of its content. Art does not seek so much to provide a new content to the future. It doesn’t have that type of utopian drive. It rather activates the inconsistencies and vicissitudes of temporal passing to remove the future from its modern role—the role of initiator of change—and make room for the re-imagining of the future. The temporal turn is non-progressive: its progressiveness lies in the reconsideration of modern progress. This argument begs for two important clarifications. First clarification: the passage of time (the phenomenological consciousness that life passes away; that things change and will never be as they were; that we forget; that we get old and die) is one of the elementary temporal experiences outlined in Ernst Pöppel’s taxonomy of the subjective.10 If the experience of temporal passing is indeed essential and fundamental, to say that contemporary art’s inclination is to ‘contemporize’ temporal passing encourages objection. Rightly so. Such a statement negates the phenomenological reality of temporal passing—the fact that we relentlessly and necessarily organize our lives around what Dolev has aptly designated as “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past.” Yet, the contemporary phenomenology of temporal passing has slightly altered the fluidity and universalism implied in Dolev’s designation. This mutation is manifest in contemporary assessments of temporal passing in the realms of art, philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, ecology, communication, and physics. These accounts claim that time cannot simply be said to flow and pass like a river (according to what shore could it be proven to flow?); that temporal passing is most often experienced in distorted ways; that time does not universally pass at the same rhythm for different social groups; that temporal passing is often messed up with emotional

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knots, inversions, and denegations; that it can be experienced as unproductive and leading to loss; that the spread of the internet (its insertion of quasi-instantaneous communication over great distances) has compressed it; that temporal passing might simply be an illusion, or that it is unreachable as an objective reality. These findings indicate that the notion of temporal passing as “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past” is not a simple or single form of becoming. The notion, in other words, must seriously be complicated. Contemporary art partakes of the time-models provided by these different disciplinary assessments. It is flooded with a temporality gaining in malleability; a time which might well be ecologically just-about-too-late but which persists as a temporal passing that passes differently for different beings; an unreality we cannot do without. Yet it also partakes of the counterpart confirmation of the functionality of humans as temporal beings and the human possibility to phenomenologically manipulate temporality. It sets into play a diversity of aesthetic operations that suspend the forwardness of moving images, moving bodies, and moving narratives: the fissuration or lateralization of the perspectival linear system by which the forwardness of a walking performer, for example, is depreciated; the near-immobilization of the flow of the filmic image; the prolonged holding of a shot, or of a view; the ruination of the image; the simultaneous deployment of micronarratives non-causally related; and narrative recombinations in which a sequence of images is cut off from a larger narrative and reshuffled to endlessly mix with other narrative fragments. These suspensive procedures are far from being a romantic trope à la Lamartine (“O time, suspend your flight”). If they are, they historicize that trope to reorder the modern alignment of past, present, and future. They are closer to Eugene O’Neill’s realism (“The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too”11). Their significance comes from their ability to convey contemporary experiences of temporal passing that make them effective as modalities of reconfiguration of historicity, of past/present/future realignments. Second clarification: the suspension of the forward movement of images, bodies, and narrative is a suspension that allows temporality (more specifically, lived temporal passing) to condition historicity. Hence, suspension is not an end in itself. Artists of the temporal turn experiment with temporality (lived time) in ways that significantly alter the future-driven modern deployment of historical time. Although art historian Linda Nochlin, when discussing Orientalist painting of the

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nineteenth century (notably the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme), rightly suggests that the Orientalist tendency to represent scenes of the Middle East in a standing-still state deprives them of historicalness,12 stillness (the suspension of forwardness) can be explored critically not to cancel out but to reorder problematic deployments of historicity. This confrontation of temporality and historicity relies on the following presupposition, which is the main presupposition of this study, fittingly formulated by philosopher Giorgio Agamben: “[e]very conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to ‘change the world’, but also—and above all—to ‘change time’.”13 Although a temporal phenomenon is not inevitably a historical phenomenon and, although not every experience of time provides historical consciousness, there is no historicity (no condition of being historical) without time. As philosopher David Couzens Hoy points out: “temporality is a condition of the possibility of history.”14 Hence, to say that artists of the temporal turn connect temporality and historicity by suspending the forwardness of moving images, bodies, and narratives is to say that they insert their experiences of time (especially temporal passing) into their practices to reinvent historicity, to rearticulate modern historicity as a progressive paradigm. These clarifications allow us to lay out the book’s three central themes: the aesthetic suspension of forwardness; contemporary art as a critique of the modern regime of historicity; and “turning” as a generative moment.

The Aesthetic Suspension of Forward Movement Let us consider an installation by French artist Melik Ohanian: Hidden (Figures 0.2 and 0.3) from 2005, a video projection of a single sequence of an oil well-pumper in a field. The projection conveys a sense of stillness: it does not expose the spectator to a succession of different images of an oil field engaged in a series of transformations. The image is apparently about sameness; about the repetitive and endless up-and-down movement of the pumping unit’s arm. Yet, as the spectator encounters the other component of the installation—a computer which

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displays the mathematical encoding of an invisible image hidden behind the visible image on the screen—she becomes increasingly aware that it is the temporality of simultaneity which is key here. Indeed, the unique sequence of the oil field contains an invisible image only made visible by the simultaneous, yet inaccessible, projection of that invisible image in another city. The installation is composed of two coexisting images of two coexisting oil well-pumpers (in Floresville, Texas and Baku, Azerbaijan) presented in two coexisting galleries in two coexisting cities (Paris and Amsterdam). Hidden forces us to temporalize historicity (the condition of being historical) not as a progressive march towards the future, but as the simultaneous (flattened out) deployment of two events in two different areas of the world, put into relation here because of their belonging to a same geological and economic activity. It also confronts us with a perceptual impossibility or, more accurately, a perceptual challenge: to perceive the invisible image encoded in another image and to be present in two separate cities at once. Other key examples of these time sensitive works include Lyne Lapointe’s reconfiguration of the history of music through the anachronic integration of an old yet still functional musical instrument and a suspended (dysfunctional) clock onto a contemporary canvas: this

Figure 0.2   Melik Ohanian, Hidden, 2005. Videoprojection, DVcam DVD, color, encoding, PC, monitor, 60 min. Exhibition view, IAC, Villeurbanne, France, 2006. © Melik Ohanian, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

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Figure 0.3   Melik Ohanian, Hidden, 2005. Videoprojection, DVcam DVD, color, encoding, PC, monitor, 60 min. Exhibition view, IAC, Villeurbanne, France, 2006. © Melik Ohanian, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

juxtaposition thickens the “now” of the viewer’s perception as it ages the canvas and contemporanizes the instrument; Julieta Aranda’s challenges to conventions of time, including You Had No Ninth of May! (2008), a visual materialization of the 1995 displacement of the International Date Line in the South Pacific archipelago of Kiribati which aimed to establish a time–space continuum, up until then negated by the line which split the archipelago between “today” and “tomorrow”; as well as Two Shakes, a Tick and a Jiffy from 2009 (the book’s cover), an oversized analog clock in which the cycle of a day is divided into 10 extended hours following “decimal time,” an iconoclast system launched during the French Revolution that split the day into 10 hours (each hour corresponding to 100 minutes of 100 seconds each), and where the equally iconoclast movement of the second hand represents the erratic rate of the artist’s heartbeat over the course of a day; Stan Douglas’s video projections of narratives staging modern historical events through divergent perspectives that never meet, that are continuously being interrupted, recombined, and multiplied; Tacita Dean’s emblematic Fernsehturm (2001) (Figure 0.4), a 16 mm looped film showing the inside of a modernist once revolutionary rotating restaurant, which exposes the inscription of the past on a devalued yet resilient building of East Berlin and integrates it in the cyclical temporality of daily life unfolding within and around the building, which is equally subjected to transformation and persistence (clients come and go, observing the city beyond the windows/the waiters circulate in and out of the dining area/the sun rises and sets/the afternoon golden light enters the room

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to be gradually replaced by artificial light/the numbed sound and the fixed camera suspend the flow of time despite the stream of activities/ the film itself plays and replays throughout the museum opening hours/ the spectators of the film also come and go); and Horsfield’s Broadway, a video meditation on the recent aftermath of September 11, 2001 attacks, which leaves images of the traumatic event outside the screen to concentrate exclusively, as in Dean’s Fernsehturm, on the relaying observers, of what remains of Ground Zero. Additional key contributors to this turn who explore the suspension of forwardness to reconfigure the modern regime of historicity include: James Coleman, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Thierry Kuntzel, Bill Viola, Dan Graham, On Kawara, David Lamelas, Chantal Ackerman, Rubén Ramos Balsa, Olivia Boudreau, Douglas Gordon, Doug Aitken, Jane and Louise Wilson, Willie Doherty, Vanessa Beecroft, Cyprien Gaillard, Mark Dion, Manon de Boer, Adad Hannah, Veronica Janssens, Alfredo Jaar, Steve McQueen, Fiona Banner, Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Francis Alÿs, Mark Lewis, David Clearbout, Darren Almond, Nancy Davenport, Tatiana Trouvé, Roni Horn, Leamdro Katz, Idris Khan, Joachim Koester, Matthew Buckingham, Tehching Hsieh, Candice Breitz, Camille Utterback, Chris Marclay, Eve Sussman, Guido van Der Werve, Anri Sala, Amar Kanwar, Harun Farocki, Walid Raad and The Atlas Group. All of the works described above ask: what type of future can be built once the idea of progress has been drained away of its content?15 They

Figure 0.4   Tacita Dean, Fernsehturm, 2001. 16 mm anamorphic film, color, optical sound, 44 min. Film still. Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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deploy experiences of temporal passing which weigh against historicity and sometimes succeed in modifying its future-driven inclinations. They do so by extracting the temporal category of the future from its role as initiator of historicity. In so doing the works activate or, in some instances, simply disclose the precarization of the spectator’s capacity to connect the components of the visual field or the audio field. They freeze, reorient, reshuffle, flatten out, lateralize, spatialize, excessively hold, they even ruin the unfolding of events as “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past.” In this regard, they insist on the productivity of temporalizing the spectator’s perception— to stimulate perception as duration but also to break with its optical wholeness as well its binding and recognition faculties—as a condition for his or her engagement with the temporal/historical operations elaborated in the artworks. The artistic suspension and regeneration of time, and this is what singularizes these procedures, set into play a series of “post-optical” strategies, which partake of a marked depreciation of the modern paradigm of pure opticality (the Wölfflinian view of Baroque art as the “world seen”—an optically unified world that can only be given by a disembodied subject16). Temporal critique is a perceptual critique as well as a solicitation to perceive. There lies, I believe, art’s main contribution to the question of temporality today.

Contemporary Art and the Critique of the Modern Regime of Historicity How is temporality connected to historicity in the actual artworks? What types of shifting historicities are being considered and reconsidered in the temporal turn? The core of this book’s task is to show how, in the temporal turn, a performance, an installation, or an image consists of a series of procedures that let contemporary temporalities in to allow them to influence modern historicity. This historical reordering basically corresponds to an aesthetic turning of the futuristic regime of historicity of modernity into a presentifying regime in which the articulation of the past, the present, and the future is rethought as the past is brought closer to the present and the present brought closer to the future. “The becoming present of future events and then their becoming past” shifts into “the becoming present of past events and then their becoming future” or “the equalization of past, present, future”; it can also persist but only substantially transformed or fragilized—deployed

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as a disappearing or an unframable becoming present of future events and then their becoming past. This presentifying operation unfolds according to a post-metaphysical view for which there is no such thing as “the present”; for which the present exists but only as contextualized and just-about-passed (let us follow O’Neill here: “the past is the present, isn’t it?”); and for which it is events and not the present that are present and endure. They are seen as imperative insofar as they enable the taking care of ongoing contemporary experiences of time which do not fit in the modern paradigm. The notion of “regime of historicity” is crucial to the understanding of the temporal turn. This study relies extensively on this notion. It has been proposed by the French historian François Hartog as a conceptual tool to account for the different ways different western civilizations have ordered and articulated the relationship between past, present, and future. The examination of regimes of historicity, as Hartog defines them, is particularly useful in moments of transition when a specific regime is in crisis and becomes manifest because of this crisis: it helps to “better apprehend, not time, all times, or the whole of time, but principally moments of crisis of time, here and there, when the articulations of the past, the present, and the future become less evident. […] Are we facing a forgotten or an excessively recalled past; a future which has almost disappeared from the horizon or a future which is mainly threatening; a present incessantly consumed in the immediate moment; or the almost static and interminable if not eternal present?”17 His analysis of the modern and contemporary regimes of historicity suggests that, at least since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 which has come to crystallize the fall of one of the last master narratives of the twentieth century, the futurism of modernity—a regime in which actions are guided by the future and cease to be envisaged in continuity with the past; in which history is teleologically conceived as a vast process of emancipation of humanity through (and not merely in) time, towards universal progress18—has been substituted by a regime which abolishes the prerogative of the future, to promote instead the prerogative of the present. This reordering of time is highly characteristic of the temporal investigations of post-1990s art. But Hartog designates this regime as presentist. In this new regime, the present has become the privileged temporal category through which the past and the future are being not only understood but, more problematically, absorbed. This present is a devouring present in relation to which the engendering of historical time seems suspended—a manifestation which is not without partly echoing

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the suspension not of historical time but of forwardness. Hartog’s study succeeds in revealing how our contemporaneity corresponds to a major re-articulation of the temporal categories, in which even memory and memorial practices are predominantly made from the perspective of the present, and in which the future is made to be inhaled into the present. But the notion of presentism is a generalizing term, endowed with the forces and limits which always accompany generalizations. I want to argue that to privilege the present does not necessarily (although can easily) entail the absorption of the past and future. It might sometimes entail the requirement—and this is more properly indicative of the temporal turn in contemporary art—to imagine a future that ceases to devalue the present and the past. What modernity traditionally devalues is now claimed to be what shapes the future. Such a reversal corresponds to the latter part of Mary’s declaration in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night—a declaration that might well betray her inability to transform the past but that at least discloses her unwillingness to simply forget the past: “It’s the future, too.” The past persists in the future.

“Turning” as a Generative Moment The temporal experimentations of contemporary art are unique as they systematically encompass both a contemporanization (of temporal passing) and a reactivation (of historicity). The book argues that these are presentifying and not simply presentist experimentations. Although presentism is certainly symptomatic of our times and extremely useful as a prism though which to understand our era, the diagnosis of presentism fails to account for the more creative ways in which the present is activated as an organizing principle of the past and the future. Indeed, contemporary artistic practices such as the ones investigated in this book propose a present that gains in texture, thickness, influence, and complexity when it is set into proximity with the past and the future. The practices bring the past closer to the present so that the recalled past might disclose what was otherwise forgotten, unseen, or unrealized. They sometimes ruin the past anew to make it exist in the present so as to futurize the past. They occasionally equalize past, present, and future. They ultimately show that the privileging of the present does not necessarily require the mere rejection of or rupture with the modern regime of historicity. For, as we will see, what the temporal turn makes evident is that the very practice of rupture is in contention. Presentism is not

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the right word to describe that turn. To account for this specificity, I prefer to borrow Vivian Sobchack’s “presentifying” terminology when she speaks about how she teaches the past to her students in cinema and media studies: “‘we have a certain obligation (as we always do) to remember and to teach (not sell) the historical past. But we now have to do this differently—for parts of our own lived historical past […] are long past and were not lived by our students. Thus we cannot successfully make students care about or—more important—engage in either the past or the future of feminism and its relation to media unless we begin in the present.”19 Sobchack’s association between care and the temporal category of the present is crucial: it sustains the temporal turn in contemporary art. These remarks allow me to formulate more precisely the underlying claim of this study: the suspension of the forward movement of images, bodies, and narratives in contemporary art is a turn; it is an aesthetics by which western contemporary art has embarked into a temporal turn. As a suspension, it is the very materialization of that turn, especially if we follow Irit Rogoff’s definition of the term: “a generative moment in which a new horizon emerges in the process—leaving behind the practice that was its originating point […]. In a ‘turn,’ we shift away from something or towards or around something, and it is we who are in movement, rather than it.”20 Suspension partakes both of an “it” (aesthetics) and a “we” (spectators); “away,” “around,” and “towards” regimes of historicity. My hypothesis is that contemporary art operates a shift away from an aesthetics grounded in the conventions of time of classical modernity, understood here as a condition, a discursive rhetoric,21 and a historical period. It is a shift away from time conceptualized as pure continuity, unity, and succession, together with history as progress, acceleration, and teleology; towards a post-metaphysical “presentifying” aesthetics of reorientation of modern conventions of historical time. As stated above, suspension takes different forms: stillness; holding; perspectival weakening; ruination; compressed forwardness; de-synchronization; the simultaneous deployment of micro-narratives non-causally related; as well as narrative recombination. As will be argued through an in-depth examination of the film, video, installation, and performance works of Tatiana Trouvé, Francis Alÿs, Guido van der Werve, Mark Lewis, Tacita Dean, Melik Ohanian, Harun Farocki, Nancy Davenport, and Stan Douglas, contemporary artistic practices explore suspension to connect temporality and historicity. They articulate the presentifying operations—the new regime of historicities that have come to structure

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this study: (1) ecology; (2) potentiality; (3) ruination gone wrong (or spectrality); (4) simultaneity (I and II – Chapter 5 and 6); and (5) the historical sublime (or longue durée revisited). As Rogoff’s definition suggests, however, the turn also supposes that spectators are turning as the aesthetics is turning, away and towards. In the last years, a lot has been said about how contemporary art has increasingly been a modality by which the spectator is asked to participate in the artwork, leading to a plea for the “emancipated spectator.”22 But in this awareness, little or nothing has been said about who this spectator is, the historicalness of that spectator, namely how perception in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century has been increasingly conditioned by demands of interactivity, multitasking, hypersolicitation of attention, and acceleration. Artists interested in the making of time suspend forwardness in relation to this historicized spectator. The present study is therefore dedicated to the understanding of a turn that crystallizes, despite or indeed because of the manifold art practices it includes, a rich dialogue between art, philosophy, history, science, and perception in a period where the passage of time, so crucial to the unfolding of history, is considered to be in crisis. Recent art can be said to be haunted by modernity. As we will see, the temporal turn stages, disavows and reorients modernity’s temporalization of history. By advantaging the temporal category of the present, it questions the four operations of that temporalization: progress, acceleration, teleology, and totalization. These are the main points of contention addressed in contemporary art practices. Modernity is understood as endowed with promises of progress, change, perfectibility, novelty, inclusiveness, and opportunity, all of which are supported by technoindustrial and scientific invention. As it enacts these promises, modernity articulates what historian Reinhart Koselleck has called the growing asymmetry between experience (the present past, whose past “events have been incorporated and can be remembered” in the present) and expectation (the future made present, which “directs itself to the not-yet, to the nonexperienced, to that which is to be revealed”).23 Such temporalization is inseparable from the accelerating pace of the modern world shaped by developments in communications and rates of production: this pace leaves human agents with briefer time spans to experience the present “as the present,” an increasing brevity by which the self-accelerating temporality “escapes into a future”’ while placing heavier and heavier demands one that future.24 The heaviness of these demands, adds philosopher Miguel de Beistegui in relation to the subprime mortgage

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crisis of the late 2000s and the contemporary development of capitalism “driven by even greater and more crippling levels of debt, deficit, and lack,” means that the future is more and more firmly borrowed “before it has been actually lived.”25 Modern temporalization is consequently a segregating process: not only does it differentiate between categories of beings who are and aren’t on par (either too early or too late) with history, it also carries what philosopher Peter Osborne has designated as the impulse to “abstract from the concrete multiplicity of differential times […] a single differential through which to mark the time of the present.”26 Time is power, and modernity is a temporalization of history in which space has increasingly relegated to time its central force in human conflicts, despite the observation of many thinkers (notably Bergson) that classical modernity is mainly a spatialization of time. What interests me here, then, is another hypothesis than the simple suspension of time and history, one that doesn’t so much invalidate than complicate Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of suspension as a spacing of time and a development of a waiting, anxious “we.”27 I want to show how suspension (the suspension of forwardness) presupposes a changing spectator and that it creates different reorientations of historical time which are critical of modernity, what art historian Terry Smith has designated as “(alter)temporality” in a world of contemporaneity.28

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Chapter 1

Temporal Investigations in Contemporary Art, Social Sciences, and the Humanities: A Comparative View

It is common to generalize about time—to anthropomorphize it; to project our fears, hopes, needs, desires, and losses on it; to acknowledge it as an autonomous dimension acting in the world according to its own laws while paradoxically making it so intimate to our beings that it becomes our being; to dis-historicize or naturalize what are in fact conceptualizations, constructions, and highly mediated experiences of time. These various attributions help us live our lives, even though they too easily suspend the question of the interplay between subjective and objective realities of time. It is also the case that the field of time studies is amazingly large, which means that different concepts from different disciplines get effortlessly blurred into each other to define it, often leading to contradictory understandings of time. It is also difficult—especially in relation to artworks which exist to be perceived, performed, and apprehended—to go with the challenge of investigating a dimension which never simply appears and is only obliquely graspable. Hence, before we move on to the actual artworks, a few specifications are called for in response to some of the most pressing questions about time: what is the difference between time and temporality, non-phenomenal and phenomenal time?; how has modern western philosophy defined it?; what are the main disciplines addressing time today?; and what is the current state of time studies? These precisions will help us circumscribe more tightly what it means to say that the forwardness of moving images and bodies, in the temporal turn of contemporary art, is suspended; that temporal passing is contemporized; that history is temporalized and historicity presentified. It will also help to situate contemporary art historically, in relation to other contemporary disciplinary studies on time. This comparative approach will show that time studies are far from

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consensual, although some of their findings do overlap. They mostly coexist as a variety of internal (disciplinary) debates. Art is a unique participant in these debates. Its originality comes from its reiterated attempt to connect phenomenologically and historically oriented investigations of time. As we will see, the temporal turn is motivated by the commitment to elaborate images, sounds, and performances that aesthetically translate contemporary experiences of temporal discontinuity and inconsistency. While western philosophy has tended and sometimes still tends to look for what makes time a continuous reality or phenomenon, the temporal turn presupposes, acts upon, and activates a discontinuous time. It never lets go of interested time. Although it acknowledges a certain level of indiscernibility of the past, present, and future, the temporal is a turn in which the past, present, and future persist sufficiently to allow for forms of realignments. It is a turn constitutive of a regime of historicity in which the temporal category of the present is thickened by its proximity to the past and to the future.

The Modern (Western) Philosophy of Time, or the Impossible Question: What is Time? As elegantly observed by philosopher of science Étienne Klein, notions commonly used to define time—change, movement, flow, passage, duration, causality, irreversibility, nonspatial continuum, dimension— are not so easily interchangeable.1 They fall short of providing a definitive definition of time. Such a unified characterization is impossible—not only because the meaning and conceptualization of time differ historically, but also because the history of the conceptualization of time is a history of debates between conflicting conceptualizations whose spectrum unfolds between two limit positions: between the claim that time exists in our phenomenal apprehension of it and the claim that time does not exist. The elusiveness intrinsic to any definition of time derives as well from the fact that we never perceive time per se, but events, change, and movement in time. Hence, to try to answer the questions “which aspect of time is being addressed?,” “how is time being addressed in recent art?,” and “why has time become so significant to contemporary artistic practices?” is to enter a labyrinth of concepts, relays, and contradictory perspectives. Klein’s observation, however, effectively discloses four important aspects about time, which help to circumscribe the temporal turn I am trying to describe here.

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First: time’s particular relation to change. Aristotle identified time with motion and concluded that time requires change: it depends on change since it is unperceivable without change. Still, today, change (transformations in nature, in our environment, in the people we know, in our own bodies) is understood as the phenomenon that makes time tangible to us. Time appears first and foremost through change. But, at least since eighteenth-century western philosophy, time ceases to be reducible to change. A distinction must be made between time and phenomenal time, for indeed when we say that things change in time and that change is the manifestation of the passage of time, there is more to time than change. It is a fact that in the realm of philosophy, after Newton’s postulation of the absoluteness of time, which posits time as independent from the existence or non-existence of external things, and Kant’s claim that time is a type of intuition—an a priori—impressed by the mind on experience, time is no longer considered to be the measurement of movement, and movement has become subordinate to time.2 This means that our search for the temporal in art cannot be reduced to a search for change of/in the image, of/by the performer. Second: Klein’s observation pertains to the relation between time and mind. Time is recursively understood as depending on our own existence. With Kant, time is posited not as a characteristic of things as they are in themselves, existing autonomously from the human faculties to take hold of them, but as a mental a priori condition for the possibility of knowing things in the world. This standpoint, however, fails to account for the fact that planets and stars precede us; that the time of the universe is not simply human. Moreover, as recently pointed out by Couzens Hoy, the Kantian ordering “that puts mind before time” has been fundamentally challenged by the Heideggerian phenomenological tradition which argues that “temporality is a condition for the possibility of subjectivity,” preceding the human subject as it were.3 It is not, though, that the reversed order—the priority of time over mind—is closer to the truth of time. Rather, it is that the very principle of priority (the priority of mind over time or of time over mind) must be fundamentally questioned, as it is sometimes in the field of contemporary art. Third: Klein’s point signals how time is compartmentalized according to disciplinary perspectives and hierarchies. This hierarchization reveals that some times are labeled as more real than others. The most common distinction is the one established between physical time and psychological time, the first considered to be objective and real, and

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the latter subjective and unreal (prone to illusion). These distinctions end up creating divides between different temporal deployments instead of allowing for a deeper understanding of how they relate. Even phenomenology has its problems in this regards for it simply bypasses the problem of distinction by ignoring any allegation concerning the transcendence of experience, including the existence of objective time. It simply affirms that temporality—lived time as it manifests itself in human existence—is real time because temporality “must always be experienced as real.”4 But the tension between objective, subjective, and phenomenal times cannot simply be discarded. Indeed, although the metaphysical question of the reality or non-reality of objective time (“is time a ‘real thing’ that is ‘all around us’, or is it nothing more than a way of speaking about and measuring events?”5) remains unresolved to this day, its irresolution is nevertheless productive for it has generated significant developments both in physics and aesthetics. This is why I find Philip Turetzky’s philosophical definition of time as “a boundary condition on phenomena”6 particularly insightful. To say that time is a boundary condition on phenomena—a boundary condition on things that appear—is to highlight that, in western thought, time might not be definable as such but its function can be delineated as a delimiting function that never completely erases its supplemental dimension—a function that becomes quite palpable, as we will see, in contemporary art. This boundary function is a constant, although what it actually borders changes from one philosophical system to another, depending on the degree of phenomenality accorded to time. Turetsky explains well the consistency and diversity of the bordering role of time: […] all such variations will exhibit one of the following four boundary structures […]: 1. as something which does not itself appear but which acts as the most immediate constraint on what does appear; 2. as itself a phenomenon which somehow encompasses and constrains all other phenomena; 3. as something neither strictly a phenomenon nor something which does not itself appear but something intermediate between the two which constrains phenomena (or mediates the relations between what appears and what does not); 4. as a double limit where two sorts of time are posited, one on each side of the boundary between phenomena and what does not appear.7 The definition of time as a boundary condition on phenomena has the merit of not discarding time in favor of temporality (lived, phenomenal

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time). Indeed, although it is more tangible to speak about phenomenal time, non-phenomenal time always weighs on phenomenal time as an ideal or a metaphysical mystery. There is no point in denying this mystery, which persists in our apprehending of time. And fourth: in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87), Kant completed the inversion of the Aristotelian subordination of time to movement and initiated the deployment of time for itself.8 From this inversion on—an inversion that liberated time as an object of inquiry in its own right, but which will also posit it as mind dependent—time became crucial to the development of philosophy. It is not that subsequent philosophical investigations were interested in the nature of time as such. Rather, time became the boundary through which to understand the processes of consciousness (perception, memory, intuition, etc.) and subjectivity, according to principles of unity, flow, continuity, and freedom. Kant’s thesis on time has been largely discussed and is well known by now. His main argument is that, although there is no knowledge of objects without sense experience (as postulated by the empiricists, Locke in particular), not all knowledge is derived from sense experience insofar as a priori (transcendental and universal) conditions must exist to allow knowledge and experience. All knowledge and experience of objects presuppose transcendental conditions that make it possible to empirically know the world. Time has a special status in such an unfolding of knowledge: it is experienced through the senses but it is also ideal. Objects cannot be experienced atemporally, but this does not entail that time is a property of things in themselves, which would exist beyond our ability to grasp them. Kantian time is more fundamentally an a priori, a universal and necessary condition that makes any knowledge and experience of objects possible. As explained by Turetsky: “Time has the structure of the absolute mathematical flow of Newtonian time, and likewise cannot be discovered through any sense experience; time is an a priori condition of any possible experience. Kant’s fundamental characterization of the nature of time is that time is ‘the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever.’”9 Nineteenthand twentieth-century traditions rely on this emancipation of time in relation to movement to scrutinize the dynamics of temporal succession and to emphasize the significance of temporal passing—a scrutiny grounded on a shared criticism of the Kantian distinction between noumena (things in themselves) and phenomena (things as they appear).10 As Turetsky has acutely observed, be it the analytic tradition, which deliberates about McTaggart’s problem of the non-existence of

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time; the phenomenological tradition, which focuses on the unity of temporal appearances; or the Bergsonian tradition, which meditates upon temporal synthesis: these traditions accept the empiricist project of tying all possible reality to appearances; they focus on time as closely connected to existence; and, as such, consistently seek to affirm the continuity of time, the irrevocability of its passing. Especially in the phenomenological tradition (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), but also with Nietzsche, Bergson, and Proust, modern philosophy and literature attend to the passage of time while attempting (I follow Couzens Hoy’s insight here) to reconcile itself with temporal passing and the losses entailed by such a passage. Husserl’s description of duration and succession as intentional experiences shows them as constituting, in their flow, their own unity: duration and succession appear to a unified consciousness and time consciousness is a consciousness that unifies a continuously occurring flow of intentionalities.11 Heidegger’s postulation that temporality is the very medium of the authentic subject suggests that being-in-the-world is not a waiting for time to pass but an existing temporally characterized by “the unity of expecting, retaining, and enprésenting”—a unity that connects the future to the past to the present.12 Bergson’s postulation that time is a pure duration that can be intuited as one and whole beyond the measured task-oriented temporalities of daily life presumes the existence of a durée that is quantitatively indivisible yet always dividing itself qualitatively into past and present as the past incessantly prolongs itself into the present so that the present may pass. All of these postulates (Husserl’s, Heidegger’s and Bergson’s) rely on a rich set of related beliefs in: the existence of time; the agency of consciousness or intuition to grasp the continuity, connectedness, and persistence of time; and the subject’s ability to attend to and perhaps affect the passage of time.13 In the temporal turn of contemporary art, this belief in the passage of time is fundamentally questioned, and the possibility of disorganizing it is set into play. To summarize our four points: the “temporal” in art cannot be reduced to a change of or in the image; the principle of priority (the priority of mind over time or of time over mind) must be radically problematized; the understanding of time as a boundary condition on phenomena has the advantage of acknowledging that, whereas phenomenal time is more tangible and decipherable, non-phenomenal time constantly weighs on phenomenal time as an ideal or a metaphysical mystery; and the postulate of temporal passing as “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past” is contestable. These are the main

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guidelines which will channel our appraisal of the temporal experimentations at play in recent media arts.

The Time-image One of the central contemporary studies proposing an understanding of the image as fundamentally temporal is without doubt Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image, first published in French in 1985 and translated into English in 1989. The book proposes a study of postwar cinema notably pre-dated by Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), mostly covering the period of Italian neorealism and French new wave. Its main claim is by now well known: in these films, a purely optical and sound situation replaces the sensory-motor situation of traditional realism.14 The purely optical and sound situation is one in which perception (the characters’ perception) ceases to extend itself into action to become related to thought. The perceivers are not so much actors of/in their environments than pure seers wandering in a variety of any-spaces-whatever. This is so precisely because the optical situation replaces sensory-motor action. Such a shift entails that, in the image, distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity, the imaginary and the real, the actual and the virtual, the present and the past become irrelevant: “We run in fact into a principle of indeterminibility, of indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask. It is as if the real and the imaginary were running after each other, as if each was being reflected in the other, around a point of indiscernibility.”15 This indiscernibility is surely the main property of the time-image. It says two things about the time-image. First, time is now anterior to normal movement: it ceases to be generated by movement. This explains the predominance of aberrant movement—the dispersion of centers, for example. Aberrant movement has this particularity of presenting (and not representing) the “everythingness” of time to the spectators straightforwardly and immediately: What aberrant movement reveals is time as everything, as ‘infinite opening’, as anteriority over all normal movement defined by motivity [motricité]: time has to be anterior to the controlled flow of every action, there must be ‘a birth of the world that is not completely

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restricted to the experience of our motivity’ and ‘the most distant recollection of image must be separated from all movements of bodies’. If normal movement subordinates the time of which it gives us an indirect representation, aberrant movement speaks up for an anteriority of time that it presents to us directly, on the basis of the disproportion of scales, the dissipation of centres and the false continuity of the images themselves.”16 Second, the time-image is a site of indiscernibility insofar as the three temporal categories of the past, present and future coexist but “tend ultimately to become confused by slipping into the same point”17 of imperceptibility. The temporal categories are barely related, semantically speaking: “there is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come. Simple succession affects the presents which pass, but each present coexists with a past and a future without which it would not itself pass on.”18 Deleuze’s view fully integrates the Bergsonian conceptualization of duration as a synthetic undividable flow, in which the present tends to disappear as a distinct (spatial) temporal category insofar as the time-image is always simultaneously both present and past.19 Deleuze’s regime of historicity is not presentist or presentifying at all, nor is it futurist or passéist: it is one in which the articulation of past, present, and future can barely come about insofar as the temporal categories lose in distinction what they gain in indiscernibility. As philosopher Peter Hallward has convincingly suggested, Deleuze’s philosophy associates being with creation. Creation occurs as an immediate intellectual intuition and not as a gradual unfolding as was the case, for example, with Heidegger, where creation corresponds to a promise of access to Being (Dasein) through processes of veiling and unveiling.20 His philosophy sets out to liberate the concept of difference from “any external mediation, any subjection to the normalising channels of generality, identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance.”21 This means that to differ is to allow a thing, a system or a subject to differ in itself and not to differ from the other. Deleuze’s non-dialectical and non-representational approach to difference is precisely what sustains his description of the time-image as an indiscernibility in which “we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask.”22 This

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aspect is crucial: the deferring is always a self-differing of the thing; it refuses externality and relationality; it enacts Bergsonian pure duration as the indivisible continuity of time, indifferent to actuality, indifferent to what Bergson calls interested time. This indivisibility presents a great challenge to human beings who tend, on the contrary, to divide time, measure it, and rationalize it to survive and function socially. Hallward is quite perceptive on this specific point: Life is an indivisible flow, but we experience it as if it were divisible. In reality, time is continuous change but we tend, precisely in order to make the most of ‘our’ time, to divide it into measurable segments […]. Why do we tend to think of continuous actions as isolated things? Bergson answers: because it is our own immediate interest to do so. It is useful, for the sake of our preservation or for the satisfaction of our needs, to approach the world as if it were made up of distinct moments and objects whose relationships can be measured and predicted and thus managed or controlled. […] We tend to reduce a movement through space to the mere trajectory that it generates, since trajectories (or representations of movement) are divisible things that we can map, and inflect. […]. True philosophical insight must set out, then, not from facts or from rationalised versions of our ordinary understanding, but on the contrary, from those moments in which such understanding is suspended. Insight is never a matter of actual fact. It can begin when the pressures of practical action yield in favour of a disinterested and ultimately disembodied intuition—intuition of reality as it is in itself.23 To argue then (this is Deleuze’s argument) that the time-image is a purely optical and sound situation is to maintain that it ceases—in contrast to the movement-image—to establish links between events and individuals, perceptions and perceivers (perceivers with specific life-stories). It is to concentrate on the deployment of lines of flight away from the actuality of our experiences (our normal perception of the world, for example, determined by ordinary habits, needs, and interests; or our measuring of time) toward the temporal condition of experience: duration—a temporality that exists all at once as a Bergsonian synthetic indivisible flow. Deleuze does not provide a theory of difference in which actual, social, and embodied time plays a significant role in the act of differing. His is a theory of non-relational difference, in which differing is to differ within itself immediately. This

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precludes any view of change, transformation, time, and history as arbitrated by actuality.24 The following chapters will show that, whereas Deleuze’s legacy—the temporalization of the image, the requirement to perceive images as a site of generation of time beyond movement, and the understanding of moving images as themselves supported by time—permeates the temporal turn, its leaving-behind of the actual is what the temporal turn fundamentally thrives to counter. This leaving-behind is seen as yet another instance of the futurist (modern) inclination to obliterate the present and to distance the past for the sake of a detached and detachable future. The near-dissolution of the distinctiveness of the temporal categories of the past, present, and future into indiscernibility is also seen as problematic, for the pressing concern is to create relations between these—to keep a certain level of discernibility; to reorient the articulation of the past, present, and future—so as to alter unsatisfying regimes of historicity. The temporal turn’s challenge is to keep Deleuze’s insight that the time-image deploys “time as everything”25 while historicizing that insight; while transforming it to connect it to worldly, interested times. Whereas, indeed, the three temporal categories “tend ultimately to become confused by slipping into the same point of indiscernibility,”26 the temporal turn refuses to produce a time-image that embraces an ultimate confusion. It keeps the “tend” by suspending the “ultimately.” Art holds on to at least two (Bergsonian/Deleuzian) philosophical precepts related to the manifestation of time—namely (1) the unpredictability of change as temporally derived, and (2) the possibility of perceiving time obliquely. These precepts will be addressed in the following chapters. What have been abandoned are the belief in continuous indivisible duration beyond our daily lives and the belief in time as a fundamental agent of force in and by itself (i.e., beyond history). It is safe to say that the preoccupation with the discontinuities of the actual and of the everyday is so encompassing that disciplines in general (including art and art history) have been increasingly disclosing temporal passing as variable, malleable, discontinuous, uneven, and unequal. Engaged within a historical thrust, art has come to dramatically consider the persistence and incontournability of interested time. The blooming, since the 1980s, of memory, trauma, and archive studies, in health sciences, social sciences, the humanities, literature, media, and art, is in itself indicative of the undesirability of simply leaving the past and the present behind, as well as the related requirement to figure out the most productive way not to leave these temporal categories behind.

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Contemporary Studies on Time In its consideration of interested time, art directly and indirectly draws on contemporary studies which address time following specific perspectives that are not always reconcilable but that do sometimes significantly overlie, even if they are hardly put into relation. In contrast to nineteenthand early twentieth-century philosophy, contemporary disciplines are not fundamentally concerned with the unity or continuity of time—a premise usually based on the philosophical belief in consciousness’s or intuition’s ability to grasp such temporal features. They show how time is highly mediated, in the sense that it can never directly be accessed: time is psychically, socially, technologically, environmentally, culturally, and biologically conditioned. It is not my intention here to ascertain the multiplicity of hypotheses and findings on time proclaimed by the many disciplines currently engaged in the understanding of time and temporality. Such a task is impossible. The following disciplinary map provides instead an overview of the prevailing ways in which lived time, notably the lived “becoming present of future events and then their becoming past”27 is at the forefront of disciplinary research mainly as a predicament, a questionable reality and an unevenness that preclude the institution of any form of universal a priori on which to ground the existence of time or to access temporal flow, wholeness, indivisibility, and permanence. This map is incomplete, brief, and provisional; it will be developed throughout the book in relation to the examined artworks; and it focuses for now only on the disciplines and approaches that the artworks of the temporal turn directly or indirectly interpellate in their aesthetics. I have intentionally omitted the scientific realms of physics and mathematics (these are temporal continents in themselves), to privilege the realms of the humanities and social sciences which are more directly related to the artworks investigated in this book, although physics will be indirectly considered through a brief examination of analytic philosophy. The map shows that the acknowledgment yet problematization of the passage of time are not exclusive to contemporary art. On the contrary, artistic practices must be seen as grappling with concerns similar to other contemporary fields of knowledge. Of special relevance to this study are the following fields. (1) Analytic Philosophy: one of the major debates occurring in the philosophy of the mind concerns John McTaggart’s 1908 claim that time is unreal. The different readings, oppositions to, and partial endorsements of that claim have lead to what is now known as the tensed-tenseless debate

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corresponding to real/presentist versus non-realist/eternalist views of time. Does time pass, or is temporal passing just an illusion? Analytic philosophers examining this question are split, for the most part, between two groups: the tensed group, which posits that time’s passage is real and that the present is ontologically privileged over the past and the future; and the tenseless group, which refutes the passage of time and maintains that all events, notwithstanding their temporal location, are ontologically equal. (2) The philosophy of the event (Derrida, Nancy, and Badiou): these are among the most read and discussed (but not necessarily fully endorsed) philosophers in the domains of art, art history, literature, and film/media/cultural studies. Derrida’s “out of joint” temporality, which “dislocates the self-presence of the living present”28; Nancy’s pure present of “it happens”; and Badiou’s “insurrection of the unfounded”29 as a discontinuity of the present: these philosophers share a concern for the productivity of the event understood as the unpredictable occurrence of an encounter; a revolution or an invention that shatters the order of things. Unpredictability is viewed as creative of genuine novelty. The event (let us follow Badiou here) is that which “cannot be inferred from the situation”; as Hallward puts it in his study on Badiou, the surprise of the event “is why every event indicates, in principle, a pure beginning, the inaugural or uncountable zero of a new time (a new calendar, a new order of history).”30 (3) Communication, media studies, and the philosophy of technology: this area includes a diversity of approaches to the question of technological determinism, which evaluates technology’s conditioning of temporality. Communication studies, dedicated to the study of the ways in which we communicate, have been particularly useful for the understanding of the impact of technologies of communication and informational technologies on the accelerated experience of time. As stated by human geographers Jon May and Nigel Thrift, “from about the middle of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War, and again towards the end of the twentieth century, there occurred a radical restructuring in the nature and experience of both time and space. […] considerable agreement exists as to both the main characteristics of this restructuring and its consequences. […] the general consensus seems to be that both periods saw a significant acceleration in the pace of life concomitant with a dissolution or collapse of traditional spatial co-ordinates (changes usually expressed via some kind of discourse on speed—or space divided by time).”31 Developments in

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transport and communication technologies have played a major role in this great acceleration in the pace of change and in the “progressive shrinking of the world and its simultaneous enlargement as people became aware of events in ever more distant parts of the world.”32 The same has been argued about the twentieth-century development of digital media: the flow of time has now been reduced to the instant, leading to quasi-instantaneous modes of connection between users. Digital media accelerates our experience of time and concomitantly reduces our sense of duration and distance. One of the main proponents of this claim, social theorist and geographer David Harvey, maintains that the modern junction of the development of technologies of communication, travel, and capital economics has resulted in a time-space compression: “As space appears to shrink to a ‘global village’ of telecommunications and a ‘spaceship earth’ of economic and ecological interdependencies […] and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is (the world of the schizophrenic), so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds.”33 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff also maintain that in neoliberal economies “profit depends on compressing space and time,” as well as “unpredictable shifts in sites of production and the demand for labor,”34 while Arjun Appadurai observes that “[g]lobal capital in its contemporary form is characterised by strategies of predatory mobility (across both time and space).”35 What these studies are consistently claiming is that temporal passing has shrunk to the moment, the instant, the now. For some (let us refer here to Fredric Jameson’s “end of temporality” and Paul Virilio’s speed-space of the electronic era) it even disappears. But studies also indicate that the technological making of time does not necessarily mean that time is fully determined by technology, and that the experience of informational technology is far from uniform throughout the planet. Of special interest for the temporal turn is the work of Bernard Stiegler whose Technics and Time posits that techné is the very essence of human becoming; it is the condition of possibility of humanity and homonization per se. But the twentieth-century development of industrialized temporal objects—a category which includes radio, cinema, television, video gaming, among others—is seen as fundamentally problematic because the main operational feature of these is to objectify (to dispossess the humans from) the consciousness of the flow of time. Cultural industry will exploit the consumer’s synchronization with temporal objects for its own economic

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ends, absorbing and controlling what defines and shapes human consciousness understood from a Husserlian perspective. (4) Psychology: the study of the psychological perception of time is increasingly concerned with the distortions that such perceptions entail. As stated by psychologist William Friedman, the everyday phenomenon is evaluated to be so dominant that “there must be something lawful about these distortions.”36 In other words, they might not be distortions at all; they might only be distortions in relation to clock time. When subjects are asked, in controlled laboratory situations, to make time judgments prospectively or retrospectively about the passage of time, they are indeed significantly different from clock measurements of time. Findings are that cognitively demanding tasks shorten the impression of temporal passing; that a greater number of events lengthens impressions of a given duration; that we experience an acceleration of the passage of time as we grow older; that an interval of time seems exaggerated if we are frustrated with waiting, bored with waiting, anticipating a pleasant experience, perceiving ourselves to be in danger, socially marginalized, or simply carefully watching for some event to occur; that an interval seems longer if we remember more of its contents or if it was made up of more distinct segments (it seems shorter if we think of it in a simpler way).37 Bluntly, when we rely on perception alone, the flow of time is uneven and hardly synchronous with clock-time, rate wise. Psychology also examines the role of mental events—attention, anticipation, and more importantly memory—in forming an impression of elapsed or shortened time content. As best expressed by Friedman, “most of our impressions of ‘how much’ time rest on ordinary mental contents and not on a special time sense. The ‘quantity’ of these contents is subject to the vicissitudes of what occurs, what we notice, and what we remember and thus is vulnerable to distortion.”38 Time distortions are increasingly seen as stress related; and there is growing evidence that emotions substantially affect our perception of time, as well as growing evidence that the general state of our physiology impacts temporal perception.39 (5) The related field of neuroscience: the neural bases of time perception remain uncertain and unknown, especially the question as to exactly how and where time is encoded and processed in the brain. There are moreover competing models used in the evaluation of the neuronal system properties involved in the encoding of duration. Psychologist and philosopher Marc Wittmann provides one of the best descriptions of this state of affairs: “Investigations in the fields of experimental psychology, clinical neuropsychology and neuroimaging have resulted

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in an extensive literature on the mechanisms and underlying neural systems of temporal processing. Over the last decades, certain cognitive and neural models have dominated time perception research, but alternative models exist and the number of potential theories has to date increased considerably. To summarize the status of the research field in general terms: there is a lot of conflicting evidence and there are several competing conceptualizations.”40 It appears, however, that there are several cognitive processes that are entangled with our perception of time, which require the integrative processing of multiple modules distributed across the brain, including the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia. What is more, research has systematically shown—corroborating findings in cognitive psychology, but here with an emphasis on understanding how brains “encode or decode information that streams in through time” and how signals enter “various brain regions at varied times coordinated with one another”— that time perception distortions in the evaluation of duration and time intervals are consistent; and that time judgment calibration activated by the brain is recurrent as a countering device, to specifically counter some of these distortions. These processes are understood as influenced by attention shifts, working memory, and cognitive expectations.41 Neuroscience has also concentrated on the deficits in time perception found in neurological diseases which affect the chemistry and structure of the brain such as Alzheimer and Parkinson, but also schizophrenia and affective disorders—namely depression and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In ADHD, for example, one of the most prevalent conditions of child psychiatry, researchers have identified three main psychological constructs of deficient temporality: delay aversion (“the intolerance for waiting that can manifest as a tendency to select an immediate reward over a larger reward for which the subject has to wait”42), deficits in temporal processing, and deficits in working memory. Aphasia and dyslexia have been posited as timing disorders rather than language disorders. Patients suffering from depression as well as cancer patients suffering from high levels of anxiety have been reported as experiencing a slowing down of the pace of time and an overestimation of temporal intervals.43 This could be explained by an attention shift for patients in psychological distress whereby one’s attention to meaningful thoughts and actions is being replaced by attention to the passage of time. (6) Sociology: “any search for a singular or universal social theory of time must be doomed to failure as both that which it seeks to account

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for (the timing of social life) and the frame within which those timings may be set is itself variable across both time and space.”44 This statement by May and Thrift affirms what is now a premise in any sociological research: social time is constructed and reconstructed according to social practices that shape and are shaped by the degrees to which societies are bound up with natural rhythm; by our relationships with spacetime technologies; by the prevalence of specific social disciplines; and by various discourses conceptualizing and re-conceptualizing time, which regulate more or less strongly our understanding and experience of time. The picture of social time is thus “less that of a singular or uniform social time stretching over a uniform space, than of various (and uneven) networks of time stretching in different and divergent directions across an uneven social field.”45 Time passes but it passes differently from one culture to another, and from one economic class to another. Social time is a matter of distribution. Not everyone is equal in its access to and participation in public time. Sociologists have nevertheless observed the increased availability, in rich countries, of a variety of technologies that allow humans to suspend the forwardness of our biological bodies as an irremediable route towards death. Edgar Morin has invented the term of “amortality” to describe how the development of genetic engineering has introduced the possibility of incessantly postponing death.46 Céline Lafontaine has more radically proposed the terminology of a “post-mortal society” to refer to a society that sustains “the declared will to technically conquer death, to ‘age without aging’, to indefinitely prolong death.”47 As for the economic side of things, neo-Marxist sociologist and political philosopher Antonio Negri has provided one of the most stimulating elucidations of the contemporary enthralment with time by holding that time has become a “general phenomenal fabric” of life. In his “The constitution of time” (1981), Negri analyzes Marx’s conceptualization of time as both a measure and matter of labor—a measure that reduces labor to a “homogeneous substance” and a matter that determines the productive power of labor by the multiplication of average temporal units.48 However, the fundamental restructuring of capitalism into a global economy at the end of the twentieth century has favored the replacement of the factory-based, single-task worker of the Fordist–Keynesian model by the socialized, mobile, and flexible worker involved in abstract, immaterial, and intellectual labor—a type of labor which can be responsive, notably, to the computerized factory. This new labor is regulated through multinational lines and laws of the world market. More significant to our discussion of

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the temporal turn, time loses its labor/non-labor compartmentalization insofar as the institutional evolution of capitalism invests the entirety of life. The Marxian understanding of time-as-measure becomes irrelevant insofar as social labor concerns all the time of life and enters all of its constituencies. The “all-over” argument proposed by Negri should be taken with a certain dose of skepticism insofar as the socialization of labor is far from being a uniform, universal, and completely achieved affair (this point will be discussed in Chapter 6). But anchored as it is in Deleuze’s view of “time as everything,”49 its productivity comes from its disclosure of the slow dissolution of the boundaries which separate work and non-work. This (still incomplete) dissolution heightens the daily experience of a growingly unbounded time—lived both as overwhelmingly available and dramatically insufficient. (7) History: historical studies which have integrated the impact of memory and temporal experience in the study of the past and the present (including studies by Reinhart Koselleck, Paul Ricoeur, François Dosse, and François Hartog) have concluded that the modern development of historical time based on notions of progress and teleology has lead to significant relocations of the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. Throughout the nineteenth century and at least until the long boom of postwar economic expansion, temporal passing confirmed itself as a future-oriented movement of development which increases the obsolescence of the past and the present. But in light of the failed utopias of modernity, in light of its marked injustices, and in light of the war and genocide catastrophes of the twentieth century, temporal passing has now reached a moment of stillness. Ignored pasts must be remembered but fail to be truly remembered as past; the traumatizing past can barely be remembered and thus fails to pass; the fear of reproducing the atrocities of the past blocks any sense of futurity. François Hartog speaks more precisely of a presentist society, where the historical time is literally suspended. (8) Postcolonial studies: in its investigation of the cultural legacy of colonialism, this interdisciplinary field (combining philosophy, anthropology, political science, geography, feminism, film studies, literary studies, and art history) has been crucial to the understanding of modernity as a representation, a condition and rhetoric of attribution of lateness to colonized nations and subaltern subjects. Modernity as a discourse of progress, acceleration, and teleology is a practice of totalization which excludes and relies on the exclusion of those who do not fit in these pre-defined parameters. Postcolonial studies emphasize how

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modern historical time is a process of inclusion and exclusion of beings as to their right to belong to history. To belong or not is a temporal affair: it is a matter of being too late or in advance, or simply on par. Of special interest here is how these studies insist on examining the residual effects of colonization. These remains are markers of temporal passing; they are a genuine dimension of our contemporaneity. They increasingly emphasize the need to address the relationships between dominant and marginalized temporalities not as binary opposites but as interdependent realities. As historian Frederick Cooper rightly maintains, “the long history of antislavery, anticolonial, and anti-apartheid movements” are movements by victims of empire, which means that their temporality was never simply outside of the discourses of progress; they should be considered as counter-temporalities active within the modern, which were successful “not only because local mobilizations assaulted the orderly normality of colonial regimes but because mobilizations resonated and connected across space.”50 Postcolonial approaches have also confirmed David Harvey’s view of compressed space-time by emphasizing that the globalized world is “a place where first-world capital is always shifting the third-world sites of its exploitation in order to cut costs, avoid regulations, and maximize profits.”51 (9) Political ecology: in contrast to medicine and related health disciplines which keep extending life expectancy and which are progressively suspending the body as the marker par excellence of the passage of time, ecology and environmental studies urge us to become aware of the finitude of the human species. In light of past, current, and anticipated natural and environmental catastrophes (from the overexploitation of natural resources, to global warming, to overpopulation and the unequal distribution of resources, to war devastations), the passage of time is perceived here as fundamentally limited. Political ecology, environmentalism, and geography have articulated some of the most forceful critiques of the postwar notion of development. What is being challenged here—through the concepts of finitude, countdown, irreversibility, and delay—is the modern conception of time based on continuity, growth, and unending progress. Temporality and historical time now appear to reach their ending. If time still passes, there is not much time left to save the planet from irretrievable deterioration. (10) Museology, library studies, architecture, and urban planning: these fields share a genuine concern for the archival preservation of deteriorating, endangered or ephemeral artefacts, objects, and buildings. Such activities of preservation are often accompanied by activities of

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renovations which (for better or for worst) end up erasing—as in plastic surgery—the age markers of the passage of time. Predominant architecture and urban planning concurrently tend to replace the old with the new. As such, they eliminate the ruins of modernity and, with it, the sense of time passing and flowing, the sense of something in the process of being lost.52

The Privileging of History over Philosophy This schematic disciplinary map indicates that temporality is critical to the development of social sciences, health sciences, and the humanities. These disciplines strive to disclose its crucial, allegedly growing role in the shaping of our lives. Most of these studies examine the non-Bergsonian/Deleuzian temporalities of our contemporaneity. Temporal passing, in particular, is seen as an inherent dimension of contemporary subjectivity, society, medialogy, ecology, historicity, and world order. Debates do not fundamentally engage in discussions about the continuity versus the discontinuity of temporal passing insofar as it is de facto considered as made of both. Rather, they question, test, and investigate the realness, reality, adequacy, consistency or inconsistency, and universality or perspectivism of temporal passing. The problem of finitude—the requirement to acknowledge the condition of being finite as opposed to being eternal, undetermined, dis-interested, and indefinite; the attempt to embrace post-finitude; or the reproving of attempts to ignore it—sustains most of these debates. Said differently, the question of the realness and reality of temporal passing is consistently a question of finitude. Notice how the assessment of time and temporality is systematically related to the requirement to call attention to materialities (bodies, objects, societies, and geographies) or to the possibility of surpassing or bypassing these materialities. Indeed, on the one hand, contemporary studies on time are preoccupied with the inconsistencies of temporal passing when considered in its human finitude. They speak of the perceptual distortions of temporal passing (identified as a constant in psychological studies); the alarming eventuality of ending temporal passing (denounced in ecological and environmental studies); the possibility to extend temporal passing before its end (assumed both in psychology and ecology); the compression and acceleration of temporal passing (postulated in media studies and sociology in their analysis of the quasi-instantaneity of informational exchange provided by

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digital telecommunications); the inequality and unevenness of temporal passing in society (as mapped out in recent sociology and postcolonial studies); and the presentist deployment of temporal passing in contemporaneity (affirmed by historians specialized in historicity matters). On the other hand, contemporary studies on time investigate the emancipatory effects of an unreal or denied temporal passing—effects which rely on a post-finitude perspective on time. They call attention to the promising yet unforeseeable discontinuation of temporal passing (as theorized and celebrated by the philosophers of the “event”); the sheer non-existence of temporal passing (as hypothesized by the “tenseless” camp of analytic philosophy); and the development of technologies that allow us to delay temporal passing (in restoration and preservation practices in health sciences, library sciences, curatorial sciences, and architecture, that erase age value and seek out methods to postpone aging processes that manifest the irremediable move towards death of any living thing). Between these two camps, Antonio Negri’s neo-Marxist (Deleuze-informed) approach attends to the materialities of capitalism to postulate, however, that its post-industrial development progressively unbounds time, dissolves it as it were into the fabric of life. These claims and findings show contemporary life to be structured by a temporal passing that is everything but fluid, flowing, accessible, assured, and universal. It is a question of accepting finitude or not, wanting finitude or not. The book will show that contemporary art sides with finitude. Yet, it does not simply disregard the post-finitude perspective: it sometimes explores the latter to better reach the former. Our disciplinary map also shows that time studies reach their efficiency— their capacity to explain the temporal dimensions of existence and the temporality of our experiences—by dividing subjective and objective accounts of time; by distinguishing phenomenological apprehensions from factual descriptions of time. These divisions are made on the fundamental (although improvable and not necessarily satisfying) assumption that there is a gap rather than a continuum between subjective and objective time. Divisions are also made because of the sheer difficulty of assessing these two realities together; of delimiting where subjectivity ends and objectivity begins; of defining what objectivity consists of (is objective time clock-time; is it social or culturally defined time; the time of physics or the time of geography; or is it time beyond our phenomenal accounts of it?). These divisions are reinforced as sharp, irreconcilable and unbridgeable divides—a growing incompatibility that is partly due to the compartmentalization of the very disciplines that study them and to the

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marginalization of the metaphysical tradition which primarily assumed the continuity of time. These divides are problematic. They are as problematic as the separation between mind and brain in cognitive and neuroscientific studies (something that recent cognitive science is beginning to address by the development of approaches that help to unify body and mind). They are unsatisfying insofar as the separation between subjective and objective dimensions of temporal passing is never clear-cut; it presupposes a divide that prevents a rapprochement between disciplines which could easily be combined and would easily gain in being combined to enrich our take on time; and it diminishes our ability to adequately address the (social, economic, psychological, biological, and technological) multidimensionality of interested time. They fragment the complexity of time; they value some temporalities over others without understanding their relationality. These divides are attempts to manage, as much as possible, a dimension that is unperceivable, excessive, and ultimately incalculable. Time studies reveal that there is no time without anxiety about time. These anxieties permeate the questions that ground time studies: how does one measure the immeasurable?; how can death be delayed?; how does one live if one cannot organize, spatialize, and compartmentalize time? In her study of western art of the 1960s, art historian Pamela Lee has shown that the temporal investigations of art practices of the 1960s strongly resonated with temporal findings emerging from the field of cybernetics. As an interdisciplinary field studying the structure of regulatory systems by attending to the information flows between human beings and intelligent machines, cybernetics (in its initial developments between the 1940s and 1970s) introduced “nonlinear, recursive, and multidirectional” models of time and causality to explain the homeostasis, self-regulation, and feedback mechanisms of systems.53 Then, once cybernetics started to consider the observer as part of the examined systems (the autopoiesis of systems), it established the irreversibility of temporal passing and sustained the second law of thermodynamics: the principle of entropy.54 As argued by Lee, the 1960s was a period where the western world was concomitantly exposed to “speed and accelerated models of communication.”55 Minimalism, land art (especially Robert Smithson’s site/non-site practices), even painting (namely, Bridget Riley’s op work) can be seen as exploring cybernetic and communication models of time in the shaping of their aesthetics based on repetition, entropy, and feedback processes. In so doing, they confronted the social anxieties—the chronophobia—resulting from such unleashing of temporal order.

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Although the influence of the defunct discipline of cybernetics is still palpable today in new media arts’ investigation of information flows, especially in mixed-reality art’s coupling of virtual and real-world environments where the body of the user is itself understood as an informational medium, more recent artistic practices have expanded their temporal investigations by engaging directly and indirectly with a larger spectrum of disciplines, embracing philosophy, sociology as much as psychology, health sciences, ecology, environmental sciences, history, communications, and postcolonial studies, all of which are occupied with one form or another of temporal passing. This larger embrace is crucial. Its productivity is threefold: (1) contemporary art’s experimentation with multidirectional informational flows—an experimentation mapped in Lee’s study—is the basis on which more recent practices are now addressing the informational flows between disciplines, as well as between the art object and the spectator; (2) this interdisciplinarity and interpositionality have defined art as a unique field of investigation endowed with the ability to connect different perspectives on time and to bridge subjective and objective qualifications of time; and (3) recent art has invested in the connections between lived time and history, between the lived passage of time and the historical passage of time. It can therefore be said to attend to the finitude of temporal passing (its warped contemporary deployments). In contrast to artistic experiments of the 1960s, it is the question of finite interested time—of historical time—which has unexpectedly yet strongly come to the fore in artistic investigations, at least since the 1980s. This shift is not a rupture. Indeed, the work of Robert Smithson on entropy, Gordon Matta-Clark on housing, and Martha Rosler on war—to name the most obvious— were already concerned with history. But now, it is the temporalization of historicity through passing and suspensive temporalities that have come to occupy aesthetics. It is the case that artists today have adopted a more historiographical outlook on time and conversely a more temporal outlook on history, anchored in disciplinary findings that affirm the malleability—the “warpability” (to borrow Anthony Vidler’s terminology applied to contemporary architectural space)—of temporal passing and the persistence of time as a predicament. Each contemporary model described above precludes any institution of any universal a priori on which to ground the existence of temporal passing. The interested time of the actual—time as local adaptation, shaped by our daily actions and mundane necessities; the spatialized (dividable and measurable) time

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condemned by Bergson; what Deleuze summarized in his Bergsonian analysis of postwar cinema as the perceptual condition whereby “we always perceive less” of the entire image (“we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands. We therefore normally perceive only clichés”56): it is this interested time that preoccupies and occupies contemporary artistic practices of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. This preoccupation is specific in its temporal combinations. What these practices consistently address is: temporality within history; time with history; temporality as part of historical time; adapted time; actualized time; world time; and temporalized history. This study will show that they address what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has designated as the remains with which we live. Contemporary artistic practices strive to potentialize remains as forms of resistance to and redeployment of modern life. As another philosopher, Peter Hallward, has insightfully emphasized in his criticism of Deleuzian philosophy and in his related support of Agamben’s approach, potentiality does not disappear “in actuality,” but “preserves itself as such in actuality,”57 so that remains may regain their potential. What he says about Agamben’s notion of potentiality also applies to the temporal turn in contemporary art: “Unlike Deleuze, Agamben’s concern is less with forms of becoming that remain external to history so much as with the properly historical effects of a temporality that remains missing within history, that is present in history in the form of ‘deferral and procrastination.’”58 In short, at the forefront of contemporary art today lies the understanding of time as both experiential and historical. The underlying thrust has become the disclosing and exploration of the experience of time to change the conception of history.59 Our case studies will demonstrate that the temporal turn has fully integrated but has also reconsidered the practice of discontinuity initiated by Walter Benjamin in the field of historical studies. As observed by historian François Dosse, German thought developed in the 1920s by Benjamin (as well as Franz Rosenzweig and Gershom Sholem) has been key in elaborating a discontinuous practice that fundamentally questions the continuous, progressive, rationalized, and teleological view of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment history. This suspension of the linear unfolding of history—the production of dialectical images that arrest the historical process at a standstill—was developed as a means to make manifest the failed aspirations of the past (what was not realized but hoped for) and to renew these aspirations in

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the present.60 The productivity of a discontinuous history comes from its ability to actualize the forgotten; to re-enliven remains of finitude. In the realm of aesthetics, Benjamin’s support of the interruptive feat of montage as a technique of combination of heterogeneous sources—the dada, readymade, surrealist, and constructivist disruption, fragmentation and remixing of texts, objects, sounds, or images—became a dialectical strategy that strove to shock the viewer out of its numbness. An antecedent to recent artistic practices, the dialectical image was seen as a means to suspend the temporal past/present/future ordering of the modern regime of historicity so as to retemporalize history outside of the futuristic tropes of continual progress. Key here is the attempt to suspend the forwardness underlying the progressive unfolding of historical time. In his assessment of Benjamin’s critical history, Agamben rightly argues that, in light of the irreconcilable divide between experience and history, “[i]t is certainly no accident that every time modern thought has come to reconceptualize time, it has inevitably had to begin with a critique of continuous, quantified time. Such a critique underlies […] Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ […].”61 As Chapter 3 will emphasize, however, contemporary art has moved away from these types of radical discontinuities. It keeps Benjamin’s insight that it is possible to question the historicity of modernity (its articulation of the past, present, and future following laws of progress that require the reiterated production of the new) by exploring modern temporalities that disrupt its futuristic logic. But the lived (finite) temporalities it explores are more presentifying than radically discontinuous, more a practice of complicating than of interrupting historical time.

Timing History Remains are what is left of something after it has partially or substantially disappeared after use, consumption, destruction, disenchantment, or simply after the lifespan of things. In the last two decades or so, art history and visual studies have been quite successful in identifying the main impulses and practices that have supported and shaped contemporary art’s concern for historical remnants as traces of finitude and interestedness: memory practices (Huyssen, James Young, Bal and Crewe and Spitzer, Saltzman, Dalmia and Hashmi, Gibbons, Petty, Reifenscheid, and many others); traumatic disclosures and the bearing witness to trauma (Baer, Bennett, Lauzon); reenactment (Schneider);

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anachronism (Didi-Huberman, Rancière); archival practices (Foster, Enwezor); history (Godfrey, Blocker); as well as archaeology (Roelstraete).62 These studies have investigated the different ways in which remains are explored in contemporary art and aesthetics. Surprisingly, however, they have not examined—in any significant way, except for Daniel Birnbaum’s insightful but short philosophical essay on the exploration of time in contemporary art63—the temporal conditions of possibility of these practices. This section proposes a brief assessment of some of these studies to show that the temporal turn partakes of the allegorical, archival, historiographical, and archaeological impulses of contemporary art. It concomitantly shows that, even though the temporal turn is shaped by these impulses, it adds a surplus value (to borrow W. J. T. Mitchell’s term in relation to images as things)64 to these impulses: temporality. Part of, but not completely overlapping with, the temporal turn, is certainly the archival impulse as mapped out by art historian Hal Foster in 2004. In his famous article, “An archival impulse,” Foster identifies archival impulse as a major inclination in the artistic practices of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The main thrust underlying these practices, Foster argues, has been to reconnect the fragmented past with the present, while opening it up to the future. Artists whose works are the most discussed in the context of the archival impulse include, to name a few: Carol Bove, Mark Dion, Gerard Byrne, Joachim Koester, Thomas Ruff, Renee Green, Tacita Dean, Thomas Hirschhorn, Anri Sala, Sam Durant, Zoe Leonard, Craigie Horsfield, Harun Farocki, Stan Douglas, Matthew Buckingham, Walid Raad, and The Atlas Group. Concentrating on the work of Dean, Durant, and Hirschhorn, Foster speaks of the archival as an artistic practice that makes “historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.”65 As an aesthetics of retrieval or détournement of historical information, it produces “alternative knowledge or counter-memory.”66 These archival practices are undeniably part of the temporal turn: they constitute the materialities by which history is reassessed. Yet, the temporal turn cannot simply be trimmed down to an archival impulse insofar as it explores the archive (and does not necessarily need the archive) to address a larger concern: the temporalization of history and historicity. Also, close to and undoubtedly conditioning the temporal turn are the art practices addressed by Mark Godfrey in his 2007 essay, “The artist as historian,” where the art historian suggests that, overall, it is not simply the archival gesture which has become central to recent art, but historical research per se. Godfrey refers explicitly to artistic

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activities “that invite viewers to think about the past; to make connections between events, characters, and objects; to join together in memory; and to reconsider the ways in which the past is represented in the wider culture.”67 These artists concentrate not only on particular historical subjects, but also on the history of representation and the mediality of historical representation. They have methodological freedom but their archival research remains rigorous and inventive. They question the narrative conventions of historiography. In his essay, Godfrey focuses on contemporary film and photography, and goes on to examine in more detail the multi-media work of Matthew Buckingham. In Buckingham’s projects, historiography becomes a method of investigation of predominant representations of marginalized or ignored histories—the history of slavery, the history of Native American people and their land, the history of the American corporate involvement in the economy of South America, for instance. His production concentrates on restaging historical events “to think about the present.”68 More generally, however, the historiographical activity in contemporary art includes for Godfrey six major types of practices: the exploration of the fallibility of the archive (Santu Mofokeng, Fiona Fan, Jamie Shovlin); the integration of the contingencies of the artist’s biography in historical making (Laura Horelli, Anri Sala); the criticism of Hollywood’s fictionalization of the past (Pierre Huygue, Omer Fast); the reiterated use of fiction as a productive form of assessment of the past (Walid Raad and the Atlas Group); the performance of the history of a place (Jeremy Deller, Francis Alÿs); and research on the history of art practices of the 1970s (Tacita Dean, Renée Green, Sam Durant, Dave Muller, Matthew Antezzo, Jonathan Monk). Godfrey’s observation whereby it is not simply archives but most importantly history which have become central to the practice of a significant number of artists since the 1990s is crucial, for there is no temporal turn without a historiographical turn. The former relies on, although cannot be equated with, the latter. The same must also be said about the archival impulse which is key to the temporal turn insofar as the temporal investigations made by artists mostly rely on the examination or the invention of archives—which are themselves remains. But neither Foster nor Godfrey really address the interactions between lived time, historicity, and historical time. The dimensions of time and temporality constitute the blindspot of their analyses. Partially responding to the imperative of asking how time passes in these artworks, art curator Dieter Roelstraete has more recently stated

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that artistic practices mobilized by the archival impulse often tend to adopt a new but not necessarily useful “retrospective” mode of historiography by “looking back, both at its own past […], and at ‘the’ past in general.”69 These artists, he continues: either make artworks that want to remember, or at least turn back the tide of forgetfulness, or they make art about remembering and forgetting: we can call this the “meta-historical mode,” an important aspect of much artwork that assumes a curatorial character. […] these artists delve into archives and historical collections of all stripes […] and plunge into the abysmal darkness of history’s most remote corners. They reenact […], reconstruct, and recover. […] They invariably side with both the downtrodden and the forgotten, reveal traces long feared gone, revive technologies long thought (or actually rendered) obsolete, bring the unjustly killed back to (some form of) life, and generally seek to restore justice to anyone or anything that has fallen prey to the blinding forward march of History with a capital, monolithic “H” —that most evil of variations on the Hegelian master narrative.70 Roelstraete convincingly insists here on the need to situate the artistic practices mobilized by the historiographic and archival impulses in relation to the “current crisis of history” as a discipline, a practice, and a field of inquiry. The crisis corresponds to what Roelstraete refers to as art’s and art history’s inability to effectively counter historical forgetting as well as to the contemporary inflation of “myopic microhistoriography” which emphasizes details instead of attempting to provide larger historical views of the past. What is more, Roelstraete argues that recent art’s investment in history has lead to another problem, one that concerns directly the question of temporal passing: the persistent turning backward and, in this movement, the consistent closing off of the past from “possibly more pressing obligations, namely that of imagining the future, of imagining the world otherwise (‘differently’).”71 The current historiographic preoccupation in art has in fact become an aesthetics of compensation for art’s “inability to grasp or even look at the present, much less to excavate the future.”72 Roelstraete’s assessment is important for it calls attention to practices that problematically isolate and cling to the past to the detriment of the present and future. The obsession over the past forecloses the possibility of history and historicity, self-defeating the historiographical project. Roelstraete’s

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critique implicitly discloses the need to connect temporality and historicity insofar as there is no renewal of the discipline of history without the mobilization of a new regime of historicity, a new realignment of the past, present, and future in relation to each other. Yet, his assessment has been too rapidly formulated for there is at least one example of a major exhibition dealing directly with the archival impulse in contemporary art, which partially defeats his claim about the closing off of the past from the temporal categories of the present and future. I am talking here explicitly of the Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art exhibition held at the International Center of Photography in New York in the winter of 2008, curated by Okwui Enwezor. Enwezor states that the main objective of the exhibition was to explore “the ways in which artists have appropriated, interpreted, reconfigured, and interrogated archival structures and archival materials,” the main media for these explorations being photography and film, explored here as a means of mechanical inscription, recording, circulation, and reproductibility.73 Mechanical capacities of reproduction have enabled a unique form of institutionalization of the photographic and filmic archive as a carrier of veracity, imbued with an “evidentiary function” which has given the archive its presumably incontestable interpretative power.74 The artists of Archive Fever question this institutionalization: not only do they read the archive “against the grain” to disrupt its evidentiary function, they sometimes invent counter-archives to bring archives closer to life events. Enwezor particularly insists on how the artworks of Archive Fever, in their probing with the resilience of the archival document, confront the spectator with a series of tensed relation between the archive on the one hand, and memory, trauma, public information, ethnography, identity, and time, on the other hand. This reference to time is crucial. It is directly articulated in Enwezor’s examination of three works: Craigie Horsfield’s E. Horsfield. Well Street, East London. August 1987 (1995), Stan Douglas’s Overture (1986), and Jef Geys’s Day and Night and Day and … (2002). As Enwezor succeeds in pointing out, these works explore the archive to temporalize it. In the case of Horsfield, the time gap his photographic work institutes between the recording of the image and its (unique and unedited) printing several years later—a time gap that has structured the photographic process of E. Horsfield. Well Street, East London. August 1987, a black-and-white print of a reclining female nude—emphasizes the deep temporality of the creation of the archive, one that not only counters the instantaneity of the photographic shot, but one that also

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enables the recording of a temporal gap. The archive becomes an archive of time as passage, “as if the exposure is drawn out over many years.”75 Enwezor’s description of Horsfield’s work shows that Roelstraete is not completely right in his assessment of archival practices as simply looking backwards to the past. In Horsfield’s case, the work’s temporality corresponds to the delay between the making and the printing of the photographic image, during which time the image can be said to have moved forward, towards its potential yet never assured visibility. Enwezor also examines the temporality at play in Douglas’s Overture (Figure 1.1), a looped 16 mm film projecting footage made by the Edison Company in the Canadian Rockies between 1899 and 1901, employing an audio track of recited extracts from Marcel Proust’s In Remembrance of Things Past. We will come back to this work in Chapter 7. For now, suffice it to say that Enwezor calls attention to the cyclical temporality constructed by the work, highlighting how the persisting loop structure of the piece gradually binds together the gaps of the footage and of the Proustian text to finally expose their repetitive recurrence: “[t]hough the film is

Figure 1.1   Stan Douglas, Overture, 1986. 16 mm film installation, b/w, optical soundtrack, approximately 7 min (each loop). Film still. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

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stitched together in three sections, and the passage from Proust is incorporated as six separate segments, through two rotations, the loop allows the experience of the film to occur as an endless revolution of image and time, suturing breaks in time and images, transforming the filmic space into a closed circuit.”76 Finally, Geys’s Day and Night and Day and … (2002), a 36-hour film made out of tens of thousands of photographic images taken between the 1950s and 2002 activated as moving images by slow dissolves, is described as a “boundless procession of discrete levels of time,” that unfolds as an “endless pursuit […] of history as the passage of time.”77 The strength of Enwezor’s discussion comes from its ability to relate the archival drive to a genuine exploration of temporal passing. E. Horsfield. Well Street, East London. August 1987 transforms the archive into duration; Overture transforms it into a nonstop, repetitive revolution; and Day and Night and Day and … transforms it into an incessant pursuit of history as course and record of passing moments. Enwezor does not attempt, however, to establish a clear connection between these significant reformulations of time as passage and the question of historicity, nor does he attempt to examine how they might potentially reconfigure modernity’s deployment of historical time. Connections between time, memory, and history would allow us to consider the ordering of past, present, and future sustained in the archive-driven artworks and, consequently, to be more precise about how temporal passing itself (and not only the archive) is being redefined in such articulations. For example, the printing of E. Horsfield. Well Street, East London. August 1987 seven or eight years after the initial shot entails that the passage of time unfolds not as a continuity but as a suspension between recording, development, and printing; that the negative is given a status of pure potentiality (it may and may not be actualized as an image); that the negative’s temporal thickness—its age value—gains more and more independency in relation to the temporality of the actual body it initially recorded: once the negative is printed out, the image will indexically represent the body as it was, in discrepancy with the body as it is; that the historical context in which the image was shot is different from the one in which it will become visible and accessible. Latency here, the suspension of the advent of the image, is a condition for the futurity of the image: printing the negative is an operation that brings it into the present to complexify that present with anachronism, delay, and spectrality. The main argument of this book is that this considerable reversal of modern historicity must be acknowledged and examined if we are to

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understand the archival impulse sustaining a significant segment of artistic practices since the late 1980s. Moreover, the stretching of time activated not only by E. Horsfield’s time lapse between recording and printing, but also by Overture’s continuous loop structure and by Day and Night and …’s lengthy succession of days and nights might well be engaging the spectator in a critical experience of the historical sublime, a temporality we will be addressing in Chapter 7. It is also the case that Enwezor relies a great deal on the assumption that the artist is “the historic agent of memory” who can transform archives into “acts of remembering and regeneration […], where a suture between the past and present is performed, in the indeterminate zone between event and image, document and monument.”78 But the articulation between practices of memory and history is not addressed, leaving aside the important problem of the inconsistencies of memory which may well elaborate problematic sutures between the past and present, as well as the question of how history integrates memory in its explanation of the past. That question is at the core of Melik Ohanian’s work examined in Chapter 5. Let us not forget Godfrey’s insight: contemporary artists are interested in archives, but also in history and historiography, as much as they are interested in memory, remembering, forgetting, and bearing witness. The aesthetic investigation of temporal passing bridges all of these concerns.

Contemporaneity It is in the complex meeting of aesthetics, interested time as a boundarycondition-on-phenomena, the vicissitudes of temporal passing, history, and historiography that the temporal turn takes shape and must therefore be examined. As Koselleck has observed in his examination of historical discourse, to “time” history is a challenging task. Historical narratives have a typically unrecognized temporal dimension, concealed behind concepts which rely on temporal measuring devices which spatialize time to make it visible (from the system of planets according to which clocks and calendars are regulated to the social and political spheres79), which must be brought to the fore so as to account for the fact that humans depend on temporal limits to live their lives—temporal limits set out by nature, culture, and society as well as by specific conceptualizations of historical time such as modernity’s progressive unfolding of history. The historian aptly points out:

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We are always using concepts that were originally conceived in spatial terms, but that nevertheless have a temporal meaning. Thus we may speak of refractions, frictions, and the breaking up of certain enduring element that have an effect on the chain of events, […]. Here, our expressions are taken from the spatial realm, even from geology. […] They […] illustrate our dilemma. It concerns the fact that history, insofar as it deals with time, must borrow its concepts from the spatial realm as a matter of principle. We live by naturally metaphorical expressions, and we are unable to escape from them, for the simple reason that time is not manifest and cannot be intuited.80 To be sure, modern historical categories, especially progress (one of the main distinctively modern features of historical time), are spatial manifestations. What is crucial therefore is to understand how history is, although much less palpably, a mode of temporalization. As a regime that settles what is historical or not accordingly to specific temporal articulations between past, present, and future, historicity is at the center of the temporal turn. But, one must ask, what are our regimes of historicity? A resilient futurism? Presentism (the present’s absorption of the past and the future)? The main claim of this book is that, although presentism certainly defines a predominant realignment of the past, present, and future of the contemporary world, it coexists with other regimes of historicity made of less absorbing but still highly significant realignments. Art history has already proposed a notion that highlights this coexistence of historicities: “contemporaneity.” This notion—even if it is still an embryonic notion—has the merit of referring to the main operation of the temporal turn: the unique meeting of two temporalities: the lived and historical passages of time. Terry Smith’s notion of contemporaneity takes its full resonance in relation to the temporal turn’s temporalization of the archival, archaeological, historical, and historiographical impulses. Contemporaneity is a state of mind, a perspective, an awareness, and a historical condition about contemporariness that takes its full resonance as a general assertion of the requirement to contemporize both our notions of temporal passing and regime of historicity. It is also a notion that contests the reduction of contemporary regimes of historicity to a unique presentism. Contemporaneity refers to the unfolding of contemporary experiences of temporal passing within a globalized epoch of coexisting multiple worlds. It is a perspective that emphasizes the confluence of temporal relations between contemporaries,

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as well as the simultaneous temporalities of our times. The presentifying historicities articulated by the artistic practices examined in this book (ecology; potentiality; ruination gone wrong; simultaneity (I and II, Chapters 5 and 6); and the historical sublime) can be seen as partaking of that perspective insofar as they set out (1) to discover contemporary experiences of temporal passing that can problematize the future-driven orientation of the modern regime of historicity, and (2) to discover contemporary presentifying regimes of historicity that disclose different forms of temporal passing that cannot simply be reduced to a singular “becoming present of future events and then their becoming past.” Contemporaneity’s emergence follows the latetwentieth-century development of globalization and decolonization processes, as well as the late-twentieth-century development of “the global spread of information and the instantaneousness of its communication.”81 These developments have heightened our awareness of being contemporary with others in a tension of recognition and neglect, similarity and difference, empowerment and powerlessness. Contemporaneity is therefore, ultimately, a historical condition in which humans are increasingly conscious of “the multiple ways of being with, in, and out of time, separately and at once, with others and without them.”82 Because of its concern for interested time, the temporal turn is an intrinsic feature of that historical condition— it results from it and contributes to its development. Indeed, the temporal turn is a practice “which actually is in the world, of what it is to be in the world, and of that which is to come,” struggling as it does with “the remnants of the cultures of modernity and postmodernity.”83 Smith: an essential quality of contemporaneousness [is]: its immediacy, its presentness, its instantaneity, its prioritizing of the moment over time, the instant over the epoch, of direct experience of multiplicitous complexity over the singular simplicity of distanced reflection. It is the pregnant present of original meaning of modern, but without its subsequent contract with the future […] contemporaneity consists precisely in the constant experience of radical disjunctures of perception, mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world, in the actual conincidence of asynchronous temporalities, in the jostling contingency of various cultural and social multiplicities, all thrown together in ways that highlight the fastgrowing inequalities within and between them. This certainly looks like the world as it is now. No longer does it feel like “our time” because

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“our” cannot stretch to encompass its contrariness. Nor, indeed, is it “a time” […].84 We are far here from the Deleuzian belief in the cosmic creativity of time as becoming. Smith is speaking here of the requirement to disclose the coexisting asynchronous temporalities of today. In his description of the interestedness of contemporaneity (its grounding in the world), he does not specifically attend to the experiences of temporal passing examined in this book (unproductiveness, fissuration, extendibility, ruination, equalization, unframability, and interminability), but he does call attention to the main effect of temporal passing when it is contemporized and aesthetically explored: it transforms historicity; it produces alternative regimes of historicity that coexist in contemporariness. The notion, however, still needs to be refined. Indeed, what must be mapped out are the different ways (some more satisfying than others) by which we have become increasingly conscious of “the multiple ways of being with, in, and out of time, separately and at once, with others and without them.”85 Moreover, Smith’s description tends to assume that the asynchronous temporalities of the globalized world connect and that they are perceivable in their connectedness. As we situate the temporal turn within contemporaneity, our main challenge will be to exemplify how coincident worlds are not necessarily connected or easily connectable. In light of what historian Frederick Cooper has argued in his study of postcolonial history, the notion of contemporaneity might well be useful to define a world that joins different contemporary worlds, it should also emphasize the persistence of structures that block interconnectedness, as well as the persistence of structures that thins down lived time by isolating it from deep time: “[w]hat is missing in discussions of globalization today is the historical depth of interconnections and a focus on just what the structures and limits of the connecting mechanisms are. It is salutary to get away from whatever tendencies there may have been to analyze social, economic, political, and cultural processes as if they took place in national or continental containers; but to adopt a language that implies that there is no container at all, except the planetary one, risks defining problems in misleading ways. The world has long been—and still is—a space where economic and political relations are very uneven; it is filled with lumps, places where power coalesces surrounded by those where it does not, places where social relations become dense amid others that are diffuse. Structures and networks penetrate certain

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places and do certain things with great intensity, but their effects tail off elsewhere.”86 The presentifying processes of contemporaneity must thus be addressed critically, so that the actual possibilities and constraints facing any actor and any acting in time may be better assessed. Contemporaneity is never a given. It is a processual perspective on the contemporary. While history “does not offer answers” and historians “do not make better prophets than anyone else,”87 the historicities that secure contemporary history are connecting challenges, never a fait accompli. To undertake these challenges, what still needs to be attended to are the actual artistic practices which articulate such temporal realignments. It is crucial not to simply write on art but to write and think with art.

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Chapter 2

Ecology

Since 1997 Italian-born, Paris-based Tatiana Trouvé has been developing a sculptural structure titled Bureau of Implicit Activities (BIA)—Bureau d’activités implicites in its French designation. The structure is an aesthetic response to years of unsuccessful effort for professional recognition— an effort that includes the accumulation of odd jobs, correspondence with a multitude of galleries, various grant applications, the elaboration of ideas for artworks never realized, and a lot of waiting. The BIA first took the shape of cells (Sand Cell, 1997) and matrixes (Ghost Matrix, 1999; Phantom Matrix, 2000), but gradually confirmed itself as an ongoing series of “modules”: units made out of components designed for easy assembly and flexible use. These units constructed to standard office-industry scale resemble offices, information cubicles, and waiting rooms. Partially enclosed, built out of panels that delimit the sites from the outside, they primarily function as protective units for the artist’s personal memories. Their shape, space, and materials convey a configuration to her professional struggle. They also store evidence of that struggle, including letters, personal notes, unrealized projects, photographs, diverse traces of past activities, and sound recordings. The units are nevertheless quite varied. Let us provide here a few examples: an open rectangle room made out of panels in which other panels have been assembled to shape a closed zigzag space (Titles Module); a mirror cylinder on wheels inside of which stands a stool, surrounded by countertops and tiny pigeonholes carved in the curved panels, preserving various memories on slips of paper (Reminiscences Module, Figure 2.1); standing billboard panels pulled together into a space (Slips of the Tongue Module); an informational booth with several “windows” through which can be seen administrative documents and materials (including application correspondence sealed in plastic, CVs and various office supplies), and an exterior surface displaying Trouvé’s various student and national identification cards (Administrative Module,

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Figure 2.2); a storage room on wheels made out of wire mesh (Strike Module); a large storing cabinet (Archives Module); and, finally, an open space made of a desk with vinyl chair and bench, and what appears to be padded gym equipment, together with a stereo system playing sound recordings made by the artist in periods of waiting (Waiting Module no. 1, Figure 2.3). Three consistent features shape these different modules. First, their materiality is particularly rich and inventive, made out of mundane material: foam, wood, Plexiglas®, imitation leather, sand, chamois, and reels of adhesive tape. Second, the “reality” status of the modules is far from stable, as they consistently oscillate between imaginary, fictional, and real working spaces. Third, whereas the spaces include a variety of objects, they exclude the physical presence of the artist and of the spectator: they remain uninhabited, non-accessible, and impractical. They are hybrids between private and public spaces, between architecture and design. In short, the expanding BIA provides

Figure 2.1   Tatiana Trouvé, Bureau of Implicit Activities (Bureau d’activités implicites), Reminiscences Module, 1999–2003. Wood, plastic foam, metal, mirror, Plexiglas®, silicone, Formica, rubber, cardboard, paper. Installation view. 135 × 135 × 135 cm. Image by Laurent Edeline. © Tatiana Trouvé / SODRAC (2011). Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris.

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Figure 2.2   Tatiana Trouvé, Bureau of Implicit Activities (Bureau d’activités implicites), Administrative Module, 1997–2003. Wood, paint, identity cards, rubber bands, photographs, paper, plastic, metal, tools, felt, Plexiglas®. Installation view. 150 × 350 × 180 cm. © Tatiana Trouvé / SODRAC (2011). Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris.

Figure 2.3   Tatiana Trouvé, Bureau of Implicit Activities (Bureau d’activités implicites), Waiting Module no. 1, 2002. Plexiglas®, imitation leather, metal, wood, stereo system, music, CD. Installation view. 186 × 165 × 80 cm. Image by Bernhard Strauss. © Tatiana Trouvé / SODRAC (2011). Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris.

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protective sites for unproductiveness, but it insists on making these sites unused and unusable, only partly accessible by sight, and never fully visible. Unproductiveness is exactly that: something not represented; something that cannot be simply represented; something that cannot be made productive simply by representing it. BIA is a struggle against disappearance. It is in these specific terms that Trouvé talks about the BIA. She talks about the sculptural structure as an architectural attempt “to give a form to things that were formless, since my various projects, letters, even the titles of works had never seen the light of day. My modules finally allowed these materials to exist, be presented and stir the viewer’s desire to actually consult them. I built them in order to finally give a space to things that, in our inner selves, can have huge spaces, but have no form outside.”1 She also insists on the temporal dimension sustaining such a project, suggesting that the BIA gives a form and a place to “waiting time”—maintaining that waiting time is never completely lost: it is recoverable; it can be given a form and a place; it necessarily shapes the self even if waiting is apparently a fruitless temporality. In an interview with Francesca Pietropaolo, she talks more specifically about how BIA is an ongoing recovery process—a search for lost times that prevents unproductiveness to turn into wasted time, into non-time: “I was interested in working on the recovery of time, and of things that are never really considered constructive, or part of a productive activity. Like when you are waiting for your turn in line, or for a bus, an appointment, a phone call. All this, which is an enormous amount of time in our lives, is regarded as non-time, as something wasted. This isn’t so obvious. I believe these waiting moments are quite productive. In this waiting time there is a construction of the self, of the subject.”2 Trouvé’s reference to the social/cultural designation of non-time as “something wasted” is pivotal. The Bureau of Implicit Activities produces different spaces for an otherwise invisible and unacknowledged, allegedly unproductive time. It prevents the crystallization of waiting time into non-time. But the staged moments are so fundamentally uninhabited, so fundamentally frozen and suspended, that they show how the distance between waiting time and non-time is an infra-thin distance. If it wasn’t for the documents deploying occasional traces of life and for the modules themselves as a creative assembling of things, the distinction between waiting time and non-time would disappear. Waiting time would be completely emptied of its temporal passing. In a way, the modules materialize the B-theorists’ tenseless postulation

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that the passage of time is not real, and to the psychoanalytical understanding of the unconscious as “time that does not pass.”3 But this is only half of the story insofar as the unreality or absence of temporal passing is exposed not as a fixed metaphysical or a psychic truth, but as what happens to unproductive time when it is not recognized and valued—its consolidation as a wasted time always on the threshold of being lost as one tries to enter into the social order of art. Non-time is not an a priori but a social and historical evaluation. It is what unproductiveness becomes when it is left out of historical accounts (Trouvé: “If the time in which I am interested produces neither a clear image nor a perceptible movement, it also leaves few traces and does not appear in any historical register”4). The history of the self shaped by waiting time falls outside the criteria of progress, acceleration, passage, and novelty of modern historical time. It can’t be recognized in the modern regime of historicity. When lived and valued through the lens of this regime, it is a history that inscribes the self in a sterile repetition of unproductive effort (as the artist argues, in moments of waiting, “a Monday is a Monday, a Tuesday is a Monday, a Wednesday is a Monday”5). These constructions are thus shelters for waiting time just before (or just after) it becomes non-time: they give form to unproductive/unrecognized time. The modules not only store archives (letters, etc.), they are also archives themselves protected by the museum as a larger shelter. Both the museum and the module care for the archives as “not-all,”6 as different yet incomplete traces of alleged unproductiveness, which is itself an insufficient effort of productivity (Trouvé: “I organize disappearance; I archive this void”7). The museum’s and the modules’ main two functions are surely to secure what Jacques Derrida has called (1) the domiciliation of archives—their localization in a site (the module, the gallery and the museum) which protects them and makes them accessible—and (2) the consignation of archives—their gathering together.8 But these functions are significantly not fully productive: they reiterate the unproductiveness archived by the modules. Indeed, the domiciliation of the archives occurs without articulating the full passage from the private to the public insofar as they are never fully accessible: fabric, plastic, wire screens, cords, and panels surround the spaces. Even the partial views are deceptive, for the documents are stored so as to resist complete identification. This is a crucial dimension of the BIA: as the spectator experiences the partly inaccessible units, she is invited to experience herself as partly excluded. The spaces must thus be occupied mentally; they invite the viewer to imagine what occupancy

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Figure 2.4   Tatiana Trouvé, Model of the Bureau of Implicit Activities (Bureau d’activités implicites), 2007. Wood, Formica, imitation leather, sand, metal, tape, mirror, Plexiglas©, paper. Installation view. 90 × 740 × 370 cm. © Tatiana Trouvé / SODRAC (2011). Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris.

of a space might be in periods of waiting time, when occupancy partakes of an exclusion from the other or a sheer inability to be included in specific social orders. The partial access also manifests the resilient secrecy and invisibility of the archive, the fact that it can never make unproductiveness productive solely by making it visible. The domiciliation of the archives is moreover nomadic, transportable from one museum to another, from one gallery to another. It is expandable. BIA is an ongoing series (Figure 2.4): a mobile architectural system embedded in but also escaping standardized office design; a series that is movable and adjustable; an annexable structure to which can be added a potentially unlimited number of modules expanding in space, following a non-progressive, never-secured evolution. This expansive attribute plays a significant role in the undermining of the turning of waiting time into non-time. It reappears in the Polder series (1997–) initially built from scraps left over from the modules. Miniature extensions of the BIA constructions, scaled to half the average

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size of the objects which compose them, the works forming the series have gradually replaced the BIA, increasing the indeterminate oscillation between interior and exterior, fact and fiction, past and future. They have taken the form of semi-private, semi-public rooms, studios, or models of rooms. These architectural environments have a closer connection to the exhibition space: directly assembled in the sites, they are often installed in the corners or supported against the walls, with their own floors suspended a few inches above the floor of the gallery. Both the BIA and Polders are recovering systems in constant mutation, which increasingly encroach upon the actual exhibition space, unloosing non-time. This mutational quality becomes even more noticeable when several modules or polders are presented simultaneously in a single space: they take the form of recovering shelters continuously expanding in space, but not expanding forward. I believe this layout to be crucial to any aesthetics of unproductive time. Trouvé’s structures are non-progressive. As the BIA expands, the spectator does not see more, does not enter more: the all-seeing promise of linear perspective’s establishment of the central visual ray—the ray that connects our viewpoint to the vanishing point in the work—is fundamentally suspended. Why this suspension, if not because unproductiveness is not what can be made suddenly to appear, to be seen and then revalorized or resolved in that sudden visibility. The ongoing expansion of the sculptural structure in space is partially indifferent to our localization. We witness that ongoing expansion; we are certainly not the endpoint of that expansion. The modules’ interaction with the museum space of which we are a part is increasingly dynamic as the structure grows. As it expands, it reveals and makes us experience the problems of waiting time: its unnoticeability and unaccountability (these are BIA’s critical and experiential dimensions). As it expands, it also turns waiting time into something productive—into a temporality that allows for ongoing interactions with the environment (this is BIA’s creative dimension).

The Chapter This chapter seeks to examine artistic practices that give productiveness to unproductive time. This productivity comes about by fissuring, eternalizing, or lateralizing the progressive structure of linear perspective. Of special interest here are artistic practices that depreciate the perspectival system inherited from early modernity—a

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geometric method for creating the illusion of space through the establishment of a pure reciprocity between the vanishing point and the viewpoint. They depreciate linear perspective by destabilizing the vanishing point/viewpoint adherence that attaches the spectator’s vantage point to an unreachable ideal of perfectibility; obliterating the present and erasing the past in that very process. In so doing, the futurity presupposed by linear perspective is made to unfold by suspending as much as possible the forwardness of perspective, by dismantling as much as one can the modern notion of progress sustained by that perspectival system—a notion which always ends up confirming unproductiveness as unproductive, and waiting time as non-time. To make unproductive time productive requires a fundamental questioning of the system of values and the system of perspectival vision by which certain temporalities are considered creative while others are deemed uncreative. Unproductiveness corresponds to a denegated, infertile, and devalued temporality—time as waste, as it were. The uniqueness of the works examined in this chapter—works by artists Tatiana Trouvé, Francis Alÿs, and Guido van der Werve—lies in their reconsideration of linear perspective—a reconsideration by which productiveness is conveyed to unproductiveness precisely because the modern notion of forwardness embedded in linear perspective is being fundamentally altered. This reconsideration has been surprisingly unacknowledged or under-acknowledged in the literature dedicated to these artistic practices. To situate the specificity of this critique of the perspectival model as a temporal investigation, it is important to emphasize that, in the last two decades, a significant number of artistic practices have contemporized temporal passing (shifting Dolev’s “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past”9 into “the becoming present of past events and then their becoming future”) by allowing unproductiveness to infiltrate the passage of time; that is, by disclosing how unproductiveness conditions the experience of the passage of time. Let us briefly refer here to the performance work of Italian born, New York based artist Vanessa Beecroft, Columbian artist Oscar Muñoz, and English artist Fiona Banner. Their performances have consistently disclosed the persistent occurrence of unproductive time in daily life. Beecroft’s VB performances made in the 1990s and early 2000s, for example, stage groups of young, predominantly white, underwear-clad or unclad girls with high heels, who are asked to stand still or to move slowly and pose for 2 to 3 hours in front of an audience.10

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The immobilized performers literally embody the suspension of the forwardness of moving bodies. But even after a few minutes into the performances, the performers can never stand still: their body movements are about the continual effort to do so and the failure to meet the prescribed expectation of the pose. Unproductive time emerges precisely there, within the visual unfolding of the performers’ attempt to reenact the standard stereotypes of ideal femininity and the spectator’s acknowledgment of their continual effort to cope with the impossibility of this reenactment. Indeed, at the start the performers have the monumentality, control, and perfection of Helmut Newton’s models: they stand motionless, in photographic stillness, within the public space. But as the performance unfolds in time—as the “live” component of the performance deploys itself in the long duration of the piece—Newton beauty inevitably breaks, vulnerability sets in. Photographic stillness and the phantasmatic snapshot of control (one that is not without recalling the anorexia-bulimic fantasy of corporeal containment) are subsumed by the slow disintegration of posture. This is when the models’ lower backs start to ache and when they begin to slouch, kneel, crouch, bend, sit, lie down, and withdraw. Whereas Beecroft’s performances stage the unproductiveness of the stilled pose, Muñoz’s video works bring the insufficiency of memory to the fore. The works refer to the political reality of missing persons in his native Columbia by emphasizing the unproductiveness of their portrayal, the fact that the mnemonic dimension of the portrayal is always on the threshold of being lost despite the effort to remember. In his 2005 five-monitor video projection Project for a Memorial (Figure 2.5), for instance, the hand of the artist quickly sketches faces of missing people using brush and water on stone. As he attempts to complete the portrait, the face starts to fade away and will eventually disappear. Meanwhile, he repetitively invests in the drawings of other portraits of other missing persons. Each screen frames a different face in various phases of appearance and disappearance. They are portraits based on newspaper obituaries in Cali, Colombia, where Muñoz lives. No portrait will ever be seen as a whole. These are disappearing portrayals of disappearing individuals. Similarly, in Muñoz’s 1:56 min single-screen video projection Line of Destiny (2006), the face of the artist appears as a reflection in a puddle of water located in the fold of his cupped hand. Soon, the water slides away between the fingers, bringing the reflection with it. Projected as a loop, the disappearance is incessantly reenacted. A comparable manifestation of fleetingness underlies Fiona

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Figure 2.5   Oscar Muñoz, Project for a Memorial (Proyecto para un monument), 2005. Five-channel video installation, color, no sound, 7:30 min each. Installation view, Tamayo Museum, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Sicardi Gallery.

Banner’s wordscapes which correspond to shot-by-shot transcriptions of Hollywood feature war and porn films written in her own words. Her accounts have taken the form of solid single blocks of text recalling the shape and size of cinematic screens, but also of oversized books, such as The Nam (1997), a 28 × 21 × 6 cm/2.388 kg 1,000-page book containing frame-by-frame present tense descriptions of Vietnam War movies (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Hamburger Hill, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July). The sheer size and weight of The Nam show the immensity of the effort invested in these transcriptions. The book documents a written performance the outcome of which is never clear (there is no real usefulness to word transcriptions of films) and never successful (written time cannot match cinematic time). In all of these practices, the performer’s inability to freeze, register, slow down, or match the passage of time discloses the typically invisible and unacknowledged unproductive times that mobilize our lives on a daily basis. In these works unproductiveness is tied to failure: the failure to meet the standards of ideal femininity; the failure to remember; and the failure to translate the cinematic into a written equivalent. More fundamentally they are about the failure of history to account for these

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allegedly unfruitful temporalities. In other words, unproductiveness is set out as fruitless in relation to a progress-oriented historicity. There is also an attempt to archive this unproductiveness. Indeed, the video transmissions of standing bodies and tracing hands, as well as the written transcription of a writing which is always too late in relation to film: these material recordings rescue unproductiveness from oblivion. These materializing processes sustain the performance work of Trouvé, Alÿs, and van der Werve, whose staged unproductiveness will occupy us for the remainder of this chapter. But what interests me here is how Trouvé’s, Alÿs’s and van der Werve’s work unravel unproductive time by collapsing the “forward” movement of linear perspective. This collapsing articulates itself through a shattering of the viewpoint position of the spectator—an operation which partakes directly of the perceptual dimension of the temporal turn this book sets to map out. I focus on these practices largely because they enact unproductiveness by weakening the linear system of perspective through which they are either performed (by the performer) or perceived (by the spectator). In Trouvé’s BIA, this weakening occurs in the lateral non-progressive expansion of sheltered, only partially visible, waiting times in ways that bypass the reciprocity of the viewpoint and vanishing point. Works by Alÿs and van der Werve also have the particularity of shattering perspectival forwardness by fissuring or displacing the viewpoint/vanishing point reciprocity. It is the main argument of this chapter that these untying procedures alter the modern regime of historicity. This argument will mobilize the following sections, but it is useful to spell out here some of its main points, so as to clarify my claim. Alÿs’s and van der Werve’s practices share a “walking” attribute: in their performances, the performers unproductively walk in a specific territory. Whereas the sites are quite clearly identified (Mexico City or the Scandinavian North, for example), the performers (like Trouvé’s modules) come from nowhere in particular and do not go anywhere specific: the destination of their walks is made irrelevant. They move forward but their forwardness is made unproductive. They accumulate rubbish as they walk. They trace lines and trajectories which are incomplete or fissured. Within the modern regime of historicity, this type of unproductiveness is an endangered species always on the verge of being lost. But in Alÿs’s and van der Werve’s walking performances (again, as in Trouvé’s BIA), unproductive time is not only made manifest but also revalued, even made productive, through particular forms of suspensions: the suspension of perspectival

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vision and the suspension of linear perspective’s localization of bodies in space. The walks detach the future from unreachable ideals of perfectibility and progression; they weaken the perspectival system as a forwardness device and replace it by an ecological act in which the perceiver (the performer or the spectator) is invited to attune herself to her environment and to gain texturally in that very process. The weakening of the perspectival system takes different forms and can only be understood in the examination of specific artistic practices. But they all pertain to a suspension of forwardness. In Trouvé’s Bureau of Implicit Activities, this weakening corresponds first and foremost to the construction of an ongoing architectural unit that: (1) never fully makes visible the archives of unproductiveness it nevertheless stores and shelters; (2) partially excludes the spectator from the shelters (destabilizing, in that very process, the perspectival connection between the vanishing point and the viewpoint); and (3) expands into space cumulatively without progression. In Alÿs’s performances, the weakening of linear perspective manifests itself as a micro-fissuring, an inversion and an infinite extension of the perspectival line linking the viewpoint and the vanishing point. Van der Werve’s performance-based films block and lateralize the forward movement of the performer’s walk. All of these works instigate a major disruption of the linear system of perspective by connecting the objects or the performers to their environment instead of situating them in relation to a transcendent vanishing point or viewpoint. They set into play an ecologization of a slice of space, which brings the past and future closer together. In so doing, they invent a unique historicity—one that alters the modern regime of historicity from within. To summarize, the chapter argues that artistic practices investigating the productivity of unproductive time activate a depreciation of linear perspective. This depreciation is a necessary condition of the temporal turn, one in which art sets out to alter models of perception entrenched in modern forwardness. The chapter gives a name to this perspectival depreciation procedure: ecologization. The raison d’être of this designation will become clearer further down. But suffice it to say for now that the depreciation of linear perspective turns unproductiveness into a modality of “non-progressive” connections between beings, objects, and sites that lose in impermeability what they gain in non-forward relationality. These are special connections in which environments are considered not as mere means but also as ends, and in which perception per se (the perception of the spectator or the

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perception of the performer) is ecological insofar as the subject is made to be perceptually attuned with his or her environment instead of being detached from it, in control over it, or propelled away from it towards an unreachable ideal beyond that environment. To fissure, invert, exacerbate, or lateralize perspective is to allow for a connection with an environment considered as an end in itself—a connection that depreciates futuristic regimes of modernity in which the environment is reduced to a mere means. The central objective here is to understand the weakening of perspective aesthetically as a formal, structural, performative, and historical procedure striving to let the performer and the spectator occupy creatively—temporally as it were—the gap between past and future opened up by modern historical time. Unproductiveness In a brief text on the video work of Belgium born, Mexico City based artist Francis Alÿs, philosopher Boris Groys rightly observes that in the modern age, an age when the main slogan is “change,” the present is reduced to “a period of transition from the past to the future.”11 Not only is the present depreciated in modernity’s future-oriented ventures, but time itself—the time invested in the making of projects—is erased once the project is realized. The loss of productive time is usually compensated, sublimated as it were, by the historical narrative which accounts for the success of the time invested in the making of the project. Time is lost but the loss occurs through its historicization, not through its blunt denegation. The fate of time becomes more tragic when the invested time has been unproductive. For, in such cases, time simply vanishes from historical accounts. Groys identifies this relationship between time and modern history in the following terms, insisting on how history finally erases unproductive time, which then becomes non-time: In modern age, the loss of time in and through the production of a product was compensated for by a historical narrative that somehow restored the lost time of its production. This narrative glorified the life of artists, scientists, or revolutionaries who worked for the future. However, time disappears from the historical memory in a much more radical way when this time is perceived as unproductive, wasted, meaningless. Such unproductive time becomes excluded from the historical narratives—and endangered with complete erasure.12

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In other words, the progress-informed historical narrative typical of modern rhetoric erases time when it fails to deliver any definitive project. It is this devalued time that Trouvé seeks to architecturally mobilize and recover in her Bureau of Implicit Activities and Polder series. Groys’s observation confirms Koselleck’s contention that modernity initiated the experience of the future as increasingly dislocated from the past, transforming nostrum aevum (our own age) into nova aetas (the new age)—an age in which the present is obliterated to make place for the new. As Jürgen Habermas specifies, the secular concept of modernity conveys the assurance that “the future has already begun”: it lives for the future as well as for the novelty that the future is presumed to bring about.13 The caesura defined by each new beginning has therefore been transferred to the past, to a temporal dimension in opposition to which modernity is declared as a new age, so that it is the past which is somehow always too late, behind, not on time. In such a caesura, “time becomes experienced as a scarce resource for the mastery of problems that arise—that is, as the pressure of time.”14 The Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, defines the present “as a transition that is consumed in the consciousness of a speeding up and in the expectation of the differentness of the future”; as a temporal dimension “that understands itself from the horizon of the modern age as the actuality of the most recent period.”15 Because of modernity’s deployment of the present as a transitional moment heading towards a continuously different future, it must reaffirm its rupture with the past as a “continuous renewal.”16 But Groys should be understood as dramatizing Koselleck’s and Habermas’s observations insofar as he specifies that the race for change and the continual renewal of the caesura between past and future amount to the loss of time invested in any project. Not only is the loss of time eventually subsumed by historical narrativization, it is radically threatened to disappear when the project fails to materialize. He considers contemporary art’s response to this state of affairs. Time-based art, he argues (his reference in this text is to video art but can easily be stretched to cinematic art, digital art, performance, and any installation art that integrates such forms), documents the time which has been devalued in modernity, more specifically the time “in danger of being lost because of its unproductive character.”17 Time-based art’s main ability is to transform the notion of wasted time into the more positive notion of excessive time, which Groys defines following a Heideggerian terminology, as “time that attests to our life as pure being-in-time, beyond its value within the framework of modern

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economic and political projections.”18 He specifies that the excessive time being produced—one that is not simply swallowed up or denied by the historical narrative—is a suspended, non-historical time in relation to which projects cease to lead to the realization of an identifiable product or in which the product (when realized) is separated from its results. A key example of suspended non-historical time is repetition, what Groys calls “the non-historical pattern of eternal repetition,” as described in Camus’s Sysiphus.19 He finds excessive time at play in Francis Alÿs’s Rehearsal series which involves repetitive actions that only succeed in producing unproductive time. For Groys, such suspended times are located outside history. This is indeed correct, for they will not be accounted for in history. But his terminology is somewhat tricky, for it does suggest that suspended time (as pure being-in-time, beyond modernity) is not historical although he himself postulates that such suspensions are explored in a “historical period”20 in which modernity is being reconsidered in time-based art. If we stop to recall Trouvé’s work, non-time evolves from the unproductiveness involved in her effort to gain professional recognition—the effort involved in waiting, applying, corresponding, and producing ideas for artworks never realized. In the BIA, it is this specific unacknowledged time which is given form by the protective modules. Unproductive time is declared as always already historical, never outside history—the history of a specific society (France), of a specific world (the art world) and of a specific self (Trouvé); never merely a suspended non-historical time. Let us also briefly examine a few works from Alÿs’s Rehearsal series to which Groys refers when he discusses the non-historical dimension of excessive, unproductive time. In Rehearsal I from 1999–2001 (Figure 2.6), a red Volkswagen endlessly attempts to drive up a hill on the outskirts of Tijuana (possibly attempting to reach the U.S. border) as a Mariachi band is heard rehearsing a song: each time the band loses track of the tune and pauses, the car stops; when the musicians tune their instruments and talk, the car slides downhill; when the musicians play, the car moves uphill again. In Rehearsal II (2001–6), a stripper performs her striptease while listening to a soprano singer and her pianist rehearsing Franz Schubert’s Lied der Mignon (Song of Longing): she strips as they play but stops and starts to dress up again when they pause to discuss the piece; her striptease ends when she completes it, which means that the action moves forward but only through interruptions and movements backward. Politics of Rehearsal (2004) (Figure 2.7), a rehearsal of Rehearsal II, begins with an excerpt from American

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President Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural address, where he proposed the notion of “underdeveloped areas” to refer to countries that could benefit from American “scientific advances and industrial progress”: the soprano and her pianist rehearse Schubert’s Lied, playing and stopping to discuss the piece, behind a stripper who also rehearses (starts and stops to start again), while taking occasional cues from a person offstage; meanwhile, a photographer, a video maker (Alÿs himself), and a director move inside and outside of the frame to occasionally interact with the performers. A voiceover by critic Cuauhtémoc Medina relates the performance specifically to Latin American modernity as an alleged “problem of development,” “forever arousing, and yet always delaying, the moment it will happen.” The repetitions that compose the rehearsal series are unambiguously historicized by Politics of Rehearsal: as curator Marc Godfrey points out, “[f]or Alÿs the rehearsal serves precisely to allegorize the processes of modernisation in Latin America, where economic changes are always promised but never ultimately achieved. However, these works are […] reflections on the impasse reached due

Figure 2.6   Francis Alÿs, Rehearsal I (El Ensayo), Tijuana, 1999–2001. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega. Video, 29:25 min. Video still. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

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Figure 2.7   Francis Alÿs, Politics of Rehearsal, New York, 2004. In collaboration with Performa, Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc Medina. Video, 30 min. Video still. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

to conflicted politico-economic desires: on the one hand, the desire to modernize, and on the other, a compulsion to resist the imposition of Western economic practices.”21 This is to say that Trouvé and Alÿs explore unproductiveness in relation to historical time. In their work, sterile repetition comes about in relation to a social/economic regime that excludes temporalities which do not fit the project-oriented criteria of modern progress; a regime that transforms these temporalities into non-time. Groys’s setting of suspended time activities outside history and the denial of situatedness implied by such a setting are the very operations that these artists are trying to counter. What is more—and this is the main argument of the present chapter—these artists are aesthetically investigating perspectival processes to invent a new form of historicity in which unproductive time is not simply lost. As we will see, in Alÿs’s performance works, this investigation is tied to a perspectival practice that fundamentally disrupts linear perspective as the underlying structure of modernity’s rhetoric of forwardness.

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Francis Alÿs and the Perspectival Systems of Modern Visuality Let us begin with The Collector (1990–2), made in collaboration with Felipe Sanabria. Alÿs walks in the streets of Mexico City, pulling behind him an object analogous to a child’s toy—a magnetic dog on rubber rollers made out of materials of recuperation (Figure 2.8). The dog is a tool of exploration which catches metal objects in its passage. It randomly collects urban leftovers. This is Alÿs’s first form of urban archaeology, as well as the actions in which Alÿs “self-consciously confirmed walking as his main strategy of intervening in the urban space.”22 During the 1994 Havana Biennale, he reintroduces the project by replacing the toy with shoes. Entitled Magnetic Shoes, the performance involves Alÿs walking through the city wearing magnetic shoes which pick up vestiges of the

Figure 2.8   Francis Alÿs, The Collector (Colector), Mexico City, 1990–2. In collaboration with Felipe Sanabria. Magnetic sculptures with rubber wheels and video documentation of an action. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

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Figure 2.9   Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis I (Sometimes doing something leads to nothing), Mexico City, 1997. Video documentation of an action, 5 min. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

street and modify his footsteps as the metal pieces accumulate on their exterior surfaces. Alÿs’s walks, however, do not always have a collecting impulse. Indeed, in Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes doing something leads to nothing) (1997), the 9-hour walk consisted in Alÿs pushing a block of ice through the streets in the center of Mexico City until it melted first into an ice cube and eventually into a dirty puddle (Figure 2.9). The ice melts and, although it certainly mixes with the dirt of the asphalt, it fails to collect anything, as the subtitle of the work (“sometimes doing something leads to nothing”) makes manifest. Other walks include varied but consistent actions of “doing something [which] leads to nothing”: when debarking in a new city, he picks out passersby who look like him, and follows them individually, walks beside the doppelgänger and adjusts his pace to the stranger’s pace (Doppelgänger, 1999– ongoing); he crosses the working-class neighborhood of Pinheiros in São Paulo carrying a punctured can of paint that leaves a line tracing his path; he strolls through the city of Copenhagen (Narcoturismo) under the influence of different drugs (a distinct drug for each day of the 5-day action); he walks through Jerusalem, over 2 days, trailing a line of green paint from a can as he paces along the route of the armistice

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Figure 2.10   Francis Alÿs, The Green Line (Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic), Jerusalem, 2004. Video documentation of an action. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

border, known as “the green line” drawn between Israel and Jordan in 1948 (The Green Line (Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic)), 2005 (Figure 2.10). Be them collecting or non-collecting ventures, these walks share a same concern for engaging with their environment. They tend to blend with these environments by imitating the behavior of their inhabitants, by reinstating or accumulating environmental markers (a border line, for instance) which have become invisible or devalued. Even when Alÿs collects remnants by exploring different magnetic technologies, it is not the remnants per se which are valued (they will be eventually discarded and we can barely identify them in the films) but the temporary connectedness established between the performer and his surroundings. The walks or strolls (paseos) have regularly been understood as an extension of Situationist drifts—what Guy Debord described in 1958 as “a technique

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of rapid passage through varied ambiences […] involv[ing] playfulconstructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects,” most often taking the form of drift-like pedestrian walks within the city, not oriented by any predetermined trajectory, activated to suspend established rules of capitalist urban management and habitual circulation.23 In Situationist practices, the intervention seek to disclose the milieu—its urbanism, management, and the ways in which it affects daily behavior—and the psychogeographical relationship of the subject to urban space. But Alÿs’s walks do not share the Situationist attempt to map the economic or social ideologies of the cityscape, or to formulate as it were an urban critique which would eventually make possible a direct (non-spectacular and nonhierarchical) access to the city. Although they do not adopt the passivity of the flâneur, the walks consist in simple acts, performed by the artist or by locals. Characteristically, however, their simplicity usually requires a lot of effort. The effort is not geared towards disclosing the environment of the walks but to anchor them in the environment—which often pertains to developing countries. This relationship to the environment is quite unique in that it reveals it but only obliquely; relates to it but only through an unproductive activity. To understand the specificity of these strolls, it is helpful to compare them to other emblematic contemporary walking drifts or actions. Whereas Doppelgänger borrows from Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969) in which the artist followed a stranger until he or she entered a building, it moves away from its chase dimension. The performer does not hide behind the stranger: he reaches and sides with the look-a-like (bypassing the viewpoint/vanishing point bond of linear perspective, as it were), adjusting his pace to imitate the walk of the stranger. Alÿs’s walks do not have either the surveillance and narrative dimension of Sophie Calle’s accounts of different filature performances, including: Filiatures parisiennes (1978–9) in which the artist follows and photographs strangers in the streets; Suite Vénitienne (1980) where she follows a man in Venice initially followed by her in Paris; and La Filiature (1981) where she is herself followed in Paris by a detective hired by her mother. Nor do they have the relational dimension of Valie Export’s From the Underdog File (1969) where Export walked her partner, Peter Weibel, on a leash to disclose the power struggle underlying the relationship between the sexes; or of Marina Abramović’s and Ulay’s 1988 Great Wall Walk, where the partners walked toward each other over the Great Wall from opposite ends for 3 months to finally meet at the center, embrace, and definitively head their separate ways. In these walks, the human

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relationship prevails over environmental concerns. Alÿs’s walks have none of the pilgrimage resonance of François Morelli’s Translantic Walk (1985) in which the artist commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima by carrying a hollow fiberglass sculpture in the shape of a charred human torso on his back, traveling from Berlin to Paris and then to New York and Philadelphia, regularly stopping to breathe air into the figure or to fill it with water so as to symbolically sustain it. They are not bodily investigations per se, such as is the case in Hendrik Sturm’s walks which enact a series of movements and in-between movements in a constant play with the laws of gravity; or Qin Ga’s Miniature Long March (2002–5) involving Qin Ga following the Long March team by first tattooing a map of China onto his back, and then tattooing each site of arrival until 2002: the 6,000 mile Long March was miniaturized onto Qin Ga’s back and extended when he continued the march in 2005, creating a performance that coalesced collective and individual memory. They are not about the relationship between body, technology, and orientation (as in Douglas Ross’s Pan-American (1997) project where the artist walked in urban sites wearing a robotic video camera guided by a compass as it constantly sensed north), nor about creating alternative city maps through the accumulation of body data (as Christian Nold’s East Paris Emotion Map (2007) in which different participants explored a Parisian district equipped with a bio-mapping device to measure and map their emotional arousal in relation to their geographical location). Although much more detached from his environment, which he nevertheless keeps staging in its social and economic dimensions, Alÿs’s walks are closer to Mona Hatoum’s Unemployed (1985–6) performed in the streets of Sheffield, where the artist stenciled footprints containing the word unemployed down the streets in Sheffield, so as to map out the economically distressed city. What distinguishes Alÿs’s walking actions from other contemporary walking works is certainly their everydayness but also their apparent unproductiveness, their enactment of unemployed work. Their ordinary unfolding makes them enact the surroundings by working unproductively as an unemployed worker, more than exposing (as is the case with Hatoum’s intervention) the unemployment of the surroundings. In a capitalist economy, as Trouvé’s work poignantly shows, the unemployed works even if his or her efforts are unproductive. Removed from a disclosing aesthetics and embracing a performance aesthetics, his walks belong to Michel de Certeau’s practice of everyday life, in which the walker collects, gathers or discloses “the remaining relics of meaning,

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and sometimes […] their waste products, the inverted remainders of great ambitions. Things that amount to nothing, or almost nothing, symbolize and orient walkers’ steps: names that have ceased precisely to be ‘proper.’”24 They also enact (as Groys has already observed) unproductive time. Their ending is arbitrary: walks end when the ice melts, when the paint can is empty, when the magnets cannot take more metal. They collect waste and the waste will eventually be wasted. They are ephemeral: the paint will disappear, the ice will melt; there are no urban remaining traces of his narcotourism. The actions are futile in comparison to the effort invested in their making. They not only gather and lose remains, they become themselves remains because of their apparent inability to complete any “useful” project. They partially survive, however, through their documentation. Their enactment takes time, but their duration is meaningless, without a specific purpose, and eventually compressed within the different photos, videos and films that serve to document them. As will be expanded upon further down, this sense of futility is systematically affirmed in Alÿs’s statement about his work: “Can an artistic intervention truly bring about an unforeseen way of thinking, or it is more a matter of creating a sensation of ‘meaninglessness,’ one that shows the absurdity of the situation? […] Can an absurd act provoke a transgression that makes you abandon the standard assumptions about the sources of conflict?”25 As Alÿs repeats unproductiveness from one action to another, what manifests itself as unproductive time is Latin America’s uneasy relationship with the modern temporality of progress, acceleration, and unequal distribution of time. How is Alÿs’s walking aesthetics a matter of time? How does it operate as an aesthetics—as a redistribution of the realm of the sensible? In his walks and, more patently, in the actions made with locals, the redistribution of the sensible—of a modern way of perceiving the future as always “already begun” (Habermas)—occurs aesthetically in the microfissuring and micro-twisting, as well as in the excessive extension of the arrowed line of forwardness traced by the performer(s). It is in this fissuring and twisting of the central ray of perspective that a suspension of forwardness takes place. As I hope to make clear below, Alÿs exacerbates the costruzione legittima perspectival system still prevalent today (let us follow Damisch’s findings here26) inherited from the Renaissance, a system initially theorized by Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise De Pittura (1435–6) as a linear, centralized perspective construction. In this system, painting is defined as a specular surface relating two visual symmetrical pyramids: one emerging from the picture plane outside the painting

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with its apex corresponding to the viewpoint, and the other developing from the picture plane into the painting with its apex corresponding to the vanishing point, linking the viewer’s eye to the vanishing point through the central visual ray. In his actions, performed by himself or by locals, Alÿs exacerbates the perspectival system by dramatizing the vanishing point as the eclipsing point of destination toward which the modern subject continuously and unproductively flees. He also exacerbates it by fissuring the central optical ray that relates the viewpoint and the vanishing point. In so doing, the performances consistently alter the perspectival system and what remains of it today as a modernizing structuring of vision and as a modernizing mobilization of the body in space—two operations that sustain the forwardness of modernity’s conceptualization of historical time. This modernity is not any modernity but Latin America’s modernities which do not match the modernization pace of the North; modernities which are more precisely predominantly experienced and designated as too late and behind European and North-American deployments of modernity. Alÿs’s performance work to problematize, complicate, sizzle, and retemporalize that system by injecting the contemporary experience of unproductiveness. Its productivity is to trouble perspective. It does so by troubling the linear vanishing point/viewpoint connection. Forwardness is depreciated. The transformation of the environment (its futurity) is conditioned by a walk that valorizes remnants: instead of being denied by the future, past and present are prioritized to influence the future. Such is contemporaneity. The video and photographic documentation of Alÿs’s actions are quite explicit as to the line constructions—which should be seen in fact as visual ray constructions—his works regularly entail. In Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes doing something leads to nothing), for instance, the camera follows Alÿs pushing the ice box through the streets of Mexico City, leaving an ephemeral line of melted ice behind him. Lines are also the main outcome of the walking performances The Leak (1995) and The Green Line in which Alÿs holds a leaking can of paint as he walks through São Paulo (in the former) and Jerusalem (in the latter). The formation of the line is a constant in the following three collective performances: When Faith Moves Mountains (Lima, 2002) which lines up hundreds of volunteers shoveling sand as they attempt to move a dune; Bridge/Puente (Key West/Havana, 2006) where the fishing communities of Key West and Havana were invited to line up their boats to create a floating bridge between them; and Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (Strait of Gibraltar, 2008) which created two lines of children carrying small

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shoe-boats, one line departing from each end of the strait (Tangier in Morocco and Tarifa in Spain). The first property of these lines is that the actions engage them into human/environment alignments that lead to (almost) nothing. The futility of the performances (in relation to the effort required by the performances) has been highlighted by several critics and by Alÿs himself. Curator Russell Ferguson, examining the repetition and recalibration dimensions of Alÿs’s Rehearsal series, argues that the performances counter the establishment of “an unequivocal conclusion” to favor a form of completion that “is always still to come.”27 Alÿs similarly states that the absurdity of the poetic act “provokes a moment of suspended meaning, a sensation of senselessness that may reveal the absurdity of the situation. Via this act of transgression, the poetic act makes one step back for an instant from the circumstances. In short, it may make one look at things differently.”28 In When Faith Moves Mountains, for instance, the 500 student volunteers regrouped in Ventanilla (a favela at the outskirts of Lima, Peru) to form a line—they were instructed to try to walk in a single line29—at the foot of a massive sand dune, equipped with shovels (Figure 2.11). They moved the dune a few inches using their shovels, in a collective effort to counter the desertification of the area threatening the precarious habitats of close-by inhabitants. Described by Alÿs as “land art for the landless,” the work only minimally altered the mountain, and the alterations were not measureable in any way, because of the size of the dune and because of the wind which eventually blew the sand back and forth. As one critic observes, this is in many ways “an exercise in futility,”30 although, argues another critic, the collective performance should be considered as an event that “explored the power of communal action.”31 The Bridge works (Bridge/Puente and Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River) occupy the same ambiguous terrain. For Bridge/Puente, Alÿs attempted to create a line of boats between foreign shores, mobilizing hundreds of people in the process. The performance did not result in any bridge, yet one critic insists that “the communal effort in the face of inevitable failure, and the attempt to forge a link between areas separated by social and political divides no less bridgeable than the sea, is paradoxically uplifting.”32 It is not, however, that the regrouping of the participants into large communal unproductive efforts takes its productivity from the communal gathering per se. What seems to me to be more productive is its fulfillment of purposeless projects, within a specific North–South dialectic. The sheer effort involved in moving a mountain, in pushing an ice cube for nine

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Figure 2.11   Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains (Cuando la fe mueve montañas), Lima 2002. In collaboration with Cuauhtémoc Medina and Rafael Ortega. Video (36 min) and photographic documentation of an action. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

hours, in queuing people to make a human bridge on moving water, is a contextualized effort—a series of interventions on specific territories whose relationship to modernity has economically split up communities. What is more, fruitless time is a means of exposing how the “too late” and the “lagging behind” are mechanisms of exclusion of the other. As pointed out by philosopher Daniel Innerarity, the marginalized being of contemporaneity is “someone who lives not at the spatial periphery but literally in another time,” at the margins of the public time of vital opportunities, including access to power, employment, and social recognition.33 Notice, also, and this highlights a second pivotal property of the line in Alÿs’s works, how in all of these performed geometries the line never stays put and never follows a logic of linearity or progression. In the collective performances, the line is systematically broken by the individual action of each participant, which is never in perfect synchrony with the other’s action. Or it is simply broken by the movement of the sea waves. As Godfrey says about the performance Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (Figure 2.12) “despite

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orchestrating lines of children to reach out to each other over a continental divide,” the artist did not create any form of sustainable bridge: “the bridge of boats was never built; the children’s attempts to keep in line are scuppered; they are brought back to the shore just like the waves. The waves, and their impact on the children, serve as a constant reminder of the impediments to, and impossibility of, easy transit from one country to another at the present time.”34 In the Peruvian performance (When Faith Moves Mountains), the line does not take its function or meaning from the point of view/vanishing point relation. It moves laterally, as the performers move up and down the dune shoveling the sand. Its lateral unfolding is a force by which the dunes will be displaced. In the solo performances, the painted line is likewise twisted by the movements of the leaking can; the imaginary line between Alÿs and his look-a-like (The Doppelgänger) is submitted to constant interruptions and reorientations as Alÿs moves ahead to side with the look-a-like. More specifically, in the 2005 Jerusalem piece (The Green Line) the green oscillating line is a subjective line that contrasts with the armistice border; it is a trace of Alÿs’s walking, on which others will now walk inadvertently—the line marks a territory but does not create a territory. The

Figure 2.12   Francis Alÿs, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (working title), Strait of Gibraltar, 2008. Video and photographic documentation of an action. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

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lines have an arbitrary beginning (the opening of a can of paint; the shoveling in the dunes) as well as an arbitrary ending (the emptying of the can; the approximate displacement of the dune). The lines do not guide the performer’s walk but what follows it: the ephemeral trace of the actions. The lines break, fade away, temporally collect, mix with and lose waste. Their existence is completely dependent on the bodies which enact them. While, in the documented performances, they do succeed in relating our own viewpoint with the vanishing points of the performances, they produce a trajectory which constantly shatters and threatens the tangibility of that link. The line—as the means by which Alys’s projects fail to produce something directly meaningful and purposeful; as the carrier of waste per se—gained in aesthetic precision when the artist started to work on a 16 mm film on an ostrich-like bird species, called nandu. Alÿs’s initial intention was to reenact the Tehuelche tradition of hunting the bird by walking after it until it falls from exhaustion. Disappointed in the documentary dimension of his film, he used instead the footage of shimmering mirages appearing at but also retreating from the vanishing points of roads along which he had been traveling. A Story of Deception (2003–6) became a film in which the 16 mm camera pursued mirages that materialized the Latin American development programs seen to operate specifically like a mirage, as a historical objective that continuously fades away as it comes into view on the horizon line. The film shows the perspective of a car-driven camera slowly yet continuously advancing on a deserted road, straddling a dotted centerline (Figure 2.13). But it advances on a road whose solidity is perturbed by the liquefaction of its upper part into a floating mirage of oil slick. Alÿs’s comment on the pursuit of the shimmering mirage must be quoted in full, for it sophisticatedly describes how the mirage allowed him to investigate modernity as a historicity inscribed in the logic of the costruzione legittima whose vanishing point remains in fact inaccessible: I found in that pursuit the perfect image of fuite en avant, of fleeing forwards. What immediately seduced me in the mirage’s endless escaping was that it materialized the very Latin American scenario in which development programmes function in precisely the manner of a mirage, ‘a historical goal that vanishes perpetually into thin air as soon as it looms into the horizon’ (to quote my fried Cuauhtémoc). […] While one approaches it, the mirage eternally escapes across the horizon line, always deceiving or eluding our progress, inevitably

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preceding our footsteps. It is a phenomenon of constant disappearance, a continuous experience of evasion. Without the movement of the observer, the mirage would be nothing more than an inert stain, an optical vibration in the landscape. It is our advance that awakens it, our progression towards it that triggers its life. It is in the obstinacy of our intent that the mirage comes to life, and that is the space that interests me. If there is disillusionment, it is because we want to catch it, to touch it. When I refer, by way of the mirage metaphor, to the modernity that always seems to be within our reach but escapes us, I don’t mean to say that modernity is the goal or what we should be pursuing. What interests me is the intent, the movement towards the mirage. For me, the emphasis is on the act of pursuing itself, in this escape forwards.35 The fuite en avant (the fleeing forwards) traced by the observer’s movement towards the mirage, a mirage that “escapes across the horizon line, always deceiving or eluding our progress,”36 is seen by Alÿs as a movement activated by the viewpoint’s progression along the

Figure 2.13   Francis Alÿs, A Story of Deception, Patagonia, 2003–6. In collaboration with Olivier Debroise and Rafael Ortega. 16 mm film, loop, 4:20 min (also cut painting, absent from the image). Film still. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

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centerline towards the vanishing point. In this perspectival system, the camera is not static—positioned as it were at the viewpoint in a relationship of reciprocity to the vanishing point—but creating the optical ray as it endlessly moves forward without reaching any point, only able to provide a record of a Daliesque melting horizon line. This dynamic is strongly enacted in Alÿs’s tornado actions which he has been performing every year for the last decade, during the dry season, in fields south of Mexico City. The performances entail running after tornados equipped with a video camera which films the tornado both from the inside and the outside. The documentary video Tornado (2000–10), made in collaboration with Julien Devaux, mostly shows him running after and unable to get inside the whirl; when he succeeds in entering it, the images of the blowing sand reveal that the tower of dust can never really be caught—framed, distanced, and controlled. The walks towards the vanishing points inscribe the performer in a line of flight that must be continuously renewed as the mirage or the tornado persists as unreached and unreachable phenomena. The mirage, Alÿs insists (quoting Cuauhtémoc), corresponds to the “development” thrust of modernity per se: “a historical goal that vanishes perpetually into thin air as soon as it looms into the horizon.”37 Unproductive (futile, unrecognized, lost) time becomes Latin American’s interested time, the sheer resource invested in the continual attempt to reach but never fully reach the modern requirements of the North. More generally, it corresponds to the perceiving subject’s movement toward the historical goal of progress—a movement that keeps the trope of progress alive. This is a movement Alÿs’s work clearly attempts to undermine. It undermines it by making the vanishing point inaccessible; by collapsing the establishment of any perspectival visual ray within the filmed tornado; by disjointing the vanishing point and the viewpoint or by making their connection endless; by blending the self with the environment; and by producing unproductive/unemployed work (Trouvé’s waiting time as working time/non-time as identity time is not far here). The experience of time in Latin America (an experience that Alÿs has declared wanting to stage) is directly shaped by “the all-too familiar scenario of a society that wants to stay in an indeterminate sphere of action in order to function, and that needs to delay any formal frame of operation to define itself against the imposition of Western Modernity.”38 Social theorist Jorge Larrain speaks more precisely of the ambivalence of modernity in contemporary Latin America, an ambivalence which has had different phases. In the 1970s and 1980s, the

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collapse of the “modernizing, state-led, heavily protectionist and developmentalist pattern of industrialization,” together with the succession of military coups associated to this collapse, initiated a reappraisal among reformers and intellectuals which was strengthened by a assessment that modernization had in fact failed: The deep crisis explained in part, and went hand in hand with, a profound identity crisis, which was marked by pessimism and renewed doubts as to whether the road to modernity that had been followed could be wrong. The rise and fall of so many intellectual fashions and the persistence of enormous economic problems and widespread poverty, not to speak of the brutal activities of military dictatorships, could not but raise doubts as to whether the relentless pursuit of Western modernization ideas could bring about any real solution. The exhaustion of the dreams of rapid industrialization and Westernization in the 1950s and 1960s, the collapse of hopes of economic independence and socialism, drowned in a sea of blood in the military coups in Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, Argentina in 1966 and 1976, and Uruguay in 1973, and the years under terrible rightwing dictatorships were bound to raise again the questions about the nature of Latin American modernity and about the nature of the theories that had underpinned the modernizing aspirations.39 Three main types of critique of Latin American processes of modernization emerged during that period, some of which still persist today. They called attention to (1) the incompatibility of a Western-defined modernity and Latin American identity; (2) the lack of authenticity of Latin American modernity; and (3) the impossibility to control the modernization process due to telluric (terrestrial) factors. These critiques share the idea that modernity “was something external, which either had to be prevented from expanding in order to preserve identity or had to be brought about at all cost in order to change the old identity.”40 At the end of the 1980s and early 1990s and henceforth, the success of neoliberalism supported the general view that modernity could in fact bloom rapidly beyond questions of identity. This bloom was facilitated by and facilitated in turn the progress in the establishment of democracy, as well as the weakening of military dictatorships. But Larrain points out that this phase of modernization does not go without some problematic consequences: the free market and open economy politics produced “a significant diminution of industrial production

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and industrial employment [although] Mexico and Brazil managed […] to expand their industrial exports, thus compensating for the flood of imports from foreign manufacturers”; growth now coexists “with an increased concentration of wealth in a few hands and the existence of extreme poverty in large sectors of the population”; and, although there has been some progress in the modernization and democratization of the state compared to former dictatorships, the rebuilding and democratizing of the political structures which fell in the 1970s “is one of the remaining tasks of the Latin American trajectory to modernity.”41 Hence, ambivalence in relation to modernization processes carries on. Claudio Véliz maintains—following an argument that is problematically essentialist but one that at least attempts to understand the stakes of Latin American modernization—that the main problem lies in Latin America’s cultural resistance to change, its emphasis on unity and centralizing structures of governance, its privileging of tradition over mobility. Such a resistance is strongly rooted in the colonization of Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese who favored a centralized system of political, religious, commercial and linguistic control. Véliz does conclude, however, that Latin America is in a period of transition, as it begins to move away from these structures. Yet, Latin American modernity remains inseparable from the European and North American one. As Larrain observes, “Latin American modernity is a hybrid that is neither purely endogenous nor totally imposed from without.”42 Moreover, Latin America does not represent one single form of modernity, but various coexisting unequal forms of modernities. The development of Mexico City itself, the city in which Alÿs lives and in which many of his urban actions have taken place, is sustained by a temporality of growth and stasis, hope and resignation. A huge city of over 19 million inhabitants spread over an area of 1,400 square kilometers (covering the Federal District area and the urbanized spreading out of the city around this area), Mexico City did not become the monster megapolis of 30 million people predicted in the 1970s; and its historic center has been in relative decline.43 But, as José Castillo has pointed out, its recent history has been shaped by a rapid population growth, cyclical economic depressions, political change, ecological and natural disasters, increased problems of pollution and congestion, as well as the absence of consistent planning policies.44 Modernity in Mexico City is thus inseparable from a tension between globalization (strengthening its economy in many regards but also weakening it by the loss of industrial jobs to China and the NAFTA factories on the American

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border) and a-modern conditions (with 60% of jobs developing as an informal economy, selling goods and offering services outside the traditional market economies).45 Mexican writer and cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis speaks of the half-invented, half-real apocalyptic condition of Mexico City, which structures a paradoxical modernity oscillating between action and stasis, movement forward and backward: To stay in Mexico City is to confront the risks of pollution, ozone, thermic inversion, lead poisoning, violence, the rat race, and the lack of individual meaning. To leave it is to lose the formative and informative advantage of extreme concentration, the experiences of modernity (or postmodernity) that growth and the ungovernability of certain zones due to massification bring. The majority of people, although they may deny it with their complaints and promises to flee, are happy to stay, and stand by the only reasons offered them by hope: ‘It will get better somehow.’ ‘The worst never comes.’ ‘We’ll have time to leave before the disaster strikes.’ Indeed, the excuses eventually become one: outside the city it’s all the same, or worse. Can there now really be any escape from urban violence, overpopulation, industrial waste, the greenhouse effect? […] In the end, although the catastrophe may be very real, catastrophism is the celebration of the incredulous in which irresponsibility mixes with resignation and hope.46 In a book co-authored with Alÿs (Alÿs provided the images to Monsiváis’s writing), Monsiváis reaffirms this disclosure of the development of Mexico City and Mexico at large as both postponing and urging on modernity, abandoning the historic center—transforming it in a “territory of neglect”—while modernizing areas sprawling around it.47 He refers to Alÿs’s photographic images as “pictures of deterioration,” that successfully sidesteps “poverty aesthetics” to portray not the veiled beauty of neglected territories but “a certain condition, a state of affairs, a refashioning of the Centre of the city of always unexpected energies, and, more exactly, a portrayal of the artistic journey that combines town planning, sociology and a resident’s experience to obtain unique pictures.”48 Alÿs’s urban walking performances, which not only represent but also map deterioration as a state of affairs, concur this reading of the transformation of the artist walk into a form of weak ecological urbanism. The ambivalence of Latin American modernities—not so much their hybridity which combines endogenous traditions with European/North

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American/Asian processes of modernization, but mostly the fact that the interconnectedness of world modernities remains, for Latin America, a tensed and often unequal one, torn between embrace and resistance to the North—is manifestly represented in Alÿs’s use of the structure of repetition, rehearsal or fuite en avant. The historical time of modern Latin America is one in which the subject must repeat and rehearse its reiterated advancement toward modern goals of progress formulated elsewhere. The movement toward these goals is a reality, yet an endless one because—as Judith Butler’s work on performative identity, made through the repetition of performed acts, has shown—ideals (here, the idealized self of modernity) are by definition unreachable. As one moves forward, one in fact flees toward a point (or goal) which keeps vanishing. But despite or because of this reality, the ambivalence of Latin American modernities also finds its aesthetics in a redefined historicity. The linear perspective grid still remains, but the line linking the viewpoint and the vanishing point is now discontinued, fissured, and inversed, sometimes infinitely extended as the vanishing point keeps eclipsing itself from the approaching camera or performer, strategically revealed to be unproductive. In other words, the movement “towards” gains in environmental thickness what it loses in linear and controllable trajectoriness; it gains in human–environment interaction what it loses in environmental transcendence; it gains in present tense what it loses in modern futurity (a futurity defined as a temporal dimension that negates the past and absorbs the present). Ecology here is both an anti-progressive concern for the environment and a mode of perception in which, following psychologist James J. Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and philosopher Alva Noë’s slight revision of it, the human and the environment are perceptually attuned. The performer samples information from the attributes of the ambient outside world that afford opportunities for action.49 The process of perception does not consist merely in an internal representation of the environment but reaches beyond the boundaries of the eye and of body out into the environment, which becomes part of the very substrate required for cognitive activities.50 The lateralization of the linear perspectival system These works are not directly concerned with the representation of historical time. Their immediate concern is the experience of temporal passing as unproductive and its eventual loss in relation to the historical

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time of modernity—its consolidation as non-time. Our discussion of Trouvé’s and Alÿs’s work shows that this concern for the devaluing of unproductiveness can be addressed by aesthetically depreciating modern perspective. This depreciation becomes a modality by which the “forward” movement of progress (the very movement that turns unproductiveness into non-time) is weakened. It aesthetically questions the modern regime of historicity which promotes a form of futurity that obliterates the present and distances the past. Unproductive time is made to weigh on modern historicity. But these works do not merely depreciate the system of perspective by fissuring it or exacerbating it; they sometimes lateralize it by tilting it to the side. In Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains, for example, the participants form a line that advances laterally over the dune to shovel the sand and displace the dune. What becomes important is not the dramatized relationship between viewpoint and vanishing point between participants but the ecological performance on a specific territory. This weakening, I have argued, is a force that ecologizes the gap between future and past inherited by the modern regime. This section will examine specific occurrences when the weakening of linear perspective takes the form of a lateralization. What does lateralization consist of? And how can it be said to correspond to an ecological process? These are important questions insofar as lateralization—as already suggested in the above examination of Trouvé’s BIA—is an ecological operation by which unproductive time is made productive. The performance-based films of Dutch artist Guido van der Werve are particularly insightful with regards to the how and the why of lateralization and ecologization. This is true especially of Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright (2007). Not only does this performancebased film confirm lateralization as an alteration of linear perspective (Louis Marin’s study on classical lateralization will help us to support this claim), but also as the operation by which the productivity of a temporal passing shaped by unproductiveness—the experience of time as barely passing; as fruitless or repetitive—is affirmed within the past/future interval left open by modernity. This is so mainly because the performer (the artist himself) is engaged in an ambivalent walk that unfolds as a frontward movement that appears slightly blocked in its forwardness. This ambivalence outmodes the central visual ray connecting the viewpoint and vanishing point in linear perspective. Lateralization, as pointed out in our analysis of Trouvé’s BIA and Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains, always ends up disjoining, disjointing, or

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eternalizing the connection between the vanishing point and viewpoint, the future and the past. It disjoins them so as to weaken the viewpoint’s adherence to the vanishing point as a point of perfectibility and futurity that is oblivious of the present and disparaging of the past. The examination of van der Werve’s work allows us to push our understanding of this process. The underlying claim of this examination is the following: when the past-future interval of the modern regime of historicity is fissured, the progressive forwardness of the historical time of modernity is not only questioned, but also transformed into an ecologization of that spacetime. This ecologization is the process by which the present relationship of the performer to his environment is radically thickened. Ecology becomes the practice and historicity by which the progressive underpinnings of modernity are altered into lateral connections. Perceptual practices (both the performer’s and the spectator’s perceptual practices) become sensitive to the ambient world in which they unfold. This aesthetics partakes of what sociologist of science Bruno Latour has defined as a contemporary regime of historicity that broadens the modern taking into account of nature for nature’s-sake. It broadens it by ecologically taking into account the network of interdependent relations between subjects, objects, and environments.51 Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright is the eighth performancebased film from a series of numbered 16 mm and 35 mm films (Nummer twee—Nummer negen) produced by van der Werve between 2003 and 2008. Of these works, critics have said—comments that recall those made in relation to the performance works of Francis Alÿs—that they expose “the ultimate failure of the grand gesture, and the strange comfort this offers us.”52 These unproductive gestures, which enact but ultimately fail the tradition of the sublime, include: playing piano on a float in the middle of a lake; launching an asteroid back to where it came from; greeting a flock of ballerinas in the middle of the street; hoisting a grand piano through an apartment window; turning clockwise in opposition to a planet persistently turning anti-clockwise; and walking across frozen waters in front of an icebreaker. But to understand the temporal dimension of these unproductive gestures, it is imperative to recast, at least at two levels, what critics have largely said about these works. First, the grand gestures should not be reduced to a neo-Romantic aesthetics but understood as a modality by which modern historicity is put into question. Second, we must appreciate his pieces not as performances per se (these will never be known directly to us), but as performance-based films insofar as film is the

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medium by which they have been both processed and transmitted to the spectator. It is in this intermediality that the temporal questioning of historicity takes place. Although we have thus far approached most of Alÿs’s performances more strictly at the performative level (the majority of his videos are documentations of actions), van der Werve’s film projections require that we approach the performances as film based. They allow us to consider how the films establish a relationship between the performer and his environment, as well as a relationship between the image and the spectator. The filmic dimension is crucial as it fundamentally structures the temporality of the performances. This is especially true with the 10:10 min Nummer acht, a 16 mm film transferred to High Definition, projected as a loop on a large wall screen. Nummer acht (Figure 2.14) registers a journey undertook by the artist in the Gulf of Bothnia (Kemi, Finland). Unedited, the film was shot on one roll of film and ended when the roll ended.53 For the whole duration of the film, we see van der Werve walking slowly 12–15 meters in front of an icebreaker, which is slowly advancing behind him in the same direction. He walks progressively across the gulf in front of the ship, as its prow smashes through the ice and rears up “like a monstrous killer whale.”54 Curator Tom Morton describes the work in the following terms, grasping quite well the drama of scale that such an activity entails: “Filmed in long shot,

Figure 2.14   Guido van der Werve, Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright, Golf of Bothnia FI, 2007. 16 mm film transferred to high definition, color, sound, 10:10 min. Film still. Image by Ben Geraerts. Courtesy the artist.

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van der Werve seems frail and tiny, forever about to be swallowed by the abyss opening up behind him, forever hearing its great creaks, gulps and rumbles ringing in his ears. The icebreaker, though, lags continually behind, and we get to thinking about the effortlessness of his passage when compared to that of the behemoth to his rear.”55 Walking in front of the icebreaker and towards the camera and viewer, the performer does not reach any form of destination whatsoever: similarly to the ship which never reaches the performer, the performer never gets to the foreground of the image. What is shown is a relentless walk, but—and this is left unnoticed by Morton—it is a walk whose movement forward is continually suspended by the camera. The camera mounted on a snowscooter with a steadycam (Figures 2.15 and 2.16) filmed the walk by moving at the same pace as the performer and the ship (a pace synchronization enabled by an earphone which allowed the performer to follow the cameraman’s speed and movement directions).56 This means that, as van der Werve advances in the snow and is

Figure 2.15   Guido van der Werve, Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright, Golf of Bothnia FI, 2007. Making of film (film crew). 16 mm film transferred to high definition, color, sound. Image by Ben Geraerts. Courtesy the artist.

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Figure 2.16   Guido van der Werve, Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright, Golf of Bothnia FI, 2007. Making of film (film crew). 16 mm film transferred to high definition, color, sound. Image by Ben Geraerts. Courtesy the artist.

filmed by a camera that moves at the same pace to maintain the same distance in relation to the performer, the forward movement of his body is barely noticeable. All of the constituents of Nummer acht converge to resist forwardness. The large plane of whiteness representing the gulf is barely distinguishable from the white sky above and this unclear distinction flattens the depth of field. The small size of the performer (in contrast to the hugeness of the icebreaker) and the positioning of the performer just in front of the icebreaker make it difficult to clearly evaluate the distance between body and ship. The small scale of the performer also discourages a psychological reading of figure and, as such, puts off any form of sustained identification with that figure. The displacement of the performer is non-eventful and homogeneous. The synchronicity of the pace of the icebreaker, performer and camera persists throughout the projection. The long shot is relatively short and arbitrary (10:10 min, the length of the roll). These features sustain a walking body that moves forward but whose forwardness leads nowhere specific, and whose forwardness is always filmed by a camera which recedes at the same pace in an environment

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of infinite whiteness, making it impossible to evaluate the distance and progress of the performer’s journey. The forward movement is perceived as suspended and stilled. The walk is goalless and futile, anti-existentialist, in relation to the vast effort entailed by an activity performed in such remote lands. The central optical ray joining the spectator’s viewpoint and the vanishing point embodied by the performer is thus persistently made ambivalent: is the performer/vanishing point advancing towards us; receding; prolonged despite the forward movement? As the performer/vanishing point suspends and stills itself despite the forward movement, the central visual ray connecting it to the viewpoint starts to become irrelevant. In contrast, what becomes increasingly important is the slice of space occupied by the performer and the latter’s connection to that surrounding space. This is what I call the lateralization of linear perspective, understood as a turning sideways of the network of visual/optical rays, whereby the central optical ray (together with the other visual rays) ceases to unfold from background to foreground, to unfold instead in parallel to the representational screen, propelling and splitting the viewpoint to the left and to the right of the vanishing point enacted by the performer. In this process, the walking body is made to blend (similarly to Alÿs’s own blending) with the environment as it ceases to advance towards the viewer. What is essentially being manipulated here is costruzione legittima as a prevailing but here fragilized perspectival system, the “mathematical system for creating the illusion of space and distance on a flat surface” which relies on the positioning of the vanishing point at the center of the horizon line, where all parallel lines (orthogonals) appear to converge, as well as the symmetrical mapping of orthogonal lines as optical or visual rays that allow the viewer’s eye “to connect points around the edges of the canvas to the vanishing point.”57 In Nummer acht, lateralization suspends the forwardness performed by the walk to connect that walking body not to the spectator in front but to the sides. The performer walks for the sides, connecting to the environment, and not forward, towards an inaccessible viewpoint (the camera or us) which is also the performer’s vanishing point following the logic of pure reciprocity of costruzione legittima. The performance/filmic temporalization of historicity occurs precisely there: where and when suspension (the partial stilling of the walk) lateralizes the forwardness of the modern regime of historicity. To clarify the aesthetic procedure of lateralization, it is vital to go back to one of the key art historical studies dealing with the process of lateralization in early modern art: “Toward a theory of reading in

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the visual arts” (1980), in which Louis Marin examines the representational system underlying Nicolas Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia (c. 1638–40) (also known as Et in Arcadia Ego) located at the Musée du Louvre (Figure 2.17). This was Poussin’s second version of the Arcadian theme. The initial one, from the Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth, was made a few years earlier, in c. 1628 (Figure 2.18). The differences between the two versions were analyzed extensively by different art historians, including Erwin Panofsky. The Chatsworth version represents the scene more dynamically around the diagonal setting of the tomb within the landscape. The shepherds have regrouped in front of the tomb (diagonally represented following the diagonal setting of the tomb) with one of them engaged in the act of reading the inscription on the frontal surface: “Et in Arcadia ego.” In contrast, the Louvre version proposes a frontal view of the tomb, its surface parallel to the picture place and the shepherds located together with other figures in a frieze also parallel to the picture plane, exchanging gazes and gestures of reciprocity. Two

Figure 2.17   Nicolas Poussin, The Shepherds of Arcadia (Et in Arcadia Ego), c. 1638–40. Oil on canvas, 85 × 121 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image by René-Gabriel Ojéda. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY, ART146596.

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Figure 2.18   Nicolas Poussin, The Arcadian Shepherds: “Et in Arcadia Ego”, c. 1628. Oil on canvas, 121.6 cm × 96 cm. © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

figures stand on the right of the tomb while another one stands on the left pointing to the shepherd located at the center of the group, kneeling, himself pointing at the inscription. Panofsky’s erudite reading of the paintings concerned the meaning of “Et in Arcadia ego”: it focused on the identity of the “ego’s” referent—which he saw diverging from one painting to the next. In the Chatsworth painting, argued Panofsky, it is death itself which speaks following the pictorial tradition of the vanitas; in contrast, the Louvre version proposes an “ego” which refers to the deceased who utters (as a voice talking from beyond the grave) a more nostalgic statement about the need to remember the Arcadian past. But Marin is interested in the representational organization of the paintings. He uncovers a structuralist dimension to the shift: the change elaborated in the second version “consists precisely in the lateralization of the depth structure of representation by situating

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the figures represented, the istoria, in a frieze parallel to the representational screen.”58 Marin observes that, in the art historical literature which has focused on this shift (namely in the work of Panofsky, Weisbach, Klein, and Blunt), the transformation brought about in the second version came to represent the shift from the baroque organization of representation to the classical one. But Marin attempts to “read” Poussin’s painting—which is after all a painting of someone reading an inscription on a tomb surface similarly to the spectator reading the inscriptions on the picture plane— so as to test if and how a textual reading of a painting is at all possible. This allows him to be attentive to the shift as a combination of specific structural operations. These operations mainly consist in: “(1) displacing the vanishing point from the deep visible structure of perspective (i.e., the horizon of the represented space) to the central point of the legible foreground of the story represented (i.e., a lateral structure); [and] (2) operating a ninety-degree rotation of the network of optical rays (whose poles are the viewpoint and the vanishing point) in order to locate them in a plane parallel to the representational screen, a plane which is scanned by the frieze disposition of the figures in two symmetrical groups where the equivalence of the viewpoint and the vanishing point appears simply reversed.”59 Lateralization already implies the displacement of the vanishing point “from the deep visible structure of perspective,” as it relocates the central optical ray between the viewpoint and the vanishing point parallel to the picture plane. In this case, Poussin has additionally displaced the vanishing point to the central point of the foreground composition. In this movement of lateralization, the viewpoint of the representational network becomes the starting and final points of the represented story, while the vanishing point (now displaced “from the deep visible structure of perspective” to the central point) is promoted to the status of the central event—towards which all gazes directly or indirectly converge, and towards which the two forefingers point out: the focal point of the istoria. This central event is the reading of the inscription (“Et in Arcadia ego”), the place of a cleft in the frontal wall’s tomb, more precisely the area where the “ego” of the epitaph is split into an “e/go.” More generally, however, what the lateralization operates— and this is where it becomes significant for the works of the temporal turn—is a liberation of representation from its subordination to its own spatial process of constitution, which it nevertheless necessitates.60 The temporal turn in contemporary art revisits and readjusts the classical lateralization of linear perspective described by Marin in

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relation to the Poussin paintings. But how is lateralization a temporalizing process? To answer this question let us go back to van der Werve’s Nummer acht. Deepness institutes itself not from foreground to background or from background to foreground, nor between a viewpoint located in front of the projected image and a vanishing point located on a fixed horizon line in the image, but in a particular inhabitation of a slice of landscape that keeps thickening and expanding as the performer walks without significantly advancing. This slice in the making is parallel to the screen. It is elaborated both by the performer who slowly walks forward and the camera that moves backward to maintain the same distance between it and him. In this process, the performer’s walk is partly stilled between a movement forward and a movement backward, so that our attention is now brought to his immediate, surrounding environment. As stated above, the connection between the performer as vanishing point and the spectator as viewpoint is weakened by various aesthetic strategies which disfavor identification processes and render the performer’s walk ambivalent. The camera’s imperceptible movement; its capacity to maintain the same distance from the performer even as it moves; and the backward movement of the camera (which faces the performer while the snowscooter advances in the opposite direction): these camera features work together to flatten out the forward movement of the walk. The performer in the snow field ceases to be located in the deep structure of the network of optical rays of linear perspective, both advancing and receding at the same time in front of the ship. His walk perceptually unfolds for us as framed in a 90-degree rotated network of optical rays in which he becomes the central point by which he is made to be part of a slice of space that moves with him (parallel to the screen); a slice that keeps thickening perceptually for the spectator as the performer is stilled; a slice that decenters the performer as it thickens—making him inseparable from the environment which extends at its sides, on the left and on the right. The filmed performer advances without advancing. In so doing, he adheres to a lateralized depth structure—a horizontal band of space—whereby connection ceases to be a connection between a foreground and a background or between a viewpoint and a vanishing point in the depth structure of perspective. The connection is rather with the sides—him and the white desert of ice and snow to his left and to his right. The film proposes a performer in his active interconnectedness with the environment—a human body inseparable from what is at its sides: a human body attuned to what is at its sides following

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Gibson’s ecological approach to cognition whereby subjects may be understood as sampling information from the environment that afford opportunities for action by becoming part of the very substrate required for action and cognition. This human body is tied to an environment that barely moves forward with him as his movement confirms itself as expanding to the sides, sticking as much as possible to the present-ness of that interconnectedness. He adheres to it and so, in this adherence, becomes slightly anachronistic with any historical time sustained by a principle of forwardness. This anchoring is how lateralization, in this specific work, becomes a modality by which a re-temporalization of historicity occurs. Historicity ceases to be motivated by the future’s distancing of the past and encroaching upon the present, to become a presentifying force. Unproductive time gains in productivity when deployed in relation to the historical time it works to dismantle and renew. For the sake of clarity, and to measure the originality of Nummer acht’s contribution to the temporalization of unproductiveness, let us contrast van der Werve’s performance-based film with the performance-based photography of British artist Richard Long—one of the key contemporary figures who initiated the walk art tradition. Since his first performed walk, A Line Made by Walking (1967), which resulted in a black-and-white photo of the lined-up foot traces of his walk, Long has produced geometrical figures (mostly straight manmade lines but also circles and other geometrical forms) testifying to his human presence in the land (Figure 2.19). As summarized by Dieter Roelstraete, A Line Made by Walking “is essentially known as a straightforward black-and-white photograph of a line of flattened, trampled-upon grass made by repetitively walking up and down an unidentified field in the countryside just outside London, which we may presume regained its natural upright position soon after Long had left, with only a photograph as lasting evidence of his ‘action’.”61 In this specific work, the length of the line made by trampling grass underfoot marked a length of time; and it is the photograph which preserves the transient footprints as indexical traces. Interestingly, the line begins and ends. Long insists on this crucial aspect of his walks: the line “goes nowhere.”62 It also unfolds as a Cagean aesthetics of randomness and indeterminacy, by letting uncontrollable elements of the environment shape the artwork—here, the sunlight which contributed to making the line visible.63 These aspects are a constant in Long’s work. As such, his performances enact a rupture in the tradition of linear perspective: the line falls short of pursuing or reaching the vanishing point on the horizon line. I see this as a critique of the modern search for an ever

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eclipsing future. Over the past 40 years, Long has made a multitude of walks in a multitude of places, sometimes in his native land of Dartmoor, sometimes in the outmost parts of the world. But in whatever area, his walks are systematically made according to a specific geometrical scheme within a specific number of days: A Six-day Walk over All the Roads (1975); Lanes and Double Tracks inside a Six-mile-wide Circle Centred on the Giant of Cerne Abbas (1975); A Circle in Scotland (1986); Positive Negative: a 15 day walk in the three sisters wilderness, Oregon (2001). Yet, and this is why his critique of linear perspective loses some of its initial breath, his photographic documentation systematically shows contained sites which suspend or simply ignore the “noise” of each specific environment. He avoids the consideration of elements which could actually de-sublime the landscapes: history, geology, subjectivity, rituality, the unexpectedness of the animal world (except on a few occasions), the messiness of the human world, together with ecological issues. Lateralization is ecology-historically-politically driven. In van der Werve’s icebreaker walk, for example, lateralization is the walking practice by which Long’s line (from A Line Made by Walking) is reaffirmed in its double capacity to remove the vanishing point from

Figure 2.19   Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967. Photograph and pencil on board. 375 × 324 mm. © Tate London, 2011.

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deep space and to detach the viewpoint from the spectator’s position in front of the image. It is reaffirmed but now visibly performed between a ship and man and shrunk to compress even further the distance between vanishing point and viewpoint so as to reduce as much as possible the sense of forwardness of the line. As such, it enacts David Harvey’s postulation of space–time compression proper to the era of convergence of high-speed technologies of communication, travel technologies, and capital economics (Harvey: “as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is […], so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds”).64 Lateralization is thus productive of a line that answers creatively to space–time compression. It becomes the condition of possibility of ecology. To succinctly summarize my point, it is useful to consider another performance-based film by van der Werve: Nummer negen. The day I didn’t turn with the world (2008), a time-lapse photography digitized on High Definition (HD) video, which compresses a performance in which the artist stood for 24 hours (from April 28 to 29) at the geographic North Pole (Figures 2.20, 2.21, 2.22, 2.23). Standing at the North Pole, he turned clockwise while the Earth turned anti-clockwise, negating—calendar wise—the universal 24-hour measure of the day operated by one rotation of the planet. But this 24-hour performance comes to us time-lapsed. It was in fact filmed every 6 seconds and the 24-hour film was time-lapsed to 8:40 min. Time-lapse photography is a cinematic procedure whereby each film frame is captured at a rate much slower than it will be played back. When replayed at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. Processes that would normally appear subtle to the human eye, such as the motion of the sun and stars in the sky, the blooming of a flower, traffic, a 24-hour rotation of the body, become exceedingly visible. What is significant in this work is the dense compression of the performed 24-hour counter-time through the technology of time-lapsing—an operation which both makes visible the countering principle of the turning body and aligns it with the acceleration principle of modern historical time. The performer’s body is the equivalent of a vanishing point shown in constant reorientation: it moves but it moves without abandoning its standpoint; it moves but does not move forward. It moves only sideways, reorienting itself by turning to the side until a full circle is achieved. What’s more, this deployment of the passage of time as a rotating standstill progressively turning to the right enacts a day in

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reverse, a subtracted day, a day gained, or a day behind (depending on one’s timeframe), which unfolds simultaneously with the Earth moving clock-wise to produce 24 hours as a day. Lateralization is also made possible because of the time-lapse technology that compresses a day into 8 minutes or so and therefore allows the viewer to perceive the full rotation of the body. Once the rotation is made visible it prevents any form of stabilization of the central optical ray connecting the viewer and the performer. Each lateral move of the performer’s body to his right confirms the tilting of the deep foreground-to-background deployment of linear perspective into a micro-slicing of the landscape. The body generates unproductive time: it turns counter the anticlockwise turn of the Earth despite Earth’s resilient rotation. Yet, this unproductiveness creates a temporal tension between body and earth, vanishing point and viewpoint, which questions the forwardness of the modern regime of historicity.

Figure 2.20   Guido van der Werve, Nummer negen. The day I didn’t turn with the world, Geographic Northpole, 2007. Time-lapse photography transferred to high definition video, color, sound. 8:40 min. Video still. Image by Ben Geraerts. Courtesy the artist.

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Figure 2.21   Guido van der Werve, Nummer negen. The day I didn’t turn with the world, Geographic Northpole, 2007. Time-lapse photography transferred to high definition video, color, sound, 8:40 min. Video still. Image by Ben Geraerts. Courtesy the artist.

Figure 2.22   Guido van der Werve, Nummer negen. The day I didn’t turn with the world, Geographic Northpole, 2007. time-lapse photography transferred to high definition video, color, sound, 8:40 min. Video still. Image by Ben Geraerts. Courtesy the artist.

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Figure 2.23   Guido van der Werve, Nummer negen. The day I didn’t turn with the world, Geographic Northpole, 2007. Time-lapse photography transferred to high definition video, color, sound, 8:40 min. Video still. Image by Ben Geraerts. Courtesy the artist.

Historical Time as a Boundary Condition and the Formation of Temporal Bands of Passage Koselleck’s crucial contribution to historiography comes from his consideration of the experience of time proper to the development of modernity. He has shown how historical time—which concerns basically the periodization of temporal passing into past, present, and future— conditions social and political units of action, as well as the daily actions of human beings.65 Historical time can be recognized in how humans, as historical beings, coordinate chronological past and expected future to organize their lives. The emergence of modernity articulates a growing distance between experience and expectation. As Koselleck puts it, “on the one hand, every human being and every human community has a space of experience out of which one acts, in which past things are present or can be remembered, and, on the other, one always acts with reference to specific horizons of expectation. […] That historical time occurs within the difference between these two temporal dimensions (experiences and expectations) can already be shown by the fact that the difference between experience and expectation itself changes—that

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is, it is specifically historical.”66 His main postulate unfolds as follows: Enlightenment rationalism has dramatically relocated the past in relation to the future. It articulates a moment of rupture, whose emphasis on progress breaks with the pre-eighteenth-century peasant-artisan world based on the continuity between past and future, in which expectation “subsisted entirely on the experiences of their predecessors, experiences which in turn became those of their successors.”67 This binding of the future to the past was sustained by the Christian doctrine of the Final Days that drew a fixed limit to the horizon of expectation as necessarily related to this world. Endowed with promises of progress, change, perfectibility, novelty, fulfilment, and opportunity, all of which were supported by technoindustrial and scientific invention, modernity articulates an increasing asymmetry between memory and hope, between experience (the present past, whose past “events have been incorporated and can be remembered” in the present) and expectation (the future made present, which “directs itself to the not-yet, to the nonexperienced, to that which is to be revealed”).68 Meanwhile, the accelerating pace of the modern world shaped by developments in communications and rates of production left human agents with briefer time spans to experience the present “as the present,” an increased brevity by which the self-accelerating temporality “escapes into a future” while placing heavier and heavier demands one that future.69 Modernity is conceived as Neuzeit (new time) in which time ceases to merely be the medium in which history takes place as it gains in historical quality: “history no longer takes place in time, but rather through time.”70 This shift articulates the future as an unknowable and unforeseeable temporal category which, de facto, cannot be derived from previous experience. The main consequence of such a detachment is that the distance between the experience of the past and the expectation of the future is enduringly kept open. The horizon of expectation becomes illegible. The temporal turn in contemporary art, generally speaking, is a turn that proposes temporalities, actions, representations, and performances in which the past, present, and future are more on par in relation to each other. As mentioned in the Introduction, Hartog has argued that modernity’s asymmetrical relationship between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation has now reached a moment of quasi-rupture in which “the engendering of historical time seems suspended.”71 This lead to what Hartog has called a presentist era. This era is characterized by the valorization of memory and the related devaluing of history, which means that the differences between the past and present are

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being increasingly dissolved. It is likewise characterized by a constant postponement of the future, on the basis that the future can only repeat the catastrophes of the past. The present—or what barely stands as the present—keeps absorbing the categories of the past and the future. For more recent observers, however, namely philosophers Daniel Innerarity and Miguel de Beistegui, the presentist era must be understood as a temporalizing process in which the future colonizes the present. Global warming and the international financial recession of 2009–11, for example, show how much we have learnt to borrow the future “before it has been actually lived.”72 In other words, our current regime of historicity might still be a futurist one after all. Although it is impossible now to measure the degree to which contemporaneity is presentist or futuristic (it might paradoxically be both), Koselleck’s conclusion on the specificities of modern historical time enables us to situate Trouvé’s, Alÿs’s, and van der Werve’s work within the asymmetry or caesura between past and future, between experience and expectation. What these productions share is an attempt to shift unproductiveness to productive time by emphasizing human/design/environment connectedness. This emphasis is operated, as we have seen, by a weakening of the linear perspectival system. This weakening consists of a series of aesthetic procedures set out to depreciate the future-driven thrust of modernity responsible for the obliteration of unproductive time. We are close here to Agamben’s notion of contemporariness, as a “singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it,”73 insofar as the performances enact a turn, both an adherence to and a distancing from one historicity to another. The presentifying operations of the “unproductive” stream occur in the gap between past and future mapped out by Koselleck. The performance-based film Number acht by van der Werve makes that gap quite explicit. It locates the performer walking in the remote Gulf of Bothnia, caught into but also acting in an interval parallel to the representational screen between the background and the foreground of the landscape, between his recent past and his possible future—a future which is, however, radically flattened out in its forwardness. His walk is after all nearly completely stilled by the camera’s pace and backward movement, and the scale makes it difficult for the spectator to connect with the performer performing it. The deployment of such an interval is crucial for it modifies the futuristic orientation of modern historical time. It presentifies it by ecologizing it. That is, it turns the landscape into a human-environment stake from which, and not despite which,

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the future is imagined. In this unstable slice of land, space is being temporalized: a land is perceptually made present. Time is also being spatialized: a present affirms itself because of the performer’s anchored interconnectedness with the land. What these two operations share is the narrowing down of the gap between past and future—a narrowing made possible by the performative attempt to rescue the remains of unproductive time before its absorption in historical time. It is now the possible yet uncertain future which is made to depend on the present as the latter transforms itself into the past. These concluding remarks allow us to make one important observation about the temporal turn: an unexpected equivalence is established here between the temporalization of space and the spatialization of time. Van der Werve’s artistic practices do not reveal what comes first. And there is no point in doing so. Let us follow here the work of social scientist and geographer Doreen Massey who has convincingly pointed out the problems attached to the conceptualization of space as the mere opposite of time. She has been one of the main contenders of the requirement to think space and time together. Time and space cannot be collapsed in one another, for they represent different dimensions of the real world: this means that “the imagination of one will have repercussions […] for the imagination of the other and that space and time are implicated in each other.”74 The dualistic opposition between time and space has traditionally been grounded, especially since Bergson’s philosophical investigation of duration, in an understanding of space as static, closed, immobile, quantifiable, and pertaining to the world of representation (in contrast to the flow, passage and unrepresentability of time). Questioning this resilient dualism, Massey has argued instead that space’s main characteristics are openness, heterogeneity, liveliness, relationality; that space consists of a multiplicity of trajectories. Considered as a dynamic simultaneity and a product of social relations, space is shown to be inseparable from time: the features of space’s multiplicity are not inert but are “themselves imbued with temporality.”75 Acknowledging the work of Bergson and Deleuze—their commitment to the experience of duration and their resistance to the quantification of time’s internal continuity—, she agrees with their critique of hierarchies whereby the discrete is favored to continua and succession favored to evolution. Yet, Bergson’s valorization of duration to the detriment of spatialization has had the effect of reinforcing the view of space as ultimately deprived of dynamism. Political theorist Ernesto Laclau’s condemnation of the spatialization effects of representation—as a

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process of homogenization of time useless for any political thinking of radical social dislocation—belongs to that same misunderstanding of space as devoid of temporality. Massey maintains on the contrary that space—“the dimension of discrete multiplicity”—cannot be reduced to “a static slice though time” and that slices have “their own vital quality of duration.”76 If indeed spatialization is an operation by which things are set side by side—a laying out of things as a discrete simultaneity— a temporal reading of space allows us to see this simultaneity as dynamic and durational. She suggests defining space as “the dimension of multiple trajectories, a simultaneity of stories-so-far. Space as the dimension of a multiplicity of durations.”77 It is in this specific sense that lateralization can be said to be about both a spatialization of time and a temporalization of space.

To Conclude: The Artist as Historian? In his essay “The artist as historian,” Mark Godfrey suggests that historical research has become central to contemporary art since the 1990s. As observed in Chapter 1, Godfrey’s account refers explicitly to artistic practices “that invite viewers to think about the past; to make connections between events, characters, and objects; to join together in memory; and to reconsider the ways in which the past is represented in the wider culture.”78 It is not only that contemporary artists concentrate on particular historical subjects, but that they investigate and sometimes invent new methods of historical research, including: the exploration of the archive (its inevitability for the study of the past, but also its fallibility); the investigation of the mediality of historical representation; the establishment of a relationship between fiction, narrative, and history; the establishment of a relationship between social history and the micro-history of the self; the restaging of events as a way “to think about the present.”79 Artistic practices of the temporal turn rooted in the exploration of unproductive, unrecognized (destined to be lost) temporal passing in relation to the historical time of modernity share similar concerns. They are, after all, preoccupied with history. Yet they do not embrace historiography per se, for their main preoccupation is to alter the modern fate of unproductive time: its consolidation as non-time. While certain historiographical operations are indeed at play (namely witnessing and archiving), historical explanation, comprehension, and representation are significantly absent from their work. An

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archival practice is at play yet it is minimal: Trouvé produces inaccessible documents testifying to her unproductive effort to be recognized as an artist; although Alÿs collects wasted objects from the environment, his performances focus more on the body-environment relationship than on the archiving of the found objects; and van der Werve produce filmic and video works that block the forwardness of the efforts invested in his performances to endow them with unproductiveness. What is more, witnessing takes the form of a performance rather than a testimony. What does it mean to engage in a historical practice in such minimum terms? In his analysis of the historian’s historiographical inquiry, of what Certeau has designated as “the very operation in which historical knowing is grasped at work,”80 Paul Ricoeur divides historiography into three main steps: the documentary phase (which starts with the reception of the witnesses’ statements and ends with the production of archives that serve to establish documentary proof); the explanation/understanding phase (in which the historian explains why things happened the way they did—this is where the processing of the historical “because” takes place); and the representative phase (in which the actual representation of the past occurs, one that is destined to be read by readers of history so that the scientific requirement to share findings may be met). These are to be understood not as chronological phases but as “methodological moments, interwoven with one another,” keeping in mind, for instance, that there is no consultation of archives without a specific project of explanation, “without some hypothesis for understanding.”81 In light of this methodological layout, it may well be the case that artists cannot really be designated as historians proper. But this is not my point, for the non-equivalence of methodologies does not prevent—in fact, it has not prevented—the interdisciplinary integration of historical research within the aesthetic domain. I want instead to draw attention to the artists’ concentration on the documentary phase, a concentration which I believe is endemic to practices of the temporal turn. Not that the historical phases of explanation, comprehension, and representation are irrelevant to these practices. But these phases are most often left to spectators to resolve once the question of historicity has been raised. Indeed, the fundamental motivation is to raise the questions of historicity: what is the relationship between past, present, and future?; how is time a form of pressure?; how is time unequally distributed and why should this matter for the writing of history?; why is time a rare resource?; when and how is temporality obliterated by

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historical time?; what remains of lost times?; and what about the time that remains? Let us try to understand this aesthetics by briefly looking into Ricoeur’s description of the historiographical documentary phase, which is systematically enacted in the works we have been examining so far. In this initial phase, a declarative memory exteriorizes itself in the form of a testimony and is turned into documentary proof. The witness’s testimony is uttered and recorded by another person. This reception corresponds to the actual birth of the archive as a site of collection, preservation, and consultation. The testimony is evaluated so that documentary truth may be validated or invalidated.82 Crucial here is Ricoeur’s affirmation that the witness’s declaration of herself as a witness is the initiating moment of historical knowledge: “we must not forget that everything starts, not from the archives, but from testimony, and that, whatever may be our lack of confidence in principle in such testimony, we have nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves that something did happen in the past, which someone attests having witnessed in person, and that the principal, and at times our only, recourse, when we lack other types of documentation, remains the confrontation among testimonies.”83 The witness wants to be believed, anticipating as it were the evaluation of the deposition. Hence, the witness’s declaration takes the form of a triad: “‘I was there,’ he says, ‘believe me,’ to which he adds, ‘If you don’t believe me, ask someone else,’ said almost like a challenge.”84 Yet these declarations must be assessed. Is the testimony reliable, is it trustworthy? The evaluation of the reliability of the testimony (of its consistency; its measuring up to the reported event and to other documents) is a key operation in the establishment of the documentary proof that the event has indeed happened. As for the next and final step of the documentary phase, most archival documents will take the form of inscribed and recorded testimonies, whereby “the change in status from spoken testimony to being archived constitutes the first historical mutation in living memory.”85 In this mutation, there are no more designated addressees as was the case in the reception of the testimony, and the testimony contained in the archive is detached from the witness who gave birth to it. These archives are also constituted by the registering of other traces, equally open to historical observation: “vestiges of the past,” objects, artifacts, artworks, remains, debris, as well as documents coming from witnesses “despite of themselves,” such as diaries, autobiographies, secret documents, or reports. Ricoeur insists, however, that the document is never simply a given: “[i]t is sought for and found. What

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is more, it is circumscribed, and in this sense constituted, instituted as document through questioning.”86 The type of questions raised are crucial for, within the historiographical operation, what will be proven by the document becomes a fact—a fact which is not the remembered event, but its actual occurrence. In this process, the event moves to the fore, for it must be confirmed as “the actual referent of testimony.”87 What Ricoeur’s account obliquely discloses is how much the artists whose work has been discussed here are weak witnesses of the milieu they nevertheless make palpable by walking, performing, archiving, and giving form to. In contrast to the witnesses staged in Stan Douglas’s Klatsassin (a filmic installation examined in Chapter 7), whose testimonies are strongly voiced yet weakened by the artist’s recombinant approach to historical narratives, the works examined in this chapter strive to produce what should be called “weak” witnesses. There is no urgency of belief (“believe me”) nor is there any urgency of declaring one’s witnessing of the event (“I was there”). There is no radical event to account for. As specified by Agamben, the full witness “designates a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it.”88 In the extreme case of Auschwitz, the witness is the remains per se— the materialization of the paradox whereby “the only one bearing witness to the human is the one whose humanity has been wholly destroyed.”89 But here, the only events are the weak events of unproductiveness. There is no clear witness. What is more, there is no clear archive: the archive is out of reach in Trouvé’s Bureau of Implicit Activities; it is a hybrid (a performance-based film) in van der Werve’s production; it is a montage in relation to Alÿs’s performances.90 The archives are partial or inaccessible. What these works do reveal is that their documentary investment—although necessary for the dissemination of their work— amounts to just about “nothing” (let us follow Alÿs’s terminology here). They show what unproductive time is: just about “nothing,” just about non-time. And if indeed unproductive time is always “just about lost,” it is because unproductive time is not accountable in the historical time of modernity—a historical time which produces its systematic erasure. And if it is shown as “just about lost” it is also because the regime of historicity is turning—starting to make manifest what was beforehand invisible. This is what matters in these temporal/historical practices: not the full witnessing and the full archiving of past events, but weak witnessing and weak archiving, so as to productively activate a weakening of linear perspective that de facto obliterates unproductiveness.

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The temporal turn elaborated from the angle of unproductiveness gains to be understood as partaking of what philosopher Gianni Vattimo has designated and defended as weak thought (il pensiero debole): a flexible thought for which history ceases to rely on the idea of progress and the idolatry of the new; and for which modernity’s search for foundations is rethought to resituate questions of truth and being within the sphere of human experience. The unproductive stream performs a weak form of history, one that is detaching itself from the futuristic deployment of progress. It does so by questioning the modern structuring of opticality grounded on the institution of a visual ray that unifies the viewpoint and the vanishing point to secure the subject’s movement forward—a movement that transcends both the past and the present by disavowing the human experience of unproductiveness. To transform unproductiveness into productivity is to weaken the perspectival system by inversing it; lateralizing it; fissuring or excessively extending the connection between viewpoint and vanishing point. The vanishing point ceases to work as an external authority that guarantees progressive subjectivity and history. More appropriately, at least in relation to Alÿs’s urban performances, the temporal turn of unproductiveness partakes of what Italian architect and urbanist Andrea Branzi has designated as weak urbanism: a form of ecological urbanism that promotes the critical use of weak urban forms and non-figural fields—forms and fields which are flexible, mobile, open to change, operating through reversible solutions, taking their references from models that are incomplete, imperfect and elastic—which makes urbanism capable of resisting the continuous processes of innovation.91 Ecologization is a connecting process by which perception itself can be partly removed from a futuredriven stance. It allows for the transmutation of unproductiveness into a renewed historical time based on the here and now, a delimitated duration, and an embodied finitude acting within the modern-traced gap between past and future. To perform the unreachable vanishing point of the future in its very unreachability; to become a vanishing point detached from the laws of perspective; to lateralize the view of a landscape or of an architectural structure so that the vanishing and viewpoints may disjoin to strengthen a perceiver-environment or objectenvironment attunement: all these suspension procedures posit the dismantling of perspectival vision as the condition of possibility of an ecologization of modern historicity, in which the present attunement to the environment (and the unproductiveness past it includes) guides the possibilities of the future.

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Potentiality

Spadina: Reverse Dolly, Zoom, Nude (2006), a short (2:53 min) 35 mm film, starts with a close-up view of the foliage of a tree, filmed from the perspective of a dolly whose motion is in reverse (Figure 3.1). As the dolly slowly moves away, the close-up progressively unfolds into a wider view of the tree and the park within which it stands. A plane appears at the upper left side of the image and will gradually cross the sky, but it is an elusive plane whose materiality is slightly absorbed by the sky through which it moves, whose status is both real and spectral. Moreover, the dolly’s reverse movement cannot be said to convey fluidity to the scene. Indeed, although the camera reverses, the moving images are somewhat stilled: they subtly resist the backward movement and, in this resistance, reveal the camera as an eye that cannot completely let go of the desire to be close and to hold what it frames. But our gaze now is already elsewhere, attentive to the uncanny divulgation of a tall, grid-structure, modernist building, located behind the foliage. The contrast between the standing building and the standing tree is forceful. Grey versus green, culture versus nature, hard versus soft. The apartment building stands there alone within a park with no connection to its environment, overwhelming its tree counterpart by its imposing scale and materiality. The tree, the building, and the sky actually unfold in their own separate worlds, more or less autonomously, disconnected from each other as foreground, middle ground, and background, as though they were cut-outs laid on top of each other. Notice, though, how ambivalence persists: seen from afar, the building unfolds both as a construction and a model, a computerized mock-up of a building to come. Unfolding in this ambivalence, as built and to-bebuilt, it is both a present and a future building which will soon be of the past; or perhaps a built building which was once the mock-up of a future building at a specific present. In a few seconds, a zoom directed towards the building is activated and will specify the ambivalence: this

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is when the zoom fleetingly catches the materiality of the worn-down concrete surface. The time-worn surface discloses the building as existing in the present but belonging to another era, whose past is not completely behind us. The building was surely once the dreamed future in relation to another present, but of a present which has not completely passed, which is just about to pass. As the camera catches that materiality, another unexpected standing figure emerges in the frame: a static, naked woman on a balcony (Figure 3.2). Spadina ends with this view. We barely saw her. Was she real and naked? Or is she a “nude,” more of a representation, as the title suggests? The manifestation of that threshold frozen female figure isolated in an inner dream, an image borrowed from modern art history (let us think of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), The Balcony (1868–9) or Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863)), even from modern literature (Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, 1857), is pivotal. Not only does it confirm Spadina’s continual inscription of our perception in a threshold phenomenology of description, suspension, attention, and

Figure 3.1   Mark Lewis, Spadina: Reverse Dolly, Zoom, Nude, 2006. 35 mm film transferred to high definition, color, no sound, 2:53 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

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Figure 3.2   Mark Lewis, Spadina: Reverse Dolly, Zoom, Nude, 2006. 35 mm film transferred to high definition, color, no sound, 2:53 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

distraction, it also concludes the film with a surviving image. The zoom has allowed us to see the otherwise imperceptible nude—the image of a woman whose gaze locates her between the past (the deteriorating balcony on which she stands) and the future (what lies ahead of her), stilled in that specific interval. By making this woman visible (even if only fleetingly), film has potentialized the modernist building. How? Simply by zooming in and catching a figure whose survivingness and uncanny transposition passes on life to the decaying block of concrete that still manages to architecturally support it. It has also caught a feminine semi-inward/semi-outward gaze that looks ahead, bestowing the recent past with a sense of futurity. It shows us a gaze, between past and future—a gaze that could well be our gaze. Steadily, at least since Smithfield (2000), Canadian born, London-based artist Mark Lewis has been filming on location sites of postwar modernist architecture and urban development, most of which have been selected for their advanced state of deterioration, or because they were about

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to be (even filmed in the process of being) demolished, or simply abandoned. This is Spadina’s grid-structure, modernist building, whose promise of efficient inhabitability is deployed when filmed from afar as it appears as a mock-up, but whose decaying structure is revealed by the zoom. These sites represent modernism’s failure to adequately respond to the life needs of its inhabitants or simply to defeat the economy of urban development based on urban spreading and suburbanization. While some of his films evolve around modernist sites which have successfully persisted (Mies van der Rohe’s TD Center and Viljo Revell’s Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, for instance), they all raise the recurrent question of “our relationship to these [modernist] recently past forms, a question of what is to be done as the artistic signs and images of emerging and developing modernity are rapidly becoming historical.”1 They also show a deep concern for inhabitability—for how people evolve in these places. As Lewis specifies, his filming on location is always preceded by a period of observation, in which he tries to understand how people live there, or, in the case of his landscape films, how he can imagine people “might be there.”2 This is why the sites are rarely without people; they are populated with generic, silent beings, devoid of character designation; beings who are present, “both there and not there” as extras, celebrated as such by Lewis in his film The Pitch (1998), where he imagines making a film only with extras, those quasi-unnoticeable figures who have become “the silent proletariat of the film set,” and whose “job is to be quiet and in the background of history.”3 One must never lose sight of this fundamental concern, which sustains his whole production and which will be thought out more as a search for time than a search for space, addressing temporally the fundamental question raised by Bruno Latour: “why has [the world] not been conceived as if the question of its habitability was the only question worth asking?”4 His production constitutes a filmography of what remains of modernism; of how we relate to these architectural and urban remnants, and how film can potentialize them as inhabited and inhabitable sites. The filmic decision is to register these sites, not by producing archives of these sites (as in the photographic work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, for example, documenting and typologizing abandoned industrial ensembles), but by exploring film itself as a modernist or avant-garde remnant, which may also develop new potentialities as it addresses the question of our relationship to the recent past, a past which has not yet completely passed for it is still part of the present. “When it is passed,”

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says Lewis, “the past is archeology”; the sites that interest him are those that we don’t quite know what to do with, which are still part of the everyday and are, as such, barely noticeable.5 This standpoint means that Lewis thinks film in resonance with the buildings he films: as just-about or not-quite-yet past, as becoming historical, as failed promises, but also as vestiges to which might be conveyed potentiality. A non-hierarchical solidarity is established between both. This solidarity is consistent with Lewis’s reiterated disclosure of the glass-structure of modernist architecture as framed window/screens providing cinematic views of the world; window-screens that replaced the pre-twentieth-century light and ventilation functions of architectural openings to create what Anne Friedberg has designated as the convergence of the screen transformed into a window and the window transformed into a screen.6 Lewis sets into play a variety of aesthetic procedures that turn film into a medium which investigates the barely noticeable recent past (especially, but not exclusively, modernist architecture) and its own just-aboutpastness in that very process. Before looking at the re-temporalization of modern historicity articulated in his production, it is useful here to outline the eight key procedures that support this investigation. (1) His filmworks declare the end of film—at least any avant-garde or utopian modernist belief system embedded in the assumption that film has the ability “to transform consciousness.”7 This sense of the end translates in several decisions, including the combination of film with electronic and digital media and, more recently, the sole use of digital film, on the premise that the latter have not simply “usurped the place of cinema” but have made thinking of “film as past” possible.8 More importantly, it translates in Lewis’s decision to partially discard the plot-and-character narrative so as to develop what he calls a “part cinema.”9 This means that, at least until 2011, he will isolate and explore the conventions and inventions of film as what remains of film as it is becoming historical: opening credits sequences (Two Impossible Films, 1995); ending sequences (A Sense of the End, 1996); extras (The Pitch, 1998); the traveling shot; the pan; the tilt; the zoom; the focus; rear-projection (Rear Projection: Molly Parker, 2006, among others); axis rotation (Harper Road, 2003); the turning of the image upside down (Upside Down Touch of Evil, 1997); the passage of black and white to color (5262 Washington Boulevard, 2008); the split-screen (Prater Hauptallee: Dawn and Dusk, 2008). By making these conventions exist in their own right, he explores their potential—their capacity to produce something new. He injects futurity to these quasiremnants, refusing the melancholic attachment to film as a lost practice.

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(2) Since 2000, Lewis has adopted the Lumière brothers’ tradition of vues or actualities (vignettes of everyday life lasting the length of a roll of film), producing single takes without sound which are shot in real time and whose length is determined by the length of a single roll of 35 mm film (an average of 4 minutes). This method brings his films closer to the origins of cinema and further away from its Hollywood evolution; it minimizes narrative development; it also maintains film’s capacity to register contingent events, an upholding that supports the only belief in film preserved by Lewis—its “magic” capacity of détournement of the filmmaker’s initial intention, in the Situationist sense of a derailment, whereby the film takes on a new meaning following the insertion of unexpected forms, figures or extras.10 The fleeting, real/ghostly, unforeseeable emergence of the nude in Spadina might be seen as practicing such a détournement, crystallizing as it does the disconnecting natureculture drama unfolding around it. (3) Film is investigated in its intermediality, as a media situated between the photographic and the videographic, between the pictorial and the digital, mainly to counter and renew the cinematic passage of time specific to what film theorist Mary Ann Doane has designated as “the temporality of the apparatus itself—linear, irreversible, ‘mechanical’.”11 Hence, although Lewis is searching for the conventions and techniques which are specific to film and is giving them autonomy, he situates the evolution of film in relation to painting, photography and new media, trying to figure out how film evolved in relation to these; trying to explore the different media haunting cinema that cinema nevertheless works to conceal; especially trying to temporalize these medialities in relation to each other and to influence the spectator’s viewing through this very temporalization. (4) Lewis thus explores film’s relationship to its historical antecedent and celluloid structural unit: photography. This means that he will not hesitate to explore the photographic dimension of film whose stillness is usually rebuffed by the cinematic deployment of the photograms at a rhythm of 24 or 25 images per second. He is more specifically interested in photography’s temporal positioning of its referent as what Roland Barthes designated as “that-has-been,” as what “has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred.”12 Photographic immobility becomes the modality by which a building, object or site is conveyed in its death-like pastness, as well as the modality by which film will declare its own “already dead”13 yet persisting status. (5) He equally turns film into a pictorial observation of the everyday by producing images which are stilled—in this case not following the

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aesthetics of the photographic freeze, but following the motionlessness of the pictorial surface. Pictorial stillness resides in the physical fact that a painting “is more or less the same now in its absolute material form as it was five minutes before and will be in five years to come.”14 As Lewis states, “When you look at a painting, you can really be struck by the brute fact of this unchangingness, and that the image holds itself unchanged durationally.”15 The pictorial turns filmic conventions into optical moments which convey a sense of duration to the single-take shot. This is a modality by which our perception of the single take is made more attentive, in moments when the camera holds the image without denying its motion. To achieve such a dimension is one of Lewis’s main thrusts as a film practitioner (“I am […] interested in […] making work that is about opticality and the legibility of duration, how one registers time in a work of art.”16). This infiltration of the pictorial is made to counter Lewis’s main disappointment with film, which “began with the realization, that no matter what one did, the images of a film were always profoundly disappearing, escaping into the past.”17 As it pictorially holds a shot, it discloses the tensions between photographic freeze and filmic movement. (6) The 35 mm (occasionally 16 mm) films are transferred to DVD and HD to allow for digital post-production editing and looped display. Since 2008, Lewis films increasingly with HD and 4K resolution digital technology, a technology which has structurally embedded into the camera two options of photographic stillness and filmic movement.18 Digital post-production provides the possibility of adding and subtracting frames, and of creating slow dissolves. It is often explored to create a variety of détournement effects. (7) The Quattrocento perspectival tradition manifests itself strongly in Lewis’s film compositions, namely perspective’s spatial unification of the foreground, the middle ground, and the background following the orthogonals’ progressive convergence at the vanishing point. Lewis explores the limits of that tradition: the fact, for example, that such a tradition never succeeds in fully blending these grounds into one another and that costruzione legittima—as Hubert Damisch’s study of the representation of clouds in early modern painting has shown19— excludes the celestial realm from its perspectival grid. This allows him to produce film images whose recorded spacetime is disconnected from within—made out of foregrounds, middle grounds, and backgrounds that coexist but do not spatially or temporally connect (Spadina’s tree, building, and sky), caught as they are in modernism’s failure to properly convey a sense of connectedness to the inhabitant. This layering is

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complex: it frequently sets about a space/time disjuncture in which a singular space sustains two or more discontinuous temporalities. It may also be explored to produce singular juxtapositions of different spatiotemporalities. And (8) the filmworks are shown in gallery and museum spaces instead of cinema theaters. These art settings not only discourage the viewing of film as narrative, but also favor aesthetic judgments based on experiences of the sensible detached from what Jacques Rancière calls destination (messages, representative functions, a definite public). Lewis: “The enlightenment idea of the museum is still so important. It presumes the absolute sovereignty of the spectator in his or her disinterested attempt to re-make the work. I would like the viewing of my works to approximate as closely as possible the conditions of looking at painting or photography or any other high art. […] You can walk in and out of the space whenever you want; there are no seats, benches or beanbags; you can sit on the floor […] and it’s not imposed by the work itself or its place of viewing.”20 This brief description indicates how the passage of time is both a filmic reality that Lewis’s filmworks are set out to decelerate and a historical reality that the works address by representing a failed architectural past that still survives today, an architecture emptied of its initial modernist thrust yet part of our present. On the one hand, the past unfolds too quickly, which means that it must be slowed down. This corresponds to Lewis’s reiterated pictorial attempt to offset the disappearance of filmic images into the past, coming from the irreversible movement of the apparatus. On the other hand, the films speak to a historical reality (modernity) by concentrating on the recent past not quite passed (film and modernist architecture) as what begins to remain from the past and might be potentialized in the present. They thus share with the “unproductive” stream of the temporal turn the same temporal assessment: the past (the unproductive act, failed modernism) must be somehow brought in the present anew; and the future must somehow be made to emerge (as much as this is possible) from the past made present. This reconnection is necessary if one is to counter unsatisfying deployments of the future that support the promotion of modernization as an always eclipsing vanishing point or as a form of constant overtaking of the ruins it irremediably creates. The filmworks also share a preoccupation with perception: if the modern (futuristic) regime of historicity is to be transformed into a presentifying regime by a weakening of the forwardness of the optical logic of perspective, this transformation also requires that the “now”

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of the present-ness of events be perceptually extended to integrate pastness and futurity. But—and this is the main claim of this chapter—the filmworks differ from the “unproductive” stream, or more precisely find their uniqueness on two accounts. First, they insist on the need to attend to the past that survives in the present so as to think about how the present can make the remnant or quasi-remnant significant. Potentiality is a pivotal temporalizing modality here, a historicity, one that the chapter sets out to define. Second, the filmworks question and reorient the historical time of modernity by intermediatizing the image, an aesthetic procedure which in turn intertemporalizes the spectator’s perception, so that perception may be part of the process by which potentiality unfolds. The filmworks persistently disclose that there is no potentialization of the modernist remnant without an ecology of perception, an ecology that the films activate through intermediality/intertemporality. These two “inter” concepts are awkward but necessary terminologies: they expose how much Lewis’s films partake of an aesthetics of interdependency, interconnectedness, intervallic discontinuities—an aesthetics that unfolds as a fragile equilibrium between the stillness and the movement of the image, between the continuity and the discontinuity of the frames. The notion of intertemporality is meant to suggest that Lewis’s intermedia exploration of the filmic image is fundamentally temporal and perceptual. It sustains a sophisticated phenomenology of perception (involving impression, retention and protention) that this chapter also sets out to define. Film interacts with the photographic, the pictorial and the filmic to confront the temporalities particular to each of these media: the freeze (the photographic dimension), stillness (the pictorial dimension), and movement (the filmic dimension). These different temporalities are made to coexist in the single take, and it is these interacting temporalities that pulsate our perception—slowing it down, freezing it, speeding it up again, moving it from one interval to another, soliciting it but also leaving it to its own rhythm, to its own blindnesses and distractions. Their interdependence creates moments of temporal passing that struggle to connect the now with the just-passed and the just-coming, but also systematically discontinue these holding moments of continuous connectedness. Our perceptual consciousness is systematically solicited in these works. This solicitation is the films’ raison d’être. Considering these features, the chapter argues that the passage of time in Lewis’s filmworks unfolds as an extended “becoming present

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of recent past events and then their becoming future.” Extendedness is the modality by which modern historicity is presentified: it extends the present of the image of the modernist remains so that it may include the just passing and the just coming images, retaining the passing images of the modernist remains in the visual field and allowing the coming images of modernist remains to enter that visual field. The chapter’s main claim is that, in Lewis’s aesthetics, it is essentially film’s intertemporal solicitation of the spectator’s perception that potentializes the modernist quasi-remnant (insofar as modernism is a recent past which is still imperceptibly part of our lives, it is not stricto sensus a remnant, a trace of the past as past). Lewis’s filmography is a unique contributor to philosophical inquiries on potentialization—the operation by which a latent capacity for change and growth is conveyed to an object or a subject. The uniqueness of this filmography comes from its insistence on film’s ability to craft a visual field uneventful enough to introduce the viewer to a phenomenology of perception—to a temporal passing—that connects, following a discontinuous/continuous evolution, the now, the just-passing and the just-going. This phenomenology of perception can never make the spectator but surely does allow the spectator to attend to remains, collaborate to the remaining, and co-potentialize the modernist quasi-remnant. Film does not potentialize modernism by itself; it creates conditions of perception that engage the spectator in that process. As the chapter will show, this engagement, although never guaranteed and always fallible, is a necessary engagement. Why? Because the underlying impulse of Lewis’s aesthetics is not to make films that remember modernist architecture by recording it. Rather, it is (let us follow Agamben here) “to remain faithful to that which having perpetually been forgotten, must remain unforgettable.”21 Film films the recent modernist past—a recent past which has already been forgotten or is just about to be forgotten—with the understanding that this recent past “demands [esige] to remain with us and be possible for us in some manner.”22 In film, there is no potentialization without this accompanying and perspectival view, without a viewer perceiving. I want to show that the phenomenology of perception shaped by the intermediality of the films meets the demand of modernism to remain in a different capacity. To demonstrate this claim, the chapter will first provide a general view of the modernist legacy which is so central to Lewis’s filmworks. It will then examine Lewis’s exploration of intermediality and intertemporality as pivotal aesthetical procedures by which a unique phenomenology of perception is set about to temporalize the image and

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our perception of the image. It will finally attend to the specifics of this phenomenology: the Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness it both prolongs and substantially redefines; the contemporary hypersolicitation of attention it works to offset; the presentifying processes it enables; as well as the potentiality it sometimes actualizes.

Modernism Not as Ruin but as a Quasi-remnant I adopt here Christopher Wilk’s definition of modernism as a movement that cannot be singularly defined (modernism has after all taken different forms in different countries at different times) but whose diverse manifestations share a similar concern for “formal innovation, a self-conscious desire to create something new, and a tendency towards abstraction,”23 as well as a utopian engagement with the social. In the realm of design, as initially developed in the interwar years, modernism may be said to entail: “an espousal of the new and, often, an equally veracious rejection of history and tradition; a utopian desire to create a better world, to reinvent the world from scratch; an almost messianic belief in the power and potential of the machine and industrial technology; a rejection of applied ornament and decoration; an embrace of abstraction; and a belief in the unity of the arts—that is, an acceptance that traditional hierarchies that separated the practices of art and design, as well as those that detached the arts from life, were unsuitable for a new era. All of these principles were frequently combined with social and political beliefs (largely left-leaning) which held that design and art could, and should, transform society.”24 These beliefs and utopianisms were partly formulated in reaction to the traumas of the World War I, for it was only in the 1930s that modernism properly became a style (an international style, confirmed as such by the Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 Modern Architecture exhibition) characterized by innovative design most often based on rectilinear geometry and the use of industrial materials.25 In this initial phase, modernism engaged critically with modernity as it attempted to provide a variety of solutions to modernization and to offer housing for larger segments of the population. It searched for designs and new technologies that could materialize ideals of democracy in the living environment. To say, however, that modernism is becoming historical but that we live with its heritage—that our built environment is still significantly conditioned by modernism—is to affirm that its promises were

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not quite fulfilled. At least since the 1960s, through the publication of pivotal books including Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961); Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Modern Architecture (1966); and David Watkin’s Morality and Architecture (1977), postmodernist criticism has proclaimed modernism’s failure by denouncing its three main deficiencies: its rupturing with tradition, a rupture which has consistently widened the gap between past and future architectural forms; its blind embrace of technology as a means to improve the world and resolve social injustice—especially in the postwar context where “poorly designed and built concrete towers […] were urgently needed to rehouse the population after the Second World War”; and its configuration—through centralized forms of governance— of large scale schemes for built environments.26 Watkin, in the preface of the 2001 re-edition of his book, emphasizes how the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, namely in England where most of the buildings filmed by Lewis are located, adopted an architectural approach dependent on Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin of 1925 which proposed to destroy and replace a specific historical area of central Paris by a grid of 18 high-rise towerblocks. “After the Second World War,” writes Watkin, “this alarming model was put into practice in towns and cities throughout the world in new buildings which, taking the place of old terraced houses in Britain, were designed with total lack of attention to their environment, to traditional forms, materials, or patterns of living.”27 What Watkin mainly denounces here is how urban planning was motivated by a philosophy of the “frankly modern” and the “blind worship of the new” that necessitated the destruction of the past to implement a rationalized setting for urban inhabitants.28 In line with Watkin’s argument, Robert Venturi condemned modernist architecture’s “attempt to break with tradition and start all over again”; he also condemned modernism’s “rationalizations for simplification,” its separation of “structure from shelter,” as well as its puritanical advocating of “the separation and exclusion of elements, rather than the inclusion of various requirements and their juxtaposition.”29 For Venturi, the modernist architectural language of simplicity, based on Mies van der Rohe’s principle of “less is more,” was highly inadequate because of its endemic separation “from the experience of life and the needs of society” and eschewal of “the real complexity and contradiction inherent to the domestic program—the spatial and technological possibilities as well as the need for variety in visual experience.”30 Deploring the “less is more,” he criticized modernist architecture as a “less is bore” so as to defend a form of

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hybrid architecture that could reflect the tensions and ambiguities of contemporary visual perception and experience—an architecture of “both-and” rather than “either-or.”31 In short, as architectural historian Anthony Vidler summarizes, modernism has been criticized for favoring abstraction over history and humanism: “its functional promises and technological fetishism were nothing but failed utopias of progress; its ideology was out of touch with the people, if not antihumanistic. Its formal vocabularies were sterile and uncommunicative.”32 In their refutation of modernism, postmodernist architects have thought to counteract the modernist legacy by welcoming history and humanism back, and by plainly abandoning functionalism. Yet, Vidler’s study of the historical approaches of modernist historians and theoreticians makes the convincing point that modernism never rejected history: on the contrary, it might be said that it respected it too much. By affirming the need to cut with the past, it “in fact understood history as a fundamental force, an engine of the social world,” believing that the movement of history (viewed in Hegelian or Marxist terms, according to a transcendentalist or dialectical perspective) “might be anticipated, its force applied to new and anticipated ends.”33 Likewise, postmodernism’s alleged embrace of history must also be nuanced insofar that its tendency to simply restore classical styles and juxtapose architectural styles from different periods are not without flattening out the peculiarities of historical styles. What might be saved from modernism is precisely its thinking of history as “an active and profoundly disturbing force.”34 Vidler’s critique of postmodernism and his postulation that some aspects of modernism can still be useful sustain Lewis’s films which attend but also attempt to potentialize the decay, deterioration, critical state of abandonment, and dysfunctionality of modernist buildings, architectural complexes, and urban sites that are part of the everyday. On the one hand, the films make manifest the disconnection between the building and their immediate environment, as already seen in Spadina: Reverse Dolly, Zoom, Nude, as well as between the building and their occupants as significantly manifest in Rear Projection: Molly Parker (2006) and Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night, Skating (2009) (Figure 3.3), where human bodies cannot be fully anchored in the site they occupy. Yet, while this disconnection is manifest, occupants go about their daily life. The critique of modernism is never simply a rejection of it, confronted as it systematically is in Lewis’s work, with the everyday, what Stephen Johnstone has called “the vast reservoir of normally unnoticed,

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trivial and repetitive actions comprising the common ground of daily life”—a reservoir that social theory and contemporary art have brought to the fore since the mid-1940s, following a growing desire “to bring […] uneventful and overlooked aspects of lived experience into visibility.”35 Indeed, although the decaying structures of modernist buildings as well as their disconnection with their environment are exposed, the filmworks disclose how the uneventful everyday experience still unfolds. In the Situationist paradigm, displaying the everyday is a modality by which what Georges Perec designated as “the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual,” are made noticeable through art.36 Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists believed in the possible redemption of the everyday. They perceived the everyday to be an ambiguous space—a site of alienation and creativity, homogeneity and heterogeneity, docile conformity to and disruption of repressive routine, where routine and habits could be radically transformed into the uncanny, the strange, the new. Many observers have exposed how the Situationist call for defamiliarization and estrangement most often ended up reinstating the divide between the everyday and history. Neo-Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík has more precisely affirmed that “[w]hile the everyday appears as confidence, familiarity, proximity, as ‘home’, History appears as the derailment, the disruption of the everyday, as the exceptional and the strange. This cleavage simultaneously splits reality into the historicity of History and the ahistoricity of the everyday. History changes, the everyday remains.”37 In synchronicity with recent literature which in fact insists on the benefits of routine for psychological development, problem-solving, even inventiveness and effective socio-political action,38 Lewis’s filmworks propose an everyday in which the cleavage between routine and history, repetition and change is significantly dissolved. If derailment is possible, it is not necessarily to the detriment of habit, routine and everydayness. For, even in the restrained spaces recorded by the films, human bodies are active: they stand, look, play, walk, and cycle. In The Lawson Estate (2003) and Downtown Tilt, Zoom and Pan (2005), the urban sites spread out through a triad deployment of a foreground, a middle ground, and a background that simply fail to connect; and in North Circular (2000) a grid-structure industrial building sits in the middle of an empty parking lot, surrounded by urban roads. Yet, and this is indicative of Lewis’s take on failed modernism, these sites never articulate the absence of life or the inability of the inhabitants to engage with failure and negotiate a place for living. A young woman with a baby carriage appears unexpectedly

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Figure 3.3   Mark Lewis, Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night, Skating, 2009. 35 mm and 4K film transferred to 2K and 35 mm, color, no sound, 4 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

in the frame and walks down the middle diagonal lane of The Lawson Estate, while a man mows grass in the background and the shadows of construction workers move in the left foreground. Young teenagers can be seen hanging out in the North Circular building. The concern for inhabitability becomes fully explicit in Cold Morning (2009), which films the urban shelter of a homeless man organizing his precarious life space. The same must be said about the Heygate Estate works (2002–3). Heygate Estate is a large housing development in south-east London that was completed in 1974, presently in the process of demolition. Both filmworks concentrate on sections of the development, filming the warn-down buildings and surrounding environment. But children are shown playing in these environments. Tenement Yard, Heygate Estate proposes a static 4 minutes single-take of children carrying out a football game in the yard of the housing blocks (Figure 3.4). The fixity of the site is counterbalanced not only by the movement of the children but also by the activity occurring on the balconies of the buildings (the movement of clothes hanging out to dry and the walk of inhabitants transporting a mattress). Children’s Games, Heygate Estate proposes an uninterrupted 7:21 min traveling shot in which a camera mounted on a rickshaw dolly moves along the above-ground walkway crossing the estate. Although

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Figure 3.4   Mark Lewis, Tenement Yard, Heygate Estate, 2002. Super 35 mm film transferred to DVD, color, no sound, 4 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

the tower blocks take up most of the frame and the walkway is deserted, human action unfolds at the periphery: children from different cultural backgrounds play a variety of games (cycling, roller skating, football, and badminton), filling “the marginal spaces of the brutalist architecture with lively activity.”39 Let us be clear here: these films are not about the human capacity to adapt to failed environments but about film’s capacity to capture the persisting interaction between inhabitability and modernism, to make them connect anew; to capture not only architecture’s potential but also the potential of inhabitants who are sometimes active but also sometimes (as the nude in Spadina, for example) just about as reified as the architecture that sustains them. The requirement is to “engage with” the failure of recent modernism.40 In a pivotal text responding to T. J. Clark’s book, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), in which the art historian claims that modernism is

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now drastically past (“already the modernist past is a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp. This has not happened, in my view, because we have entered a new age. […] On the contrary, it is just because the ‘modernity’ which modernism prophesied has finally arrived that the forms of representation it originally gave rise to are now unreadable. […] Modernism is our antiquity, in other words; the only one we have”41), Lewis speaks of the necessity to consider modernism not only in its pastness, but also in its relation to the future. The engagement with the past is a difficult task insofar as we can only observe modernism from a present which is not the past’s present: as we come to acknowledge that “high-modernist forms have become historical ones,” we realize that “we can no longer fully identify with them, as they belong to a different time, to a different knowledge, and finally, of course, to a different ambition.”42 In this statement, Lewis raises the problem formulated elsewhere by Damisch, to the effect that when we look at past artistic or architectural productions we can only do so through a visual perception that belongs to our time.43 The historical gap between then and now is never fully resolvable. Lewis’s answer to the problem of historical distance is to propose an observational practice that keeps modernism alive as not fully historical but just about to pass: if one observes any modernist building, it is difficult to know what it really wanted but one must, in order to proceed “acknowledge that it might just continue ‘wanting.’”44 As such, Lewis contests Clark’s standpoint according to which modernism—as an aesthetics that critically kept modernity at bay and injected modernization with utopian prospects—has ceased to be operative. His main objective is to “engage with the failure” of modernist architecture “as an unexpected development that in turn might produce new and unexpected forms.”45 This means that Lewis wants to potentialize modernism’s critical embrace of modernity’s drive for “change, transformation and possibility.”46 In this chapter, our question will therefore be: what does it mean—in the actual filmworks—to potentialize modernism?

The (inter)Temporality of Film To reiterate this chapter’s main claim: it is through the extended single-take, whose intermediality combines film, photography, painting, architecture, and electronic and digital media as enactments of different temporalities, that a presentifying regime of historicity (potentiality) is

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set about. Potentiality must be thought out within the intertemporalities of that intermediality. The various media temporalities are defined by and experienced through their specific capacity to convey or not to convey movement, a set of specificities that are not so much media than intermedia derived—informed by the historical evolution of each media in relation to each other, as well as by the ways in which the different media temporalities are made to interact with one another in the filmworks. Historically speaking, film becomes film not only because of its technological properties, but because it is a reaction to photography and painting. In turn, film influenced the development of painting; and digital media infiltrated film. Lewis’s filmworks bring together the freeze (the photographic), the still (the pictorial), and movement (the filmic). They more specifically combine media temporalities. They make them coexist in a movement/stillness tension to prevent the incessant disappearance of the filmic images into the past. They strive to hold the image as much as possible. I. The photographic Lewis conveys a photographic dimension to the built environments to enforce their near-death stance. The films activate this by letting the photographic foundation of analogue film resurface, despite film’s effort “to remove the strange deathliness of the single photograph by artificially bringing the dead back to life.”47 For Barthes, the “that-has-been” feature of photography comes from photography’s relationship to its indexical reference—the fact that the photographed subject or object was present at the moment of the photographic shot but frozen into an absolute past by that very shot. Confirming the Barthesian approach, Peter Wollen states that “photographs appear as devices for stopping time.”48 This freezing of the passage of time is exactly what Lewis’s films release with varied intensity. It reaches its highest intensity when the camera is static and the captured built environment is particularly immobile. Once the past is exposed as lifeless, the camera has freedom to turn away and explore other aspects of the depicted scene. Unfailingly, however, the photographic is always deployed in relation to the filmic succession of images, which suggests movement. This coexistence allows the simultaneity of opposite (media defined) temporalities to work both against each other and for each other, guiding our perception of the single-take in that very oscillation.

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Let us look briefly at a few works to see how this relation proceeds. The photographic treatment of the image is appreciably at play in North Circular; Queensway: Pan and Zoom; Downtown Tilt, Zoom and Pan; and Willesden Laundrette: Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday Prayers. In all of these works, the single-take starts with a static view of the scene conveyed by an immobilized camera. North Circular (2000), a 4 min 35 mm CinemaScope film, begins with the image of an abandoned industrial building slated for demolition, located in one of London’s suburban no man’s lands (Figure 3.5). For more than 1 minute, the immobilized camera frames a panoramic view of the modular structure, conveying it as a frozen photographic scene. A variety of aesthetic decisions are combined to make sure that the photographic effect persists: the distance between the camera and the edifice which makes the activity of the latter difficult to perceive: the generalized absence of life surrounding the building; the abandoned state of that building; the absence of sound; and the immobilized frame. It persists, however, within movement—namely, the movement of the teenagers on the second floor and of flying birds. As viewers, we are caught in the tension of freeze and flux, death and life, perceptually negotiating our way into the (im)mobilized image. Likewise, Queensway: Pan and Zoom (2005), a 3:05 min super 35 mm film, proposes three static views, each of them about 1-minute long (Figure 3.6). The views are conveyed by a camera which reiteratedly immobilizes itself to frame each scene. The recorded site is made of two adjacent warned down brick apartment blocks, surrounded by roads and electric poles, located on the other side of a patch of lawn full of detritus. The site is filmed on a grey day or at dawn or dusk, when natural light has not yet fully emerged or has nearly abandoned the environment. An initial take provides a more distant view of the site: it frames a barely legible woman rummaging through her bag, next to one of the buildings. The scene is suddenly interrupted by the pan movement of the camera towards the right, which gives us a second outlook: a closer view of the other building where one can see (but again only schematically) a woman sitting outside the entrance. This scene will also be cut short by the sudden activation of the zoom which provides a close-up view of one of the building’s windows, through which we can see curtains and a hanging piece of clothing (Figure 3.7). Crucial here is how the immobilized camera and the quasi-absence of movement in each view let the photographic dimension of the filmic image emerge despite and within the filmic dimension of the piece. Slight movements—all of which are related to human life—do occur, but tend to be identified with a slight

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Figure 3.5   Mark Lewis, North Circular, 2000. 35 mm cinemascope film transferred to 2K, color, no sound, 4 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

Figure 3.6   Mark Lewis, Queensway: Pan and Zoom, 2005. Super 35 mm film transferred to DVD, color, no sound, 3:05 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

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Figure 3.7   Mark Lewis, Queensway: Pan and Zoom, 2005. Super 35 mm film transferred to DVD, color, no sound, 3:05 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

delay, coming from and always threatened to fall back again to a frozen state, as though they were themselves made (like the buildings) of some inert material. The same must be said about the first close-up framing of a muddy patch of soiled land in Downtown: Tilt, Zoom and Pan, a 4:28 min super 35 mm film from 2005 (Figure 3.8): for about 30 seconds, the static camera frames the quasi-motionless grubby ground, partially covered with detritus (used pipes, an empty plastic bottle, a paper cup) and contaminated water. The only movement comes from the grass patch on the left, whose tips gently oscillate under the impact of the wind. Soon, the framed immobilized view will be enlarged to allow for larger immobilized views of the industrial wasteland which heavily contrasts with the postcard view of the cityscape of Toronto unfolding in the background. This first frame conveys a photographic effect that brings the filmed environment to a death state (modernism has failed, it is

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past, it has become historical, we nonetheless still live within its legacy). Even when we perceive movement, stasis is occasionally stronger than movement, and our tendency is to follow that death drive. Yet, and this is the persisting paradox, the photographic process never wins: despite the deteriorated environment and the freeze, life still manages to manifest itself. This is the very aesthetics that sustains the initial view of the dryers and the second view of the man looking out of the window of a launderette proposed by Willesden Laundrette; Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday Prayers (2010). The dryers’ wall frame appears frozen but the dryers are engaged in their monotonous circular motion (Figure 3.9). As for the man, he stands motionless, his face glued to the window, but his immobility is eventually upset by a reflexive eye blink. The function of this aesthetics is double: (1) it is to indicate the pastness of the built environment while preventing the turning of that environment into pure past, into pure disaffection, into pure (unredeemable) waste; and (2) it is occasionally to confer a death-like stance to its inhabitants

Figure 3.8   Mark Lewis, Downtown: Tilt, Zoom and Pan, 2005. Super 35 mm film transferred to high definition, color, no sound, 4:28 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

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Figure 3.9   Mark Lewis, Willesden Laundrette; Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday Prayers, 2010. 4K digital film transferred to 2K, color, no sound, 4:40 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

while preventing the turning of these beings into lifeless extras. The photographic is coming to the rescue of the filmic to perform a specific contemporary temporality: a temporal passing that evolves in a constant freeze/motion tension—a flow of becoming made of radical micro-discontinuities. II. The pictorial In 2001 and 2002, Lewis temporarily moved away from the representation of urban sites to produce two films of Algonquin Park, a protected provincial park located in Ontario, Canada. These works allowed him to experiment with the pictorial development of film, focusing as it did on a specific twentieth-century tradition of painting initiated by the Group of Seven, a group of Canadian landscape painters famous for their paintings of what was to become—through their iconography—the “Canadianness” of Canadian landscape. Their work not only stylized the Algonquin Park, the park also became emblematic of the group, especially through the figure of one of its main painters, Tom Thomson, who worked there as a guide and actually died there while canoeing. Algonquin Park was and still is an emblem of the “Canadian” wild, allegedly (yet falsely) unoccupied, landscape. More importantly, it is

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tightly tied to the pictorial: a dimension explored by Lewis to still the filmic image. In the second version, the 35 mm film Algonquin Park, Early March (2002), the first minute provides an apparently immobile image of an expanse of soft blue, what appears to be an empty sky. The spectator cannot notice the reversing zoom because of the constancy of the blue image. More than a minute after, pine tips appear. The sky as sky is confirmed: it is what is now located in the background, behind the trees. The zoom continues its reverse movement, showing more trees in the foreground. Our reading of the image is vertical: we stand in front of standing trees which echo our own body orientation. The sky is above and behind the trees. The depth of the visual field is close to the surface, accentuating verticality. This vertical reading, however, is abruptly disrupted as the edge of a piece of land emerges on the upper right corner of the frame. The piece of land confirms itself as a shore, located on the other side of a frozen lake. In other words, the sky was never a sky but a lake. The zoom continues its slow reverse movement, now making visible a skating rink with skaters, as well as a moving snowmobile. In these moments, a horizontal reading of the field completely replaces the vertical reading; depth has significantly expanded to make room for a middle ground—the frozen lake—where human life manifests itself. Referring explicitly to this second version, Lewis had this to say about its pictoriality: “For me Algonquin Park, Early March is a film that articulates the desire for a film to become a picture, but because the film is constantly caught revealing something, it fails to hold the attention necessary for it to achieve that pictorial state (how can you look at something properly when you are continually waiting to see what’s going to happen next?).”49 Although, for Lewis, the Algonquin film strives but fails to become fully pictorial because of its revelatory process, its pictorial dimension occurs when the image is able to “hold” the spectator’s “attention.” What would the Algonquin film be if it was removed of its revelatory dynamics? It would not reveal images for the spectator. It would provide “still” conditions to allow the spectator to access herself the barely perceptible in the shot. It would activate a phenomenology of perception less narratively inclined and more structurally active. This is what his filmworks will set out to do from then on. The thrust to make pictorial films is articulated multivalently. It corresponds to a return to the origins of cinema, especially the Lumières’ actualities tradition—a cinematography that takes its pictoriality from its ability “to depict time and movement without actually moving itself.”50 As suggested above, it also corresponds to a filmic attempt to embrace the

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“unchangingness” proper to the pictorial surface (the relative stability of its materiality in time).51 Lewis insists on this specific complexity: his filmworks are an engagement with film’s inability to be “more or less the same now in its absolute material form as it was five minutes before […].”52 Finally, it corresponds to a processing of the filmic image as an attentional prosthesis, one that is facilitated by the “unchangingness” of painting. North Circular is emblematic of this processing. When the camera approaches the building, it catches a small group of teenagers. Through the windows of the second floor, one of the young boys puts a top spin on a table and activates it; he looks at it for a while but then leaves it spinning; the spin starts to wobble; the film ends as the wobbling is about to stop. Iconographically, this scene refers to Chardin’s Portrait of the Son of M. Godefroy, Jeweller, Watching a Top Spin (1738), in which a young boy is absorbed by the spinning-top’s equilibrium performance, as well as Michael Fried’s reading of Chardin’s genre paintings as a manifestation of Enlightenment’s staging and valorization of the act of absorption. In an article co-written with Charles Esche, Lewis describes the Chardin painting as a site of “absolute absorption,” but he also establishes that the young boy’s attention favors a sense of duration which ends when attention inevitably shifts into distraction: We imagine that eventually, quite soon in fact, the top will lose its perfect poise and begin a wider and wider arc of movement and start to falter and then fall on its side or off the table on the floor. This sense of duration, of the sense of absorption and its imminent termination, is a feature of so many of Chardin’s genre paintings. […] We witness a quiet moment of absorptive contemplation, the suggestion of an interior world of seemingly little representational consequence—except perhaps to suggest that these moments exist […] ‘out there’ and which compel the boy to return, they beckon; they demand that banal moments such as these cede eventually to theatre. Put simply, in order to sustain our attention, something has to happen. This imminent end or return reminds us that attention of this sort (the attention of the boy and that of the spectator) is always subtended by distraction; absorption leads necessarily to the impossibility of sustaining absorption.53 Jonathan Crary, in his study of the nineteenth-century conceptualization and representation of attention as a “fluctuating membrane,” is not without confirming Lewis’s account of the attention/distraction

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continuum. In his first case study—Manet’s The Balcony (1868)—he explains how the balcony, which is occupied by three figures, articulates a threshold “not just between the balcony and the world but between an attentiveness seeking to grasp and inhabit the palpable immediacy of a modernized present and the dissolution of that attentiveness into an unbounded self-absorption.”54 Following Crary’s analysis, modernity must be seen as the era in which attention is not only solicited from the subject but also complicated by its leaning towards and eventual cancelation into distraction. In reference to Willesden Laundrette; Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday Prayers, Lewis thus concludes: “You have to hold something long enough so that it can reveal something about itself, but all the time you have to walk the line between revelation and boredom.”55 Holding the image is an imperative but it can never last; it must make room for an interruption and other holdings which will also have to be interrupted to seize the spectator’s attention.

Inter-temporality as a Perceptual Experience It is not so much the combined use of the filmic, the photographic, the pictorial, the digital, and the architectural which is important in Lewis’s production than the intermediality by which he sets the different media up in relation to each other so as to favor the non-modernist temporality par excellence: durationality. Pictorial unchangingness is a form of stillness that holds the image durationally, between the photographic freezing of the image and the filmic moving of the image, to surpass Lessing’s reduction of painting’s temporality to the pregnant moment. In his analysis of André Bazin’s study of photographic stillness, “The ontology of the photographic image” (1967), Jonathan Friday observes that, for the film critic, the photographic exploration of film does not completely freeze the lived passage of time, and, therefore, does not quite convey the Barthesian death effect of photography. Photography works as a defense mechanism “against the passage of time, the decay and death that is its effect, and the very conditions of existence within relentless becoming,” a mechanism that enables “the phenomenological being of its subject to persist through time without being subject to the mutability of becoming.”56 What cinema provides is the possibility to photographically preserve that being as it filmicly transmits “the movement of its becoming.”57 This standpoint helps to specify Lewis’s filmworks’ intertemporality. Although Bazin is motivated

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by the possibility of using movement to convey becoming to a preserved (recorded) being, Lewis’s filmography relies on too much pastness to completely suppress the Barthesian “that-has-been-ness.” Lewis is motivated not by preservation but by the possibility of slowing down the movement so as to counter the disappearance of images into the 24 images-per-second flow of the apparatus. It is not so much the photographic but the pictorial dimension of the image that operates this deceleration. Moreover, the filmworks integrate conflicting temporalities to guide the spectator’s perception into an attentiveness that exists in an attention/distraction continuum. It is the perceptual trajectory of the viewer in relation to recent pastness (modernism) which is key here. One does not see time. As Le Poidevin puts it, “we do not perceive time as such, but changes or events in time” yet “we do not perceive events only, but also their temporal relations.”58 But as spectators, we are exposed to an intertemporality that works as a prosthesis: this intertemporality is endowed with a “holding” stance that allows us to see the imperceptible—not only what we fail to see in everyday life (the quasiremnants of modernism) but to complete the films’ potentialization of what we fail to see in everyday life. This potentialization is a form of derailment not so much of the everyday than of the filmic images of the everyday. Here are a few key examples of the potentialization effects of intermediality/intertemporality. They show how the suspension of forwardness is a modality by which the modern regime of historicity is reconsidered to make room for modernist remains which become active (transformed and transformative) in the present. Let us consider Airport, a 10:59 min super 35 mm film from 2003 (Figure 3.10). It proposes a single fixed view of an unused airport lounge, filmed 1 year before Terminal 1 of the Toronto Pearson International Airport was taken down to make room for the airport’s extension. The take is mute. Although the lounge is motionless, we see vehicles and planes moving on the runway through its panoramic window structure. The window structure acts as an interface between the frozen (hence more photographic) foreground and the active (hence more filmic) background. Pictorial procedures—the fixity of the camera; the absence of sound; the soft monochromic grayness of the whole, which endows the scene with an ethereal dimension—can be said to envelop the photographic and filmic tensions to provide a sense of duration to the scene, holding our look as it were. Our looking involves a slow dance of retention and pretention to which I will come back further down. Suffice it to say for now that the immobilized view

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of Airport and its repeated viewing (a repetition enabled by the looping device that secures its continuous projection) allow the spectator to see on the runway—although this seeing is far from guaranteed— several ghostly, quasi-imperceptible and radically unforeseeable slow dissolves which appear to be generated by the window intervals: first, an airport baggage trailer; then, other baggage trailers; and eventually, a plane. The useless architecture of the terminal has been potentialized: although a quasi-remnant, it generates new images; unforeseen realities. These images would be imperceptible if not for the film and its crafting of a visual field that solicits our attentiveness. Attention might not occur; it is surely fragile and always difficult to achieve: but if and when it does occur, it contributes to the filmic processing of the modernist environment. Let us, more briefly, consider Bricklayers Arms: Out of Focus, Pan, Eviction, a 4:36 min 4K film from 2008 (Figure 3.11). Here, an out-of-focus camera attempts to get closer to an abandoned modernist building. It turns around, approaches a glassless window which frames another building in the background. It moves backwards to disclose a few cyclists; the camera re-zooms toward the window; stops; stays there; holds the image; focuses. The hold initiates a spatial connection between the window and the blue bicycle panel (the only colored surface of this otherwise grey site). Indeed, in that very moment, the right vertical line of the window aligns itself with the right vertical line framing the bicycle panel. Blue, like the water bottle in Downtown: Tilt, Zoom and Pan and the arrow sign of Roundabout (2007), suspends the overall grayness, letting us imagine a bicycle circulating out the panel and through the window towards the background. The abandoned architecture becomes an imaginary site of circulation and passage, a site of invention and newness. The potentialization of architecture occurs in this very moment of the hold. This is when temporality and historicity meet. Outside the National Gallery (2011) works in similar ways: as the fixed camera films one of the concrete walls of the gallery and gives us a glimpse of passersby utterly indifferent to that wall, it shows—reflected on that very wall—the shadow of a tree surrounded by flying and pausing birds. The film’s framing of the wall allows the spectator to see what the passersby fail to see: the poetic shadow of a tree. The spectator not only sees this shadow but is perceptually solicited to contribute to the potentialization by which a modernist quasi-remnant is made to act as a surface of reflection. Without film, but also without the remaining wall and without the phenomenology of perception, there is no poetry.

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Figure 3.10   Mark Lewis, Airport, 2003. Super 35 mm film transferred to DVD, color, no sound, 10:59 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

Figure 3.11   Mark Lewis, Bricklayers Arms, 2008. 4K digital film transferred to high definition, color, no sound, 4:36 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

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The Continuous/Discontinuous Extended Image As we stand in front of Lewis’s projections, our perception responds to a set of temporalizing aesthetic strategies that work together to hold our attention but also to abandon it in a state of distraction; fixing it and then releasing it, inciting a close reading of details but also a sudden detachment; reassuring our perception with predictability but subsequently destabilizing it through unpredictability; worrying it and enchanting it. They inscribe our perception in a passage from continuity to discontinuity of what is perceived, without discarding one for the sake of the other, attempting to keep them in a tension. The films consistently solicit perception as an activity, what philosopher Alva Noë has designated as an enacted perception: “Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do. […] The world makes itself available to the perceiver through physical movement and interaction. […] What we perceive is determined by what we do (or what we know how to do); it is determined by what we are ready to do. […] we enact our perceptual experience; we act it out. […] Perception and perceptual consciousness are types of thoughtful, knowledgeable activity.”59 This enacted perception, which makes manifest how much the visible world is never seen all at once “as sharply focused, uniformly detailed, and high-resolution,”60 operates through the constant pulse of our eyes. As we look with and through film, potentialization occurs and modern historicity displaced. The intermedia temporalization of the image does not inscribe itself in a metaphysics of time, as a quest into the reality or non-reality of time as passage. It does not easily fit within the phenomenological assumption formulated by Heidegger and then by Merleau-Ponty that subjectivity is time. There is also no underlying assumption that duration necessarily comes about in our perceptual activity, although duration, as the means by which we can access “the qualitative aspects of temporal experience,”61 is surely what the films attempt to integrate when the camera holds the image at a near standstill. Duration is never taken for granted. On the contrary, the films struggle against the photographic freeze, the reduction of modernism as passed, and the filmic succession of images which activates their constant disappearance. As a countering suspension of forwardness, the hold sets into play a phenomenological description of temporal consciousness that allows the viewer to experience a temporal span through a threefold unfolding of primal impression, retention, and protention. In this phenomenology, the

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just-passing quasi-remnant is presentified: it connects with the now and the just-coming to constitute an extended present. Especially in moments when the camera holds the images for a span of time, the films deploy a temporality which partakes of and reconsiders William James’s “specious present” formulated in The Principles of Psychology (1890) and initially introduced by the psychologist E. R. Clay. James’s specious present underscores the complexity of the present, which is made both of instantaneity and duration. It exposes this complexity by affirming that we perceive durationally. “In short,” he writes, “the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddleback, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration with a bow and a stern, as it were—a rearward- and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it.”62 According to this skeptical formulation of the present, the present is not instantaneous; nor is it simply located between the past and the future as an isolated temporal dimension. It is a duration (“the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible”63) experienced as a continuous flow made of change and persistence. The experienced present takes its “specious” quality from its deployment as an interval; an instant with duration. As neurobiologist Francisco J. Varela stipulates, speciousness is a feature of lived duration: “it creates the space within which mental acts display their temporality.”64 Lewis’s films must be seen as partaking of this quest to extend the present as a perceptual modality by which to retain (even if only temporarily) the image of the modernist quasi-remnant in the present. They stretch the perceived event by connecting the now to the just-passed and the just-coming. It is clear, however, that they inscribe themselves into this phenomenology of temporal passing not merely to reinforce it, but also to disclose how duration must today make room for a discontinuous continuity. Husserl’s presumption of the continuous flow of consciousness is significantly impeded. Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness stems from James’s account of the specious present. Yet, it seeks to move beyond the empirical analysis offered by psychology to develop an approach that discloses the a priori structure of consciousness as intentional (a structure that relies

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on a transcendental, universal faculty as foundation of all experience). As Turetzky specifies, phenomenology is the science of the lived in opposition to the objects of the outside world. As it sets out to describe “only what is imminent to it,” phenomenology brackets out the objective world and relies on intentionality—the positing that consciousness is a consciousness of something, that mental acts (perception, representation, attention, judgment, etc.) are directed toward something—as what structures our lived experience of the world; it affirms that “every intending includes some way in which it is directed toward the intended object.”65 Husserl’s specific phenomenology introduces the problem of the unity of temporal appearances, by concentrating on the connected apprehendings that allow us to experience a temporal span as unified. It asks: how is it possible for human subjects to experience a temporal extent as unified?66 When we hear a melody, a sound that lasts, or an image that unfolds, we cannot experience the duration of that melody, sound, or image if we are only conscious of what is perceptually present in a single moment. A temporal object, such as a melody, keeps its unity despite its differences in content; it does so as the temporal object stretches over a temporal span.67 This unity is ensured by what Husserl describes as the three-layered phenomenon of temporality, in which primal impression, retention, and protention unfold to secure temporal experience not as a succession of discrete, self-contained moments, but as a flow of connected moments that reflect previous ones and anticipate later ones.68 As Couzens Hoy suitably points out, in Husserlian phenomenology, it is “because our temporality involves the structure of protention, retention and primal impressions” as a span of connected times, that “we experience ourselves as in time and as having a past, present, and future.”69 The temporal object endures; it extends over a time span. The unified experience of that temporal interval is one in which parts of the span will be apprehended as now, just-passed and justcoming. The temporality of the temporal object is thus paradoxically both a now and a passage, a longitudinal intentionality, a continuum. As such it includes a just-passed and a just-coming, which means that previous and subsequent notes are present to consciousness when the current note is being heard, and that each note is itself enduring (with a beginning, a middle, and an end): “If we hear a bit of a melody,” writes Husserl, “we do not hear merely single tones, even less moments of single tones or mathematical tone-nows, matching the now-points that could be abstracted in thought. We rather hear enduring tones— specifically, tones combining into a tone-formation; and we grasp this

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whole tone-formation as a formation that is steadily building up and as that which is heard.”70 Advocating the intentionality of consciousness, Husserl relies on a “transcendental machinery” to unify duration: this machinery is the flow of consciousness understood as constituting its own unity for everything (including temporal objects) appearing in experience.71 The role of retention is crucial here: it intends the past. In contrast to recollection which represents the past, retention presents the past.72 As we will see, retention is particularly pivotal to Lewis’s filmworks whose intermediality favors a phenomenology of perception that acts to retain the just-going in the present. In Husserlian phenomenology, it has a special mode of intending directed toward the tone as just passing, different from impression, reverberation, afterimage, recollection, representation, and memory. It is the modality by which the past is present to consciousness. Philosopher James Mensch specifies that a retention “is a consciousness of the dying away, the sinking down of what we impressionally experience.”73 In retention, we hear or see a sound or an image as just-passed because it is retained. It is not that retention retains the sound or the image in present consciousness (there is no simultaneity between retention and what is retained); it is not that the just-passed image stays present in consciousness as a reverberation; it is that the just-passed image is presented to consciousness as just-passed: it presents what is absent. It gives us a direct apprehending of the justpassed. Turetzky specifies: “retention holds in consciousness, as just passed, what has been constituted in impressional consciousness,” while recollection or secondary retention—an operation in which retentions are represented—“reproduces intentional objects that endure through a continuum of retentions.”74 In recent years, there have been several attempts to incorporate Husserl’s insights—especially his conceptualization of the function of retention—into neurobiology and cognitive science, notably in the work of Francisco Varela, Tim van Gelder, Dan Lloyd, and Rick Grush. The scientific program of neurophenomenology, primarily developed by Varela, has integrated Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness in its examination of the neural basis of time perception. This ongoing interdisciplinarity is indicative of neuroscience’s belief that it can actually gain from integrating phenomenology into scientific research. As observed by Evan Thompson et al., neurophenomenology’s inventive uniqueness is to address the “explanatory gap” that persists in the understanding of the relation between neurobiological and

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phenomenological features of consciousness.75 Relying on a connectivist understanding of the brain, but approaching it from a dynamical perspective, Varela’s research suggests that the brain regions are reciprocally interconnected: “whatever the neural basis for cognitive tasks turns out to be, it necessarily engages vast and geographically separated regions of the brain” that form neuronal ensembles or cell assemblies (“a distributed subset of neurons with strong reciprocal connections”) interconnecting through reciprocal determination and relaxation time.76 The transient synchronization of neural ensembles is understood as structuring the durational specious present. Varela suggests that there are strong analogies between the dynamic behavior of neural ensembles and Husserl’s tripartite conceptualization of the phenomenal present. The synchronization of neural ensembles, which lasts a few seconds, corresponds to the time it takes for a cognitive act to be completed. It is a synchrony that temporarily holds together within the constraints of transmission times and cognitive frames of a fraction of a second; as an integration-relaxation process, it is a strict correlate of present-time consciousness, which eventually enables broader temporal horizons in remembrance and imagination. Of special relevance to our discussion of Lewis’s work is Varela’s explanation of retention as leaving an “active residue,” which he also designates as “a remnant which is apprehended” that becomes particularly manifest when the initial percepts hover around the stabilized percepts and wander to different positions in space.77 Retention is the attribute of a mental act which retains phases of the same perceptual act. Its key feature is its direct contact with earlier impressions—a contact that makes perception at any given moment a temporally extended cognition act. The fact that Lewis’s films continuously stage modernist quasi-remnants is pivotal in relation to Varela’s definition of temporal perception as composed of a remnant activity. Phenomenology is explored here as a perceptual activity that emphasizes the retentional dimension of the experience of temporal objects—the becoming remnant of impressions; the connection of the remnants with the now and the just-coming; their progressive sliding away of neural synchronizations. It describes a mode of time consciousness that favors retentional acts in which the past weighs on, even overlaps on, the anticipated future (which is both a temporal and a historical category). The holding shots offer a temporal milieu in which temporality may affect historicity: to experience the image as an enduring temporal object through the connection of mental remnants (as the just-passing) with

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the just-coming is to become available to the historical quasi-remnants in the image. The phenomenology that the holding shots sustain creates conditions of possibility for a perception that mentally and historically connects the just-passed with the just-coming. What Lewis’s filmworks keep from this phenomenology is its specific account of the perceptual experience of temporal objects. A temporal span—a duration, an enduring temporal object—is one in which the different temporal phases of the temporal object cease to be understood as discrete units that follow each other untouched. Duration becomes a span where now-images are co-perceived with just-passed and the coming images. These images are distinct but intimately connected; they affect one another. But the filmworks question the phenomenological assumption of temporal continuity. The hold might well connect the now, the just-passing and the just-coming, the temporal passing of the temporal span is made of tensions between the photographic, the pictorial, and the filmic. It sustains a tensional continuity. The temporal spans are also regularly interrupted by aesthetic procedures (including the shift of views resulting from the movement of the camera or zooming operations) that discontinue the hold. This means that the near-endless connectedness of now, just-passing and just-coming phases in the perception of temporal objects described by Husserlian phenomenology is highly problematized while never simply cancelled out. These discontinuities are closer to contemporary psychological findings that increasingly suggest that “the naïve assumption that time is a single, unified experience” must be abandoned.78 As neuroscientist David Eagleman points out, “varied judgments—such as simultaneity, duration, flicker rate, order, and others—are underpinned by separate neural mechanisms that usually work in concert but are increasingly separable in the laboratory—demonstrating that their cooperation is typical but not necessary. The word ‘time’ is currently loaded with too much semantic weight; future experiments will be forced to be more specific about which aspect of time they are exploring.”79 The films’ discontinuous unfolding of continuity also support Gaston Bachelard’s view that duration is made of rhythms, systems of instants, and renewed efforts that work together to enable continuity. Although Bachelard formulated his view in response to Bergsonian (and not Husserlian) duration, it opposes the conceptualization of duration as a pure continuity: “In fact, duration always needs alterity for it to be continuous. Thus, it appears to be continuous through its heterogeneity, and in a domain which is always other than in which we think we are observing

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it.”80 The discontinuous continuity, which is a fundamental feature of Lewis’s filmworks’ phenomenology of perception, is crucial at two levels. First, it is the very filmic condition of possibility of the potentialization of modernism. Second, it is the very filmic condition of possibility of attentive perception for the contemporary viewer. The next two sections will address these two levels of productivity, without which the presentifying of the modern regime of historicity can simply not occur.

Filmic Potentiality: Towards a Post-Analogue Aesthetics of the Interval What does it mean to convey potentiality to modernist quasi-remnants— remnants which are not completely passed? How can film set into play potentiality? What does potentiality as an alternative regime of historicity consist in? Agamben’s conceptualization of the notion is helpful here, for, related as it is to inoperativity, it describes potentiality as both a potential and an impotentiality. Agamben takes his definition from Aristotle, which posits that potentiality is both a potentiality to do and not to do something: “For Aristotle,” he writes, “all potential to be or to do something is always also potential not to do […] without which potentiality would always already have passed into actuality and would be indistinguishable from it […]. The ‘potential not to’ is the cardinal secret of the Aristotelian doctrine of potentiality, which transforms every potentiality in itself into an impotentiality […]. Just as the architect retains his potential to build even when he does not actualize it and just as the kithara player is a kithara player because he can also not play the kithara, so thought exists as a potential to think and not to think, as a wax writing tablet on which nothing is written […].”81 One of the main manifestations of the force of potentiality as impotentiality comes from the stand taken by the copyist Bartleby character from Herman Melville’s novella, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853), who obstinately responds to all requests addressed to him by the narrator: “I would prefer not to.” This repeated formula is not a refusal or an act of will, but the suspensive formula of potentiality par excellence, a formula that “destroys all possibility of constructing a relation between being able and willing, between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata.”82 Potentiality lies both in the possibility to actualize a faculty or a thing (an image, a remnant, a perception) and the possibility not to actualize it.

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This specification allows us to be more precise about the filmworks’ potentialization of modernism. As we have seen, potentiality comes about when the take is held as long as possible and when it solicits a phenomenology of perception that extends the perceived image in a now that includes the just-passing and the just-going. Although, as art historian Whitney Davis has rightly observed, “[n]othing whatsoever makes us see anything in or anything as anything else,”83 the filmworks sustain a perceptual phenomenology of extension of the present endowed with potentializating effects. The spectator might see or might not see (vision is always complexly interdetermined 84) the unexpected images unfold, but they are there to be seen. When the unexpected images emerge and are seen, potentiality can be said to be actualized: children hang around inside a deserted building (North Circular); children play at the periphery of Heygate Estate’s abandoned walkway (Children’s Games); a woman stands on a decaying balcony (Spadina); a piece of clothing mysteriously floats in a brick-building window (Queensway: Pan and Zoom); moving human shadows and the shadow of an active bird tree are reflected on modernist walls (The Lawson Estate and Outside the National Gallery); a young man’s face is glued to and flying birds are reflected by the windows of a launderette (Willesden Laundrette); a man waits in his car in an empty industrial site at the margins of central Toronto (Downtown: Tilt, Zoom and Pan); a plane materializes on the other side of an airport lounge window (Airport); a window opening randomly aligns itself with a road sign to let us imagine a bicycle path (Bricklayers Arms: Out of Focus, Pan, Eviction); and the photograph of a young woman attached to a lamppost memorial is illuminated in Walworth Road (Rosa Miguel, age 32, August 22, 2009) (2011). The orchestration of unexpectedness does not even require abruptness to occur—a fact made manifest in many of the works described above but also in the subtle passage of black-and-white to color in 5262 Washington Boulevard; in the quasiimperceptible re-centering of the shack in Golden Rod; in Centrale’s (1999) progressive disclosure that the woman and the man who seem to occupy the same space on an urban sidewalk belong to a split space (the image of the man is a mirror reflection) (Figure 3.12); and in The Fight’s (2008) barely perceptible use of the technology of rear-projection which isolates the fighters from the spacetime of the passersby circulating in the background. In all these filmworks, modernist sites and buildings are made to remain in the visual field and to change their functionality. Potentialized and actualized in their potentiality, they become materialities by which we are made to see the imperceptible—acting beings,

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Figure 3.12   Mark Lewis, Golden Rod, 2006. 35 mm film transferred to DVD, color, no sound, 2:30 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

thinking/looking beings, intangible presences, elusive machines and imaginary pathways, eerie or odd occurrences. These potentializations are made possible by a threefold association between film, modernist architecture and the spectator’s phenomenology of time consciousness (in which vision plays a significant role). I. Film Potentiality relies on one of film’s most important techniques (as old as the Lumières’ aesthetics of actualities): real time, notably real time’s “structuring” of contingency. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Doane has shown contingency to be—with rationalization—one of the two main temporalities of analogue film. From early twentieth century on, film became central to modernity’s reconceptualization of time precisely because of its double temporality. The technology of film had the capacity to bridge together two apparently conflicting (although mostly interdependent) manifestations of time: on the one hand, the

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standardized and rationalized time of industrial organization with “its obsession with efficiency, strict management of time, and the elimination of waste”; and, on the other hand, time as contingency, indexicality, and chance.85 These two temporalities were supported by different camps whose perspectives became inseparable. They were in fact replies to each other, active counterparts. Rationalization corresponds to what Benjamin has called the homogeneous, empty time of modernity; and to what Bergson has designated as the spatialized time of modernity. Benjamin’s and Bergson’s critique of rationalization made manifest their respective philosophical and epistemological anxieties over the loss of time (anxieties related to the loss of the aura in Benjamin and to the loss of duration in Bergson). Both thinkers instituted new temporalities (now time and pure duration) to dismantle the rationalization of time (historicism and interestedness). For Benjamin, film was the medium par excellence of this new complexity (which would be nevertheless condemned by Bergson): although divided in static frames, the projected “instants” of time created the illusion of uninterrupted time and movement; they could also be explored to create irrational cuts that would shock the spectator out of its numbness. As a counterpart to filmic rationalization, film offered a technology which also fascinated for its possibility to produce contingency, indexicality (the trace of a once-present moment), and chance.86 The significance of film in this context lies in its apparent capacity to embody the contingent, to provide a pure record of time, as a counterpart to rationalization. This effort was particularly at play in the Lumières’ actualities, which strove to capture the moment “as it happened,” even if this usually required different levels of pre-orchestration.87 Despite these promises of contingencies, however, rationalization made its way in film, as film went on to explore new forms of editing not only for narrative and formal purposes but also to defeat what Doane identifies as film’s capacity to store time excessively—“time as relentless passage.”88 Despite Lewis’s increased use of digital technologies, his filmworks have never abandoned the temporality of contingency, even if this entails the requirement to script it in, to partly anticipate or postproduce it. The historical belief in film’s alleged capacity to produce contingency grounds his decision to cinematically engage with the failure of modernism and treat it itself “as an unexpected development that in turn might produce new and unexpected forms.”89 The filmworks are particularly innovative in this regard: they produce unexpended images (unexpected actualizations of modernism’s potentiality) but

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they never lose sight of the conventionality of real time by which contingency is made possible. The films expose the inevitable interruptions, absences, and darknesses that the real time of any single shot entails: these micro-interruptions are the substrate of the films’ solicitation of a continuous/discontinuous phenomenology of perception. The contradictions embedded in real time are key to his project. To understand this ingenuity, let us be attentive to Doane’s account of the “unperceived darkness” that sustains the production of real time: “Real time refers to the duration of a single shot […]. If the physical film is not cut and its projection speed equals its shooting speed (usually somewhere between 16 and 24 frames per second), the movement on the screen will unfold in a time that is isomorphic with profilmic time, or what is generally thought to be our everyday lived experience of time—hence the term real. […] But this temporal continuity is in fact haunted by absence, by the lost time represented by the division between frames. During the projection of a film, the spectator is sitting in an unperceived darkness for almost 40 percent of the running time. Hence, much of the movement […] is simply not there, lost in the interstices between frames. These interstices, crucial to the representation of movement, must themselves remain unacknowledged. The cinema presents a simulacrum of time [illusion of real time].”90 What Doane’s description makes manifest is how real time is a failed promise of temporal continuity because of the sheer materiality of celluloid film, which is made of a succession of frames whose interstices (the intervals between the frames) interrupt temporal flow. This is why Bergson ended up not supporting film. Lewis’s filmworks, however, fully embrace the micro-interruptions provided by the invisible interstices between frames (even as he uses digital technology where intervals between frames have ceased to exist, replaced as they are by virtual frames). The unperceived darkness (“for almost 40 percent of the running time”) becomes for Lewis the materiality and the history by which potentiality is provided to modernism, insofar as his filmworks are sustained by an intermedia aesthetics that keeps creating tensions and resistances between still and movement. This aesthetic insertion of lost time in the continuity of the hold is sometimes used as an architectural editing process, following Doane’s definition of editing as “the possibility of a cut in the temporal and spatial continuity of the shot,”91 when the grid structure of modernist architecture is used as the interval by which new images contingently emerge in the visual field. In these moments—let us recall Airport’s lounge window and the ways in

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which its vertical frame engenders the image of different transportation machines—the architectural interval and the cinematic interval meet to actualize the potentiality of modernist architecture. The editing cut was perceived by Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer as “the incarnation of temporality in film, and constituted the formal response to the restructuring of time in modernity.”92 Made visible, it is where a breach or a hole is perceived; it materializes the possibility of an interruption in the forward movement of the film strip; it breaks temporal continuity. The divisions between frames—not only filmic but architectural frames—in Lewis’s “part cinema” are freed from their binding function; they are isolated and retrieved from their place off-screen to become the means by which modernism may or may not “produce new and unexpected forms.”93 They not only create singular juxtapositions of different yet coexisting temporalities, they also create (Airport; Bricklayers Arms) new images, new cartographies, new architectures. II. Modern, modernist architecture The intervals or interstices, as suspensive devices by which potentiality is materialized, have an architectural orchestration that is not only isomorphic to filmic editing processes but that is also historically tied to the co-development of modernist architecture and cinema (what Friedberg has designated as the convergence of the screen transformed into a window and the window transformed into a screen). Lewis’s Smithfield and TD Centre, 54th Floor make this interdependency particularly visible. In Smithfield, a 4:12 min 35 mm film from 2000, the camera provides a slow traveling close-up shot view of the outside of a modern triangularshaped stone building. The camera acts as a circulating eye but it is an eye which cannot see all. It looks inside the building through the large windows of its façades, showing a woman cleaning the over-lit yet completely vacant office space. As it smoothly moves around the building, it gives us a view of the inside, but the view is regularly cut by the columns and the narrow vertical walls between the windows, as well as by the vertical sides of the window frames. It circles towards the right and then comes back to trace the same trajectory in reverse. Although the camera’s movement is continuous, the vertical intervals interrupt this continuity and, more dramatically, make the female figure disappear for a few seconds each time the camera encounters the intervals. In these blinding moments, the indexical image is exposed in its limitations: it

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can never make the absent present. The woman’s reappearance is never guaranteed (will she still be there after the interval?; where is she now?; who is she now?). Our look—as it follows the camera’s movement—is fundamentally unsecured. This insecurity is twofold. It corresponds to the insecurity of the look: the fact that look is consistently made of minute experiential blindness and can never give us access to the whole of the visual field all at once (this is why, among other operations, the camera must circle around to see). It also corresponds to the insecurity attached to the desire of possessing the other through the look. But these anxious intervals are also the very sites of potentialization of the building: each time that the camera integrates these minute moments of discontinuity, a new image of a differentiated woman may (or may not) appear. They invite us to connect continuity and discontinuity, time and lost time, appearance, and disappearance. This is how we are solicited to contribute (through our own phenomenology) to the potentialization of the filmed architecture. With TD Centre, 54th Floor, a 6:18 min 35 mm and 4K film made in 2009, the camera is now inside a Mies van der Rohe modernist tower building—the Toronto Dominion Centre (Figures 3.13 and 3.14). But it still looks through a set of windows, providing a sharp, compressed view of King Street below. The building, built in the 1960s and located in Toronto’s financial district, corresponds to the typical van der Rohe’s black steel I-shaped beam structure whose façades are made out of a glass grid. The internal 54th floor perspective emphasizes this high rectilinear verticality. The camera films from a standpoint that locates it close to the ceiling. It moves parallel and in close proximity to the windows, filming not only the street below but the windows through which the street is made visible. This means that the visual field is regularly cut by the vertical frames located between the window panes (as was the case with Smithfield, but now from the inside of the building). It also means that the view provided by the camera is vertiginous—as if the camera was just about to fall in the void beyond the windows. The traveling-track is steady, slow, and silent. Moving from the left to the right, it reaches one of the perpendicular walls of the room. It will then trace the same trajectory in reverse. But the visual field is not a calm field. Indeed, the vertical frames are enlarged by the above, close-up filming of the scene. Our vision is regularly blinded, darkened, and obliterated by the camera’s passage in front of the intervals. The exposed intervals cut the flow of perception of the outside as the camera moves to capture it, integrating discontinuity within continuity. What’s

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Figure 3.13   Mark Lewis, TD Centre, 54th Floor, 2009. 35 mm and 4K film transferred to 2K, color, no sound, 6:18 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

more, they are the means by which we can start to perceive contingency in the visual field: the anachronistic behavior of the shadows of the building on the buildings of the other side of the street, for example. This temporal discontinuity is perceivable when we notice that, although the camera travels from left to right and then from right to left, the shadows in front—that is, the shadows that result from the circular motion of the planet in relation to the sun, which we can see reflected on the buildings—continue their own movement from left to right. We are thus made to see two completely opposed sun/camera movements at the same time. The windows have been transformed into hybrid cinematic/architectural screens. These renewed screens have the combined capacity to both project and make visible an incongruous outside world. The modernist building par excellence (van der Rohe’s TD Centre) is made to remain in the visual field and is potentialized in that very process: it has now acquired the function of double-timing. As the potentialization of modernist architecture occurs, the discontinuity of a contingency is actualized.

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Figure 3.14   Mark Lewis, TD Centre, 54th Floor, 2009. 35 mm and 4K film transferred to 2K, color, no sound, 6:18 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

What particularizes the architectural intervals such as the ones described above, is the way in which they set into play the fort-da game conceptualized by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)—a game by which the psychoanalyst seek to describe his grandson’s throwing away of a stringed wooden reel and the object’s coming back following a dynamic of disappearance (fort/gone) and reappearance (da/here). But the fort-da game gains a surplus value in Lewis’s filmworks: the intervals do not merely articulate lost times (they are not merely disappearance mechanisms), they are the verticals by which imperceptible, unforeseeable images emerge as though out of nowhere, as though generated by the intervals themselves. We see these new images, but not necessarily on first view; they might not even be seen; but when we do see them we look for other images; we have learned to see with intervals. Unproductive (lost) time has become productive. The window frame structure has been integrated as a quasi-remnant in the extended present of the image. Retained, it has been potentialized, even actualized.

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III. Contemporary attentiveness The filmworks’ activation of a continuous/discontinuous phenomenology resonates with Lewis’s concern for attentiveness and related understanding of the contemporary interdependency of attention and distraction. As suggested above, the temporal spans solicit the spectator’s attention. Interestingly, however, attention is never fully distanced from distraction. About Chardin’s genre paintings, Lewis says: “they demand that banal moments such as these cede eventually to theatre. Put simply, in order to sustain our attention something has to happen. This imminent end or return reminds us that attention of this sort (the attention of the boy and that of the spectator) is always subtended by distraction; absorption leads necessarily to the impossibility of sustaining absorption.”94 The films must be seen as acting in similar terms, integrating continuities and discontinuities by which the perception of the spectator is guided into attentiveness, inasmuch as attentiveness is understood as existing in an attention/distraction continuum. Their unfolding of the attention/distraction continuum is best described by referring to the famous Posner and Petersen study (1990), which has identified three different attentional processes that confirm attention’s inseparability from distraction: the disengagement of attention from a stimulus; the shifting of attention from one stimulus to another; and the engagement of attention on a new stimulus.95 The consistency of Lewis’s approach confirms his filmography as a reiterated attempt to address the contemporaneity of the attention/ distraction continuum. In his recent analysis of the contemporary industrialization of temporal objects, philosopher Bernard Stiegler maintains that this continuum has become significantly unbalanced. In his third volume of Technics and Time, he argues that the unity of a film—as any Husserlian melody—unfolds as a flow “that coincides with the flow of consciousness of which it is the object—the spectator’s consciousness.”96 Adopting Husserl’s account of the temporality of consciousness as a structure of flow, he specifies that the temporal object “constitutes itself temporally as what appears when passing, as what passes, as what manifests itself by disappearing,” while “the flow of the temporal object absolutely coincides with the flow of consciousness of which it is the object.”97 Stiegler sees attention as the flow of consciousness itself, a flow initially created by primary retentions.98 This account, as we have seen, involves primary retentions which come about in perception and belong to the extended present of perception. It also involves secondary

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retentions—the recollections of primary retentions—that “condition” the protention of primary retentions and, more specifically, correspond to the memorized melody—the melody heard yesterday that I can personally recall through my imagination.99 To these retentions, Stiegler adds a third type of retention, tertiary retentions, which are collective and pertain to technical memory, recording and transmission. The recording techniques of contemporary audiovisual objects allow the spectator, listener, or user to experience a same temporal object differently, insofar as the second, third, fourth … experience of a reproduced or retransmitted melody or film is always affected by the previous one. Stiegler is quite critical of these new reproducible temporal objects (a category which includes radio, cinema, television, video gaming, advertising, the music industry, among others), as they are currently managed by the programming industry, which he sees as exploiting the consumer’s synchronization with temporal objects for its own economic profit.100 Industrialized temporal objects objectify the flow of time; they dispossess humans from that flow in so doing. They absorb consciousness, especially deep attention. Their flow coincides with the passing of time of the human consciousness that perceives them, a process that allows human consciousness to synchronize itself with the temporality of these objects; yet, and I am following Stiegler here, the flow of the reproducible temporal object progressively replaces human consciousness in that very process. In contrast to the reading of texts where the reader’s consciousness still deploys its own personal temporality (“text-time is produced by the time of consciousness that […] flows on throughout the course of a reading”101), the spectators, listeners, or users who consume collective audiovisual objects not only lose part of their psychic realm (which is increasingly transferred to audiovisual, computational devices), they more importantly lose the interiorization still active in primary and secondary retentions and the concomitant “possibility of creating new transindividuation circuits.”102 It is not that Stiegler suggests that audiovisual objects do not allow deep attention, but that their production by programming industries is devised to service attention-capture devices that he sees as “fundamentally destructive” in their “hypersolicitation of attention,” which leads to attention deficits.103 Audiovisual objects like cinema have the status of the pharmakon: they are simultaneously poison and remedy. In response to this state of affairs, what must be invented according to Stiegler are industrial audiovisual objects that solicit deep attention as opposed to hypersoliciting attention. He is thus highly critical of what Katherine

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Hayles designates as the cognitive style of hyper-attention—which involves “switching focus rapidly between different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom”—in contrast to deep attention— which involves “concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times.”104 Although Hayles wants to examine how the educational system can coordinate deep attention and hyper-attention (a legitimate quest in itself), Stiegler non-equivocally condemns hyper-attention as “merely captive, channeled, and in that sense passive,” a type of attention channeled by television—a channeling that leads “inevitably to channel surfing (zapping).”105 Hyper-attention (the now standardized audiovisual capturing of attention) corresponds to the activity by which a user is required to surf or leap “from one object to another,” in a “dispersed and unfocused” state; it corresponds to “what does not last.”106 Stiegler’s answer to this problem is to devise an “ecology of the mind”—one that takes care of the mind with the objective of ensuring its futurity. Significantly, this means a return to primary and secondary retention. Not only are retentions attentional fluxes, they are “the basis of all care systems, which are always training systems for attention formation.”107 Adopting a stance which is less radical than Stiegler’s, Lewis’s filmworks does not opt for one cognitive style to the detriment of the other. When the camera holds the image it privileges deep time; but he makes sure that the holding does not last too long to prevent boredom or hallucination from creeping in.108 His films accept the limits of attention while attempting to sustain it. They simply hold the image, usually for about 1 minute, the time span that Lewis has judged to be the laps of attention that lasts until distraction starts to settle in.109 Distraction does eventually settle in: it is not condemned as such insofar as its eventual emergence becomes the expected phenomenon that will delimit the time length of the hold. By favoring a phenomenology of perception that retains the just-passing quasi-remnant, however, Lewis’s temporal aesthetics partakes of Stiegler’s caring ecology. This phenomenology is grounded in a fundamental concern for the spectator’s attentional capabilities, in a western world of increasing hypersolicitation of attention. It is also the case that discontinuity resulting from the ending of the “hold” establishes a rhythm or an instant (in the Bachelard sense of the words) that allow for the renewal of continuity; as much as distraction allows for the shift and renewal of attention. Moreover, as we have seen, discontinuity

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systematically accompanies continuity even within the “holding” spans. If the phenomenology of perception is to do its work—which is to sustain the spectator’s perception into a looking activity that is enacted and attentive, so that the potentialization of the modernist quasiremnant may occur—this tension must be continuously active, as much as the freeze/stillness/movement tension is at play to intertemporalize our vision.

The Temporalization of History In a paper entitled “On the life of students” (1915), Walter Benjamin set out to expose the problems attached to the modern conceptualization of history as a progressive continuum. Especially critical of Hegelian forms of historicism, according to which every epoch reacts against the previous one to ensure the progress of human societies, Benjamin denounced its problematic belief in the endlessness of progress. He described this historicist conceptualization as a view “that puts faith in the infinite extent of time and thus concerns itself only with speed, or lack of it, with which people and epochs advance along a path of progress.”110 Benjamin proposed a specific critical operation to interrupt the continuum of history: the insertion of a now-time; the mobilization of a “now” that could arrest time at any moment and produce the past anew. In the final section of this chapter, I want to briefly discuss Benjamin’s temporalization of history so as to better illustrate how Lewis’s filmworks confront temporal passing and history to presentify the modern regime of historicity. As has been suggested thus far in this chapter and as has been argued by film theoretician Laura Mulvey, Lewis’s films “[rethink] the past through the present” to alter “its significance without distorting its historical specificity.”111 This rethinking situates his production as an extension but also as a reorientation of the Benjaminian exploration of the image as a dialectics at a standstill. Faithful to the Benjaminian tradition of critical history, the filmworks articulate the possibility of potentializing modernist quasi-remnants through specific suspensive practices. Yet, they are deprived of the messianic dimension of Benjamin’s now time. What is more, they tend to extend the present to include and renew the past rather than radically interrupting the continuum of historical time. My objective here is to continue to address the following two, still incompletely resolved, questions: how are temporality and historicity brought together in

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Lewis’s filmworks? How does Lewis’s phenomenology of perception presentify historicity? Discussing Benjamin’s concept of the “now time” (Jetztzeit), Jürgen Habermas states that Benjamin “is struggling […] against at least two conceptions which, on the basis of the modern understanding of history, intercept and neutralize the provocation of the new and of the entirely unexpected: [1] the idea of a homogeneous and empty time that is filled in by ‘the stubborn belief in progress’ of evolutionism and the philosophy of history; [and] [2] the neutralization of all standards fostered by historicism when it imprisons history in the museum and ‘tell(s) the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.’”112 His is a critique of evolutionist historicism as a practice that, in its advancement towards a better future, must ignore the role of the present in the making of history and leave the past behind, as well as discard any social group that resists transmission.113 Peter Osborne is convincing on this point: “[h]istoricism perpetuates this illusion” of progress; hiding its economy of violence, “it functions as a radical denial of death. In this denial, historicism trades a true remembrance for its restoration of continuity with the past.”114 Benjamin’s alternative (dialectical) history promotes a representation of the past within the present, one that awakens the present out of the past, out of tradition. His historical interruptive practice makes the present active in relation to the past— shattering (suddenly, unexpectedly but also fleetingly) the infinity of the extent of time proper to the view of history as an inert albeit progressive continuum. It is important here to emphasize that Benjamin establishes a new relationship between past and present through a specific exploration of the image: “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill […]. Only dialectical images are genuine images […] and the place where one encounters them is language.”115 Hence, the image has the ability to produce a constellation (a dialectics) that brings the present “into a critical state.”116 As Habermas summarizes, the awakening image of the “now time,” in which historical time is at a standstill, corresponds to a moment in which the future-oriented time of modernity is reoriented toward the past and in which, concomitantly, the anticipation of the new of the future shifts into a remembering of the obliterated past. In this process, Benjamin radically reverses the horizon of expectation and space of experience: In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin

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mixes surrealist experiences of shock and motifs from Jewish mysticism to shape his notion of “now time.”117 Habermas writes: This idea—that the authentic moment of an innovative present interrupts the continuum of history and breaks away from its homogeneous flow—is fed from both sources. The profane illumination caused by shock, like the mystical union with the appearance of the Messiah, forces a cessation, a crystallization, of the momentary event. […] He twists the radical future-orientedness that is characteristic of modern times in general so far back around the axis of the now-time that it gets transposed into a yet more radical orientation toward the past. The anticipation of what is new in the future is realized only through remembering a past that has been suppressed. Benjamin understands the sign of such a messianic cessation of events as “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.” [… As a solution] Benjamin proposes a drastic reversal of horizon of expectation and space of experience. To all past epochs he ascribes a horizon of unfulfilled expectations, and to the future-oriented present he assigns the task of experiencing a corresponding past through remembering, in such a way that we can fulfill its expectations with our weak messianic power.118 Remembrance (or, more adequately, potentialization as the practice by which the remnant—the suppressed past—is constituted in the present) is therefore not a looking-backward but a means of futurity. The dialectical image that works to carry the dialectics between the now and the past to a standstill deploys itself as a lightening flash that produces a moment of recognizability in which (let us follow literary scholar David Ferris here) “the unperceived significance of the past” appears as a force in which the present “is ready to receive a meaning that the past could not realize.”119 As specified by Osborne, Benjamin sees modernity as a destruction of tradition but paradoxically turns to that tradition to uphold a concept of history that “perform[s] a dialectical redemption of the destruction of tradition by the new” in which Neuzeit (new-time) is transformed into Jetztzeit (now-time).120 In this transformative process, historiography’s focus on “narrative forms of historical totalization,” especially the narrative of progress, is replaced by a focus on montage: “from story to image.”121 Montage historiography elaborates a messianic, revolutionary arrest of history as a progressive continuum. It discontinues the flow of history. It has an interruptive force. But this messianic,

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revolutionary arrest is a weak one insofar as history as continuum threatens to suppress it at all times. The ultimate challenge is to rescue that interruptive force from being suppressed by history. Lewis’s filmworks belong to the alternative historiography elaborated by Benjamin: not only do they privilege the present of perception, they also rely on a standstill conception of the image by which the futuristic temporality of the modern regime of historicity is (temporarily at least) presentified. Yet, the filmworks reorient that alternative tradition in two significant related ways. A brief analysis of Willesden Laundrette; Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday Prayers (2010) helps to disclose this twofold reconsideration. The 4:40 min digital single-take starts with an inside view of a warneddown launderette located in north-west London, a suburban area known for its transient, new immigrant population.122 The initial shot is static, operated by an immobile camera filming the cyclical movement of the dryers. Because of their radical immobility (a radicalism that comes from the static camera that records them but also from their hard materiality), the outside surface of the machines, the two benches, the floor, the walls, and the ceiling endow the film with a frozen, photographic effect. The photographic dimension coexists with the filmic movement of the image: it resists it (without canceling it) by inserting a death-like pastness to the moving image. After 30 seconds or so, the camera starts to reverse to give a wider view of the room. It moves out of the room, reaching the door, stopping there, just beyond the doorstep. We now see not only the room but the lateral windows of the exterior façade of the building on each side of the door. Unexpectedly (appearing suddenly in all of its uncanniness), we see a male face glued to the window on the left. He is located inside the room but his gaze is directed towards the outside (Figure 3.15). The face is frozen, drastically photographic: not only is the body motionless and strangely fixed to the window as though it was an inherent part of it; it is a young man’s face which is just about petrified (confirming the Barthesian “that-has been” dimension of photography). The photographic, however, never succeeds in revoking the unfolding of movement recorded by film, even if this bodily movement is quasi-imperceptible: in this case, the blinking of the eyes. The hold, in this very moment of the single shot, potentializes the modernist building. Not only does it locate a perceiving subject between the past and the future (between the inside and the outside of the launderette). It also allows the window panes of the building to work as an original cinematic screen that is both transparent

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and opaque—a screen window structure, which simultaneously frames the inside and reflects the outside. How is this? The window structure concomitantly frames the man’s face and projects (through reflection, on the panes located above and on the right) the accelerated passage of birds otherwise invisible to us. The novelty of the multi-frame window structure also pertains to the different temporalities it brings together: the quasi-photographic (frozen) temporality of the image of the young man and the compressed (multi-layered and highly edited) temporality of the image of the passing birds. The transformation of the building’s surface, enabled by the threefold collaboration of film, modernist architecture and extended perception, actualizes the potentiality of the otherwise warned-down (just about passed) launderette. But a fourth player (or, more appropriately, set of players) is also at work in this actualization: the inhabitants (Lewis’s exquisite extras). Indeed, after another twenty to thirty seconds, the camera reverses, stops, and eventually pans to the right to gradually transform itself into a curved travelling shot of the street. The Lumières’ aesthetics of actualities properly begins there, as the camera discloses the everyday life of the multicultural district of Willesden: the shops, the passersby, the cars; the Afghan community. The potentiality of a modernist urban development is always partially conditioned by the ways in which inhabitants live there

Figure 3.15   Mark Lewis, Willesden Laundrette; Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday Prayers, 2010. 4K digital film transferred to 2K, color, no sound, 4:40 min. Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto.

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and how they have appropriated or not a passing architecture to make it theirs. It is significant that the moment in which the camera flows freely to the right, it offers a view of a street full of life: not only is the street crowded with people walking everywhere in different directions, it is occupied by a transient, new immigrant population. About the work, Lewis says (as already stated above): “You have to hold something long enough so that it can reveal something about itself, but all the time you have to walk the line between revelation and boredom.”123 These holding moments are moments of perceptual retention that transmit the just-passing and the just-coming of present events. Within each holding phase, our perceptual activity can be quite dense: the holding gives a certain freedom to our look, letting it observe and even search for quasi-imperceptible details; it ensures the unfreezing of the photographic and the continual tension of stillness and movement; it allows for the unexpected to occur: the blinking eyes of the young man; the passing birds; the Afghan community. It is in these tensional shots of the extended present—in these specific experiences of temporal passing—that the architectural quasi-remnant (the launderette) is perceptually inserted into the duration of the present, presentifying the past in that very process. Inasmuch as we perceive them, these shots potentialize our perception as much as we potentialize the image, following a reciprocity in which it is impossible to say what comes first in the act of potentialization (the image?; perception?). The modernist interval has been capacitated, re-potentialized to potentialize our own perception, which simultaneously re-potentializes the image. Willesden Laundrette is also emblematic of how Lewis’s filmography elaborates a historiography that both partakes and reorients Benjamin’s interruptive historiography. It potentializes the just-passing by presentifying it and, yet, does not fully embrace the discontinuous aesthetics that sustains Benjamin’s critical historiographic process of montage. Continuity and discontinuity coexist. The spectator is certainly not shocked out of any numbness. The filmwork reveals a transitory moment of history in which the recent past still coexists with the present and to which will be integrated, with its new immigrant population, another past, present, and future—perhaps more hybridized than before. The phenomenology of perception solicited by the film endorses that fluctuation: it never becomes a mere rupture. Considered in its historiographical dimension, Willesden Laundrette (as most of Lewis’s filmworks) never simply focuses on the past as fully historical. To perceive an object or an event as wholly past is the historical gesture par excellence of

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the modern regime of historicity, as defined by Jacques Le Goff, one of the main historians of the Annales School: “the distinction between past and present is an essential component of the concept of time. It is therefore fundamental to both historical consciousness and historical knowledge.”124 Historical work, according to LeGoff, “is carried out through a continual oscillation from one of its poles to the other.”125 This standpoint is also at the foundation of Paul Ricoeur’s affirmation that history institutes itself from a distancing act, namely “the recourse to the exteriority of the archival trace.”126 But this distinction is not quite at play in the filmworks. For sure, a historical consciousness sustains them, but it is a historical consciousness that is closer to Michel de Certeau’s concern for “the concept of alterity”—the recognition of the other and otherness in historiographical practices. Critical of historical discourses which erase and unify the diversity of traces for the sake of coherence, Certeau promoted historiography as a form of heterology (as a science of the other) “to make differences relevant.”127 Significant to our examination of Lewis’s filmworks, is Certeau’s understanding of the past as what represents difference in relation to the present, a status which allows the past to open up futurity. The filmworks may be said to be motivated by the historiographical thrust of disclosing alterity—the alterity of the modernist quasi-remnant. They as equally insist on the banality of the modernist quasi-remnant as well as its unperceived being there. The modernist quasi-remnant is not quite a historical object; this is what makes it more pragmatically and less utopianly retrievable. Writing on the relationship that historians have with forgetting, historian François Fourn identifies two opposed views of history. The first is a history for which the past is dead, according to an evolutionist perspective in which the present is seen as the ultimate phase of progress and the forgetting of the fate of the weak: the time of the latter is over, and forgetting operates “the destruction of what […] could not subsist.”128 The second perspective, closer to Benjamin, is the history of “a still present past, a reactivated past” in which the investigation of the past entails not a justification of the present but a search to change the present “by the exhumation of buried facts […] that can be reactualized.”129 This chapter has allowed us to propose a third view: one in which reactivation operates on the just-about-to-pass. Here, the present is made to activate a recent past for the sake of the future, but only inasmuch as the recent past is not yet quite passed. This activation is mobilized by the threefold contribution of film, architecture, and perception.

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In a recent analysis of Matthew Buckingham’s 1996 Amos Fortune Road, art historian Jane Blocker suggested that Buckingham’s staging of an absent center—the life of African-American Amos Fortune (c. 1710–1801) who bought his freedom from slavery at the age of 60 and moved to New Hampshire to open up a tanning business, but whose sole life traces are a set of tattered business receipts—could only but incompletely deploy the past of a suppressed historical subject.130 In this specific work, the past is exposed as an uncertain reality which needs to be repeatedly deferred to the future insofar as the quest for the truth and reality of that fragmentary past must be continuously postponed to the future for its resolution. This is an important observation which highlights both the interpretative activity that mobilizes historical research and the humility that must accompany any historiographical interpretative act—the awareness that one can never know the past in its entirety, once and for all. The fate of the past here is to be differed; a fate inseparable from the melancholy awareness that the deferral of the past to the future will never resolve past losses. Blocker’s observation helps us to clarify Lewis’s filmworks’ exploration of the just-about-remnant, which is quite different from Buckingham’s. Indeed, the quasi-remnant with Lewis is not so much a materialized past in need of interpretation or the materialization of a lost origin, than an object about to pass, retained in the present not to be known but to be potentialized for the possible production of new or unfulfilled images. What is important is not what is lost but the aesthetic potentialization of what remains.

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Chapter 4

Ruination Gone Wrong

In an interview with the Washington Post, English born, Berlin-based artist Tacita Dean expressed in the following words the fundamental thrust driving her artistic practice: “I am attracted to obsolescence, so film is the perfect medium for me to work in.”1 A few years later, she specified: “For me, making a film is connected to the idea of loss and disappearance.”2 These two statements are central to the temporal turn: they point to an acute sensitivity to temporal passing—a sensitivity upheld by the worry over the losses resulting from any “becoming present of future events and then their becoming past,”3 and more strongly by the worry over how the modern regime of historicity works both to deny that reality (in its contemporary constitution of a- or postmortal societies) and accelerate it (in its progressive mobilization of change—an economic and technological mobilization that favors the constant surpassing of the past). For Dean, today’s difficulty to represent, disclose, or perform the passage of time comes from the fact that the image technology best suited to do so—analog film—is itself disappearing. Her statements provide the best description of a practice that has variably but consistently invested in the recording of passing things through a passing technology. This particular investment was unambiguously confirmed in Dean’s 2006 Kodak (Figure 4.1), a 44-minute, 16 mm film chronicling the last days of production of the Kodak French film factory at Chalon-sur-Saône. Bringing together various long shots of the industrial process of celluloid production, the work called attention to the materiality of the celluloid (its tangibility, pliability, cutability, and chemical capacity to register light and color) to gradually bestow on it an emotion of loss. The sense of loss was suggested by the auratic dimension emerging both from the celluloid strips turned into evanescent abstract paintings and from the machines themselves turned into constructivist and minimalist sculptures of light and reflection. Partly dematerialized by these abstracting and lighting procedures, film

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technology was displayed as a star whose last glowing light revealed its imminent death. Art critic James Quandt’s insightful account of the film illustrates quite well this material yet awe-inspiring perspective: “As the celluloid traverses six miles of machinery, Dean’s aestheticizing eye concentrates on texture, color, found design: Flavin-like red lozenges of overhead lighting; a cobalt drum parked next to a copper one; a strip of blue celluloid with a beveled edge crowding three-quarters of the image, a diagonal shaft of white light arranged behind it; a trio of symmetrical metal tubes rolling ribbons of pinkish film; an undulating surface that appears to be aqueous but turns out to be celluloid—accompanied by a mechanical musique concrete of hum and whir.”4 Dean speaks about the film in more dramatic terms, as an attempt to not simply aestheticize but to transform the whole making process of film into a “sublime beauty,” whose sublime dimension is substantially heightened by the end of film production: “Film is drawn as a line in endless circuits around this immense factory, pulled at great speed up and down and across rollers, outlining and defining a building and a process of immeasurable sophistication and splendor. […] From a viscous blue solid to an evanescent transparency, the manufacture of film is a journey of sublime beauty, and one I would never have known were it not for its incipient

Figure 4.1   Tacita Dean, Kodak, 2006. 16 mm film, color, sound, 44 min. Film still. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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obsolescence.”5 This obsolescence was particularly patent towards the conclusion of Kodak, when the camera attended to unpeopled rooms sapped out of color, scattered with abandoned pieces of celluloid. These final shots declared the end of analog film; but this declaration did not fully embrace ending. Indeed, insofar as these shots were transmitted by the very technology being displayed as superseded, they also declared Dean’s project not to simply confirm but to engage with disappearance and obsolescence; to make film last in it waning. Dean is thus not without sharing Mark Lewis’s assessment of film as an obsolete medium, whose analog ending entails the twofold requirement not to abandon it (both artists continue to avidly use it) and to think about what film can do despite or because of its obsolescence. For Lewis, this requirement materializes itself in filmworks that explore the inventions of film but also film’s interdependency with photography and painting to investigate how they can contribute to the potentialization of modernism. The reiterated exploration of pictorial stillness—the holding of the filmic image—effectively translates into a retaining process that inserts the just-passing (the modernist quasi-remnant) in the present to generate new visibilities, new images, new worldviews. Dean has the same acute awareness of the growing desuetude of film and, in the hope of making it significant again, invests as intensively as Lewis in the stilling of the image. But, whereas Lewis’s filmworks renew what is about to disappear (film and modernist architecture), Dean’s oeuvre attends to disappearance, not only to the irreversible fading away of things in general but to the vanishing of the analog image technologies which used to represent it. Indeed, the spectator of Dean’s filmworks is unremittingly exposed to worlds (objects, subjects, places, media) that are passing away. Time as a continuum unfolds, but it is a continuum shaped by melancholia and mourning, by a heightened sense of irreversibility. Let us list here some of the disappearing, aging, fleeting, or decayed worlds that have come to inhabit Dean’s film production: the declining lighthouses of Disappearance at Sea (1996) (Figure 4.2); the abandoned yet unfinished egg-shaped house (“a failed futuristic vision” underlying a prototype designed to withstand hurricane conditions6) in Bubble House (1999); the decaying 1930s military radar devices of Sound Mirrors (1999); the jaded façade of the slated for demolition (now demolished) Palast der Republik in Palast (2004); the disappearance of the fated around-the-world yachtsman Donald Crowhurst in Disappearance at Sea (1996), Disappearance at Sea II (1997) and Teignmouth Electron (2000);

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the recording of his beached, forgotten hull, bleached and rotting trimaran in Teignmouth Electron (2000) (Figure 4.3); the warn-down jute walls and aged carpets of Joseph Beuys’s seven-room installation in Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, filmed while the controversial renovation of the space was underway, in Darmstädter Werkblock (2007) (Figure 4.4); the dappled skins of the liqueur-bottled pears in Prisoner Pear (2008); the fleeting eclipses of The Sun Quartet: Diamond Ring series (2002); the solar eclipses of Banewl (1999) and Totality (2000); and the capture of the refracted green of the last ray of sun as it passes over the horizon in Green Ray (2001); the out-of-date East Berlin’s visionary yet “locked in the past” Television Tower in Fernsehturm (2001) (“I’m […] interested in things that don’t sit very easily in their own time. Things that are uncomfortable—objects, buildings, people”7); the closing of the film production facility of Kodak’s factory in Chalon-surSaône in Kodak (2006); the five remaining nuns of Presentation Sisters (2005); the aging and handicapped male protagonist (supported by an orthopedic boot) in Boots (2003); disappeared or about to disappear artists and poets in Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1997), Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers) (2002), Mario Metz (2002), Darmstädter Werkblock (2007), Michael Hamburger (2007), Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4 33  with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances, six films (2008); and the filming of Giorgio Morandi’s studio in Still Life (2009) and Day for Night (2009).

Figure 4.2   Tacita Dean, Disappearance at Sea, 1996. 16 mm anamorphic film, color, sound, 13:9 min. Film still. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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Figure 4.3   Tacita Dean, Teignmouth Electron, 2000. 16 mm film, color, optical sound, 7 min. Film still. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

Figure 4.4   Tacita Dean, Darmstädter Werkblock, 2007. 16 mm film, color, optical sound, 18 min. Film still. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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Dean’s filmworks are mourning and melancholy attachments to what is disappearing but still highly valuable, to what is obsolete but still vital: not only the objects to which the analog image refers but the very materiality of the analog image. The overall project will thus be to persistently express temporal passing by using and repeatedly staging the analog image (from one projection to the next; from one work to the next; from one exhibition to the next) in its passing away. The uniqueness of this project lies in its reuse of a technology staged and restaged as dying. The vanishing technology is an attractive force: brought into the gallery or museum space, it still has the ability to transmit the passage of time and, as such, should not be dismissed. Especially when integrated into looped installational settings, temporal passing’s indebtedness to film— the sense that analog film has been the main image technology to have shaped the twentieth-century subject’s experience of time as passage— inundates the exhibition space. But because analog film is shown in its growing obsoleteness, temporal passing, what Dolev has designated as “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past,”8 becomes a surplus value or an orphan value, something like a haunting remnant waiting for its re-actualization. There lies, this chapter will argue, the productivity of Dean’s filmic installations: the filmworks create temporal passing itself as a pending remnant. It keeps Dolev’s definition of temporal passing but discloses it as an awaiting residue. The regime of historicity instituted by this specific exploration of temporal passing—a regime which will be detailed below but that can already be announced as forcefully presentifying the modern regime of historicity—is not so much ruination, but ruination gone wrong (repeated ruination, exacerbated ruination, ruination that turns temporal passing into a spectral remnant). To understand how temporal passing is both activated and deactivated in Dean’s filmworks (to understand more specifically why that double-binding is a crucial dimension of an aesthetics that keeps staging the dying to make film last in its waning), the chapter will unknot two coexisting phenomena which are easily confused when we read Dean’s statements too quickly: the filmworks’ inherent capacity to provide a record of disappearance and the filmworks’ materialization of film’s disappearance. On the one hand, film is explored as the resilient medium par excellence of temporal passing. Dean’s stilling aesthetics consists in suspending the forwardness of moving images and bodies by privileging the static camera, the edited single-take and the filming of the slow unfolding of uneventful or dying actions in the world. But this

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suspension solicits our perception so that it may be attentive to the otherwise imperceptible micro-events structuring temporal passing in and even outside the image. Analog film is explored for what it can do: it registers and transmits the phenomenological law of the irreversibility of the passage of time. It provides the “illusion” of time as a continuum. The artist is explicit about these features as intrinsic filmic features: [s]lowing down time for me is […] about the fact that time has been very sped up. The time I use is the time of film; it is film time […]. But also, film is the very physical manifestation of time: twenty-four frames a second. If you are working with this physical stuff, you’re dealing with physical time, not something that’s obtuse and nonlinear, or a screen where you can pluck anything and put it wherever you like. It’s really a ritual of time, making a film on a flat table. […] That’s profound and that’s why film is so different from digital technology. It’s a language of time and it’s all about editing. I edit in order to create the illusion that time is a continuum.9 On the other hand, Dean’s filmworks are shown together with their 16 mm projectors whose whirr and structure are indicative of a technology now superseded by the digital; they also set into play a looped projection of the films which gradually destroys their celluloid photochemical materiality (resulting from the physical fact that within a week the copies of the film need to be replaced insofar as their continuous use (for hours on end) accelerates their deterioration and shortens their lifespan). In this process, they reenact and divulge the market’s turning of the celluloid strip into an antiquated technology—an operation that shows how the filmic image’s ability to generate temporal passing is itself dying. Film is made to persist here as an obsolete technology, following the “outmoded” verdict of a regime of historicity programmed to produce new technologies by devaluing and erasing older technologies. In their double-binding aesthetic operations, what Dean’s filmworks in fact bring together are the two opposed filmic temporalities outlined by Mary Ann Doane in her study of cinematic time: contingency (the micro-unexpected or unforeseeable changes of the temporally passing things captured by the camera and recorded on the celluloid) and rationalization (the laws of capitalism supported by the modern regime of historicity). The tension between these two forms of temporality is incessantly restaged from one work to the next but also in each work with the help of the looping devices that enable the continuous replay

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of the films. It establishes the coexistence of multiple albeit conflicting aesthetic operations in the same work: the deployment of analog film as a major transmitter of temporal passing (contingency); the release of destructive forces that cumulate to end analog film (rationalization); its display as a countering practice against—but also part of—the modern regime of historicity which has declared analog film defunct (contingency versus rationalization); the proclamation of that regime as ultimately insurmountable—analog film is ending—yet repeatable in its insurrmountability (rationalization versus contingency). The tension between contingency and rationalization is left unresolved. This is important: there is no wining side. Of all the artistic productions examined in this book, Dean’s is the closest to the conceptualization of time as an irretrievable becoming from future to past, to the point where the passage of time itself is disclosed as passing as a dimension of our experience. Film is celebrated for its exceptional capacity to register the passage of time (by which objects, subjects, and events are experienced as slowly passing away), an exceptional capacity that the filmworks (by their materiality and their technological setting) declare as superseded. Yet, insofar as the tension between contingency and rationalization is left unresolved and insofar as that tension is repeated, restaged, reiterated, reproduced, and reenacted as an ongoing archive, this chapter proposes that the filmworks do succeed as a mode of, albeit a precarious mode of temporalization. An alternative (contemporary) regime of historicity is produced as temporal passing subsists as a residue. For sure, temporal passing is not (and cannot be) produced directly. Such a directness and fluidity would deny the forces of rationalization that work to abolish the very analog technologies responsible for temporal passing; they would leave the forces of contingency untroubled by these persevering rationalizing forces. Yet, the chapter will show that the repeated use and restaging of analog images of disappearing things turn temporal passing into an awaiting remnant, ready for a future which would not abolish it; a waif deprived of but made available to any adequate relaying technology that could pick it up and transform it in that very process. My central claim is that the double-bind concurrency of contingency and rationalization in Dean’s filmworks takes its innovativeness and its power of invention from its multivalent investment in the trope of the ruin which is both represented and acted out in and by the films. This concurrency is a ruining activity following the eighteenth-century tradition of the “ruiniste” artist—the painter of ruins. The ruiniste procedure is doubly active in the filmworks’ recording of ruins (which

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belongs to the contingency of cinematic time) and the filmworks’ display as a ruin and its own ruining of the celluloid (which discloses the rationalization of cinematic time). It conveys an age value to the filmic image while gradually turning it into a ruin, acting out the very progressive stance of the modern regime of historicity responsible for its obsolescence. From one exhibition to the next, it is moreover protected as a ruin, much like Tatiana Trouvé’s Bureau of Implicit Activities discussed in Chapter 1, whose modules work as shelters of the traces of unproductive time. It is not that analog technology is resurrected in the present despite its growing obsoleteness. Rather it is made to survive transformed in the present as a persisting yet pending remnant haunting the exhibition space, waiting for a perceiver or a technology to pick it up and actualize it anew. Our initial comparison to Lewis’s filmworks can now be specified. Lewis’s practice is a potentializing activity that actualizes the (modernist) remnant whereas Dean’s practice is a potentializing activity that ruins film into a remnant (of temporal passing). The future of the image and the future of time lie in the possible (yet indeterminate) re-actualization of filmic temporal passing. Lewis’s practice relies partly on film to actualize the remnant it registers whereas Dean’s practice declares the dying status of the technology on which Lewis’s potentializing acts depend. Let us bear in mind, however, that Lewis’s practice has always been an intermedia/intertemporal practice aware of the “end” of film. It is a practice that does not have a view of film as an autonomous, pure medium. It is grounded in the understanding that film has grown interdependently, from the very beginning, with photography and painting, and now with the digital image. Dean is more interested in the temporal specificity of analog film. This chapter will examine Dean’s ruining aesthetics by focusing on a single filmic installation: Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4 33  with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances, six films) (2008). This six-screen installation has been selected because of the different layers by which it explores the ruiniste tradition as a mode of disclosure of temporal passing—a tradition that critiques modernity from within. It works as a record of the aging body of Merce Cunningham; it ages the celluloid strip through incessant projection; it eventually ruins the celluloid strip completely; it ruins the specificity of film by injecting photographic stillness in the making of the image. It also stages a dancer and a composer (Cunningham and Cage) famous for their performances of chance, contingency, and indeterminacy principles. These principles

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were at the forefront of Cunningham’s and Cage’s dance and music compositions—an observance that explains Dean’s attraction to these two monumental figures of contemporary art. The reenactment of principles of contingency and indeterminacy is indicative of Dean’s strive to ensure their survival not despite but amidst the filmic ruins of temporal passing. These principles are crucial insofar as they are the modus operandi by which temporal passing expands in space, by which the installation is made to integrate unforeseeable environmental temporalities, and by which the modern forces of rationalization are counterbalanced. This expansion plays a major role in the creation of temporal passing as a surplus value. The chapter will argue that Dean’s original contribution to the temporal turn lies in her unique exploration of the ruiniste aesthetics. Her approach to modernity is in direct continuation with the reclaiming, protective, and critical thrust of that tradition. It also re-launches the preservation predicament brought forward by the late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century art historian Alois Riegl, especially Riegl’s investigation of how and under which conditions the preserved yet ruined materiality of monuments of the past can reconcile their historical and age values. But, in Dean’s work, prolongation does not go without significant alterations. Indeed, considering that film here is concurrently investigated as a rich provider of temporal passing (it is a record of ruins) as much as a destroyer of temporal passing (the projector literally ruins the projected film), the ruiniste attitude has gone wrong. Film is produced as a ruined monument, endowed with constructive and destructive forces which play against one another to the point of near collapse. In this process, however, ruination becomes a dematerializing practice by which film is transformed into what must be called a spectral reality—a filmic reality made to survive beyond the end of film. The chapter’s main question is: how does Dean’s filmic production (exemplified here by Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS) renew the ruiniste tradition to contemporize temporal passing? In other words, how is “ruination gone wrong” a productive non-progressive procedure of temporalization; a regime of historicity pertaining to contemporaneity?

Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) was first presented in the vast dark basement of Dia: Deacon in the summer of 2008, and shown in many other venues since then, including

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North America, Europe, and Australia (Figure 4.5). The installation is composed of six screens of different sizes, from approximately 2 × 3 to 12 × 12 feet wide, as well as six Eike 16 mm sound film projectors installed in front of each screen. In all six films, we see 88-year-old Cunningham sitting in a chair in his dance studio on Bethune Street, Manhattan, New York. He is shot from six distinctive angles and distances, a variety that materializes into an assortment of views: close-up views of Cunningham face front, for example, and larger ones showing him half or full length from different sides. We see him either through or against a smudgy fulllength mirror, or independently from the mirror; doubled by a mirror reflection, solely as a reflection or without reflection; back to us or facing us, but most often in slight profile; his gaze directed in different directions—in some cases toward the spectator. Despite this variety of

Figure 4.5   Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4’ 33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances, six films), 2008. 16 mm, six-screen film projection, color, optical sound, approximately 5 min each film. Installation view. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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views, the different screens stage the same sequencing of the threemovement composition. Sitting throughout the whole performance, Cunningham adopts a pose for 30 sec; he then changes his posture for a longer 2:23 min span (by resting his head on his hand or his two hands); he eventually adjusts his weight to enact another posture of 1:40 min long. Three times, three movements, three fixed postures. In some of the shots Cunningham’s collaborator Trevor Carlson appears as a fleeting shadow, a reflection or a body in camera range, standing with a stopwatch: with his hand held up, he signals to Cunningham the moment when he is to change positions. The performances enact the three movements that structure 433 , one of the most far-reaching works composed by his long-time collaborator and partner, John Cage, who died in 1992. Cunningham had already performed Cage’s 433  as part of a bigger choreographed piece, but STILLNESS, the piece performed for Dean’s installation, is not a pre-existing choreography. It was devised by Cunningham for the filmic installation. Dean recounts: “Merce chose to hold his pose, only moving to shift his position at the end of each of Cage’s three movements. He held himself unimaginably still.”10 The piece must be seen as an artistic collaboration. Dean’s aesthetics is at large an aesthetics of stillness, which means that her shots and editing processes, as well as her use of a static camera, cannot but underpin Cunningham’s stilled movements. Likewise, Cunningham continues here his collaboration with Cage insofar as he has created a dance counterpart to Cage’s silence aesthetics. First performed on August 29, 1952 at Maverick Concert Hall by the pianist David Tudor, Cage’s 433  stages a performer who sits at his instrument for the whole 433  of the piece without sounding a single note, while the audience members are abandoned to themselves to hear the sounds of the environment. Labeled by art historian Branden W. Joseph as Cage’s most radical work, the composition was the first in Cage’s production to shift the focus from the performer to the audience. In the absence of musical sound, the listeners become alert (even more so if they are alienated by that absence) to the ambient noises occurring over the duration of the piece’s three silent movements (30 sec, 2:23 min and 1:40 min, each demarcated by the raising and lowering of the keyboard lid). Cunningham performs these movements by adopting and immobilizing three different poses, respecting the duration of each movement. As in Cage’s 433 , where silence divulges nonintentional noise, the stillness of the poses divulges unforeseen movement—movement revealed precisely because of the body’s fixity,

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by contrast as it were. Even the flow of the film is made visible because of the body’s immobility. As with Cage’s 433 , the spectator of Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS becomes sensitized to chance occurrences within the films, such as a shadow’s flicker across the studio floor; the rise and fall of Cunningham’s chest as he breathes, now a little faster now a little slower; the flicker or trembling of an eyelid; the ambient sounds of the studio picked up during the filming session (Manhattan traffic, the squeaks of the chair and the floor). The spectator might also become sensitized to chance occurrences in the actual space of the installation, such as the reflection of the screens on the basement’s shiny floors; the unexpected fleeting shadow reflection on one of the screens as a spectator passes by; the unforeseen flickering of light on the floor as it reflects the films; voices, steps, conversations; one’s own metabolism; the whirr and heat of the projectors; the occasional film jumps as the films scroll through the projectors. These are, of course, filmed performances—performances enacted to be filmed, which exist for the spectator as films. This filmic dimension is strongly emphasized in the installations as they persistently work to make the materiality of the projected images perceptible. This perceptibility is favored by Dean’s use of 16 mm film technology. The images are unstable on their support insofar as they never completely match the size of the screen; not fully anchored to the screens, they appear to float on them. They are low in resolution, lowering in resolution when the screens get wider and the perspectives are further away from Cunningham’s body. This means that, in some images, his profile tends to blend with the environment and that the body reflections come to appear as shadows. The images occasionally jump; they are grainy, and are regularly marked by spots, lines of light, or thin black lines. The presence of the Eiki projectors in front of each screen reinforces our awareness of the materiality of the installation (Figure 4.6). The whir of the projectors is continuous but variable; it incessantly interacts with the sounds of, in, and around the films. This technological sound betrays the historicalness of 16 mm film, a historicalness which is easily experienced by contemporary spectators now habituated to high definition images. Resilient, the projectors stand at different heights. Anonymous, their role is crucial: they provide light and their whirr provides a sound to the “linear, irreversible, ‘mechanical’”11 temporality of the filmic apparatus. They stand as contributors to image-making but also as faithful witnesses, although their location among the screens makes it difficult to single out the exact projector/screen attachments. They

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Figure 4.6   Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 433  with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances, six films), 2008. 16 mm, six-screen film projection, color, optical sound, approximately 5 min each film. Installation view. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

make visible the circular movement of the celluloid strips, as well as the exposure of the strips—their accessibility and consequent precariousness. Finally: our own trajectory as viewers. As in Melik Ohanian’s Seven Minutes Before (2004), examined in the next chapter, we can never see the installation as a whole. The spreading of the screens in space and the different orientations of the screens in space prevent that. We must thus make our way by walking, posing/stilling, and walking again. It is by moving in space and by looking perspectivally anew that we apprehend the installation and come to realize that this is indeed a highly structured filmed performance: what seemed at first to be the antithesis of dance—stillness as a suspension of forwardness—progressively becomes movement, transformation, and passage; what initially seemed to be different views of a same performance reveals itself to be an assemblage of six different performances of a singular musical composition (which itself, when performed, varied from place to place).

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Stillness and the Suspension of Forwardness Stillness here—the phenomenological suspension of forwardness, which is the main aesthetic operation of the installation—is in fact a convergence of multiple stillnesses that involve time and perception: the stillness of the camera filming Cunningham performing bodily stillness in homage to Cage’s 433  performed musical stillness. All of these stillnesses are perceived by a spectator adopting stillness, for a while at least, to better apprehend their opposites: movement, change, the passage of time, and any other neglected phenomena of our environments. As art historian Briony Fer has noted in her analysis of Dean’s Pie (2003)—a 16 mm film that frames a view of birds flying, resting on tree branches, and departing, with the sun progressively setting in the background—stillness “requires us, as viewers, to be still—to watch, to wait, to observe,” threading “a fine line between indifference and attentiveness.”12 Stillness (the stillness in the film, of the film, of the viewer) allows the viewer “to observe what would normally fall below the threshold of our notice. A film that, at first, appears to contain very little turns out to be full of small incident[s].”13 This leads Fer to conclude that what “is at stake” in Dean’s works is not so much what is represented than “the patterns of our viewing habits.”14 Theodora Vischer has equally insisted on how Dean’s filmworks are about the temporality of perception: “time,” she writes, “[…] does not correspond to the time it takes for an action to develop but rather to the time it takes to perceive what is seen, the time in which the object of the film can become the subject.”15 About The Green Ray (2001), a 2:30 min 16 mm film shot on location in Madagascar to capture the last visible realm of the color spectrum as the sun sets, Dean herself explains that the elusiveness of the green ray makes the film more “about perception and faith rather than about the phenomenon.”16 Indeed, the film requires intense looking insofar as the ray is there but not in any single frame; rather “its visibility depends on the persistence of vision.”17 But what do these statements about the temporality of perception— about how stillness requires and heightens perceptual acuity—exactly say about the temporal strategies at play here, about how Dean explores disappearance by the disappearing technology of analog film? Dean’s critique of digital technology and concomitant defense of analog film are well known. The artist has declared many times that digital images have no depth of field, no black, no intrinsic relationship with time, in contrast to film which is a medium of time, light, emulsion, lenses,

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and silence.18 “Digital is an efficient medium,” she states, “but it’s not about time at all.”19 Yet, commentators on Dean’s filmworks and Dean herself never discuss the historical dimension of time and perception, despite the fact that there is no such thing as time and perception, only historical conceptualizations and experiences of these, as well as disciplinary debates as to what they consist of. This marginalization of the question of history is quite surprising considering that Dean systematically films historical objects and subjects, objects and subjects that have existed and disappeared or are on the threshold of disappearing; narratives of human failing and flawed actions20; natural phenomena (sunsets, an eclipse, the green ray) which are about elusiveness and evanescence; as well as portraits of aging artists.21 Moreover, a contradiction persists when Fer states that stillness “requires” viewers “to be still.” In the installations, at least, stillness is always punctuated with the movement of the spectator in space. What is more, as we have seen in our analysis of Lewis’s filmworks and in light of what Stiegler has called the contemporary hypersolicitation of attention, stillness rapidly transforms itself into distraction. Finally, to require that the spectator perceive in a specific way would be to cancel out the nonintentionality principle sustaining most of Dean’s work. In short, as our (partially) stilled experience of temporal passing and film’s own power of contingency are activated by the filmworks, the rationalizing powers of modernity are also at play. Temporal passing is elaborated relatively to the futuristic modern regime of historicity. As spectators, we are therefore confronted with the disappearance that binds these two temporalities together: the binding of the lived passage of time (“the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past”) transmitted in/by the images and the dying passage of time resulting from the vanishing of the recording technology par excellence of temporal passing. If we follow philosopher Ian B. Philips’s study on the experience of time, it is possible to posit that the installation establishes a direct relation “between the temporal structure of the objects of experience, and the temporal structure of experience itself.”22 This confirms the phenomenal fact that, as perceivers, “we ‘take in’ the temporal structure of the events we witness in witnessing them.”23 Because of its exploration of stillness (but also, as we will see further down, of the aging body and the aging celluloid), Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS can be seen as enabling the matching of the “temporal passing” transmitted by film, the “temporal passing” of film technology per se, and the “temporal passing” structure of our perceptual experience. Yet it provides it as disappearing.

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This brings us to the main constituent of the installation: the filmic image per se. In Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS, it is explored as a media skin endowed with age value and historical value. The media skin—constituted here as a ruining process—can be said to embody the confrontational forces of contingency and rationalization: it provides an amazingly rich record of an aging artist; it itself ages as it is projected; it shows the ruining effects of a static camera filming body stillness (a type of filming that makes the celluloid strip manifest); it is itself displayed as a outmoded technology; and it is gradually destroyed by its multiple projection. As already suggested, there is no clear resolution to this confrontation. Contingency and rationalization coexist in tension. The following section will allow us to examine this crucial constituent of Dean’s aesthetics: the media skin as pertaining to the ruiniste tradition. Our questions will be: what does the media skin keep from that tradition?; how does it change it?; and why? As we address these questions, we will steadily make our way up to the principles of contingency and indeterminacy that sustain Merce Cunningham Performs STILLLNESS’ homage to Cage and Cunningham. Our aim here is to follow as closely as possible the complex ruination path set out by the installation so as to circumscribe its alternative, non-progressive, and presentifying model of futurity.

Media Skin as a Disappearing Temporizing Volume Let us first attend to the aging processes set into play by the installation, those that support the rendering of temporal passing as “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past.” In an interview about Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS, Dean states that “[t]he reason that I like older people is that they carry so much information in their bodies.”24 The modern body—even more so the skin when its markings are not erased—is an index of temporal passing. The installation is Dean’s most radical work to this effect, as it continuously attends to the aging skin of Cunningham’s body as well as the eroding skins of his studio environment. Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (Figure 4.7) operates a pivotal shift in the media production of the skin, from the now more common understanding of the screen as surface or interface to its deployment as a skin deployed as a temporizing volume, which engages the spectator’s perception in the very constitution of this volume. This shift is primarily elaborated by the all-pervading stillness

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that sustains the whole piece, as it works to reveal the minute movements of the body and the image together. It is above all manifest in sequences when the dancer’s aged wrinkled skin intertwines with the flickering grainy creases of the 16 mm film celluloid strip: here, media skin (the visual blending of the human skin and the celluloid) can be seen as emerging from stillness as it brings together photographic freeze and cinematic movement—a tensed merge that builds the media skin as a stilled site of micro-changes that show the resilient “becoming present of future events and then their becoming past.” By integrating the aging body to the aging analog film (both a disappearing technology and a technology progressively deteriorating on site by multiple projections), Dean’s installation not only defines the image as a temporizing volume but ultimately questions modernity’s future-driven logic of progress—a logic which has practically erased female aging skins from our contemporary cinematic screens.

Figure 4.7   Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 433  with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances, six films), 2008. 16 mm, six-screen film projection, color, optical sound, approximately 5 min each film. Installation view. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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The media skin starts to build itself tangibly in the installation’s smaller screens which frame close-up views of the dancer, screens that activate a filmic version of what art historian Amelia Jones has called flesh/screens: the exploration of the screen as a mode of presentation of bodies through video or filmic texture where flesh takes “its texture and materiality from that of the televisual monitor” or film screen.25 Interestingly, the operations of the flesh/screen are echoed in other surfaces, namely in the studio’s ubiquitous mirror. The mirror consistently reflects Cunningham. It also discloses parts of the studio which would otherwise be left outside of the frame, while also affirming itself as a solid not-so-transparent surface because of the grimy spots that partially blur its reflexivity and the forms reflected in it. These small surface traces are themselves echoed in the erosions marking the surface of the old wall to which the mirror is fixed. This echoing is important: it asserts a skin logic which is analog, mortal, and indexical— a skin logic, in other words, made out of erosions that partake both of deep structures (the profundity of the studio space, the thickness of the wall, Cunningham’s body, Cunningham’s performance) and superficial traces of the passage of time (accumulated body prints, crumblings, wrinkles, creases of the celluloid strip). What is more, it asserts the skin logic as made out of erosions that partake of both stasis and movement, where the stasis manifests itself as an energy of resistance to movement as well as a mode of disclosure of imperceptible events. In Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS, it is the image itself that operates as a skin insofar as its surface embodies a fixity that turns into movement and a movement that turns into fixity. It is a surface made out of surfaces (Cunningham’s wrinkles, the celluloid strip, the mirror, the wall, even the gallery floor) that incessantly turn into depths and depths that turn into surfaces. It is an image that also allows us to better account for the spectator’s temporalized perception of the piece insofar as the spectator can be described (let us follow Phillips again) as taking in “the temporal structure of the events” she witnesses “in witnessing them.”26 Let us not forget that, for Dean, film is the medium par excellence of the phenomenal passage of time. A few conceptualizations of this aesthetics, an aesthetics in which the intertwining of skin and video or film screen is shown to orient the viewer’s perception of images, have been proposed in the last decade or so. As we will see, however, they still rely on the notion of screen as interface and must be reviewed to encapsulate the temporalization of the screen developed in Dean’s work.

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In my own study of Mona Hatoum’s Corps Étranger (1994), I argued that the confusion between skin and screen worked both to protect Hatoum’s recorded flesh from the viewer’s gaze and to trouble the “correct distance” between the viewer and the other’s flesh. The skinscreen confusion (Hatoum’s skin as screen) intensified in moments when spectators touched the floor screen with their feet.27 Although the skin effect in Dean’s installation does not involve spectators touching the screens, it does consistently maintain, through the coalescence of the graininess of Cunningham’s aged skin and 16 mm celluloid materiality, a confusion of skin and film that solicits from the viewer a perceptual negotiation of distance and proximity between her body and the screens. Media theorist Laura Marks, in her book The Skin of the Film (2000), has also emphasized how contemporary media works solicit the viewer’s vision haptically. In her articulation of haptic vision, she refers to a videotape by Shauna Beharry, Seeing is Believing (1991), a work made in mourning of her mother, where the camera approaches a still image of the artist wearing her mother’s sari, following the folds of the fabric “as they dissolve into grain and resolve again.”28 As the tape stages her vision, it does so through the sense of touch so that the eyes are not so much invited to look than to “brush” the image of the fabric. Here, as in many intercultural works, including the work of Mona Hatoum, Sami Al-Kassim, Roula Haj-Ismail, Leila Sujir, Shani Mootoo, Alia Arasoughly, and Ming-Yuen S. Ma, the breaking down of the figure-ground relationship; the use of close-up; the marking, graininess, blurring, or disintegration of the surface of the image: all of these procedures “appeal to embodied memory by bringing vision as close as possible to the image; by converting vision to touch.”29 Following Alois Riegl’s distinction between optical and haptic visuality, between a mode of vision at distance (from a far) where objects are seen as forms and figures in space and a mode of vision that appeals to tactile connections on the surface plane of the image, Marks argues that haptic video and film images “invite a look that moves on the surface plane of the screen for some time before the viewer realizes what she or he is beholding. Such images resolve into figuration only gradually, if at all.”30 Particularly relevant to Dean’s Merce Cunningham piece is this durational temporality; the fact that it takes time for the spectator to identify what she is beholding. The durational dimension of the viewer’s perception comes about because of the thingness of haptic images, which requires that the spectator loose himself or herself in the image and slowly bring “his or her resources of memory and

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imagination to complete” the image.31 The haptic image favors contemplation instead of bringing the spectator into a narrative. It appeals to the embodied viewer. It is a particular kind of affection-image that “can bring us to the direct experience of time through the body.”32 Although one must remain skeptical about the possibility of ever experiencing time directly, Marks’s point is well taken insofar as the modern body is a marker of temporal passing. Marks’s observation also rightly insists on the temporal dimension of the skin of the film in haptic images. In Dean’s installation, the stilled media skin is the modality by which temporal passing is conveyed; stillness is the procedure that enables the skin to act as a manifestation of temporality. But, as Jones’s notion of the flesh screen helps to specify, the media skin is not a simple surface property. Thickened by the technology that materializes it, skin is both surface and depth. This double quality is acknowledged in Jones’s analysis of video works by Paul McCarthy, Lynda Benglis, Vito Acconci, Mona Hatoum, and others, which explore the screen as a mode of presentation of “bodies through an electronic (or, as McLuhan puts it, ‘electric’) texture.”33 These artists, she writes, “announce and perform their embodiment as resolutely technologized, but as technologized in such a way that the televisual screen is embodied while their flesh takes its texture and materiality from that of the televisual monitor, its depth […] from the profundity suggested by the puncture-wound opening of the monitor in the dark space of the room or gallery (even if the lights are on, televisual luminosity wins out over any ambient glow).”34 To account for the complexity of skin as a temporizing volume (a volume generated by the surface/depth, stasis/movement interactions between the recorded bodies and the celluloid strip as well as between the spectator and the screen), it is useful to look at Dean’s drawing production. A brief examination of her drawings prevents us to reduce the skin to notions of filmic interface or screen; it also allows us to observe that Dean’s artistic practice as a whole preserves the analog functioning of the image, of things in general. Her black-and-white photographed chalk drawings on blackboard series from 1992, entitled Sixteen Blackboards—individually numbered black-and-white photographs of 16 states of the same blackboard, drawn in chalk, conveying a visual translation of thought process spread out over several boards—, were created by a mutual process of erasing and overdrawing, a method “of making the image multi-layered and dense—by way of using erasure as a visual element.”35 Other series, namely her five-part chalk drawings on blackboard Sea Inventory Drawings (Opening Swell, Wind Getting Up,

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Angry Sea, Filthy Weather, Calmer Now) from 1998, propose images that represent the sea by both confirming the surface quality of the blackboard through the inscription of sentences and by deepening the surface through drawing the foam of the waves and allowing the foam to leap the surface forward into the space of the viewer. What is represented is the deepness of the sea—a deepness that Dean describes as resulting from the connection of the blackboards “to the sea, its constant motion, flux, change […] the dark abyss of the ocean.”36 In other words, the deepness of the sea is concomitant to the blackboard surface whose surface quality is not only supported by the inscriptions of words and sentences but troubled as a mere boundary by the foam of the waves which tend to leap out into the spectators’ space. Her Alabaster Drawings (2002–5) consists of a series of dry points on alabaster stone that convey, again, a sense of skin as milieu (Figures 4.8, 4.9, and 4.10). This milieu effect results from the mutual interaction between the surface and the deepness of the stone: the etching of the stone produces incisions of white lines that trace the natural lines of the stone; the translucence of the surface allows light to filter through it to create a soft muted light; the close-up and all-over view provided by the slab framing of the stones

Figure 4.8   Tacita Dean, Alabaster Drawings, 2002–5. Drypoint on agatha alabaster. 61 × 61 × 2 cm each. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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Figure 4.9   Tacita Dean, Alabaster Drawings, 2002–5. Drypoint on agatha alabaster. 61 × 61 × 2 cm each. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

Figure 4.10   Tacita Dean, Alabaster Drawings, 2002–5. Drypoint on agatha alabaster. 61 × 61 × 2 cm each. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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visually flatten the stone to activate the vaporousness of the amber and the cloudy volumes of the motif. This cloudy atmospheric rendering is only but affirmed by Banewl, a 16 mm color anamorphic film made in 1999, which presents a cloudy sky in the midst of a total eclipse of the sun. Her painted postcards, Himmel/See (2005) and Painted Trees (2006), validate the image as surface—she overpaints most of the image in generously applied white—but never abandons the depth of the landscape whose elements stand forth and whose veiled surroundings convey an unresolved depth. In all of these works, skin is conveyed as a milieu, canceling out the skin as a mere interface, screen, or flesh/ screen, to propose a surface-depth, fixity-movement relationship that constitute skin as change, the dimension par excellence of time. It is precisely in these terms that literary theorist Steven Connor describes the contemporary skin. Connor’s study of the skin and examination of the contemporary skin as a milieu (a term he borrows from Michel Serres), shows the skin as a surface/depth place of minglings where body and world meet and touch. The notion of skin as an environment underscores a mutation from previous paradigms where the skin is understood mainly as a surface, membrane or interface. The skin as milieu or temporizing volume assumes, firstly, that the skin is not detachable from the body “in such a way that the detached part would remain recognizable or that the body left behind would remain recognizably a body: a body minus.”37 Secondly, it assumes that the skin goes beyond itself in its relation with the world. It is a milieu that is perceived, as Paul Schilder has contended, “only when we are in touch with reality and its objects,” as when a body part is in contact with other body parts, everyday objects, clothes, furniture, elements of nature such as wind or rain. It is itself a mode of touching. The main capacity of the skin as conceptualized and experienced in contemporary times—and this highlights how notions of membrane and interface have lost some of their relevancy—is its capacity “to be folded in upon itself” so that “it is involved in other, much more mobile and ambivalent substances too, substances and forms which do not have simple superficiality or absolute homogeneity, but in which, so to speak, the surface turns on itself, goes all the way down: smoke; clouds; dust; sand; foam.”38 Connor says: The skin marks and holds another time, an embodied temporality that is a third element, between the law and the flesh, which […] disturbs their settled compact. The skin may be something else, a third thing, between the alternatives of a screen that lets things through, or a

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slate on which things may be deposited. It might be, as it in fact is, a temporizing volume, a milieu, an environment, a multiplicity, a depth, an archipelago or Northwest Passage. The law of marks imposed upon the body, either as expression or as accident, is a positive law, which erases the possibility of loss, or erasure, or approximation. The life of the skin is probabilistic, an unfolding between the alternatives of the family face, with its bags and folds and wrinkles buried in the genes, and the tannings, softenings, emaciations and alimentations to which it is heir in time. The idea of marking the skin aims to hold it suspended between the alternatives of figure and ground, accident and intention. But the mark on the skin in fact marks out the subjection […] to the invisible and imperfectly calculable space of competing probabilities. Freckles and acne come and go. The mole may or may not develop into melanoma, which may or may not be malignant. The skin is more like a sea than a screen, more like a mobile sky of shifting cloud and sun than the punctual night sky.39 This notion of skin as a temporizing volume takes a special “aging” dimension in Dean’s filmworks which attends to matured, abandoned, deteriorating, decaying, or ruined objects/subjects, including lighthouses, houses, studios, palaces, boats, liqueur-bottled pears, nuns, artists, and poets. Temporizing media skins are produced to emphasize the passing into the past; a passing corroborated by these different aging skins. Fundamentally analog, they directly oppose the current skins of predominant cinema, which bring together digital film and human skins divested of their temporal markers through cosmetic dermatology and aesthetic surgery. Dean’s temporizing media skins are reinforced by the 16 mm projectors which not only make manifest the insertion of the celluloid strip into its continual disappearance but also progressively ruin it, confirming its irreversible passing into the past. In Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS, the media skin that materializes the image as a temporizing volume results from the stillness operations of the work which make surface fold into depth and fixity into movement. These foldings have an added quality on which stillness takes hold: age value. Age value is materialized in Cunningham’s aged body, in the half-ruined wall and stained mirror, as well as in the aging celluloid film (not only 16 mm film as a disappearing technology but the literal decay of the celluloid strip resulting from the uninterrupted looped projections).

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The Modern “Ruiniste” Tradition To say that Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (Figure 4.11) partakes of the modern European preoccupation with ruins is to argue that it attends to ruins in order to reclaim and protect them, and reinvest them with their capacity to convey the passage of time. Dean’s ruiniste approach must be seen both as an aesthetic strategy and an interpretation of the filmic image. It is explored to overdetermine film as a medium of temporal passing insofar as ruining surfaces as a manifestation of the passage of time are not only filmed but are also what occurs to film; they reveal film as the transmitter of disappearing things while staging and operating the disappearance of film. This overdetermination is reinforced by the looped projections that restage the ruining processes (in and of the films), by the presence of the projectors whose whirr provides a sound to temporal passing, and by the spreading of the installation in the exhibition space that not only propose different perspectival views of ruinations but also articulate their constant overlapping with the environment’s own temporalities. Overdetermination is set into play to produce a counteracting force strong enough to balance out the rationalizing forces of the modern regime of historicity. It is harnessed to preserve temporal passing as an awaiting remnant. The media skin, so powerfully explored in Merce Cunningham Performs STILLLNESS, takes most of its temporizing volumetry from its ruined dimension, which is characteristically endowed with what must be called the “age value” of the filmic image. This notion was proposed by Riegl to describe one of the main values of historical monuments. Whereas Marks, in her study of the skin of film, develops Riegl’s distinction between optical and haptic visuality to underscore film’s and video’s ability to bring vision “as close as possible to the image; by converting vision to touch,”40 it is more useful here—in an attempt to better circumscribe the ruining scope of Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS—to return to Riegl’s discussion of the age value of the work of art. In his 1903 study, “The modern cult of monuments: its character and its origin,” the art historian postulated that the memory value of monuments (a category that includes artifacts and works of art), when perceived from a twentieth-century perspective, lied not only in the historical but also in the artistic and age values of the monuments. The age value corresponds to the temporal quality of the monument—the degree to which the ruined or aging skin of the monument transmits to the modern spectator a sense of temporal passing. It is a meeting point between the objective traces

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Figure 4.11   Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 433  with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances, six films), 2008. 16 mm, six-screen film projection, color, optical sound, approximately 5 min each film. Installation view. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

of age registered in the materiality of the monument and the modern spectator who has acquired (this is Riegl’s pivotal claim) a subjectivized mode of perception. Riegl defines age value as the dimension that “springs from our appreciation of the time which has elapsed since [the monument] was made and which has burdened it with traces of age. […] This immediate emotional effect depends on neither scholarly knowledge nor historical education for its satisfaction, since it is evoked by mere sensory perception.”41 We will come back to Riegl’s study further down to show how it attempts to reconcile the historical and age values of the monument. What must be emphasized now is how it succeeds in pointing out how age value is both an objective reality (it is made manifest in the markings of the monument’s skin) and a subjective reality (it is experienced because

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of the modern subject’s “appreciation” of temporal passing). In “The modern cult of monuments,” as was the case in most of his art historical studies, Riegl set out to question traditional notions of historical objectivity that failed to consider the temporal dimension of the artifact and the beholder’s active perceptual involvement in the unfolding of the represented spatiality of the work of art (in seventeenth-century Dutch group portraiture, for instance, he observed that the beholder was posited as perceptually completing the artwork). His project was to disclose the role of perception in constructing the coherence of historical accounts of past artifacts on the basis that past artifacts are never simply external to the perceiving art historian: as perceptual temporal objects, they necessarily unfold as an interrelationship between subject and object. As beautifully demonstrated by historian Michael Gubser, the overall motivation behind Riegl’s historical enterprise—a motivation equally underlying the philosophical work of some of his contemporaries, including Brentano and Husserl—was to dismantle the persistent divide between subject and object that characterized mid-nineteenth-century positivism.42 Riegl’s stand exemplified the task of the art historian: the need to acknowledge that the observer never perceives or aesthetically judges from an absolute vantage, which entails the requirement to attend to the temporal dynamics inherent in the act of judging itself. To address this problem, Riegl proposed two different notions of time: time as a historical concept (which altered from one epoch to the other); and time as a phenomenon embedded in artifacts (which both supported and broke away from perception).43 The double premise of his art historical perspective—the assumption that artworks, for Riegl, were not only products of historical perception (artworks from different ages represent different ways of perceiving the world), but also products of the subjective involvement of the spectator—elaborated an important challenge to historical studies of past artifacts: the obligation to account for the persisting fact that the art historian (the beholder in general) is necessarily conditioned by a conceptualization of time that does not match the temporalities of other eras and cultures which s/he nevertheless attempts to grasp.44 Conscious of the historicity of his own art historical venture and as a means to alleviate problems of anachronistic reading of past artifacts, Riegl developed a formalist approach that confirmed the increasingly subjectivist dimension of perception (which reaches its apex in twentieth-century modernity with the rise of individualism) while letting the phenomena be studied objectively so that they might manifest themselves both ‘in their own terms’

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and as symptomatic of their own time.45 The perception of historical monuments was emblematic of this objective/subjective experience: ruins transmit the passage of time in the encounter between objective markings and subjective appreciation. The very conceptualization of age value (which is prevalent in Dean’s installation) is impossible without this understanding of the objective/subjective perception of historical monuments. As emphasized by Gubser: Only in perception could the traces of a proto-phenomenological, artifactual time emerge. By analyzing the relationship among modern historical perception, the artifacts it attempted to organize, and the alternate constructions of temporality they envisioned, Riegl identified a new project for art history: like chronologists without the benefit of a fixed calendar, art historians strove to understand the interaction among various conceptions of time. […] An artifact could possess age value even if it offered no clues about a specific historical era. […] Artifacts—written, visual, architectural—represented the passage of time in traces of age accumulated over the course of their existence. This representation was not a function of either the artifact or viewer alone, but something they both “joined in” or “made with” (mitgemacht) each other, literally a re-presentation of time emerging within the visual dialogue between an artifact and a viewer.46 Evoking a proto-phenomenological sense of time as passage, age value corresponds, for Riegl, to the temporal apprehending of artifacts whose decaying states resonate with natural cycles of becoming-and-ending: “[a]n aesthetic axiom of our time based on age-value may be formulated as follows: from man we expect accomplished artifacts as symbols of a necessary process of human production; on the other hand, from nature acting over time, we expect their disintegration as the symbol of an equally necessary passing. […] In the twentieth century we appreciate particularly the purely natural cycle of becoming and passing away. Every artifact is thereby perceived as a natural entity […].”47 Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS feeds on this modern development of age value—one that takes its full force in the observation of ruins. In a period of obsolescence and supersession of analog technology, it is not enough to project films of disappearing things. Ruination—the filming of ruins and the ruination of film—allows Dean to overdetermine temporal passing. It allows her to counteract rationalization and retain some level of temporal passing’s indebtedness to film.

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Prolonging the ruiniste tradition, Dean’s production sets out, therefore, to take care of the traces of temporal passing inscribed in these ruins. As recently summed up by Andreas Huyssen, the ruin is a central topos of modernity: effectively, the ruin is “a significant conceptual and architectural constellation that points to moments of decay, falling apart, or ruination as early as the beginnings of modernity in the eighteenth century. […] Real ruins of different kinds function as screens on which modernity projects its asynchronous temporalities and its fear of and obsession with the passing of time.”48 This imaginary of ruins, as an alternative conceptualization of modernity, stands against modernity’s naive belief in progress and its correlate denial of temporal passing. In contrast to the optimism of Enlightenment thought, the modern imaginary of ruins “remains conscious of the dark side of modernity, what Diderot described as the inevitable ‘devastations of time’ […]. It articulates the nightmare of the Enlightenment that all history might ultimately be overwhelmed by nature.”49 There lies their productivity: they signal the passage and devastations of time, so as to reorient the modern regime of historicity out of its progressive path. This aspect is crucial: ruinisme is a critical voice of modernity within modernity. As a modern critical practice, it prevents the reduction of modernity to a univocal futuristic set of procedures working to embrace progress while denying its damaging effects. Studies have shown that the imaginary of ruins is an inherent constituent of modernity itself. In the late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century, especially in the philosophical work and political writings of François-René de Chateaubriand, Constantin-François Chasseboeuf de Volney, and then again in early twentieth century, of Walter Benjamin, ruins are disclosed as the sinister vestiges of Enlightenment’s conceptualization of history as a progressive, perfectible continuum: they signal the contingency of history; the impossibility to unify it and direct it as a transcendental law of becoming. Understood as a symptom of a crisis, they became the basis for improved articulations of past, present, and future—articulations that could problematize the futuristic thrust of modern historicity. In her study on the critical function of ruins, philosopher Sophie Lacroix has exposed how, already in the mid-eighteenth century, a new ruiniste mentality found some of its main expressions in arts, art criticism and history, notably in the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Denis Diderot as well as in the Roman etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Renaissance’s veneration of ruins as emblems of a glorious past was replaced by an increased sense of responsibility to save ruins. Once

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the archaeological excavations showed ruins to be mutilated scraps from which it was impossible to reconstitute the unity of past architecture, they came to be observed as irreplaceable goods which could be protected as pre-figurations of the future of humanity. Lacroix’s study suggests more precisely that ruins manifested the “troubling paradox” of artifacts which refer to absence through their own presence; a materialized paradox which could then be used to effectively warn humans against the unquestioned belief in the clarity and transparency of reason.50 Ruins set out a doubt, therefore, over the power of operational reason. This imaginary was confirmed at the end of the eighteenth century, when the aesthetic sensibility of ruins worked to sustain a reflection on history. This sensibility could be passeist, presentist, or presentifying, catastrophic (supporting the view that all revolution destroys the great achievements of men) even futuristic, but it strove to renew the understanding of the role of the future in the becoming of societies. Said differently, ruins became a pivotal instrument of transformation of historical consciousness. This critical standpoint was central to Volney’s The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1791), where ruins are the lessons from which a proper foundation of civilization can be thought out. Lacroix insists on this point: Enlightenment’s “anxious consciousness of a present which will not come back and of a past which is lost” is both triggered by the observation of and made manifest in the ruins; it justifies the dismissal of the cyclical conception of time (following the cycle of natural revolutions such as the night and day) and the promotion of the conception of becoming as an innovating process.51 Ruination is a historical consciousness. It is a historical consciousness that emerges from the ruins’ manifestation of the irreversibility of temporal passing—an irreversibility precipitated by progressive acts of destructions. As it sets out to critique the progressive drives of modernity, the ruiniste tradition—of which Dean’s filming practice is a part (both in its recording and projection activities)—reclaims and protects, but it must also let ruins express temporal passing. Michael S. Roth, co-curator of the exhibition Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed held at the Getty Center in 1997–8, specifies that the reclaiming and protection of ruins must indeed work to disclose the losses that partake of temporal passing. Otherwise, ruins risk not having their full historical consciousness and aesthetic contemplation effects: “the word ruin has its origins in the idea of falling and has long been associated with fallen stones. When we frame an object as a ruin, we reclaim the object from its fall into decay

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and oblivion and often for some kind of cultural attention and care that, in a sense, elevates its value. In the European traditions the classical ruin is elevated out of oblivion into a particularly exalted position of contemplation or even worship. But all ruins are reclaimed, at least in part, because they are vulnerable to the irresistible threat of decay and the uncanny, vertiginous menace of the forces of forgetting. Ruins must remain exposed to these forces in order to have their full effect on the beholder, but they must also be protected from them if they are to survive for us as ruins.”52 The paradox of the ruin lies therefore in its acknowledgment as a fallen object (as an object belonging to a past that is irremediably lost) that must nevertheless be made to survive, persist, and remain—made present as it were—so that it may be “given to the future.”53 In short, at least since the eighteenth century, the ruiniste tradition presentifies ruins to allow their past to come to the fore. They are the modality by which an observer can proceed to reconsider the progress-oriented rationalizations of modernity partly responsible for their initial ruination and to think historicity anew. This brief synopsis helps us to situate Dean’s ruination practice as a genuine prolongation of the modern imaginary of ruins: intensively attentive to ruins, it relies on that imaginary to reclaim and protect ruins, so that film may overdeterminatly continue to transmit temporal passing. In its perpetual filming and staging of ruins, it must be seen as striving to elaborate a critique of the rationalizing forces of the modern regime of historicity that incessantly replace the past (the old, the whatcame-before, the aging and the aged) by the new. Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS’s creation of a ruined media skin is emblematic of that ruiniste thrust (Figure 4.12). But it is not enough to say that Dean’s filmworks prolong that tradition. As we have seen, ruins are not simply reclaimed and protected in the works but persistently made. In contrast to the ruiniste tradition, they ruin the ruin by producing ruined media skins and by eventually eroding the celluloid strip. In so doing, they radically fragilize that tradition, risking erasing the ruins’ capacity to act as a reminder of what is lost when the rationalizing forces of the modern regime of historicity have come to the fore: temporal passing’s indebtedness to film. Ruination has gone wrong because it is now overdetermined. But this “going wrong,” the remaining sections will argue, is indicative of an acute sense of the rationalizing forces of modernity which have effectively turned analog film into an outdated, archaic medium. A return to Riegl’s “The modern cult of monuments” will show that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, the age

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Figure 4.12   Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 433  with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances, six films), 2008. 16 mm, six-screen film projection, color, optical sound, approximately 5 min each film. Installation view. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

value of monuments (the modern subject’s “appreciation” of temporal passage) was threatening to overtake their historical value, emptying as it were the experience of temporal passing from its historical substrate. By producing ruins which will be ultimately ruined, Dean’s Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS refuses that the filmic experience of the passage of time be separated from historicity; it works to maintain the historical value of film. As the last section will demonstrate, it is only by ruining the ruin (by overdetermining temporal passing) that temporal passing—film’s historical claim to contingency—may be potentialized.

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The Modern Cult of Monuments Riegl’s study of monuments is essentially an occasion to raise the predicament of preservation of historical artworks. What is Riegl proposing in his “The modern cult of monuments: its character and its origin” if not the possibility of understanding and preserving monuments as art objects transformed into documents of art?54 This is precisely what Dean’s filmworks set into play: the unfolding of film as a monument. Film is approached as a mnemonic document, in the double sense of it being an archival record of disappearing objects/subjects and of it being—once it is installed in an exhibition room with its 16 mm projectors—the enduring, historical memorial or tombstone of analog film. Her filmworks preserve both the content and the materiality of 16 mm film. It reclaims film, protects it, and ensures its survival. But Dean’s filmworks operate as monuments paradoxically, through ruination practices that end up ruining the preserved ruins. In his study, Riegl is not without revealing this paradox when he raises the question of preservation, asking that we think about the “why” and the “what” of preservation: for indeed, which value (commemorative, artistic, historical, temporal, age) is being preserved when a monument is preserved? The debate over whether historical buildings should be restored to their original state or simply be preserved and left to their slow decay is crucial insofar as the coexistence of the different values of monuments entail competing even contradictory forms of preservation practices. Whereas somewhat critical of the modern propensity to valorize the age value of monuments, the essay presented a case for preserving the historical value of monuments while also being critical of restoration practices that erased the monuments’ indexicality— their material registering of the passage of time. The study concludes on a recommendation: the need to preserve the historical value of monuments, the historical corresponding to “everything that has been and is no longer.”55 But the recommendation is not straightforward in that it attempts to reconcile the historical value of monuments (which comes from the nineteenth-century cult of monuments), its art value (which, since the eighteenth-century establishment of aesthetics, does not rely on objective canonical ideals of art but on the subjective satisfaction experienced in relation to art) as well as its age value (proper to the twentieth-century appreciation of monuments). In the modern cult of monuments, age value has become so significant that the historical value finds itself jeopardized. When the monument or artifact

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acquires significant age value, its “original significance and purpose” loses its importance to the benefit of the artifact’s capacity to reveal “the passage of a considerable period of time” through the evidence of survival provided by the deterioration of its exterior appearance.56 This overvaluing of the age value is part of a larger always increasing tendency, inherent to the modern emancipated individual, to transcend “an objective physical and psychic perception in favor of a subjective experience […] thereby substituting for [the monument’s] objective individuality a merely subjective effect.”57 The age value paradoxically supports the deterioration of the monument insofar as it is what must be attended to in order to maintain its age value. It supports deterioration and so condemns any human interference and any interruption operated by means of preservation or restoration. The cult of age value opposes the cult of historical value: the latter wants to preserve the original state of the monument while the former wants to let natural decay proceed, that is, “to permit the monuments to submit to incessant transformation and steady decay.”58 The cult of age value paradoxically “contributes to its own demise.”59 Riegl insightfully discloses this paradox—the very paradox highlighted in Dean’s filmworks—when exposing its main dilemma: how can age value be preserved if it is not by preserving the monument so that its aged materiality may continue to convey the temporal passage of time? If it is not, also, by maintaining the nineteenth-century historical value on which twentieth-century age value relies to convey the passing of the past? This observation allows him to propose preservation policies that combine age value and historical value, that enable the difficult yet not impossible co-preservation of decaying processes and sense of origins. Riegl searches for a reconciliation between the historical and age value positions. This standpoint allows us to go back to Dean’s installation to see that it significantly departs from Riegl’s hope for reconciliation between the cults of historical value and age value. The installation overdeterminedly cultivates the age value of ruined monuments; it relies on the spectator’s subjective response to ruins as a co-producer of age value; it even takes up the modern tension between the historical and age values by maintaining the contingency and rationalization double-bind. It is precisely because Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS does not only produce a media skin endowed with age value but a media skin in a state of ruination that a reconciliation between historical and age values is declared as impossible. The installation reenacts Kodak’s chronicling of

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the last days of production of the Kodak French film factory at Chalonsur-Saône. Ruining the ruins, the installation both activates and resists the “destructive forces that continue to produce contemporary ruins.”60 The only way out of that irreconcilable tension is to care for temporal passing beyond film and to take care of film beyond temporal passing. It is to create remnants. The installation, and this is the case for Dean’s production as a whole, substantially partakes of the archival impulse described by Hal Foster; but they more specifically institute an aesthetics of care—a care not only for the archives it films and the films it produces but also for the spectral dimension of the ultimate but ungraspable archive of temporal passing per se.61 Her filmworks notably provide a record of disappearing things; they also strive to ensure a partial survival of analoge film and its unique capacity to engender temporal passing. As it repeats, restages and sets out to protect again and again the ruins of film (by looping devices and by simply filming them), Dean’s production develops as an ongoing archive of film by film. So as to better understand the concurrency of conflicting forces embodied by the media skin as well as the ambivalent ruination it sustains, it is useful to look into Jacques Derrida’s definition of the archive as an irremediable site of conflicting forces. In his philosophical study of the archive, Derrida underlines the necessary paradox that underlies the archiving process—a paradox that Dean’s work unequivocally sets into play. His study calls attention to two Freudian texts (“A note upon the ‘mystic writing-pad’,” 1925 and Chapter VI of Civilization and Its Discontents, 1929–30) that disclose psychoanalytical theory itself as a practice of archivization. In these texts, Freud not only defines the psychic apparatus as an active site of inscription and encryption of memory traces, but also (and this is more properly the main objective of Civilization and Its Discontents) seeks to inscribe, imprint, preserve and transmit his own psychoanalytical finding of the death drive, initially theorized in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Derrida reads this Freudian association between archiving and death drive as a transformational moment of psychoanalysis, a moment when the discipline posits itself as a particular theory of the archive—one in which the archiving as an impression and preservation process is silently troubled by a drive of destruction. The death drive must be understood, Derrida argues, as a drive that “works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own ‘proper’ traces.”62 The death drive is first and foremost “anarchivic”: it is an anti-document and antimonument drive that pulls humans into oblivion as it works to obliterate

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(and sometimes succeeds in erasing), in its destructive flow, the memorization, reproduction, and reimpression processes of the archive.63 Such is what Derrida designates as our feverish relation to the archive: the contemporary seeking of the archive “right where it slips away”; right where the death drive makes the archive possible; even right there, in its spectral dimension—the archive being a trace “always referring to another whose eyes can never be met, no more than those of Hamlet’s father, thanks to the possibility of a visor.”64 The projection of Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS can be said to actualize this paradox: it inserts destruction in the very making of the image, creating a media skin that registers a disappearing world (a world highly textured as a temporal passing), while progressively destroying that media skin by obsessively ruining it and restaging it. This double-bind operation constitutes the archival impulse sustaining the installation. Gone is Riegl’s hope for the reconciliation between historical and age values. The installation constitutes temporal passing not merely as “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past,” but as a becoming just about abolished by rationalization. The media skin is a temporizing volume whose volumetry is always conditioned by the futuristic laws of the modern regime of historicity. In so doing, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS digs into the ruiniste tradition. But, as I have been claiming, it digs into it to alter it. It owes something to Robert Smithson’s unfolding of the times of geology, history, the second law of thermodynamics, and technology. The works that explicitly revisit Smithson—the audio piece Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1997) and the film From Columbus, Ohio to the Partially Buried Woodshed (1999)—perform what most of Dean’s films perform and what Smithson performed himself in his artistic practice: entropy. They extend Smithson’s works related to the post-industrial “monuments” of Passaic, New Jersey, and the “ultramodern” architecture of the 1930s: his production of material ruins.65 Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS is therefore more of a negative monument than a commemorative monument that would compensate for the gaps and fissures of history. Yet, as has been the case with Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which remerged several years after being submerged in the Great Salt Lake, the installation shows entropy to be an incomplete process. The double-bind between contingency and rationalization persists and its transmission of temporal passing (of temporal passing’s indebtedness to analog film) is persistently overdetermined. This overdetermination is crucial. Its productivity comes from the fact that temporal passing remains as a

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homeless surplus value awaiting for future actualizations. So that this dimension of time may survive, analog technology must be preserved but not restored (to reaffirm John Ruskin’s standpoint according to which restoration corresponds to an act of destruction, which is mostly carried out because of the belief in the restorability of the past: “Neither by the public, nor for those who have the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word restoration understood. It means the most total destruction which a building worst manner can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed”66); the installation adopts a preservation practice, however, that keeps the death drive of archival practice alive.

Contingency, Nonintentionality and Indeterminacy One of the important aesthetic procedures sustaining Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 433  with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances, six films (Figure 4.13) and ensuring its interaction with the environment inside and outside the work is indeterminacy—a performative practice that works to suspend the conscious fixing of properties of image, movement, and sound, so that unforeseen images, movements, and sounds may have the same value as selected and performed ones. Art critic Holland Cotter is right to state that Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS raises the question of delimitation and containability: “Where and when does Ms. Dean’s piece, with its staggered comings and goings of images, begin or end?”67 The installation not only expands beyond the screens to bring together the images and the light reflected by the floors, it also blends the sounds in the films (Cunningham’s Manhattan studio), of the films (the whirr of the projectors; the roll of the celluloid strips), and of the exhibition space (the sound of visitors circulating; conversations; a variety of echoes). It never really ends or begins insofar as the looping system ensures the automatic re-projection of each film at different times. This is to say that the installation invites, even calls for, interactions between the projected films and unforeseeable environmental images and sounds. As indeterminacy is enabled, the installation gains in spectrality. This is even more noticeable in the installation’s blending of authorship which propels the Cagean principle of indeterminacy to the fore: 433  is enacted; the Cunningham–Cage collaboration

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Figure 4.13   Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 433  with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances, six films), 2008. 16 mm, six-screen film projection, color, optical sound, approximately 5 min each film. Installation view. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London.

continues beyond Cage’s death; and as STILLNESS unfolds, Dean’s film stilling aesthetics blurs with Cunningham’s stilled movements. Let us recall Derrida’s definition of the spectral dimension of the archive (a dimension which partakes of the death drive that makes the archive possible): the archive, he observes, is a trace “always referring to another whose eyes can never be met, no more than those of Hamlet’s father, thanks to the possibility of a visor.”68 Transmitted by a looping system, the images are in effect haunted by previous images which will never be fully regained. In the installation, the light reflections are haunted by the images; sounds are haunted by other sounds; the beginning of a film is haunted by the end of another film; Dean’s film is haunted by Cunningham’s performance itself haunted by Cage’s composition. The installation itself pays homage to 433 . It explores its aesthetics

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of contingency, nonintentionality, and indeterminacy—this is the main claim of this concluding section—to create what must be called a spectral dimension, by which temporal passing survives as an awaiting remnant. It is because the installation is open to indeterminacy that the overdetermined temporal passing it produces can be transformed into a spectral reality that survives as a pending surplus value. To clarify the installation’s transmutation of the Cagean aesthetics of indeterminacy into an aesthetics of spectrality, it is important to emphasize that Cage’s musical development of indeterminacy corresponds to a framing, expansive, and non-progressive unfolding of temporal passing. About the future of music as a temporal practice, Cage stated that “[t]he composer […] will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time.”69 As musicologist James Pritchett keenly observes, “the empty time structure” of the Cagean formulation of sound and time as expansive fields “does not require any particular continuity, syntax, ordering or sense of progress of the sounds within it. A composition structured as lengths of time does not rely upon the sounds themselves to create the structure: it exists with or without them and it is silent about how they should come and go.”70 4’ 33” operates as a framing activity that lets temporal passing unfold unforeseeably and non-progressively as an unlimited field. Let us recall 4’ 33” (1952): a performer sits in front of a piano for the requisite amount of time without sounding a single note, while the audience members are invited to listen to the sounds occurring in their surroundings. The work has three separate movements, which last respectively 30 sec, 2:23 min, and 1:40 min. As Joseph points out, Cage’s aesthetics is not an aesthetics of shock or negation but an aesthetics of difference in which silence is not envisaged in its antagonistic relationship with Muzak-type commercial background music or as silence in its opposition to sound but as a version that revalorizes silence as “a positivity of its own”; where sound and silence are “inextricably interrelated.”71 Silence becomes the manifestation of nonintentional noises. Joseph sees in Cage (who read Bergson’s Creative Evolution) a Bergsonian conceptualization of time as a perpetual becoming, in which irreversible duration unfolds as the continual elaboration of the absolutely new, delineating the task of the artist as a producer whose work fosters a more direct perception of duration.72 But this deployment of time as a perpetual becoming must be nuanced insofar as indeterminacy occurs only if its spacetime has initially been framed (i.e. determined) and insofar as perpetual becoming is understood

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as non-progressive, non-hierarchical, and expansive. As art historians Caroline A. Jones and Jonathan Katz have argued, the silent pieces are strategies of resistance that open processes of perception and interpretation to other voices and perspectives, opposing hegemonic cultural values, namely masculinist abstract expressionism and McCarthyist political repression.73 What is common to these different interpretations is the view according to which indeterminacy is an aesthetic procedure that allows the outside to appear within the temporal frame of the composition. As Michael Nyman similarly suggests, specifically in relation to 433 : “433  is a demonstration of the […] permanent presence of sounds around us, of the fact that they are worthy of attention, and that for Cage ‘environmental sounds and noises are more useful aesthetically than the sounds produced by the world’s musical cultures.’ 433  is not a negation of music but an affirmation of its omnipresence.”74 The listening experience is key here75 in that the listener experiences the piece in a presentational mode: silence is not about understanding but about undergoing.76 Constance Lewallen’s examination of Cage’s composition emphasizes the same point: “Cage’s most innovative and provocative musical concept was that music cannot be separated from all other sounds. In other words, he agreed with Thoreau […] in believing that music is a continuous presence in the environment, that only listening is intermittent. Extending this idea to visual art, Cage said, ‘art is everywhere; it’s only seeing which stops now and then.’”77 As finally suggested by Joseph, sound gradually became for Cage a sound-space or a field, and the composition ceased to begin in the mind of the composer to draw its materials “from the entirety of an acoustical ‘field.’ […] Although continuous and unlimited, the ‘total sound-space’ implied in Cage’s ‘field situation’ was, importantly, not homogeneous.”78 It was endowed with multiplicity. After his experience of an anechoic chamber—in which Cage heard, not silence, but the noises made by his circulatory and nervous systems—the composer would come to define silence, not as the complete absence of sound, but rather as the sounds not sought, i.e. unintended. The same piece at different times and performed by different performers gives rise to different acoustical experiences. The openness of the compositions to the inclusion of ambient and unintended noises further differentiates each performance in different spacetimes. Similarly, Cunningham’s performance of 433  is multiple, as much as Dean’s filming of it: six different films for six different performances of a single composition (which is, when enacted, never single).

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The manifestation of nonintentional noises resulting from the apparent silence of 433  is a manifestation of the passage of time. This nonintentionality is, however, intentionally framed, which means that Cage always accepted a certain degree of determinism. To compose his musical scores, for example, Cage would ask questions and respect the answers inspired by the Chinese oracular book I Ching (Book of Changes) chance operations.79 Sorting out Cage’s post-1950 references to notions of nonintentionality, chance and indeterminacy, Jackson Mac Low shows the persistent paradox underlying such chance-based experimentations. If to intend means to “plan to do an action or series of actions conceived of as being within their powers to do,” nonintention in Cage is “severely constrained by clear intentions at higher (more general) levels.”80 Chance operations came into the creative process “only when he had clearly delineated (probably in very general terms) what was to enter a work (and what was not to do so).”81 As for the indeterminacy principle, Cage’s compositions were never completely indeterminate: they evolved mostly as “constrained indeterminateness.”82 Cage intentionally resorted to chance as a means to produce nonintentional results and of absenting the self. Mac Low, however, concludes that, despite its inherent contradictions, Cage’s methodology diminished the ego’s dominance over composition as well as over the listening of the compositions.83 As observed by Katherine Hayles, indeterminacy in Cage is a way to undermine the anthropomorphic perspective that builds continuity from a human standpoint of control and isolation.84 Cage himself states that his “intention in putting the stories together in an unplanned way was to suggest that all things—stories, incidental sounds from the environment, and, by extension, beings—are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not oversimplified by an idea of relationship in one person’s mind.”85 Hence, indeterminacy can be understood as a practice of abandonment of the anthropomorphic viewpoint—an abandonment that allows the composer and the performer to engage in the world instead of isolating the self from it. But this practice of abandonment is made possible by a predetermined frame. Cage makes room for determinacy. Although he failed to consider the amplitude of the rationalizing forces of modernity and their necessary impact on the unfolding of contingency, the recognition of determinacy allows Dean to explore the double-binding of contingency and rationalization. Although it associates itself to and allows the principle of indeterminacy to take place, Merce Cunninghamn Perfroms STILLNESS insists on the necessity not to separate contingency and rationalization, ruination as a

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modality of production of temporal passing and ruination as a destruction of (filmic) temporal passing. The potential of contingency is conditioned by the forces of rationalization. As it overdetermines the ruined media skin as a temporizing volume of temporal passing, the installation, however, allows indeterminacy to unfold in the cracks of these rationalization processes. It adopts the fieldness, nonprogressiveness, and expansionness of nonintentional sound, image, and silence to allow filmic temporal passing to spread in the environment without hierarchy, to continuously include incoming phenomena. It also spreads irreversibly. This is key. For what unfolds through the principle of indeterminacy if not contingency and temporal passing itself? In her study of Cage’s chance operations, Hayles convincingly singles out the specific temporality entailed by such operations. Once the throw of the I Ching sticks was made, chance was understood as spoken. The compositional process would obey its dictates, following an irreversible conceptualization of time. As Hayles explains, “[c]hance expresses itself through the profusion of possible paths and the emergence of one […]. Implicit in this system is a strong affirmation of time’s one-way directionality. Not everything goes because the arrow of time points only forward. Hence Cage’s work can be understood as a performance of time, as well as a performance in time.”86 Hayles defines temporal irreversibility by referring to the collaborative work of chemist Ilya Prigogine and co-author Isabelle Stengers, who have argued that the processes of interconnecting causal chains and creating chance confer an arrow to time: Before the chains intersect, there is no necessary reason why they have to come together. Their evolutions progress independently of each other. After the conjunction occurs, however, reversing time would mean coordinating actions that were previously independent. […] There is experimental evidence to suggest that once in a great while, the products of subatomic collision come together again to recreate the original particles. […] Even so the probability that they will be coordinated in just the right way is small enough to make microscopic time reversal a rare (indeed disputed) event. […] Putting the matter in these terms, we can say that when time runs forward chance overwhelms operation, but that if time were to run backward, operation would have to overwhelm chance. Time’s one-way directionality thus affirms the predominance of chance over operation.”87 In short, when Cage engages in chance operations, he performs the directionality of time and the complexity of its becoming, as well as

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the association of causal determinism “with an open and unpredictable future”.88 This embrace of the directionality and irreversibility of temporal passing is pivotal to the understanding of Dean’s installation. Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS adopts a stillness procedure that lets temporal passing unfold as a field. The camera frames a view by stilling it—as does Cage’s composition; as does Cunningham’s dance—to allow movement, sounds and images of the environment enter the frame. The installation has the spreading modality of Tatiana Trouvé’s Bureau of Implicit Activities; it enacts the ecological time performed by Francis Alÿs and Guido van der Werve. But the principles that guide this spread are fundamentally Cagean: they pertain to contingency, indeterminacy, and nonintentionality. These principles are reconsidered in light of the persistency of the rationalizing forces of modernity that have turned analog film into an obsolete medium. Deeply aware of the obsolescence of analog film (let us recall Kodak), the installation never simply reinstitutes temporal passing through indeterminacy. Ruination proceeds simultaneously as a constructive and destructive energy. Yet, contingency is not abandoned. Facilitated by the installation’s overdetermination of temporal passing, contingency is transformed into a non-progressive aesthetics of expansion of temporal passing. This is why the spectator can be said to experience time as a spectral reality. As much as Cage haunts the installation, as much as each constituent of the installation is haunted by a previous one, our perception is haunted by temporal passing. This spectral dimension is fundamental to the spectator’s experience of the piece; it accounts for the persistence of time as passage when one leaves the exhibition room. It is therefore far from evident that stillness in Dean’s films work, as Fer suggests, “requires us, as viewers, to be still.”89 Indeed, the contingent Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS cannot require stillness from us at all without contradicting the contingency it sets out to frame and the spectrality it ultimately achieves. Stillness as a minute aesthetics of movement and temporal passing cannot be imposed from the outside. As Pritchett has keenly observed in relation to Cage’s 433 : “The piece, I think, can most usefully be seen as a tribute to the experience of silence, a reminder of its existence and its importance for all of us. But the piece is flawed, however, in that it may suggest that silence is something that can be presented to us by someone else. Ultimately, the experience of silence is not something that can be communicated from one person to another. It cannot be forced into existence externally, and we cannot wilfully make it happen. […] Instead, we have to do the work of facing silence ourselves […]”90 Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS

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is more of a condition of the possibility of futurity of a remnant made spectrally present, than an effectuation of futurity. It solicits a perceiving spectator in this very process—not so much the pensive spectator (Raymond Bellour’s film viewer who “invest(s) more freely in what [he or she is] seeing”91 when confronted with photographic stillness within cinematic movement) or the emancipated spectator (Jacques Rancière’s spectator as a perceiving actor) than what I would call the nonintentional spectator, a spectator haunted by temporal passing’s indebtedness to analog film. There is no guaranty here that film’s temporality will survive. Ruination is too heavily at play to secure this survival. But a remnant as a spectral surplus value is created, awaiting a new home. Dean, about film: “it’s […] a medium of time, because with film you’re dealing with a roll of time.”92 Now that analog film has ended, time must indeed find a new home—an inhabitability we will be considering in Chapter 6 in our analysis of Nancy Davenport’s Workers (leaving the factory) installation. In other words, if indeed ruination (gone wrong) is an alternative regime of historicity that brings the past into the present to condition the future, that past (analog film and temporal passing’s indebtedness to film) remains more as a virtuality than as an actuality.

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Chapter 5

Simultaneity I

This chapter focuses on two video installations by French artist Melik Ohanian, made between 2004 and 2007. Both installations explore simultaneity as an aesthetic procedure of suspension of narrative forwardness and linearity. Simultaneity presentifies historicity by equalizing the different temporalities of contemporaneity. The “unproductive” stream ecologizes the present as the future; the “extended present” stream potentializes the quasi-remnants of the recent past into the future; the “aging” stream ruins a past technology to generate temporal passing as a spectral reality that might be actualized by a future technology. The “simultaneity” stream, at least in this first version (the stream will be revisited in the following chapter) equalizes past, present, and future to confirm the heterogeneity of contemporaneity. To be more precise, it contemporizes “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past”1 by turning temporal passing into “the equalization of past, present, and future.” Ohanian’s installations materialize that equalization by using specific structures of projection that make different worldviews coexist: either multi-screen projections or split single-screen projections. They provide a spatialized view of contemporaneity; a contemporaneity which appears to be made of a single present but which is in fact made of different presents, pasts, and futures. In so doing, they establish simultaneity as an alternative regime of historicity, in which temporal categories are equal; in which no temporal category is privileged over the other. Simultaneity, the simultaneity of events, is a temporal relation that appears simple (which the Oxford English Dictionary briefly defines as “existing, happening, occurring […] at the same time; coincident in time”) and yet, one that has historically been at the center of a variety of philosophical and physical conceptualizations of time, and one that must be seen as a mobilizer for innovative redeployments of historical time. The works examined in this chapter certainly partake of these investigations. Although simultaneity

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is explored here as a form of contemporaneity and can therefore be seen as partaking of what historian François Hartog, in his study of the contemporary amendments of the modern regime of historicity, has designated as presentism, it doesn’t activate the presentist withdrawal into the present; the present’s absorption of the past and the future. My claim is that Ohanian’s installations articulate a unique suspension of narrative linearity that problematizes Hartog’s insight. Relativized or split, contemporaneity is shown to be made of a multiplicity of coexisting yet incommensurable, expanding, and sometimes irreconcilable (perhaps negotiable) worldviews. The present breaks down into the past and the future of others. With simultaneity, time become times. The installations examined here are compelling examples of the impressive burgeoning of multi-screen filmic/videographic/photographic installations which have come to occupy a great deal of the gallery, museum, and biennale spaces since the 1990s. We have now become accustomed to these multi-screen deployments which incessantly interpellate us in their simultaneous mode of address. It is not enough, however, to say that a significant number of installations are increasingly composed of video projections or photographic shots presented simultaneously in a singular space. What is unique to some of these multi-screen projections is that this simultaneous presentation supports an understanding of history as a contemporaneity. This chapter seeks to show that, by relying on the principle of simultaneity, contemporary art introduces the spectator into the analytic implications of the physics of time, of the special theory of relativity. This exposure means that she will be confronted with events which are on par with each other, following a relativistic simultaneity whose effect is to abolish the privileging of any event over the other, of any frame of reference over the other, of any tense over the other. In so doing, the multi-screen projection propels itself not simply as a temporal device of coexisting times but as a device that thickens simultaneity into a historical condition. Ohanian’s installations are particularly insightful in this regard: they explore simultaneity not as a mere structural device but as a mode of temporalization of contemporary history. In this historicity, the past, present, and future—as postulated by the tenseless B-theorists—are made to occur in a relationship which is not about the passage of time but about being before, after, and at the same time. In this coexistence, being before, after, and at the same time are equally valid realities. This tenseless view is what gives density to the slice of time or slice of space being observed; it conveys a density that discloses

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the installations to be part of but also contestations of presentism. The works spatially expand a slice of time and they temporally extend a slice of space. But these expansions or extensions do not unfold—as in the case, for example, in the holding moments of Lewis’s filmworks—as extended presents in which a just-passing flows into a just-coming to constitute a continuous/discontinuous temporal span. Rather, the past, present, and future of a given image or event tenselessly coexist as equally real without a manifest relational or passage-tie because of the relativity of simultaneity

Melik Ohanian: The Works Let us start with a brief description of four media works. First, the DVD video and multi-channel audio installation Peripheral Communities (2002–6), primarily a recording instrument of slams performed by slammers belonging to different communities which live at the periphery of large cities around the world. Made with local performers and inspired by local context (notably Paris, Seoul, and Dakar), the installation exists in several versions. In the Dakar version (2005) (Figure 5.1), the double screen presents two looped successions of short performances that viewers are invited to listen to by the means of headsets spread out on the floor. The 16 headsets, however, are desynchronized in relation to one another insofar as they transmit different slams and that the slams do not necessarily match the projected images. The installation is conceived, in short, as a space-time of dissonant simultaneities: different listeners in a same place at the same time see the same images but connect them to different oral stories which most often do not relate to the images on view. Second, Hidden (2005), a 60 min DVD video projection transmitting a static shot of a sunset in an oil field (see Figures 0.2, 0.3): the landscape sequence contains within its digital encoding an invisible image only made visible by the simultaneous projection of that very image in another city and whose cryptographed configuration is “exposed” in real time by a computer located next to the screen. In a 2006 version, the installation co-projected in two galleries, in Paris and Amsterdam, the hidden image of each other’s visible image—an oil field in Floresville, Texas and oil field in Baku, Azerbaijan. The simultaneity of the two projections marginalized the passage of time to disclose the thickness of a single image in one moment in time, which always hides another image of and in another space-time. But it only paradoxically

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Figure 5.1   Melik Ohanian, Peripherical Communities, (Dakar), 2005. Videoprojection Dvcam DVD, multitrack audio, 16 tracks, color, sound, 16 headphones, white carpet, 4:09 min. Structure/screen 475 × 250 cm. Exhibition view, IAC, Villeurbanne, France, 2006. © Melik Ohanian, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

succeeded in doing so by making the other image inaccessible and imperceptible. Third, Seven Minutes Before (2004), a 28 meters-long seven-screen DVD video projection, whose 21-minute orchestration is shown in a continuous loop (Figure 5.2). Key to the overall structure is the quasipanoramic unfolding of the installation: the screens are horizontally adjacent to each other and show parallel views of a small valley in the French Vercors. The series of images were taken simultaneously by seven cameras. The camera trajectories were synchronized at the moment of shooting and the seven projected series of images—devoid of montage and submitted to a negligible number of cuts—were made to correspond to each of these singular trajectories. When we speak here of simultaneity, it is important to emphasize that it governs both the Digital Beta filming in the Vercors and the DVD projection in the gallery. Interestingly, as in Hidden, the installation inscribes the viewer in a perceptual impossibility: it is physiologically unfeasible to see the seven screens all at once but, again, as one experiences this impossibility, history starts to unfold not as a progression but as a lateral display of temporal multiplicities of a single image/event, which suggests a contemporaniety

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of different times but a contemporaneity that can never be grasped as a whole. This spatialization of time can easily be contrasted with the temporalization of space operated in the fourth installation: September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007 (2007), a single-screen video projection which has the particularity of inserting our perception between image and sound, between the seeing of mute images of Santiago, Chile, in 2007 and the hearing of the soundtrack of The Coup d’État (El golpe de estado) from Patricio Guzmán’s 1975–9 documentary trilogy The Battle of Chile. In this installation, Ohanian has introduced a film archive, but he has managed to alter it in a significant way insofar as he has only kept the soundtrack of The Coup d’État to re-synchronize it with video images of Santiago today—images of the same locations filmed by Guzmán in 1973. In its co-transmission of sounds and images extracted from two different sources, the installation reintroduces simultaneity as the structuring temporality of the installation and, with it, another perceptual impossibility which also partakes of a fragmentary approach to representation that blocks the unifying principle of opticality: the unattainable reconciliation of vision and aurality. In this piece, it is now sounds about the past and images about the present which are made to synchronize with uneasiness.

Figure 5.2   Melik Ohanian, Seven Minutes Before, 2004. Digital Beta DVD, seven-synchronized projection with DTS, color, sound, 28 speakers and 7 subwoofers, 21 min each. © Melik Ohanian, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

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In its setting of simultaneity as the structuring temporality of all of these video projections, Ohanian articulates two fundamental aesthetic operations. First, the thinking of space with time: it counters the now common view that late modernity accomplishes the overall “reversal of time’s priority over space,”2 and reconfirms one of the main insights of Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, according to which the three ordinary dimensions of space are combined with a single dimension of time to form a four-dimensional manifold for representing a space-time. In Seven Minutes Before, in particular, the spectator observes events, i.e. not mere points in the universe but points endowed with their proper times and trajectories, points that might start from a single location and move forward but whose proper time will start to diverge in relation to one another relatively to the spectator as they move through distances: three coordinates of space plus one of time. More importantly, and this brings us to the second aesthetic operation governing Ohanian’s experimentation with simultaneity, his work sets into play a fallibility in the viewer-image relationship through what should be called the retreat of the order of the all-seeing—a post-optical elaboration of the image that I hope to make clear further down. I follow here once more Zeidler’s definition of modern opticality as emblematically developed by Wölfflin: the pure opticality of the “world seen—a world that does not exist except as unified optically by a disembodied subject,”3 by a subject whose vision is assumed to be separated from the other senses (notably, tactility). The post of the post-optical refers to the waning of that paradigm, a waning which is already manifest in the “unproductive” stream’s fundamental reconsideration of linear perspective but which unfolds here as the spectator’s inability to see the whole. In order to understand the aesthetic operations subjacent to Ohanian’s concern with simultaneity—the thinking of space with time and postopticality—one has to be attentive from the outset to the art-and-science dialog at play in his work (Ohanian collaborates with astrophysicists) and to the simultaneity procedures which structure the two installations we will be focusing on: the quasi-panoramic deployment of what the artist has referred to as “the vertical desert” of the Vercors in Seven Minutes Before, and the visual/audio split of the image in September 11, 1973_. Key to Ohanian’s production is the main philosophical outcome of special relativity—that all judgments involving time “are always judgments of simultaneous events”4 inasmuch as we understand simultaneity to be not an absolute but a frame-dependent state of affairs.

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Two events are simultaneous if they occur at the same time, but their simultaneity depends on the clock of the observer, which means that, for another observer, one event may be measured to precede or follow the other. The relativity of simultaneity equally suggests that a specific event may be present for one observer but past or future for another observer: present, past and future must then be considered on par with each other. Also key to his work is its post-opticality: the destabilizing of the panorama structure and image-sound synchronization so as to disable the spectator’s perception of the multi-screen installation as a whole.

Seven Minutes Before About Seven Minutes Before, it is important to re-specify that the string of images which are being combined in the multi-screen installation were taken simultaneously by seven cameras—six of which were positioned to circulate at ground level and one which was fixed to a helicopter to provide aerial views of the landscape. The camera trajectories were thus synchronized at the moment of shooting and the seven projected series of images correspond (except for minute editing) to each of these singular trajectories (Figures 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6). Throughout the projection, the spectator will encounter various nature and art scenes, notably views of mountain roads, trees, and rocks, a tunnel, stone ruins, a Japanese musician (Etsuko Chida) playing koto, an Armenian musician (Gaguik Mouradian) playing kamantcha, an African slammer (Jean Gomis), a wolf in a cage, a bird of prey flying towards the camera, a field of lit lightbulbs, reconstitutions of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974), while the soundtrack transmits overlapping musical scores, French and English storytelling, and sounds of nature. When we speak here of simultaneity, it is important to emphasize that it governs both the DVD projection in the gallery and the Digital Beta filming in the Vercors. The spectator is made aware of the latter when the seven trajectories meet for a few minutes at the moment of collision between a truck and a motorcycle, a collision that results in the explosion of a camper van located at the site of the accident. During this sequence, all cameras frame the same accident from various viewpoints—a deployment that shows their presence in a shared space-time—and then start to move synchronously in diverse directions further and further to each other.

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Figure 5.3   Melik Ohanian, Seven Minutes Before, 2004. Digital Beta DVD, seven-synchronized projection with DTS, color, sound, 28 speakers and 7 subwoofers, 21 min each. © Melik Ohanian, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

Figure 5.4   Melik Ohanian, Seven Minutes Before, 2004. Digital Beta DVD, seven-synchronized projection with DTS, color, sound, 28 speakers and 7 subwoofers, 21 min each. © Melik Ohanian, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

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Figure 5.5   Melik Ohanian, Seven Minutes Before, 2004. Digital Beta DVD, seven-synchronized projection with DTS, color, sound, 28 speakers and 7 subwoofers, 21 min each. © Melik Ohanian, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

Figure 5.6   Melik Ohanian, Seven Minutes Before, 2004. Digital Beta DVD, seven-synchronized projection with DTS, color, sound, 28 speakers and 7 subwoofers, 21 min each. © Melik Ohanian, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

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Let us first consider the following possibility: an observer of the Vercors takes a (photo or video) shot of the valley. The image, it seems, provides an instantaneous view of the landscape. But, in fact, every object simultaneously photographed or filmed together—a mountain, a tree, a man, and a wolf; the moon and the sun (not actually filmed by Ohanian)—has a distinct age because of its unique distance in relation to the observer. Distance consistently produces a perceptual delay for the observer because there is no perception without a signal, without the luminous signal that crosses distance with its own speed to transmit to the retina the information about the object under observation. The image of the moon corresponds to what the moon was one second ago while the image of the sun is what it was 8 to 10 minutes ago; the face of the man reaches me 10-10 seconds before the face of the wolf. The objects, especially stars and planets, are not where they are seen; their visual simultaneity is an illusion, a fact established by the Danish astronomer Ole Roemer in 1676. I just adapted here a description of a photograph provided by the historian of science Jean Eisenstaedt to emphasize the crucial innovation at play in special relativity: as a spacetime theory, concerned with the measuring of the physical relations between space and time, it imposes c, the speed of light, as a new element in physics. Once the distance and the proper velocity of each star and planet, as well as the velocity of light, are known, it is possible to measure “the real simultaneous positions they occupy at the moment of observation.”5 This begins to explain why simultaneity—and here I am speaking of distant simultaneity where the distance between events is not negligibly small6—is impossible to assume within a special relativity perspective unless it is considered as relative. As Eisenstaedt explains, “a snapshot is made of the piling up, the layering of planes (in the perspectival sense); there is nothing simultaneous nor instantaneous about it, except for the photo itself but nothing but the photo to the exclusion of the events in the photo. On our retina, […] events pile up, superimpose themselves, while seeming to be concomitant. […] One would have to cut into [the image’s] thickness to find each temporal layer again.”7 As a thinker of image temporality, this is exactly what Ohanian has done: at the moment of filming Seven Minutes Before, he orchestrates the simultaneous activation of the seven cameras to take views of different objects and subjects of a single landscape in a unique space-time. He did so to eventually project these images horizontally on seven screens. Each screen is a manifestation of a temporal layer of the landscape, of any observed landscape; a temporal layer to be deployed not in

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succession with other layers as is predominantly the case in cinema, but simultaneously. Each layer, moreover, lasts in time, having a 21-minute duration. There lies one of Ohanian’s pivotal aesthetic reformulations of the contemporary image: the simultaneous projection of the different temporal depths of a single space in various screens within a televisual/digital era anchored in the technological promise of instantaneous transmission of signals. His aesthetics thickens the image both temporally and spatially. It processes the image of a landscape or, more specifically, the instantaneous image of a landscape as not one. This means that the multi-screen installation displays coexisting space-times in a single slice of time and that each screen provides duration and temporal passing. But let us complicate this observation a bit more by keeping in mind Ohanian’s focused exploration of simultaneity as a key relativist notion. The filmed and projected seven camera trajectories may well be technically simultaneous; they are relatively simultaneous for the spectators of Seven Minutes Before. To further elucidate this point and appreciate its important ramifications—for this will be the main point of our discussion of the temporalization of historicity operated by Seven Minutes Before—we will first turn to the tense/tenseless debate constitutive of the contemporary philosophical (more properly analytic) conceptualization of time. This detour will allow us to bring forward the question of the “ontologically privileged present” vital to the tensed standpoint, one that is radically questioned by the installation’s tenseless standpoint, which relies on special relativity to postulate that, insofar as the categories of time (future, present, past) are equally real, there is no privileged space-time position. This equally real view is compelling: it describes Seven Minute Before’s deployment of contemporary history not merely as a history of the present (close to presentism) but as a history of co-occurring presents, pasts, and futures in which—as a logical and physical fact—no one’s present, past, or future has privilege over the other. This tenseless reading will be followed by a close examination of the quasi-panoramic structure of the installation as a modality by which the “equally real” expands in space without closure in relation to the spectator’s actual, cognitive experience of the work. This expansion will provide a unique view of contemporaneity as a being-in-common which never settles into a circumscribable perception of the world as a whole. Hence, the historicity which unfolds here will be argued to be conditioned by a specific simultaneity: one in which the equally “realness” of past, present, and future is a process in expansion—an open rather than a closed system.

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The Tenseless Principle Contemporary analytic philosophers, theorizing on time, examine the question of whether our everyday tensed language—a language that indispensably uses verbal tenses as indicators of time, such as past, present, or future—denotes the structure of temporal facts. As Dolev specifies, the analytic tensed/tenseless debate revolves around the realness of the tensed properties of events: “When we say that the concert started twenty minutes ago, are we speaking about an event which is past, or is the (tacit) reference to the past merely a feature of the way we speak and think about the event but not of the event itself? Or, if during a skydive Sarah thinks to herself ‘I’m experiencing zero gravity now!,’ is she commenting on a present experience, or do experiences, like all events, in themselves lack all tensed properties and are only apprehended by us as though they are past, or present, or future, though they are not? […] does [time] belong to the things perceived or only to our perceptions of things? Or, more generally, is reality tensed, or does it only appear tensed to us?”8 When we state that the concert started 20 minutes ago, we learn two types of temporal information: (1) the statement tells us that this event is located in the past with respect to the present, and that the beginning of the event took place 20 minutes ago (this is the tensed view of time); and (2) the statement tells us that the event succeeds an earlier concert which was, for example, held yesterday (this is the tenseless view of time). The statement may also be questioned as to its capacity to refer to the past: is the event to which the statement refers truly past or does the past merely correspond to our perception of the world as opposed to what the world truly is? It raises another crucial question—an ontological question: what makes the statement temporally true? In short: should we, as the tensed philosophers do, take tense seriously? The current debate on the ontological nature of time draws from a paper written by the metaphysician James Ellis McTaggart at the beginning of the twentieth century, “The unreality of time” (1908). In this article, McTaggart not only argues that time is unreal. He more importantly bases his claim on a particular distinction between two temporal series: the A-series and the B-series. Each series manifests how events—as moments or contents of a temporal position—are ordered in the experience of time. In the A-series each event is differentiated as future, present, or past, and each event changes with respect to these characteristics, to constitute the passage of time as a “series of positions

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running from the far past though the near past to the present, and then from the present to the near future and the far future.”9 In the B-series (“the series of positions which runs from earlier to later”10), each event stands permanently in relation—earlier than, simultaneous or later than—to other events. McTaggart’s conclusion that time is unreal derives from his assessment that the A-series implies a non-resolvable contradiction: it supposes that every event possesses the A-characteristics future, present, and past; but this cannot be true insofar as future, present, and past are mutually exclusive determinations (if an event has one of these it cannot have the others).11 It equally derives from his assessment that the B-series does not account for change (for the phenomenal fact that time is a key dimension of change). As Turetzky explains: McTaggart assumes that if the application of a distinction to reality implies a contradiction that distinction cannot be true of reality. Given this assumption, he argues that neither A-series distinctions nor time can be real. For, first if time is real, then A-series distinctions must apply to reality and, second, the application of A-series distinctions to reality implies a contradiction. He then defends each of these premises, dividing the argument into two parts: one purporting to show that A-series distinctions are necessary for any series to be a real temporal series, the other purporting to show that the application of A-series distinctions to any series of real events implies a contradiction. […] The argument for the claim that an A-series is necessary for time assumes that time unavoidably involves change. This does not necessarily mean that time is an aspect of change, but only that if nothing ever changed there would be no time. […] Next, McTaggart argues that the application of A-series distinctions to reality implies a contradiction.12 The two (A-theory/B-theory) camps of the contemporary analytic debate, ground their respective positions on McTaggart’s logical argument by countering the conclusions of his argument succinctly described above. The A-theorists contend that the A-series takes its validity from its ability to account for change and that there is in fact no contradiction in its postulation that time unfolds as a “becoming present of future events and then their becoming past”: an event can be postulated as future, present and past if we specify that it can be remembered as past and anticipated as future. The B-theorists contend that time does not have

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to include the element of change to exist. The two main correlated elements of contention of the debate are therefore: (1) change (is transformation related to time?); and (2) the passage of time (is transience a feature of time?). The central question is whether time is tensed or tenseless—whether the moments of time are objectively past, present or future, or whether they are ordered merely by the tenseless temporal relations earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than.13 As briefly suggested in Chapter 1, the tensed theory, often referred to as the presentist or A-theory approach, maintains that the present is “ontologically privileged” in relation to the past and the future; and that the passage of time corresponds to future events becoming real as they become present and the loss of the events’ ontological superiority as they move into the past (time’s passing consists in a moving present or a now-relative time: what is now present was once future and will be past). An event is given a tensed property when we state that it is past, present, or future, but these tensed locations are given with respect to the present, which is the only real tense. Tensed philosophers therefore hold that there is temporal becoming—a view that matches our ordinary view of experiencing time. As philosopher Michael Lockwood specifies, this view “provides a satisfying account of why later events cannot cause earlier ones, and why there is no faculty that gives us a window on the future, as memory gives us a window on the past.”14 In contrast, the tenseless theory, often referred to as the eternalist or B-theory approach, maintains that there is no fundamental difference between the past, present, and future, and that all events, irrespective of their temporal location, are “ontologically on par” or equally real. Based on that postulate, it posits that there is no real passage or flow of time. Tenseless relations are generally described as relations of succession, precedence, or simultaneity: a tenseless relation between two events is therefore provided when it is said that one event is later or earlier than, or simultaneous with the other event. For example, when I say that the year 2000 has the characteristic of being past, I only really mean that 2000 is earlier than the moment at which I am speaking; my description does not establish the truth of time’s passing although it may appear to do so through my perception of the world. The tensed group contends that only present things are real. It may consider the past and the future, but only in relation to the reality of the present moment: present events lose their ontological superiority when they slip into the past and future events, which are not yet formed, are only real when they become present. This claim is based on the argument

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that it is only present conditions which are real: they are “the domain of the tangible, the existent, the experientiable,” and as such, they are the conditions that provide the truth conditions under which we can affirm that the reality claim is true.15 The tenseless camp, for which there are no tensed relations or facts, must account tenselessly for all the realities that are lived and appear as tensed in our daily lives: the phenomenal fact that time is the dimension of change—as time passes the flower changes color; the airplane has departed and landed; my body has aged; my headache “thank goodness”16 is over; I fear death because I will no longer exist after I die; the future appears open while the past appears closed. According to the tenseless view of time and tense, there is no such property as being over, as no longer happening now, as existing now and not existing later. Lockwood: Think of the moving present as analogous to a train travelling along a track. The train, as it moves, leaves progressively more track behind it, just as the moving present leaves progressively more time behind it as each initially future moment successively and fleetingly becomes now, and is then consigned to the past. Clearly, we have two ways of defining positions along the track. First, we could define them relative to the ever-changing location of the train. We should then, for example, have a moving hundred yards back, a moving here and a moving mile further on, that are analogous to the moving hour ago, the moving present and the moving two weeks hence. Alternatively, however, we could define positions in such a way that they remain stationary with respect to the track itself. The first series of spatial positions is then analogous to the A series (composed, as it is, of non-relative times) and the second to the B series (which is composed of clock times). […] I shall refer to those who believe in an objective passage of time (or real becoming, as it is sometimes called) as having a tensed view of time, in contrast to the tenseless view held by those who deny the existence of any such objective passage.17 In short, the tenseless explanation stipulates that it is our beliefs concerning these facts that presuppose the passage of time. It distinguishes between reality and our beliefs to confine tense to the mind, to postulate it as mind dependent. It is on this premise that language and experienced reality are tensed despite the tenselessness of reality. The analytic argument which supports this standpoint posits that it is

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not because we perceive time’s passing that we can conclude that time’s passing really exists; there is no necessary coincidence between reality and what appears in the experience of time. This non-necessary coincidence has also been explained by an evolutionary argument. According to tenseless philosopher D. H. Mellor, for instance, the possession of tensed beliefs is considered “vital for the success of our actions”: humans would not be able to survive without the aptitude to act at given times, an aptitude that fully relies on tensed beliefs; this aptitude is postulated to be a mechanism shaped by evolutionary processes that produce the necessary tensed beliefs on the basis of tenseless sensory inputs.18 What is crucial to point out is that, as Dolev insists, despite their oppositional views on time, both approaches rely on the assumption that there is an ontology of time, that is, that “reality claims—claims to the effect that events and objects are or are not ‘real’—are the key to the philosophical understanding of time.”19 When it is claimed, for example, that an event is not real because it is not present or that an event is as equally real as another, one is making an ontological statement. Dolev argues that the fundamental problem with the tensed/ tenseless debate is its ontological status. The predicament does not rely so much on the inability to provide empirical evidence on the reality or non-reality of time, than on the theory’s lack of coherence. For Dolev, there are differences between past, present and future, but these distinctions are not ontological, nor are they simply subjective or mental. This does not entail, however, that the analytic philosophical inquiry needs to be dismissed because of its ontological assumptions, but that one can address some of the important insights provided by the debate to complicate and improve the phenomenological approach to time. Although phenomenology is a philosophical method that seeks to describe our apprehending of things before any ontological assumption, it can be enriched by an investigation into analytic concerns about the reality of time. For the challenge in time studies—similarly to cognitive science which must attempt to find ways to connect the brain with the mind—is to bridge “human” time (which tends to deny that there is reality outside human reality) and “physical” time (which tends to deny that human beings exist). This is especially true of the tensed/ tenseless debate in which the tensed view corresponds more intimately to our everyday experience of time and in which the tenseless view is strongly grounded on the laws of physics, including special relativity. Of particular interest to our discussion of simultaneity in Ohanian’s work is the tenseless approach when it relies on the physics of special

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relativity to support its claims. The tenseless view supports one of the important findings of relativity principles: the fact that time is a physical thing, a malleable, flexible and mutable matter. In the words of physicist Paul Davies: “The major upshot of [Einstein’s] new theory of relativity […] was the prediction that time and space are not, as Newton had proclaimed, simply there, fixed once and for all in an absolute and universal way for all observers to share. Instead, they are in some sense malleable, able to stretch and shrink according to the observer’s motion.”20 Time, then, becomes one of the four dimensions of an unchanging “block universe.” In contrast to absolute theories (such as Newton’s understanding of time as absolute), which posit that time would exist even if there were no objects or events in the universe, relational theories (such as special relativity) imply that spacetime is “nothing but the spatiotemporal relationships among possible objects and their possible events.”21 The central idea of relativity is that one cannot speak of quantities such as speed, distance and time without first choosing a frame of reference (a point in space at rest or in uniform motion, from which a position can be measured along three spatial axes) in which the laws of physics are the same insofar as observers are in the same frame of reference. Special relativity defeats Newtonian notions of absolute time and space by affirming that they depend on the observer, and that they are perceived differently, depending on the observer’s position. In other words, the main point of the theory is that it is impossible to speak of space-time, speed, distance, duration or acceleration without first choosing the frame of reference defined in one given point. The laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference; the speed of light is also a universal constant (c) for all observers, even if they are in motion relative to one another. All motion is described relatively to this referential. What varies is the time lapse between two events from one observer to another: the time lapse depends on the relative speeds of the observers’ reference frames (e.g. the twin paradox which concerns a twin who flies off in a spaceship travelling near the speed of light and returns to discover that his twin has aged more than he has). To assume the relativity of simultaneity is therefore to affirm that there are variations of perception of time and distance between events when an observer passes from one frame of reference to another. Two events in two points in space that are simultaneous in a frame of reference R are not simultaneous in another frame R’, which is in motion relative to R. Simultaneity is a relative concept. Let us follow Einstein here: “we

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must not ascribe an absolute meaning to the concept of simultaneity; instead, two events that are simultaneous when observed from some particular coordinate system can no longer be considered simultaneous when observed from a system that is moving relative to that system.”22 As pointed out by philosopher of science Max Jammer, with the special theory of relativity, simultaneity ceases to be a binary relation between two events, as in Newtonian physics, to become “a ternary relation depending also on the coordinate-frame involved.”23 According to Einstein’s theory, then, one cannot speak of a universal now nor of an absolute simultaneity insofar as the theory entails that there are no objective facts about A properties and temporal passing as claimed by the tensed theorists. The principle of relativity suggests that events occurring simultaneously, relative to a certain inertial frame, occur at different times relative to different inertial frames. As such, it posits the relativity of simultaneity: two events (e’ and e”) that are measured to be simultaneous relatively to the clock of observer A may be measured as e’ preceding e” by observer B and e” preceding e’ by observer C. The relativity of simultaneity affirms that “each observer has his own set of ‘nows’, and none of these various systems of layers can claim the prerogative of representing the objective lapse of time.”24 Key here to the tenseless philosophers is the implied precept that there is no privileged perspective on time and that each observed now is as “equally real” as any other observed now: “Einstein [… urges] us to regard those living in times past, like those living in foreign parts, as equally out there in space-time, enjoying the same flesh-and-blood existence as ourselves. It is simply that they and we inhabit different regions of the continuum. […] We can, if we wish, postulate the existence of a uniquely privileged foliation, or ‘slicing-up,’ of space-time into simultaneity hyperplanes, the contents of which are successively actualized by way of an objective passage of time.”25 If there are, however, as physicist Hilary Putnam (1967)26 will argue and as Lorenz had argued, no privileged foliation (no privileged frame of reference, no privileged observer)—thus all inertial frames of reference are metaphysically on par with each other— then we have to accept that the contents of all regions of space-time are equally real.27 The two principles to which Lockwood refers to support his tenseless contention that there is no privileged frame of reference or privileged observer, have been formulated by Putnam in the following terms: (i) “At any given event on my world-line, I am obliged to regard as real everything that is simultaneous with that event, in the fame of reference

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defined by my instantaneous state of motion at that event”; and (ii) “If, at a given event, e1, on my world-line, I am obliged to regard someone else as real at an event e2, on that person’s world-line, then I am obliged, at e1, to regard as real everything that this other person, at e2, is obliged to regard as real.”28 I am therefore obliged to regard as equally real ongoing events, events that lie in the past and events that lie in the future. “[W]hen it comes to defining what is, and what is not, real from the perspective of our shared here-now,”29 I simply cannot think of myself or affirm my state of motion as having “greater authority” over another observer. These principles stemming from special relativity offer a scientific basis to ground and complexify the tenseless theory of time. It also has the merit of disclosing the logical, philosophical, and quasi-moral consequences of simultaneity understood as a relative space-time relation. Lockwood provides the following example: Suppose that a general election has been called for a certain date, which is in the future from my perspective. From your perspective, by contrast, the voting may be going on right now. The election, that is to say, is simultaneous with our shared here-now, with respect to your frame of reference. […] Clearly, I am obliged to regard you-now as real. For you-now are simultaneous with me-now, not merely with respect to the frame of reference corresponding to my current state of motion, but with respect to all frames of reference. Since, according to T, I am obliged to regard as real everything that you-now regard as real, it follows, therefore, that I am obliged to regard the election as already real, even though, by my own reckoning, it lies in the future! Similarly, if less dramatically, I am obliged to regard as still real some events that, by my reckoning, lie in the past (that is, are situated below the simultaneity hyperplane that, in my frame of reference, intersects the here-now).30 When supported by the special relativity argument, the tenseless view offers what is known as the block universe view, in which time is laid out (let us follow Davies here) as “a timescape, analogous to a landscape” made out of all of the possible pasts and futures located there, in which no privileged present can be singled out, nor any process “that would systematically turn future events into present, then past, events.”31 In that timescape, to which Ohanian’s works persistently refer, there is no privileged foliation of space-time and all contents of all space-time regions are metaphysically on par with each other.32 The perception of

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simultaneity depends on the frame of reference. It implies an “adopted” simultaneity.33 As best explained by Jammer: According to the theory of relativity […] the fact that observers in relative motion assign simultaneity to different classes of events shows that not a single class of events is objectively privileged. […] That the relativity of simultaneity implies the reality of all events, whenever they occur, whether in the past, present, or future, has been argued already by C. W. Reitdijk, H. Putnam, and others. For if a given event is in the present for one observer and hence real for him, the fact that according to the relativity of simultaneity it is in the past or in the future for another observer cannot deprive it of its ontological status of being real. These arguments support the idea of what Francis Herbert Bradley called a “block universe” in which past, present and future events possess the same degree of reality and which was described most vividly by Hermann Weyl: “The objective word simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life-line of my body, does a section of the world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.34 The tense–tenseless debate occurring in the field of analytic philosophy and the related connections now being established between the tenseless perspective and the special theory of relativity are amongst the most vibrant deliberations of contemporary time studies. As a philosophy of relative simultaneity and as an understanding of time as made out of pasts, presents, and futures which are “ontologically on par” or equally real in relation to each other (and not unfolding to constitute a temporal passing), the tenseless standpoint must be seen as supporting Ohanian’s work. As the next section will show, Seven Minutes Before materializes this parity by aesthetically spatializing the temporal layers of a single landscape in a single slice of time and by lateralizing the coexisting stories or histories of each temporal layers of a singular landscape. Likewise, as we will soon see, by aesthetically deploying the simultaneity of the past and present, September 11, 1973_ is not representing how the past has marked the present or how the present will be transformed in the future (how, in short, these temporalities tensely become), but operates a past–present equalization, which is necessarily relativistic. This tenseless reality is not just a matter of philosophical debate. It is more decisively a historical observation. If Koselleck35 and

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Hartog are right, the modern distance between the past and the future, between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, has reached a moment of near disconnection: this growing distance entails a decrease of passage and a corresponding increase in tenselessness.

The Spatial Expansion of the Equally Real: The ­Quasi-Panorama Strategy While Seven Minutes Before, as film historian André Gaudreault has stipulated, partakes of the structure of the panorama—a proto-filmic pictorial device depicting on a continuous surface different moments of a same story—the installation does not provide the single tableau effect which is fundamental to the tradition of the panorama in its attempt to homogenize diversity “through the ‘fictional’ representation” of a single narrative.36 Seven Minutes Before (see Figure 5.5) is a form of storytelling but, as Ohanian maintains, it is a narrative devoid of a scenario,37 explored as such to expand the observer’s apprehending of a plural world. It transposes into the seven-screen structure Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting logic (his 1974 vertical splitting of a two-story house in New Jersey slated for demolition): it breaks the whole so as to disclose not only the negation of heterogeneity at play in any whole but also the impossibility to see the whole when aware that beyond the house and now entering the house is an outside, a community, a city, a planet, a solar system. Crucial to the contestation of the panorama structure is Ohanian’s choice to juxtapose the imagescreens both simultaneously and laterally instead of presenting the images in a filmic succession. Also crucial is his choice of seven screens: this decision makes it impossible for the spectator to perceive the installation as a whole (the maximum for perceptual wholeness being five). This choice is concomitant with his devising of a soundtrack that overlaps French and English storytelling in a way that makes them unthinkable to untangle in any sustained way.38 What Jonathan Crary has said about the nineteenth-century panorama, that “what is lost […] is the possibility not only of a classical figure/ground relationship, but also of consistent and coherent relations of distance between image and observer,”39 is here articulated not only through the fragmentation of the panorama in different space-times (there is no singular figure/ ground relationship), but also through the movement of the spectator in space (the installation cannot be perceived without the spectator’s

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strolling if he or she is to access the seven screens). This means that Ohanian’s is a simultaneity that may well solicit the spectator sensorially, as a viewer and as a listener, but only to articulate the withdrawal of the order of the all-seeing or, to put it differently, to activate seeing in its fallibility. One cannot see the panorama stricto sensu (the images keep changing and the seven screens exceed the spectator’s field of vision), as one cannot apprehend the entirety of Hidden or Peripheral Communities (to perceive the whole, one would need to be in two cities at the same time for the former and, for the latter, to listen through the 16 headphones all at once). This conception of exceeding multiplicity is crucial. It both provides a feature of excess to the installation (our vision cannot contain the world as a whole) and a challenge to see while acknowledging that excess (our vision can learn to integrate the virtuality of the visual field as much as possible). But in what sense is multiplicity salient or in any way inventive with regards to the thinking of contemporary historicity? Critical theorist Anne Friedberg has argued in her book The Virtual Window (2006) that, except for a few exceptions, the single-frame, single-screen composition has been the dominant convention throughout the history of cinema and television. It is only in the last two decades, with the advent of digital imaging technologies, that the media “window” has started to challenge fixed perspective: these technologies “not only make it easier to conduct ‘cut-ups’ and collages, to construct seamless substitutions and simulation effects, but also ease the use of inset framing devices, to facilitate multiple ‘windowed’ screens.”40 The multiple or split screen, she maintains, and this is where lies its post-perspectival innovation, favors a new—multiple and fractured—mode of perception.41 Yet, I ask: how “new” is this perception if the fracturing of the screen or the multiplication of frames still occurs in a master frame, or if it still gives to the viewer the possibility to see the whole as though contained within a single frame? As Friedberg observes, in cinema, the consistency of the frame serves more to unify and stabilize than to articulate any form of spacing of the multiple shifting perspectives of the successive frames.42 The single-frame, single-screen, single-perspective paradigm, I thus want to contend, only begins to be challenged not, as Friedberg’s analysis seems to suggest, with the advent of the split screen but when the multiple or split-screen projection cannot be seen all at once, as a unified unity. This is Ohanian’s answer to cinematic time. The latter must be rethought if it is to represent the contemporary world it seeks to represent, a world of relative simultaneities.

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During the shooting of Seven Minutes Before, seven camera trajectories (and the events they film) occur objectively in different locations in a same Vercors referential; these are also projected simultaneously in the gallery and seen simultaneously by different observers present in the gallery at the same time, notably because of the absence of a narrative link between the images which disfavors successive viewing. But, and this is decisive, they are not all perceived as simultaneous. They are in fact perceived only in blocs (of 2, 3, 4, or 5 screens), relatively temporalized, by different spectators in different standpoints, with the consciousness that other screens exceed these perceptual selections. This is so because the image (spread out as it is over seven screens) is just that: an infinity of heterogeneous layers of time, which cannot fit in any Gestalt, causeand-effect or dialectical resolution of images and for which there is no privileged frame of reference, no privileged observer. The Duchampian infrathin space between the screens and the lack of narrative coherence activate a spacing of time, which keeps problematizing our perception of them as a succession. Cultural geography settles in now: there is no one cultural perspective but cultural perspectives within the installation as there are no one observer but observers within the space of the installation; there is no one simultaneity, but excess, a reality that problematizes the very notion of the frame of reference; there is no time but equally real times. There is a multitude of observers cohabiting in the seven-screen projection, in the exhibition site and in the world at any given time—a multitude never reducible to a totality to be known once and for all. This fact is made manifest in Seven Minutes Before’s bringing together, for example, of artists from different cultural groups—Armenian, Japanese, and African; a fact also articulated in Hidden which co-projects, at the same time but in distinct places, images of an oil field in Texas and in Azerbaijan, as well as in Peripheral Communities which pluralizes the perception of a same image through a multiplication of aural frames of reference (performed by performers from different cultures) and image-sound desynchronization. Such operations do not relativize perception. They do not lament the limits of perception. Rather, they disclose the coexistence of space-time observations by cameras and spectators which are equally real even if, more accurately because, they are not the same. To borrow from Jean-Luc Nancy’s terminology (to which I will come back later in this chapter), the spacing is a temporal operation that emphasizes a beingin-common (of the images, of the beings in the images, of the viewers in the exhibition space) that fails to hold as a whole and is represented as

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such: as a world that ceases to be an object, a spectacle.43 The thickening of the image as not one (as a seven-screen installation impossible to see as a whole) therefore presumes—this is one of its main productivity— the coexistence of different frames of reference; of non-containable equivalent world-lines. But let us be more precise as to how Ohanian’s work elaborates perceptual insufficiency. The seven-screen panorama entails that the spectator cannot perceive all the screens at once but only a maximum of five or so. Perception, here, is solicited not as a mere registration of sensory stimuli but as a cognitive function which must deal with the following predicament best described by cognitive psychologists Edward E. Smith and Stephen M. Kosslyn in their study on perception: “the world presents us with too much sensory input to include into our coherent perceptions at any single given moment.”44 Of interest here is how cognitive psychology defines this type of predicament as a special kind of perceptual difficulty: as a “binding problem”—the difficulty to associate different features of an object so that it may be perceived as a single object or the difficulty to associate objects so that they may be perceived as connected. This difficulty arises mainly because the brain’s processing of information is carried out through several systems analyzing more or less separately the different features of the object. The whole point of Seven Minutes Before is that it discourages binding although it makes use of the exhibition space as “glue.”45 We will come back to this problem in more detail further down, in our examination of Ohanian’s September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007. What is crucial to raise for now is how the binding problem not only implies the perceptual difficulty to bind what is present in the spectator’s visual field but also what is virtual in that field, what partially exceeds that field. In Seven Minutes Before, the sum total of screens cannot be perceived at once; the different views persist in their singularity but are made to co-occur in a same space-time; the principle of simultaneity of different time frames is understood but not seen. In such a setting, the perceptual question becomes—a question which is highly debated in philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience: what happens to unattended visual stimuli (the stimuli that do not bind with the perceived block of screens)? Although this debate is far from being resolved, there is a growing consensus, following the work of Allport (1989)46, “that there is generally at least some processing of the meaning of unattended visual stimuli, but that this processing often does not disrupt responding to attended stimuli.”47 Alva Noë’s studies on vision also suggest that the perceiver is phenomenologically attentive to unattended features of a

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visual scene even if she is only attentive to a specific part of that scene: “[…] I may look at you, attending only to you. But I also have a sense of the presence of the wall behind you in the background, of its color, of its distance from you. […] This phenomenon is an example of what psychologists call amodal perception. We experience the occluded portions of the disks […] as amodally present in perception. They are perceptually present without being actually perceived.”48 This finding suggests that while the spectator of Seven Minutes Before attends to a group of screens, the visibility of the unattended screens is also processed at the same time, even though not as extensively as the attended screens; they are processed as a virtual (rather than an actual) presence. The knowledge of an excess of stimuli is thus at play—and I believe this to be pivotal—as one perceives specific blocks of screens. This is to say that the quasipanoramic structure of the installation presents itself as a binding problem to the perceiving subject: it solicits attentional engagement, disengagement, and re-engagement (let us follow here the Posner and Petersen account of attention); as much as it solicits our movement in space so as to cope with that problem. It produces excessive unattended stimuli that are probably processed. It is imperative to emphasize that as the spectator perceives a block of screens, the panorama periphery is never out of sight. These shifting peripheries (they shift as we walk) may well remain unattended because of their remoteness but they are processed as extending peripheries. The exact ending of the structure is not perceivable and yet, the fact that it extends in space, is perceivable. In other words, the installation provides an experience of expandedness and continuity in space. This cosmogram—to adopt the title which was used for the catalog of the installation’s exhibition—is not a closed cosmogram. Rather, it is an expanded, possibly limitless cosmogram, which does not allow the spectator to build any cause-and-effect relationship between screens.49 If indeed a cosmogram is a flat geometric figure depicting a cosmology and if one is to consider some of the determining findings of modern cosmology (namely, Hubble’s discovery of the galactic red shift which confirmed that the universe is expanding, and Lemaître’s proto-formulation of the Big Bang theory), one must start integrating the principles of general relativity, expansion, multiplicity, changeability, inflation, parallel worlds, equalized temporalities, and coming communities that underlie the Big Bang theory as a model that describes the explosive event from which the universe is believed to have emerged some ~13.7 ± 0.2 billion (109) years ago. In the installation The Mars Clock produced

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in the rooms of the Villeurbanne’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 2006, Ohanian set up a workshop to build a clock destined to represent time on Mars. The clock devised a revolution time of 24 hours and 39 minutes in which one second was 2.75% slower than the Earth-second. The workshop thus sustained the relativity of time length through the proposition of an extra-terrestrial time. This frame of reference view of time supports an open cosmological approach to contemporaneity. This approach is manifest in Ohanian’s statement about his work: “I believe that I am trying to make ‘this elsewhere’ artistically coexist ‘with this here’ […] I am indeed interested in the cosmos, probably because there is ‘matter’ there to relativize. It seems to me difficult right now, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, to destabilize even slightly the western world in its ‘modernity’ and its ideological, aesthetic, economic, or even scientific […] certainties. Yet, when we discuss with astrophysicists, we are forced to acknowledge that after the evocation of the Bing Bang, we are lost, compelled to admit that we do not know anything! The mystery of the universe is somewhat of a mirror of human limits.”50 The exploration of the long expanse of the panorama, one that exceeds the spectator’s field of vision, entails the inscription of vision within an always incomplete visual field; a visual field made of a multiplicity of attended and unattended screens that can endlessly multiply, but whose excessivity can be processed as equally real and temporally on par with the other attended screens. In such an expandable structure, there is no privileged frame of reference. The structure of the panorama here is aesthetically inspired by the principle of the expanding universe according to which “all the other galaxies are moving away from us” and all “galaxies are all moving away from each other,”51 following a disappearing-from-view logic: “celestial objects that are currently visible will successively disappear as they approach the horizon beyond which they would be receding from us at more than the speed of light.”52 This observational limit is also suggested by the title of the installation, as it searches for the impossible (although not necessarily improbable) minutes before the Big Bang—before the alleged limit of time—as metaphorically represented by the truck–motorcycle collision followed by the explosion of the camper van, the very moment that initiates the moving away of the images from each other.

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To Conclude: Simultaneity as a Temporalization of the Being-in-Common In Ohanian’s work, it is the retreat of the all-seeing (the fallibility of the world seen) which imposes that reality. What does this mean? First, the installation articulates a radical questioning of what historian Wolf Shäfer has called “the ideology of the non-contemporaneity, the claim that not all contemporaries are contemporaneous,” on the basis of a classification of fellow human beings as “non-contemporaneous others,” i.e. primitives; the poor; underdeveloped or uncivilized nations.53 As Shäfer argues, such a classification makes some perceptions and some temporalities more real than others. This hierarchy is strongly contested in Seven Minutes Before micro-deployment of a globalized54 contemporaneity that is inherently expandable. Second, the installation proposes a conception of globality that defies the “whole”; it is a locus of interpellation of perception that questions the perception of the world as an object of vision to be grasped all at once in its totality. The spectator is solicited as within the world he or she observes and not in front of it. This is also, as we will see in Chapter 7, Stan Douglas’s spectator. The opposition that Nancy operates between globalization and mondialization is quite useful to qualify the artwork–spectator interaction I am trying to describe here. The installation operates a failure of the global defined as a “totality grasped as a whole” to sustain a “world-forming” (mondialization) philosophy which exceeds representation.55 This philosophy supports the view that “if the world, essentially, is not the representation of a universe (cosmos) nor that of a here below (a humiliated world, if not condemned by Christianity), but the excess—beyond any representation of an ethos or of a habitus—of a stance by which the world stands by itself, configures itself, and exposes itself in itself, relates to itself without referring to any given principle or to any determined end, then one must address the principle of such an absence of principle directly.”56 My claim has been that Ohanian’s work precisely addresses “the principle of such an absence of principle.” The image, to conclude, insists as a post-optical modality that makes perceptible the imperceptible simultaneity of equally valid temporalities that increasingly governs our contemporary lives.

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September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007 As mentioned above, the single-screen video projection September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007 (2007) inserts the spectator’s perception between image and sound—more specifically, between the seeing of mute images of Santiago, Chile in 2007, and the hearing of the soundtrack of The Coup d’Etat (El golpe de estado), Part II of Patricio Guzmán’s 1975–9 documentary trilogy The Battle of Chile (La batalla de Chile). In this installation, Ohanian has introduced a film archive: The Coup d’Etat. This archive chronicles, through a mixed montage of Guzmán’s own footage and news footage, the demise of the democratically elected Unidad Polular government of Salvador Allende (1970–3). It covers the period leading to the 1973 Chilean military coup, from the unsuccessful military overthrow of Allende’s government in June 1973 to Allende’s final speech and the aerial bombing of La Moneda, the presidential palace, which finally led to his death. Ohanian’s installation, though, has only kept the sound component of the archive to re-synchronize it with video images pertaining to Santiago today, 34 years after the military coup, which were shot by Ohanian himself at the exact locations where the events filmed by Guzmán in 1973 took place. The simultaneity of the installation lies in its co-transmission of sounds and images extracted from two different sources referring to different temporalities. Its main experiential effect is to situate the spectator in a perceptual predicament, one that blocks (as is also the case with Seven Minutes Before’s quasi-panorama structure) the unifying principle of opticality. This perceptual predicament, experienced by the spectator once she becomes aware that the video is made out of two documents transmitted in synchrony, is the unattainable reconciliation of vision and aurality. In September 11, 1973_ (see Figure 5.7) the simultaneity of transmission of discordant sounds and images related to a same place is compelling in its contemporizing of temporal passing. Indeed, although sound and image meet materially through synchronization, they obstinately fail to meet perceptually: they are part of two realities that cannot blend to create a historicity grounded in the passage of time as the “becoming present of future events and then their becoming past.” The soundtrack belongs to a world of socialist struggle, a dialectics between the people and military power, communism, and capitalism. Removed from its initial footage, it unfolds autonomously as an aural deployment of military technology sounds (helicopters, tanks, gunshots, explosions) and a progression of debates, speeches, claims, and declarations made

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by the main protagonists of this troubled period: workers, communist leaders, Allende himself, pro-Allende, and anti-Allende generals, leaders from the Christian Democracy Party and the National Party, a variety of citizens involved in strikes, factory sieges, political meetings, and demonstrations, pertaining either to revolutionary or anti-revolutionary processes. In sharp contrast, the visual rendering of Santiago today presents us close-up views of everyday passersby walking in the city, as well as a series of apparently neutralized sites: vacant public squares, empty cemeteries, monuments, and memorials, a completely restored La Moneda devoid of any sign of past bombardment, stores and offices displaying by-products of the Allende era, all of which are interspersed with images of guards and military figures whose continual attendance varies from a harmless military fanfare to the armed surveillance of governmental buildings to a forceful police intervention during a workers’ demonstration. These images emphasize the predominant being-there of forces of order in democratic Chilean everyday life in 2007. September 11, 1973_ starts with the soundtrack of Guzmán’s The Coup d’Etat—the flying helicopters of the June 29 failed coup— overlapping the sound and visual recording of two young boys in today’s Chile singing their hope for a better future. It ends with The Coup d’Etat’s written statement of hope (“History is ours, it’s made by the people”) only to be preceded, however, by a dystopian sequence: the simultaneous transmission of the soundtrack of victory speeches of the generals responsible for the final coup and the images of the infamous stadium today—now empty, restored and cleaned up—in which the detention, tortures, executions and disappearing of prisoners were operated. As Seven Minutes Before, September 11, 1973_ pertains to a specific site—not a valley, but a city; not the Vercors, but Santiago (Figure 5.8). Likewise, it deploys the contemporary history of a place. But the temporalization processes are significantly different in each work. The earlier installation proposed the simultaneous projection of various space-times of the same landscape, which had initially been filmed simultaneously. Through its quasi-panoramic multi-screen structure, Seven Minutes Before spatialized these co-occurring temporal layers by isolating them and inserting them in adjacent screens. Each screen or block of screens became a referential frame for the different spectators. The multi-screen presentation was the modality by which the relativity of simultaneity could be set into play, transforming the different space-times into equally valid layers. It unfolded as an alternative (non-presentist and expanding) model of the being-in-common of contemporary history. September 11,

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1973_ first and foremost temporalizes a single place (Santiago). It is posthumous to Seven Minutes Before: it takes the latter’s tenselessness as an assumed point of departure to raise the question of the binding problem which comes about when different temporal categories coexist within a single referential frame without significantly relating to each other although pertaining to a same place. It is as though Ohanian had isolated one of the screens of Seven Minutes Before to dissect the complexity of its temporal density. The single-screen installation brings us to the drama of a mnemonic and historiographic fissure between temporal categories when tenselessness becomes a socio-political history devoid of operative tensed relations. The installation brings aurally to the surface a traumatic past, which remains unresolved collectively as it fails to relate to or connect with the present. The two overlapping yet discordant temporal categories of the past and present are displayed through fractionalized documents and their respective realities scarcely match even though they concern a same place. Simultaneity has now become an aesthetic strategy that keeps sustaining a tenseless view of time—in which the relation between past and present is not one of passage but of “earlier than”, “before,” and “at the same time”—only to show, however, that the nonexistence of temporal passing activates a caesura when pertaining to the history of Santiago—earlier Santiago and later Santiago. September 11, 1973_’s aesthetics of simultaneity brings to the fore not an open common world, but a darker side: a temporal discontinuity that discloses a memory failure, one that fundamentally questions the possibility of ever arriving at a resolved historical narrative about contemporary Chile. As we will see, this is not only a loss but also, potentially, a productive reconfiguration of the narrative act that sustains the historical narratives constitutive of historicity. This mnemonic dimension is far from gratuitous. As suggested by historian Steve Stern in his 2006–10 trilogy study of the Pinochet and postPinochet years, Chile is a complex memory box made out of conflicting “‘emblematic’ memory frameworks” about the coup and the post-coup, remembered either as a salvation (as the event that saved the country), an unresolved rupture, a process of persecution and awakening, or simply as a box that must remain closed.57 These memory struggles, argues Stern, are central to the still highly discordant understanding of the Pinochet dictatorship years and the post-dictatorship years of transition to democracy. By recovering one of the most emblematic filmic archives documenting the military coup, an archive that was itself censored in Chile from the moment of its initial release up until the

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Figure 5.7   Melik Ohanian, September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile 2007, 2007. Video DVCpro HD DVD with surround 5.1 and English subtitles, color, 90 min. Video still. © Melik Ohanian, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

end of the 1990s, September 11, 1973_ actively engages with the Chilean memory box. And yet, its fundamental concern is not with memory per se but its persisting gaps insofar as the resurfacing of the past does not consist in a recovering of the past or in a reestablishment of the lost continuity between the present and past. If we compare the work to two key films on contemporary Chile—Patricio Guzmán’s Obstinate Memory (Memoria obstinada, 1997) and Ken Loach’s contribution to the collective film 1109’01 – September 11 (2002), which feature witnesses of the coup and of the Pinochet regime in an attempt to remember the past—what becomes manifest is that Ohanian’s work puts the melancholy tone of these films at bay. The continual deployment of images of Santiago 2007 reduces the melancholia that comes about when remembering disengages with the present. What is more, it becomes quite noticeable that, in contrast to Guzmán’s and Loach’s films, Ohanian’s installation insists on confronting the past and the present without proposing any form of resolution. What matters here is the fissure between past and present: both the disclosing of and the spectator’s perceptual experience of that fissure. The fissure prevents memory from settling in, more or less comfortably, in the past. It exposes the struggles of memory

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Figure 5.8   Melik Ohanian, September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile 2007, 2007. Video DVCpro HD DVD with surround 5.1 and English subtitles, color, 90 min. Video still. © Melik Ohanian, Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

and the concomitant difficulty to produce a historical narrative about modern Chile. It does so by using a perceptual device which, similarly to the quasi-panoramic structure of the multi-screen projection of Seven Minutes Before, has the effect of disabling the opticality of the all-seeing. The spectator is now confronted with sounds about the past and images about the present which synchronize in constant uneasiness. Tenselessness is not only a view of time, but a perceptual/cognitive practice to be experienced by the viewer/listener split between earlier and later which do not follow the flowing logic of “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past.” I want to argue—and this is the main claim underlying the following sections—that narrative forwardness (its linearity) in September 11, 1973_ is suspended to compel the spectator to physiologically experience herself the unsettling psychic impact of a time that does not pass when this absence of passage occurs within a same referential frame. It is also suspended to compel the spectator to find alternative ways of rearticulating its passing. The attempt here is to tense tenselessness, although without ever letting go of the persistence of tenselessness, even turning it into a modality by which historical narratives can be processually renewed.

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To provide a clearer image of what I will be arguing, it is useful to imagine Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007)—a 167 meters long crack made in the cement floor of the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London—as a companion piece of September 11, 1973_. Salcedo’s intervention starts as a simple fracture but ends up as a border. The border can be crossed by the spectators and passersby, but the crack persists as a negative space that evokes what Salcedo has described as “the hole of History that marks the […] difference that separates whites from non-whites,” a difference that is “bottomless, like the division between people.”58 In Ohanian’s work, the fissure also comes about by splitting documents (not the floor as in Salcedo’s installation, but a film deprived of images and a video deprived of sound). Like the two sides of the Shibboleth floor, the film and the video coexist disquietly. Yet, in September 11, 1973_, an additional practice of simultaneity is required: the co-projection of discordant sounds and visuals of a singular place. It is this co-projection that inscribes each spectator’s perceptual activity in an interiorized split. What the Shibboleth spectator is meant to observe, the September spectator is meant to live from within. The specificity of this experience entails a unique coalescence of tense and tenslessness— a unique incitement to corporeally experience the non-passage of time to then move towards tensed historical narratives that never simply resolve the non-passage of time. Dolev is right when he points out how both the tensed and tenseless conceptions of time depend on a problematic ontological claim about real time (both camps rely on the following de-contextualized metaphysical assumption: “the idea that there is an ontology here waiting to be fleshed out”), but he also emphasizes that the tenseless view does not challenge the persistence of our tensed experiences—the fact, for example, that we change and grow older as time passes, or that we remember the past and anticipate the future. The tenseless camp contends that the past, present, and future are spoken of and thought of as distinct and equally valid, but that this tenselessness does not concern “the things we experience, think, and speak about.”59 September 11, 1973_, I will be arguing, aesthetically maintains this nuance as a strategy of historical consciousness, insofar as the tenseless rendering of time that refuses to pass and flow progressively makes possible a post-ontological view which admits a renewed yet knotty passage of time. Why? Because the suspension of narrative forwardness compels the spectator to process the temporal asymmetries. In short, the simultaneity of sounds about the past and images about the present doesn’t simply disclose today’s gap between temporal categories

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(the absence of relations that could easily bind them), but invites the spectator to experiment these sound-image oscillations, to perceptually and cognitively struggle with the binding problem. To develop my proposition, the following sections will propose that the aesthetic strategy of the visual/audio split is the main aesthetic procedure through which historicity is presentified insofar as the split is experienced by the spectator as a binding problem between the past and present. This experienced predicament, I argue, supports an alternative elaboration of the historical narrative, one that significantly complicates the mimetic functioning of narrativity. The installation’s fissure structure inserts gaps, oblivions, and unsettlements in the deployment of the historical narrative. To understand these gaps, our discussion will consider the specificities of what Stern has called the Chilean memory box. These analytical steps are devised to elucidate how simultaneity is not merely a temporality that equalizes the different temporalities of contemporary history (as displayed in Seven Minutes Before) but also an equalizing process that can be explored to complicate the historical narratives which are, after all, the main enactments of historicity. Narratives order the sequence and understanding of historical events by articulating the past, present, and future in specific ways, according to a futuristic, presentist or passeist perspective. The main claim of the second part of this chapter is that the historical narrative set about by September 11, 1973_ is a presentifying device that insists on the co-occurrence of temporal categories and the difficulty to relate them.

The Binding Problem Phenomenologically, the spectator keeps struggling within this binding effort to reinstitute the passage of time and what must be called historicity as a historical condition (a condition that requires, according to Ricoeur, a past, a present, and a future). But the binding problem persists, which means that temporal passing can never simply be “the becoming present of the future and then its vanishing into the past.” It is this active fractionalization of two archives presented simultaneously and the perceptual crisis activated by such a fractionalization in the viewer/listener that make Ohanian’s work a unique player in what Hal Foster has labeled “the archival impulse” of contemporary art, an impulse Foster uncovers in works which, as is the case with September 11, 1973_, “make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically

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present” through the fragmentary use of archives. Foster’s insightful uncovering falls short, however, of addressing what happens to concepts and practices of time, history and perception in this very process.60 My point is that the perceptual experience sustained by September 11, 1973_ is certainly more complex than a mere mismatch of the aural and the visual. The spectator is interpellated in his or her contemporaneity both as a media multi-tasker—a performer of simultaneous media tasks shaped by the imperative of time management or by what Stiegler has called the hypersolicitation of attention coming from the programming industry of temporal objects—and as a viewer perceptually conditioned by image-sound film synchronization, by what musician and video artist Chris Marclay has called the subliminal dimension of sound in cinema—the fact that sound conditions the visual experience of the image by directing the emotions of the viewer in ways that reinforce the representational order of illusion. Sound is more powerful than the image and makes the image adhere to it.61 Ohanian is absolutely aware of the inseparability of temporal and perceptual critiques. He solicits us as multi-taskers (in our supposed ability to listen and look at two different media stimuli at the same time) but makes us fail in that task: multitasking becomes what most psychologists now call task switching, a switching that delays image–sound adherence.62 The binding problem has principally been raised in the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience. It not only refers to the complexity of the mind’s and the brain’s binding activities, but more importantly to the predicament of explaining these binding activities. The still unresolved question is: how do mental/neuronal processes— such as the contents of consciousness, the activities of single neurons, and the streams of modular input information—integrate the general unity of an entity, such as consciousness, neural assemblies or representation? As observed by neuroscientist and philosopher Adina Roskies, two main indications sustain the hypothesis that binding is a problem. The first indication is that “the brain has difficulty in binding”: this type of difficulty occurs in damaged brains but also in normal brains with temporal or capacity limitations—limitations that lead to inaccuracies such as illusory conjunctions.63 The second indication is that “even if the brain usually does not appear to have a problem in correctly binding signals, we as scientists still lack an understanding of how information variously distributed in patterns of neural firing results in coherent representations. Thus, binding is a problem in that it requires an explanation.”64 Neurobiologist Andreas K. Engel explains quite clearly

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the cognitive raison d’être of the binding problem insofar as cognitive processes systematically tackle with binding problems: This so-called binding problem arises for several reasons: First, information processing underlying cognitive functions is typically distributed across many network elements and, thus, one needs to identify those neurons or network nodes that currently participate in the same cognitive process. Second, perception of and action in a complex environment usually requires the parallel processing of information related to different objects or events that have to be kept apart to allow sensory segmentation and goal-directed behavior. Thus, neuronal activity pertaining e.g. to a particular object needs to be distinguished from unrelated information in order to avoid confusion and erroneous conjunctions. Third, it has been claimed that specific yet flexible binding is required within distributed activation patterns to allow the generation of syntactic structures and to account for the systematicity and productivity of cognitive processes. Fourth, many cognitive functions imply the context-dependent selection of relevant information from a richer set of available data. It has been suggested that appropriate binding may be a prerequisite for the selection and further joint processing of subsets of information.65 Engel’s account discloses quite well how the binding problem is addressed differently in different disciplinary fields; how it thus becomes a distinct problem in each discipline. Experts on the binding problem—cognitive psychologists and computational neuroscientists, for the most part— agree that the term pertains not only to a single problem, but to several of them. The plurality is, however, not merely one of many problems, but of many formulations of the problem. It relates to different processes occurring at distinct levels of description (neural, cognitive, phenomenal), as well as to the growing awareness, as psychologist Antti Revonsuo stipulates, that “there are many different kinds of unity—as well as many different kinds of disunity—of consciousness.”66 In the field of consciousness studies, binding (the process, for example, by which a visually perceived object is experienced as a unified entity of visual features, “where motion, color, and form are coherently bound together”67) is predominantly understood as a condition for the possibility of consciousness. From a more specifically phenomenological perspective, the binding relates to the experience of a coherent world of integrated objects or integrated properties of objects: to perceive an

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object with the features “red” and “square-shaped,” the feature-binding process must represent it as red square and not as a green square or a red circle. From a neuroscientific perspective, neurons must be “tagged” as participating in a particular cognitive course because the distribution of information processing across various neurons spreads out over distinct areas in the brain; and neuronal activity involved in the perception of a complex environment, which necessitates the parallel processing of information, must be differentiated from unrelated information to avoid confusion and flawed conjunctions.68 In cognitive science, the binding problem emerges when scientists attempt to explain the integration of representation or information processing. When it addresses the binding problem, it attempts to understand how (and I follow here Revonsuo’s cognitivist account) the different features of a single stimulus object initially processed in parallel will be eventually integrated in a unified object representation within the brain’s “more central systems dealing with selective attention, decisionmaking, declarative memory, and the control of our interactions with the environment.”69 Its examination of the binding problem pertains more closely to the binding difficulties raised by Ohanian’s September 11, 1973_: the difficulty of binding the visual and the aural features of the images so that they may integrate into a coherent representation, as well as the difficulty of explaining a specific (Chilean) historical condition. Interestingly, in the context of our study of the temporal turn in contemporary art, Engel suggests that it might well be that the binding problem in neuroscience will be solved as a temporal process. The hypothesis is “that synchronization of neuronal discharges can serve for the integration of distributed neurons into cell assemblies and that this process may underlie the selection of perceptually and behaviorally relevant information.”70 For the visual system at least, “the temporal binding model predicts a synchronization of spatially separate cells within individual visual areas to account for the integration of perceptual information across different locations in the visual field. In addition, synchrony should occur across large distances in the cortex to allow for binding between visual areas involved in the analysis of different object features. According to the temporal binding model, this would be required for the full representation of objects. Both predictions have been confirmed experimentally.”71 Although time might well be a major player in the binding of perceived features and cognitive processes, September 11, 1973_ keeps deploying that temporality as visually/aurally split. The installation can

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be said to bring the binding problem as a temporal phenomenon to the fore: the tenses of time are in fact disjoint and cannot produce a flow that would secure the coherence of a unified representation. Flowing time, its tensed deployment as a becoming, that very basis of cognitive and neurobiological binding has been fragilized. The experience of the work, however, is never simply discontinuous insofar as the viewer/ listener negotiates with the visual/aural split, finding ways of binding them and then letting the discontinuity prevail or sometimes letting the visual override the aural and vice versa. The subliminal authority of sound, for instance, the ways in which it orients the perception and meaning of the image or the ways in which—once divided from the image—it outweighs the image, never simply disappears. The sound has the aura of the past, the mystery of the invisible and the quality of a failed revolution, while the visual dimension of the images relates to commonplace, apparently impoverished, contemporary life. As one experiences the work, the sound-image inconsistency is thus not always palpable, varying in intensity from one moment to the next, oscillating between simultaneity and non-simultaneity. When the doubleness of the two sources is identified, it becomes extremely difficult—in fact impossible—to fully grasp together the sound and the image, the past and present. But the persistence of our perceptual skills (let us follow Noë’s findings here) also means that our first reflex is to overcome this cleavage. Most of the time, one is torn—for the sake of intelligibility—between abandoning the image for the survival of the sound or the sound for the sake of the image. It is only when the video proposes motionless representations, namely images of monuments (statues, the palace, tombs, famous buildings; the stadium), that the visual and the aural can more intelligibly coexist for the spectator. Let us insist, however, on this point: despite our perceptual efforts, this coexistence never leads to a present/past reconciliation. Rather, the images of Santiago today appear (on the surface at least) oblivious to the past. When the camera catches persisting symbols of communism, for example, they emerge as obsolete relics in contrast to the communist and socialist discourses of 1973; and when the soundtrack transmits different voices engaged in radio-transmitted debates of 1973, the video camera catches a 2007 view of an empty television studio whose multicolor flashing light projections propels us in the memoryless world of a spectacle empty of any form of debate. In short, the perceptual experience of image-sound simultaneity is a split one, while our highly trained filmic habits and multitask desires keep fighting to deny the

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split. Overall, however, September 11, 1973_’s simultaneity is a temporal and a perceptual procedure which may well refer to history, it refutes the future-oriented passage that constitutes it since modernity. The co-deployment of the visual and the aural never leads to a present/ past resolution, nor does it have to. But this is not to say that a historical narrative cannot unfold within (despite, because of) this non-reconciliation. Indeed, as mentioned above, our experience of the split never fully blocs binding states; and consciousness acts to bind the un-binded. Moreover, if narrative representations are understood more as a process than a result, historical narratives do come about—not in the work per se but in the spectator’s response to the work. This requires that we think of representation not only as a unified integration (as the scientists investigating the binding problem tend to do), but also as an integrating process. Philosopher Jan Plate has recently highlighted that representation is rarely discussed in scientific literature dealing with the binding problem, although it presupposes unity: “admittedly, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists do often not explicitly talk about representations when discussing what the binding problem consists in, and instead prefer to talk about features and parts themselves—that the problem consists in ‘associating’ those features and parts with each other in the right ways, or in ‘linking’ them together […] by some kind of representation.”72 He points out how there are major divergences in the understanding of representation between cognitivist and philosophical perspectives. For example, philosopher James Garson argues that the cognitivist presumption that “the unity of our phenomenal experience” demands “a process that brings sensory features back together” is mistaken.73 Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë argue, however, that the requirement that attributes which “seem perceptually to be part of a single object” be represented in “any unified kind of way, for example, at a single location in the brain, or by a single process” is itself mistaken.74 This philosophical contestation does succeed in disclosing that the binding problem is understood as a problem that must be solved to secure our experience of the world as unified and coherent.75 It also discloses that we do not necessarily always experience the world in an integral way. But the binding problem productively suggests that representation is a processing task and not merely an achieved integrated entity. A representation, a historical narrative considered as a process and as a problem, may well take the form of a non-fully reconciled récit. In

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September 11, 1973_, this occurrence has both a pragmatic and a historiographical raison d’être.

From Temporality to History: The Narrative Principle The tenseless deployment of a coexisting past and present outside temporal passing must be understood as requiring an alternative deployment of historicity. Simultaneity is a temporalizing mobilizer of historiography, especially of historical narratives that make room for gaps. In his study of the historical narrative, Paul Ricœur enounces a postulate which relates directly to this state of affairs: “Time becomes human time inasmuch as it is narratively articulated.”76 We will go back to this temporalized conceptualization of the historical narrative in our analysis of Stan Douglas’s recombinant narratives in Chapter 7. Suffice it to say for now that for Ricoeur—one of the main contemporary thinkers of the conditions of possibility of the historical narrative—it is in its narrative deployment that history keeps a link with our basic competence to follow a story, as well as with the cognitive operations of narrative comprehension by which history relates to human action and to time in general. The absence, in September 11, 1973_, of any resolved form of representation of the past in relation to the present and the future, of history tout court, means that it is up to the spectator to take up a narrative with the fragments of the documents—a narrative by which one can think “the mortal time of phenomenology and the public time of narrative sciences” together.77 As she experiences the audio/visual split of the installation, the spectator must literally (corporeally as it were) integrate oblivion in the historical narrative. The mental processes of the spectator interconnect practices of dissonances, gaps, heterochronies, representation, and interpretation, all of which have to do with return, a not-so-smooth return. Devoid of any physical or mnemonic traces of its reality, the past ceases to exist. Yet, it is the fragility of the archive (the fact that it can disappear, be ignored, or be destroyed) that motivates the recalling of these traces. “Forgetting is, in this respect,” writes Ricœur, “[…] the emblem of the vulnerability of [the historical] condition.”78 It is so, as Hayden White’s account of Ricœur’s Memory, History, Forgetting points out, because history (as a modern practice) has usually been written “to cover over or hide or deflect attention from ‘what really happened’ in the past by creating an ‘official version’ that substitutes a part of the

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past for the whole,”79 and because of the numerous political programs of modernity “designed, so it seems, to abject that very humanity that the rest of ‘history’ seemed to have been striving to create.”80 The spectator’s perceptual confrontation of two cut documents that fail to cohere but launch their openness one vis-à-vis the other initiates a narrativity which is precisely this act by which a spectator is required to insert forgetting or oblivion (the “_” of the title) in her récit historique. The historical narrative is not an answer to oblivion—a sudden means to remember and to unify past and present. Rather, oblivion here is an intrinsic part of the historical narrative as much as it is an intrinsic part of Chile’s historicalness. It is this very integration that offers the possibility of a renewed connection between past and present, an inventive redeployment of the passage of the equally real, equally valid documents of September 11, 1973_, a conception that entails the abandonment of pivotal concepts of modern historicity, including teleology, original trauma, anticipated salvation, utopia, and damnation. And yet, this does not entail the negation of trauma; it rather requires a working-through of a traumatic split. This working-through of trauma is especially relevant to contemporary Chile. In her study of cultural sites and representations of “memory symbolic” in postdictatorship Chile, sociologist Macarena Gómez-Barris suggests that Chile’s progressive shift to democracy during the 1990s was instituted through what Giorgio Agamben has called—in his characterization of spectacular states—an erasure. Not only the erasure of the country’s authoritarian and violent past. But also the erasure of September 11, 1973, an event that “marked the beginning of the end of a political dream that involved millions of people who had worked to create revolutionary and cultural change through poder popular. […] In stark contrast, the military resolution that generals Merino, Mendoza, Leigh, and Pinochet imposed came to embody a social, economic, and cultural nightmare, perhaps more in line with the autocratic tendencies of the nation that continue to haunt Chilean social and political realities.”81 Allende’s death and the state terror subsequent to his death produced a breach, both for national supporters and social movements around the world, as “abductions, collective graves, disappearances, military curfews, torture, media censorship, forced exile, and a generalized climate of fear followed the military coup.”82 This breach remains unresolved in contemporary Chile. Chile’s is a traumatic memory which can only be worked through by the reconnection of September 11, 1973 and today’s Chile.

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As Stern’s historiographic work has made manifest, despite of and because of this breach, the memory question “proved central” to the evolution of Chilean politics and culture, both under the military regime that ruled until 1990 and under the subsequent democracy “shadowed by legacies of dictatorship and a still-powerful military.”83 In the history of violence and repression during and after Pinochet’s dictatorship, memory—especially the recording of the Allende era and the subsequent military rule—became highly strategic both from above (for the elites of state, and church and political parties working to develop a social base from below) and from below (for subaltern groups, street activists, the unemployed, victim-survivors, pressuring the elites), as a mode of persuasion and influence.84 The special prevalence of memory struggles in contemporary Chile can be explained by the mobilizing work of Chileans in exile, but also because Allende’s socialist Chile was initially seen as a concrete possibility: after all, the democratically elected government could rely on a political system which had already succeeded in incorporating marginalized social sectors, and some of its past leaders had accepted the parliamentary tradition resonant with western Europe (the last military intervention was in the early 1930s). In the aftermath of the military coup of 1973, many European countries, namely France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden where politicians followed closely Allende’s attempt to create socialist reforms democratically, were struck by the following: the Chilean military, with initial support from the U.S. government, brought down the democratically elected socialist Unidad Popular government and initiated a 17-year dictatorship leaded by General Augusto Pinochet using repression against the regime dissidents (a repression assumed to be responsible of the death and disappearance of over 3,000 people, the imprisonment of over 100,000 people (estimated 200,000), and exile flow of about 200,000 (estimated 400,000)). Memory struggles became the modality by which the breaking apart of the country’s democratic resilience could be denounced, examined and understood. According to Stern, and this is a crucial point for our understanding of September 11, 1973_’s structuring of a fissure through which an alternative (non-presentist, processual) historical narrative may emerge, it is not enough to understand these memory struggles as struggles against oblivion. This understanding discloses Chile as a “culture of oblivion, marked by a tremendous compulsion to forget the past and the uncomfortable,” and posits the socially privileged as a class that can only gain in denying state violence as they become the beneficiaries of economic prosperity.85 Of course,

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social actors have worked to establish the meaning and truth about the collective trauma. It is the case, however, that these actors came to live a “memory impasse” in the late 1990s because of the increasing political belief that the military and their supporters had become too strong to continue the effort for truth and justice. The question as to whether the memory impasse persists in one form or another and whether “it will eventually yield, for new generations in the twentieth-first century, a culture of oblivion,” remains unsolved, as much as the question of democracy.86

Simultaneity as a Working-through Trauma September’s fissure (the split that enacts Chile as a culture of oblivion) is an aesthetic procedure that perceptually incites the viewer/listener to elaborate a historical narrative that includes oblivion. It materializes oblivion. As the spectator negotiates her way in the work, she attempts to confront what has been forgotten by establishing connections between the past and present. But this confrontation is never a simple willful gesture. Indeed, to say that the fissure materializes oblivion is not enough insofar as oblivion is inherent to a deeper psychological structure—one that specifically emerges when human subjects are victims of violence (including the violence of a coup d’état, which corresponds to an unexpected extrajudicial deposition of a legitimate government). I am speaking here of psychological trauma (the mental effects resulting from a violent emotional shock), a type of psychic wound that has been intensively studied in the last two decades. September’s fissure is, ultimately, a means of working through trauma, a dimension strengthened by historian Dominick LaCapra’s main argument to the effect that historiography must learn to integrate the psychoanalytical concepts of mourning and melancholia, as well as acting out and working through, in historical accounts of traumatic events.87 This integration can only adequately take place if the differences between victims of traumatizing events and subsequent commentators are acknowledged. The commentator, which includes not solely the historian but any attentive reader or listener of historical accounts (any spectator of September 11, 1973_), cannot substitute herself to the victim, but she can adopt—as an affective modality that leads to a deeper historiographical understanding of traumatic events—an empathic relation to the victims. Although the affective charge and the experience of trauma are de facto distinct for

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the victim and for the commentator, it is imperative to concede that they both engage in acting out and, possibly, working out processes. As they act out traumatic events, victims engage themselves in a temporal implosion: haunted by the past, they are “performatively caught up in the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes,” inscribing themselves in a temporality in which the differences between past, present, and future tend to collapse.88 Acting out traumatic events entails a spreading of undecidability that threatens “to disarticulate relations, confuse self and other, and collapse all distinctions, including that between present and past.”89 Working through (which can take the form of mourning and critical thought) is the articulatory practice by which the undecidability of acting out and the repetition compulsion gradually dissipate, leading to the possibility of a differentiation between past and present, as well as the possibility “to recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the future.”90 I am not suggesting here that the spectator of September 11, 1973_ is invited to empathize with the victims of the coup d’état: the victims remain invisible to us and barely audible; in any case, the passage from acting out to working through does not necessarily occur for any victim or commentator. It might well be that the victim or commentator unconsciously clings—remains faithful—to trauma, melancholically bonding with the dead so as not to betray those who were destroyed by the traumatic event. Historiography entails objectification, but this objectification may involve a numbing practice from the part of the historian, as an affective state by which she protects herself from the acting out or working through experiences of the victims; by which she represents the traumatic event by dissociating it from its affective dimension; by which she can prevent herself from identifying with the traumatized and keep trauma at a safe distance. September’s fissure materializes these protective (numbing) reactions; and the 2007 images of Santiago are not without suggesting something like a collective numbing. To perceptually experience the fissure instead of simply looking at it from afar is therefore to refuse its numbing function and return to the splitting processes psychically instituted by the victims as a means of survival. This is where LaCapra’s notion of empathy takes its full meaning, not as an assimilating identification of the other to the self but as a heterophatic identification with the victim as other. Empathy, suggests LaCapra, is a more productive (heterophatic) identification with the victim insofar as it not only succeeds to counteract victimization (in

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empathy, one puts oneself in another’s position while being aware that the other’s experience is not one’s own), but also enables the historian to cope with the disruptive experience of trauma (to acknowledge one’s own unsettlement in being confronted to the trauma of others) and to be responsive to the victim’s traumatic experiences in ways that might help “not speciously to heal but to come to terms with the wounds and scars of the past.”91 Such a working through or coming-to-terms takes its productivity from the possibility of articulating and reconnecting affect and representation which are fundamentally dissociated in the experience of traumatic events. LaCapra significantly insists on the historiographical requirement to bind representation and affect—to allow oneself to be empathically unsettled—as a necessary step of inquiry, complementary to empirical research, into the unknotting trauma: Such a coming-to-terms would seek knowledge whose truth claims are not one-dimensionally objectifying or narrowly cognitive but involve affect and may empathetically expose the self to an unsettlement, if not a secondary trauma, which should not be glorified or fixated upon but addressed in a manner that strives to be cognitively and ethically responsible as well as open to the challenge of utopian aspiration. Trauma brings about a dissociation of affect and representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel. Working through trauma involves the effort to articulate or rearticulate affect and representation in a manner that may never transcend, but may to some viable extent counteract, a reenactment, or acting out, of that disabling dissociation.92 LaCapra’s specifications allow us to be more precise about September 11, 1973_’s simultaneous projection of the soundtrack of Guzmán’s The Coup d’Etat and Ohanian’s own footage of 2007 Santiago. The film/ video tenseless coexistence of the past and present, a co-occurrence that suspends the forwardness of time from the present to the past and from the past to the present, is the aesthetic procedure by which a spectator is invited to emphatically unsettle with and not simply look from afar (as a protective, numbing device) the traumatic event of the military coup. The split asks that the spectator reenact the traumatic divide which remains otherwise imperceptible and unknowable. This reenactment is of course removed from the traumatic event. It corresponds not to a primary but a secondary or tertiary working-through modality by which

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affect and representation may start to be connected by the spectator as commentator. As LaCapra suggests in the above statement, such a process allows the victim, the spectator, or the historian “to recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the future.”93 This means that the empathic unsettlement provided by the simultaneous projection of past sounds and present visibilities may well activate memory. Historicity would then be temporalized by a mnemonic process itself initiated (and certainly not resolved) by the visual/aural split occasioned by the synchronization of the two edited documents. Pierre Nora once stated that memory and history are in many ways opposed to each other: “memory is life, always carried by living groups and as such, it is in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of recollection and amnesia, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to all uses and manipulations” while “history is the always problematic and incomplete reconstruction of what is no more […], a representation of the past […] which belongs to all and no one […], endowed with a universal vocation, […] only attached to temporal continuities, evolutions and relations between things.”94 Based on this opposition, modern history’s mission progressively confirmed itself as a destruction of memory, a “delegitimization of lived past.”95 This modern emptying out of history from memory (which modern philosophers and writers including Bergson, Freud, and Proust have attempted to rescue) has now lead to its reactionary reverse: the presentist deployment of a present in which memory is constantly talked about for the sake of the present. The contemporary blooming of memory studies is in fact the chief symptom of the disappearance of memory, its absorption into history. Following Nora, the task of the contemporary historian is to bring back memory into history. This bringing-back of memory, however, cannot simply be operated by the inflationary memory practices which have now become common place: the archivistic compulsion to multiply the archives; the retreat of public memory into a psychic memory which serves to confirm one’s personal identity; or the rescuing of just about everything as a trace of what has been lost in the discontinuity between memory and history—a trace reiteratedly endowed with “the dignity of historical mystery.”96 For Nora, and this is what Ohanian’s installation sets into play, the historiographical practice should more productively take the form of a combined practice: a hybrid between memory and history, which produces not memories but sites of memory that may well seek to immortalize death but, in so doing, might also make

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these sites live with “their aptitude to metamorphosis, in the incessant reversal of their meanings and the unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications.”97

Simultaneity as a Temporalization of Historicity The productivity of the tenseless formulation of simultaneity, a temporal passing which is barely a temporal passing as it equalizes times in the very perceptual experience of the spectator, lies in its deployment of the image as a binding problem. This deployment sustains both installations: Seven Minutes Before and September 11, 1973_ Santiago, Chile, 2007. In the former, the binding problem emerges when the spectator is exposed to the quasi-panoramic structure of the seven-screen installation—one that he or she cannot perceive as a whole. In the latter, the binding problem surfaces when the spectator becomes aware that the soundtrack and the image do not match even if they both pertain to the history of a singular city: Santiago, Chile. Simultaneity, in both cases, is complicated by the binding problems experienced by the spectator: binding predicaments relativize simultaneity in the former and dramatize simultaneity in the latter. Both are made to materialize contemporaneity but they refer to different views of contemporaneity. Perhaps more utopian, Seven Minutes Before deploys contemporaneity as beings-in-common, while September 11, 1973_ exposes the temporal divides and gaps within a singular space-time isolated in a screen. Both are quite daring as they adopt a tenseless view of time that equalizes the past, present, and future. Both suspend any form of temporal passing that could relate the past, present, and future into a becoming flow. Interestingly, however, September 11, 1973_ attempts to tense the tenselessness in order to address the historical divide that distances the coup d’état and post-dictatorship Chile. But it never loses sight of the potential of tenselessness. Indeed, this view engages the viewer/ listener in a complex reinterpretation of Chile’s historical condition. This reinterpretation, when it does occur, reactivates the passage of time, but outside teleology and within the remembering of forgetting and the working-through of trauma as constitutive acts of the historical narrative. Seven Minutes Before elaborates likewise a new historicity in which contemporaneity is defined not only as a multiplicity of times but, more importantly, as a potential process of equalization of times, taking into account the relativity of simultaneity.

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September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007, I have been arguing, enters more deeply in the historicizing process by addressing the practice of the historical narrative (to which we will come back in the final chapter). The installation is a key contributor to the aesthetic exploration of the conditions of possibility of historical time, even though it moves away—without any concession—from the explanation and representation activities of historiography. It refuses to fully recover the past event or to indicate where its history is leading us. Yet, it insists on the requirement not to abandon the event, as well as the need to confront the never fully recovered past and present. As the spectator engages in the post-ontological deployment of “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past,” she is given a crucial interval for the reinterpretation of history. As in the filmworks of Mark Lewis, an interval is made to be perceived. It even structures our perception, so that the darkness of the cinematic interstice may trouble our perception of images. This darkness imposes the need to proceed with a more dis-unified deployment of representation. The possibility of reinterpretation is what conveys a sense of futurity to the historical discourse. The outcome of this future—change or status quo?—remains of course unknown. Yet, as suggested above, the reinterpretation of the Chilean archives it presupposes does bring in a key element in our reception of the work: the notion of democracy. The suspension of forwardness is ultimately an aesthetic materialization of the 1973 coup’s suspension of democracy, which did in many ways suspend the passage of democratic time. The historical narrative is the responsibility of each observer and, as such, is never made public or manifest in the artwork itself. Moreover, it is elaborated by spectators as their perceptual experience of tenselessness is divided between an aural past and a visual present—an experience that keeps intensifying the now of a disjointed perception. The installation, in short, is more about the “simultaneous” conditions of possibility of futurity than its noticeable actualization. By setting into play perceptual discrepancies for the spectator, it is an enabler rather than a direct producer of historical narratives.

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Chapter 6

Simultaneity II

The aesthetics of simultaneity can be said to rely on the film editing technique of montage in which sounds and images are cut and assembled to order, structure and give form to a narrative or an abstract composition. It draws on the juxtaposition of a variety of framed entities to set their smultaneity into place. The multi-screen structure of projection is a constant in installations that explore simultaneity. Let us take the following example: The Simultania Project (2010–11) by Los Angeles artist Erin Cooney. This collaborative work was made by inviting people from all over the world to film their singular worldview simultaneously from their own perspective, in real time, for 1 minute, on Saturday November 13, 2010, at 16:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)/11 am EST/8 am PST. The resulting footage was assembled into a multi-screen video but the ultimate objective is to create an immersive installation projecting the simultaneous perspectives simultaneously on the different walls of a single room. The Simultania website describes the project as a manifestation of how recent social networking applications which allow users to interact through the internet in real time (from emailing to skyping to twittering) shape our experience of contemporaneity—the growing consciousness that one’s present is not unique insofar as it actually coexists with an infinity of presents lived differently throughout the world: The Simultania Project is like a giant science experiment in which we’re proving to ourselves that other experiences of reality are occurring right now besides our own […]. The concept […] was inspired by how new technologies are changing our everyday experiences of the world. […] I was in L.A. skyping with a friend in Paris. At one point, my friend pointed the webcam out of the window, and in that moment, I saw people walking down the street on the other side of the world in real time. It was completely magical. […] In such

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an instance, our experience of reality has basically become layered, with one or more of the layers physically taking place beyond our natural sensory horizons. It’s a hard thing for the brain to make sense of, which in itself is a curious thing. Why should seeing real-time phenomenon on the other side of the world cause surprise? Don’t we already know that reality continues to exist where we are not? It’s like the baby who thinks the toy stops existing when it’s only been hidden from her.1 Implicitly referring to the for-da experience theorized by Freud discussed in Chapter 3—in which a child learns to understand that what disappears (the reel, the mother) is not necessarily lost and that, indeed, it will come back—the installation counters the experience of loss or absence inherent to vision. It reassures us by making visible the invisible simultaneous worldviews experienced or at least filmed by others. Indeed, the anticipated installation—an assembly of multi-screen walls of differently framed images projecting the multiple 1-minute timestamped footages filmed simultaneously by different people around the planet (about 300 participants are said to have contributed to the event) on November 13, 2010—makes contemporaneity perceivable. It allegedly confirms participation even though it in fact problematically affirms it as a reality, a fait accompli. It proposes a democratized global village but does not build on the legacy of the live video work of Nam June Paik which initiated this simultaneity in the making. Paik’s international satellite installation works, including Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984) and Wrap Around the World (1988), which combined in real time images and sounds of performers located in different parts of the world, had the merit of allowing the failings and glitches of real time enter the composition of the piece. This “noise” is currently negated in the Simultania multi-screen video. Simultania also reassures us by stating that telecommunication technologies have made humans aware, in everyday life, of the global simultaneity of multiple lives. But to reassure us in these terms, it relies on a traditional exploration of montage: each frame is set to project and circumscribe the uniqueness yet simultaneousness of each world-view without problematizing the relationship between frames and without questioning the fact that this multiplicity has no real viewer insofar as such a multiplicity cannot be apprehended or grasped by no one, except by the installation’s software. This is to say that there is no procedure in the projected installation to indicate that the awareness of coexisting presents does not necessarily entail the

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consciousness of the relativity of our worlds; it doesn’t explore montage to find ways to deploy that relativity; it does not say anything about what multiplicity is except to present it as an additive, pluralistic practice. For in this simultaneous multiplicity, the singularities of perspectives are not really acknowledged: they are leveled out by the whole; they don’t account for the perspectives of individuals who did not participate because they did not have access to the technologies or because they did not have the time, the desire or competence to participate in the collective work. What is missing is a thinking-through of multiplicity in an era of globalization. As argued in the previous chapter, the conveyance of simultaneity does not necessarily entail this sort of flattening out. In Melik Ohanian’s September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007, for example, the simultaneous projection of sounds and images activates in the spectator a perceptual binding problem. This type of binding predicament is a constant in Ohanian’s production. It discloses the apprehending of the simultaneous temporalization of historicity as an uneasy perceptual process whose uneasiness must be experienced by the spectator. Unable but challenged to perceive a multi-screen installation as a whole (Seven Minutes Before), unable but challenged to occupy two remote places at the same time (Hidden), unable but challenged to connect the soundtrack and the images of different slam performances (Peripheral Communities), the viewer/listener is invited to live productively the failure of all-seeing opticalities while dwelling over historical time. In their attempt to produce an open relativistic contemporaneity, the pieces require that simultaneity be experienced as a predicament. Although the installations’ display of simultaneity depends on a montage aesthetics, the latter is investigated to create a binding problem which will provide a more complex understanding of the unfolding of simultaneity in contemporaneity. Whereas it shares with Chapter 5 a discussion over simultaneity, the present much briefer chapter exists separately to raise the question of the productivity and the limitations of the now common reliance of multi-screen projections on the aesthetics of montage—the spatial juxtaposition of framed units into an installation whose main function is to glue the units together. As suggested by the above description of Simultania, multi-screen projections can simply consist in a juxtaposition of multiple films made at the same time by different amateurs; they can also, as is the case with Ohanian’s works, consist in an unbinding adaptation of montage aesthetics to problematize simultaneity. But even when binding

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problems are set into play to activate this problematization, montage aesthetics remains the structure by which simultaneity is deployed. In an era of intensified globalization, montage might not be the best aesthetics to convey the experience of the “global.” To exemplify this point, the chapter briefly examines two multi-screen video installations by German filmmaker Harun Farocki (works which are contemporary to Ohanian’s installations): Deep Play (2007) and Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006). This examination will show that the reliance on montage aesthetics is indicative of the possibility to frame temporalities, even when this framing is explored to complicate homogeneous views of time as well as the view of temporality as singular and unique. When multi-screen projections attend to the question of labor, however, as is the case with Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, montage aesthetic faces specific challenges. Its reliance on the framing of units becomes tricky insofar as it somewhat doesn’t fit post-Fordist labor in which labor time is increasingly unframable. To address this unframability, simultaneity—made visible by montage—must in fact be shown as what is increasingly unrepresentable, unlocalizeable, and invisible. Multi-screen projections, as a privileged mode of conveyance of simultaneities, must be made to shift from a montage (filmic) aesthetics to a seamless (digital) aesthetics. As it proceeds to examine Nancy Davenport’s Workers (leaving the factory), 2007, the chapter will argue that it is not montage (even problematized montage) but seamlessness that best conveys a post-Fordist simultaneity in which labor time (let us follow Antonio Negri here) is life itself—that is, an unframable temporality. The seamless digital film becomes a necessary condition (although, as we will see, an insufficient condition) by which to expose the seamless invasion of time everywhere in a globalized economy. While “simultaneity I” must be understood as corresponding to a regime of historicity affected by a temporal passing that equalizes past, present, and future (a passing that is thus barely a passing), “simultaneity II” is a regime of historicity affected by a temporal passing in which “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past”2 is unframable.

Farocki’s Deep Montage Harun Farocki’s multi-screen video installation Deep Play (2007) (Figure 6.1) projects simultaneously 12 different perspectives of a single international event allegedly seen by an estimated 1.5 billion spectators

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worldwide—the July 9, 2006 FIFA World Cup final between France and Italy. The perspectives include official FIFA footage, the artist’s own footage, surveillance images of the Berlin stadium, charts of player statistics, diagrams of passes, real-time 2D and 3D animation sequences, together with soundtracks of the game, but also of police radio communication and comments by television production crews. The duration of the installation reproduces the real-time length (2:15 hrs) of the event. First presented in the context of the twelfth Documenta as an assemblage of a dozen monitors lined up side by side, the installation initially made it impossible to take in more than a portion at a time of the elaborately fragmented and interlocked piece. Farocki judged this layout to be problematic. In subsequent showings the piece was thus installed as a multi-wall multiple projection, to surround and immerse the spectators in ways that allowed them—following a display that should be understood as adhering to Ohanian’s deliberate orchestration of screens which are imperceptible as a whole—to be aware of and to confront the simultaneity of the various footages. In these settings, Deep Play’s different screens projected simultaneously different unedited documents filmed in real time during the World Cup final, including:

Figure 6.1   Harun Farocki, Deep Play, 2007. Twelve-channel video installation, color, sound, 2:15 hrs. Installation view, Greene Naftali, 2008. Image by Jason Mandella. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.

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a screen which showed the Italian and French coaches supervising the game mixed with a schematic diagram of the passes provided by Ascensio Match Expert computational analysis software; a screen focusing on the Ascensio technicians themselves, using the FIFA final to design a promotional demo of their analytical system; a screen unfolding a dynamic bar graph beneath the images of the players, which illustrated their average and peak speeds; a screen presenting a computer generated interpretation of the game; another screen offers surveillance views of the stadium; while another one uses a system conceived by the TZ1 Center for Computing and Communication Technologies to convey a spatio-temporal analysis of dynamic scenes and interpret them semantically via neural networks. The simultaneous projection of the FIFA-related footages showed different vantages of a same event. Simultaneity was more importantly about spatializing (about juxtaposing in the space of the gallery room) the hidden layers of an otherwise widely televised and thus highly visible event. In such a spatialized montage, the singular event becomes multiple without contradicting its singularity. The montage layout made this invisible multiplicity visible. Even more so, it showed images as operational materialities and not simply as transparent transmitters of an event. The assemblage multiplied the images to expose, even to prove (through this very multiplicity) that images are privileged instruments by which the game and the players are now surveilled, analyzed, evaluated, quantified, trained, and perfected, and where systems of visualization are being tested and marketed. Simultaneity was therefore ultimately about disarticulating—about breaking into revelatory fragments—the spectacle of the FIFA World Cup final so that its invisible yet effective reality as a live laboratory of observation might be disclosed. Montage, explored as a critical instrument, demonstrates that it is simply not enough to reproduce the global village as articulated by TV broadcasting. The 2:15-hours event was divided to divulge a simultaneity and to consequently thicken the present-ness of that event. In so doing, it de-pregnanted Lessing’s moment. However, although certainly more critical than Cooney’s more spectacular Simultania (the opposition is not quite fair, for the projects are motivated by very different objectives), Farocki’s Deep Play is still anchored in a montage aesthetics that allows him to expose the diversity of footages within the singular footage and the manifold instrumentalization of the image. The montage of the images in the screens and the montage of the screens made manifest this contemporary diversity and instrumentalization of the FIFA event.

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Montage is the aesthetic strategy by which the invisible simultaneity of image-making becomes visible. Deep Play’s aesthetics begs the question: is there a way to complicate montage so that is ceases to function as a mere “reparative” device by which invisibility is made visible? Such a problematization could be especially momentous if it was set to perform the renewed temporality of labor. For, as neo-Marxist sociologist and political philosopher Antonio Negri has suggested, if there is an area of contemporary life in which human activity has expanded everywhere in ways that disclose how timeas-measure (the Fordist equivalence between time and labor) has been replaced by time-as-life, it is the very area of labor. Why? Because labor, in its growing computational intermixing with non-labor and its growing orientation toward social tasking, has become less and less containable, less and less localizable, less and less measurable. In this regard, it is highly significant that Farocki has also dealt with the representation of labor and that he adapted his montage aesthetics to do so. Released one year before Deep Play, Farocki’s 12-channel digital video installation Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006) adopts likewise the organizing principle of multi-screen simultaneous projection. In this work (Figure 6.2), 12 monitors are installed directly on the floor in a horizontal suite, transmitting simultaneously and in a loop, variations of one of the most emblematic themes of the history of cinema: workers exiting the factory. The suite begins with one of the three versions of the Lumières’ La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon (1895), the mythic 45-second film generally (yet falsely) considered as the first film of the history of cinema, showing about 100 workers (mostly women) suddenly and massively leaving the two gates of the Lumière photographic factory, crossing the gates, and parting to leave both sides of the frame (Figure 6.3). Starting therefore from the “origins” of cinema, the suite presents different versions of the theme, each monitor showing excerpts from 11 decades of feature, documentary, and promotional films, including: D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The Deserter (1933), Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Roberto Rossellini’s Europa 51 (1951), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone (1961), Lang’s Clash by Night (1951), Andrzej Wajda’s The Iron Man (1977), Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), and—ending the line—Las von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000). The simultaneous projection discloses the spectrality of the Lumières’ film—its haunting re-emergence throughout the history of cinema. It likewise reveals the recurrent split reinstituted in subsequent

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cinema: the divide between the public, collective and anonymous realm of the factory on the one hand and the private individualized realm beyond the factory on the other hand. The gate confirms itself—even in films where it becomes a place of social conflict, social revolt and class struggle—as the border articulating that divide. As observed by Farocki, cinema calls attention to the exit of the factory, not the factory per se (a depreciation of the inside of the factory that Tacita Dean’s Kodak and Nancy Davenport’s Workers (leaving the factory) forcefully counter): it begins and persists as a suspension of labor and an embrace of what is beyond labor (our private lives), while maintaining that divide.3 Absent from this account is the gradual waning of the gate’s function, its materialization of the differentiation between work and non-work, insofar as the installation attends to the varied persistence of time as a measurement of labor, as well as cinema’s reiterated ability to identify workers as a situated community and force. Shown in a loop, visible as a suite of framed monitors, listened to—monitor by monitor—with the help of individual earphones, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades relies on a montaged simultaneity of film projections to allow the spectator to compare the varied filmic explorations of the theme

Figure 6.2   Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, 2006. Twelve-monitor digital video installation, b/w and color, total running time 36 min. Installation view, Raven Row, 2009. Image by Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.

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Figure 6.3   Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, 2006. Twelve-monitor digital video installation, b/w and color, total running time 36 min. Installation view, Raven Row, 2009. Image by Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.

of workers exiting a factory. This reliance on montage is confirmed by Farocki in his interview with Frances Guerin, where he explains his relatively recent experimentation with installation art: “As a filmmaker you always see the work from different perspectives—through the viewfinder, on the editing table, in fragments—and this is how it is seen in the gallery. I always use more than one image, I compare the images, to see what they have in common, it is not a linear image. It’s a form of ‘soft montage,’ taking one image ‘a,’ finding it’s not quite right, and replacing it with ‘b.’”4 Montage is a comparative device. But the actual experience of the installation also means that the spectator can go beyond the montage structuring the horizontal suite. Indeed, sitting in front of one monitor with a pair of headsets transmitting the related soundtrack, the spectator can easily activate—by looking obliquely at other excerpts—what Ohanian’s Peripheral Communities activates for the listener/viewer: the perceptual mixing of a specific soundtrack with unrelated images. This means that the structure of montage inherent to

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the simultaneous presentation of the films can be temporally overturned to create the possibility of new individualized montages. The framing of labor temporality enables a post-Fordist deployment of time outside the frame into new frames.

Time is “Everything”/“Everywhere” If one was to adopt aesthetically, even philosophically, the frameless technology of the digital which enables the seamless blending of images, how would the co-occurrence and relativity of singular temporalities within simultaneity be recognizable, especially in a post-Fordist contemporaneity in which time is everywhere, following life’s absorption of labor time? This absorption is central to Negri’s argument that one of the pivotal features of post-industrial society is the dissolution of the Fordist labor/non-labor distribution of time. In a post-Fordist era, working time and non-working time tend to blend into a temporality that has now become constitutive of life in general, materializing as it were Deleuze’s insight that time is “everything.”5 In Time for Revolution (2003) and Empire (a book co-written with Michael Hardt in 2000), Negri has suggested that capital has been fundamentally restructured during the last quarter of the twentieth century as a response to labor and anti-colonialist struggles: the decentering and the globalization of production are now the means by which the mobility of capital has significantly increased and the power of the nation state to fully regulate it significantly decreased. In this settling of globalization, the factorybased, gesture-skilled worker of the Fordist–Keynesian model has been replaced by social, mobile workers involved in abstract, immaterial, and intellectual tasks—a type of labor which can be responsive, notably, to the computerized factory. This new kind of labor is regulated through multinational lines and the globalizing realities of the world market. Discussing Marx’s comprehension of time as both a measure of labor (time reduces labor to a “homogeneous substance”) and matter (time determines the productive power of labor), Negri posits that it was successful in disclosing an industrial form of capitalism which relied on the multiplication—the quantification—of average temporal units to constitute itself.6 In real subsumption, labor “is reduced to mere quantity”: time as a quantity “is here absorbed by capital.”7 It becomes exchange-value. But, in the context of the emergence of the “social” worker, this understanding of time-as-measure does not stand and the

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limits of the history of materialism start to become manifest. For, as Negri argues, “if social labour covers all the time of life, and invests all of its regions, how can time measure the substantive totality in which it is implicit? […] When the entire time of life has become the time of production, who measures whom?”8 This aporia can be used productively, for “now we know that time cannot be presented as measure, but must rather be presented as the global phenomenological fabric, as base, substance and flow of production in its entirety.”9 Negri writes: To begin with, in Marx, time is given to us as the matter of equivalence and the measure of the equivalent. Bit by bit, however, alongside the abstract development of social mediatization and of the subjectification of abstract labour, time itself becomes substance, to the point that time becomes the fabric of the whole of being, because all of being is implicated in the web of the relations of production: being is equal to product of labour: temporal being. […] At the level at which the institutional development of the capitalist system invests the whole of life, time is not the measure of life, but is life itself. […] When work has become mobility, pure and simple mobility—when, that is, it is time pure and simple—then it is the possibility and actuality of the constitution of the world.10 It is not my objective here to agree with or challenge Negri’s understanding of globalizing post-Fordism as a totalizing process that constructs time as a collective substance which can then be used productively by a multitude of antagonist subjects against capitalism (this interpretation is an utopian belief) but to simply point out how the development of time everywhere in the fabric of life has brought the question of temporal passing—its contemporaneity—to the fore. If, indeed, the Marxian paradigm disclosed both the temporalization of space and the spatialization of time deriving from industrial labor as a measure of time, the contemporary globalization paradigm discloses the tendency of labor and non-labor to dissolve into one another. In such a dissolve, time blends with all aspects of life and loses its effects of compartimentalization of life activities. Even logician Charles Sanders Peirce’s positing that thought always takes place in an interval—in a unit of time made of smaller temporal units—is fragilized by the dissolution of a differentiated, spatialized time.11 If Negri is right, some of the fundamental temporal questions of this era become the following: how does one represent time if time is life, if temporal passing is everywhere and

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thus unframable? And how can the persisting differences between labor and non-labor be represented if time (more specifically, simultaneity) is everywhere and unframable? It is not merely, as Benjamin Buchloh has rightly pointed out, that the representation of labor has become difficult in “post-industrial and post-working class society, where large segments of labor and production are in fact concealed from common view since they are exported to the geo-political ‘margins,’”12 but that the interdependent simultaneity of labor and non-labor is dissolving and that the related interdependent simultaneity of the employed and the non-employed is too complex to establish. If it is to convey the dissolution of labor into life, montage’s main operation of producing difference through the clashing of frames (what Benjamin called the shock of the new through the meeting of heterogeneous images) needs to be rethought. The aesthetic challenge is to represent the flattening out of difference through an aesthetics of erasure of difference. This is the challenge taken up by Canadian, New York-based artist Nancy Davenport in her ongoing photography and multi-channel (computeranimated) video installation series, Workers (leaving the factory) (2004–). To make this point, the following section will attend to the multi-screen/ multichannel DVD installation composing the main body of the Workers’ 2007 China/Norway version.

From the Analog Deployment of Simultaneity to its Digital Rendering Although the spatial display of the China/Norway installation has evolved from one exhibition to the next, the multi-screen layout has mostly taken the form of 16 monitors fixed to the wall, mounted horizontally in a semi-circle, and punctuated in the middle by a large video wall projection entitled Blast Off (Figure 6.4). The multi-screen deployment consists of a DVD loop composed of a series of scanned photographs digitally collaged and animated. The digital animation provides two types of movement to the photographs: it animates the assembled photographs horizontally to create the motion of a slow continual panning of the images towards the left; and it activates microactions to the otherwise motionless sitters, namely by blinking their eyes. As aptly described by art historian George Baker when discussing a previous work (Weekend Campus, 2004) endowed with the same “static moving-image” hybridity, the slow horizontal pan is one by which frozen

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Figure 6.4   Nancy Davenport, Workers (leaving the factory), 2007. Multichannel video installation (China/Norway animation), (blast-off animation), dimensions variable. Installation view at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, 2008, New York. Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York.

subjects “simply pass by in an endless scroll—a rotating frieze […], a revolution that reaches its end only to loop and repeat itself again.”13 The unfolding of this revolution is sustained by two temporalities: “the horizontal movement of the piece mimics the continuity of film but the kinetic effects remain fundamentally at odds with the prevailing stillness. It is a scene of excessive continuity which is also relentless in its congestion—a depiction of society at a standstill.”14 The continuity of the pan is excessive in its unremittingness—the looping sequences move persistently across and beyond the multiple screens, displaying a long line of workers sitting on a suite of padded chairs, in a frontal position, their bodies facing the spectator. In contrast, the peculiar kinetic instants act to temporarily rupture the frieze, to animate the bodies and interpellate the viewer. The series is fundamentally about how to disclose the post-Fordist neoliberal shifting of labor and the related shifting of the worker’s identity in a global economy. Half-documentary, half-fictional, it relates to specific contemporary activities of labor rationalization and restructuring processes. Davenport shot the 2008 sequence at the Jaguar

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car plant in Halewood, Merseyside, after Ford’s sale of Jaguar to the Indian conglomerate Tata Motors—India’s largest automobile company, specializing both in commercial and passenger vehicles, allegedly the world’s fourth largest truck manufacturer and second largest bus manufacturer.15 The 2007 China/Norway sequence was made when Norsk Hydro—a leading Norwegian international aluminum supplier— completed the closing down of the Norwegian Søderberg line in Årdal in June 2007, an operation which was part of a rationalization program that included the shutting down of metal plants in Germany, as well as the Norwegian Søderberg lines in Sunndal (2002), Høyanger (2006), and Karmøy (2009). Also in 2007 Hydro merged its oil and gas activities with Statoil, a step that, according to the company’s press release, enabled a “new Hydro: a global, integrated aluminum company.”16 The reported record net revenue for the second quarter and half year of 2007 was explained as resulting partly from the company’s restructuring and rationalization program, which enabled it “to concentrate on new and promising business opportunities worldwide” and “to begin construction of the Qatalum aluminum plant in Qatar.”17 Part of the shutting down rationale, which lead to the loss of hundreds of jobs, was also to meet the new environmental specifications issued by the Norwegian Pollution Control Authority (STF) which reviewed the emission permits for Norway’s aluminum industry and introduced new emission specifications, which meant that Hydro had to abandon the older production technology—open Søderberg cells—and replace it with prebake built-in cells technology. It is also the case that the 2009 global financial crisis accelerated the closure of the Karmøy plant.18 The China/Norway installation is not a critique of Norsk Hydro per se (it doesn’t document the company in these terms), but a critical attempt to convey the invisible simultaneity that structures these types of multinational rationalizations and globalization processes. For, again, how does one represent post-Fordist time if time is life, if time is everywhere and thus unframable? Moreover, how can contemporaneity’s persisting temporality of simultaneity be disclosed? For, inasmuch as time is life, this does not entail that sub-temporalities are not being constituted, that time has suddenly ceased to be about power. In multinational transactions, categories of being are laid off while others are being recruited; time is increasingly being distributed and divided between those who will have too much time and others who will never have enough time. Davenport’s Workers is a crucial installation which takes up this challenge in inventive ways. In the China/Norway version,

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the looping horizontal pan of photographic images moves slowly yet continuously across the screens, displaying a lengthy line of sitting workers all wearing the same red uniform, connecting the Norwegian workers with their Chinese counterparts in what appears to be a singular community within a singular space-time. The digital collage of images guarantees the seamlessness of the line; it erases temporal passing and temporal divides, as well as analog film’s technical ability to transmit temporal passing and temporal divides (as maintained in Dean’s filmworks). In the central projection, Blast Off (Figure 6.5) the continual line of connected workers, now clothed with blue and red uniforms to distinguish the Norwegian from the Chinese, unfolds from within the photographed factory. The looping sequence leads us gradually outside the factory up to a launching area where an animated rocket will soon start to ascend until we see the Earth in all of its globality, circled by the rotating spaceship. The scene brings together the Lumières’ Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and George Méliès’s Journey to the Moon (1902). What is compelling about the installation is how it uses a seamless digital aesthetics to convey a seamless continuity between workers—a continuity that erases the temporal realities and labor conditions that in fact divide them. Of course, this suspension of the differential effect of montage risks making these divides unperceivable. But it is the unperceivability of post-Fordist unframable time which must paradoxically be disclosed, as well as the sub-temporalities that constitute it. The installation’s inventiveness lies precisely in its capacity to disclose the unperceivability of temporal difference (the sub-temporalities of unframed time).

Figure 6.5   Nancy Davenport, Workers (leaving the factory), 2007. Multi-channel video installation (Blast-Off animation), dimensions variable. Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York.

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To do this, Davenport investigates a variety of strategies which cast doubt on the realism of the images and articulate a continual tension between the stillness of photography and the movement of film. She photographs and films the factories and workers on location, and the workers are always asked to collaborate to the projects. But the installations are never simply documentary insofar as the multi-screen layouts stage the workers posing for the camera (Figure 6.6). Moreover, the photographic images are imperceptibly collaged to create an excessive horizontal space-time continuum—an excessiveness that suggests constructedness. Collage, a montage-based aesthetics, is used but only to produce an appearance of continuity. What is more, the photographed bodies are digitally animated. These bodies are not shown activating the technology related to their own work but activated by image technologies which blink their eyes and create a long horizontal deployment that mimics the assembly line of the industrial factory. The digital animation—both the unremitting (apparently endless) continuity of the line of workers and the sudden eye animation of the motionless bodies—move the still. This type of animation vaguely upsets the realism of the singleness of the represented space-time. More importantly, it temporalizes the images into a double temporality—creating heterogeneity within apparent homogeneity. The digital is thus explored as a pharmakon, as a technology that both erases difference and brings it back in. The digital animation, which combines the stillness of photography and the movement of film, is the aesthetic strategy by which an ambiguous simultaneity is thus progressively made manifest: a simultaneity of sitting or standing workers who appear to share the same space and to belong to a same temporality, but who are in fact split spatio-temporally as much as the image is itself split between stillness and movement. The simultaneity that relates these workers does not partake of a being-together but, on the contrary, of a split. For indeed, the emergence of the Chinese plant is directly linked to the closing of the Norwegian plant insofar as the two plants must appear and disappear at the same time, at different places. Davenport uses the multiscreen structure to articulate a continuity which must be problematized by the disclosure of a divide while also manifesting the seamlessness of that divide. The animation barely shows—the barely is key here as it refers to the difficulty of marking temporal differences in a global economy—that the community of workers is both real (the destinies of the two groups are interdependent) and unreal (the two groups will never work together, in fact the effective labor of one group relies on the ineffectual labor of the other group).

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Figure 6.6   Nancy Davenport, Workers (leaving the factory), 2007. Multi-channel video installation (China/Norway animation), dimensions variable. Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York.

Davenport’s original contribution to the temporality of simultaneity is to show its post-Fordist development by creating a digital tension between the stillness of photography and the movement of film, a status that cannot be conveyed through a montage aesthetics exploited to frame the increasingly unframable time of labor as well as the increasingly unframable place of labor. This is why Blast Off stages the workers inside a factory which is now opened to the outside from where the rocket will be launched into outer space: the Lumière factory gate between the public and the private has dissolved. Davenport has stated that the installation cannot simply rely on Sergei Tretyakov’s aesthetics of systematic photographic sequence and long-term observation if it is to disclose the simultaneity of lost/gained labor. But it does adopt the spirit of his shift from the single-image to the systematic photographic sequence (materialized in photomontage and the photoseries format) which the constructivist writer defended for its capacity to let the spectator “experience the extended massiveness of reality” through long-term observation.19 The slow multiscreen panning of the photographic images should be understood as re-enabling Tretyakov’s long-term observation; it even exacerbates it by the looping device and by the monotony of the horizontal succession of the motionless sitters facing the camera. Yet, it has abandoned the framing/montage structure of constructivist photomontage to favor the continuous/seamless digital unfolding of the line of sitters beyond the frames separating the monitors. This embrace of long-term observation and concomitant discarding of montage aesthetics are confirmed by the semi-circular panorama setting of the installation. As she experiences

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the half-surrounding piece, the spectator moves in the space to follow the horizontal pan continuing beyond the frames—a line of horizon that refuses to secure a stable single vanishing point and the symmetrical single viewpoint. To clarify this point, it is useful here to briefly contrast the half-surround display of Workers with El Lissitzky’s and Meyerhold’s stage design of Tretyakov’s play, I Want a Baby (1928). In the latter design, theater was transformed into an amphitheater, with plans to project films simultaneously along the perimeter of the amphitheater. The amphitheatre setting relied on the constructivist belief in the collective viewer—materialized in Lissitzky’s poster for the Russian Exhibition in Zurich 1929 showing a three-eyed vision spectator.20 Workers manifests, on the contrary, a disbelief in the collective gaze promoted by the soviet avant-garde. The viewpoints simply cannot anchor themselves in relation to any stable frame so as to eventually relate them in their similarities and differences—the installation is predominantly frameless. The still-movement dynamic privileged by Davenport should also be seen as abandoning the slide-projector saccade effects of Allan Sekula’s 1972 b/w slide piece, Untitled Slide Sequence, which shows—as a looped succession of 35 mm transparencies projected at 13-second intervals—a stream of workers at the end of a day shift, leaving the aerospace factory of the California Convair Division of General Dynamics, walking up the stairs, coming towards and past the camera. Davenport knows and admires this specific slide piece in which workers are shown leaving their workplace in a succession of movie frames.21 About this work, Sekula maintains that it “is situated between still photography and cinema. This has always interested me about slide projection: it’s a kind of primitive cinema, unable to synthetize movement. The slide projector is a quasiindustrial apparatus. […]. The rhythm of the slide projector is the rhythm of the automated factory, but the individual frame individuates both the photographer and the subject. The sequence effects a bracketing of the invention of cinema: Muybridge pushed in the direction of social movement […].”22 Art critic and historian Sven Lütticken has insightfully pointed out that the slide sequence presents the workers “almost floating past a somewhat erratic camera,” transforming as such the industrial regime of ‘discrete and maneuverable time’ without denying, however, “its hold on people’s lives.”23 Davenport’s Workers installation further dissolves the “discrete and maneuverable time” to render the post-Fordist dissolution of labor time into life. But she replaces montage aesthetics with a still/movement aesthetics already suggested by Sekula’s slide-projector piece, to problematize the imperceptibility of temporal

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difference. As stated by the artist, “I think the opposition between the still and moving image provides an interesting way to explore certain changing social oppositions—like progress versus the experience of social paralysis. I’m drawn to depicting subjects that emphasize opposed or seemingly contradictory ideas.”24 Davenport’s 2007 Workers (leaving the factory), then, investigates the digital to barely disclose (this is its strength), through a still/movement tension, the ambiguity of simultaneity in twenty-first century globalization. It capitalizes on Tacita Dean’s insight that it is analog film—an image technology based on the montage of photograms—and not digital film which conveys temporal passing and framability. It also capitalizes on Negri’s insight that time-as-labor is now increasingly everywhere (not framable as such). Yet, instead of rejecting the digital as is the case with Dean’s filmic practice (on the premise that the digital image has no time), she explores the digital as a technology best suited to convey invisible (unrepresented and perhaps unrepresentable) contemporary simultaneities, without simply making them visible. Adopting the perspective that time is not the same everywhere for everyone, Davenport’s installation offers a more nuanced portrait of Negri’s assessment of the “anywhere” and “everywhere” of time: it shows time, more precisely simultaneity, to be about power—the power to distribute productive time to some and unproductive time to others, even if this distribution cannot be reduced to a simple exercise of power over individuals. But, conscious of the post-Fordist unframability of labor time, it explores a new digital temporality that combines animation and stillness, interruption and seamlessness. Davenport designates this tension as the congested temporality of digital stills: “There are important shifts in going from the analog to digital. I’m interested in the congested temporality of digital photographs. Anyone can read them as digital collage and yet there are no seams, there’s no rupture. What happens with this new esthetic of smoothness and erasure? […] What kind of temporality does a digital photograph have?”25 I have argued here that simultaneity is the very historicity that gains in ambiguity in post-Fordist societies, and that its activation cannot simply be set into play by the frame-based aesthetics of montage. “Simultaneity I” (Chapter 5) is a tenseless simultaneity which relies on the aesthetics of montage to equalize past, present, and future; “simultaneity II” (Chapter 6) is an unframable simultaneity whose barely exposable reality relies on the seamless flow of digital image technology to become manifest. Davenport’s elaboration of a digitally based aesthetics of

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animated seamlessness is pivotal in this regard insofar as it performs the unframable. The tension it articulates between stillness and movement presentifies historicity in a special way: by animating the still, it focuses on the present-ness of a barely differentiated simultaneity so that the future of “labor time as life” may be shown as already shaping the present. If the spreading of time into life is to expand, it is the very existence of any form of historicity which is threatened to disappear insofar as the unfolding of time everywhere as “everything” is bound to dissolve the distinctiveness of the three temporal categories of the past, present, and future. Meanwhile, Workers (leaving the factory) contests Dean’s belief that the digital cannot convey the temporalities of contemporary life but it goes with the spectrality of Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4 33 . It provides a new home for a modified temporal passing—a temporal passing that has lost, in the area of labor at least, its capacity to be framed.

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Chapter 7

The Historical Sublime or, Longue Durée Revisited

Almost all of the works, especially the ones that look at specific historical events, address moments when history could have gone one way or another. We live in the residue of such moments, and for better or worse their potential is not yet spent. Stan Douglas, “Diana Thater in conversation with Stan Douglas” (1998)1 In The Content of the Form (1987), historian Hayden White establishes the narrative as an indispensable component of historical experience and method; he does so in the following terms: “A true narrative account […] is less a product of the historian’s poetic talents, as the narrative account of imaginary events is conceived to be, than it is a necessary result of a proper application of historical ‘method’.”2 He usefully explains that the legitimacy of narrative accounts in historiography (the value “of imagination in the production of a specifically human truth”) lies particularly in the recognition that the realities studied by the historian are realities of the human past which are never directly perceivable by the historian; imagination is therefore required if the historian is to represent that unperceivable past: “[h]ow else can any past, which by definition comprises events, processes, structures, and so forth, considered to be no longer perceivable, be represented in either consciousness or discourse except in an ‘imaginary’ way?”3 If indeed history is transmitted to us through historical narratives and if, contrarily to the Annaliste condemnation of the narrative judged to be too dramatic and theatrical, they must be accepted as constitutive of historical discourse, one of the main contemporary historiographic questions becomes: what type of regime of historicity do historical narratives uphold? Paul Ricoeur’s own study of the historical narrative

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proposes that, by virtue of its narrative structure, the historical plot is much more than a method of explanation, comprehension, and representation, in that it has as its “ultimate referent” temporality itself.4 Although this observation sets out time to be anterior to narrativity (ascertaining a priority principle fundamentally questioned in the temporal turn), it highlights the inseparability of time and narrativity, proposing that the narrative is one of the vital means by which humans provide meaning to the times of their lives. It thus emphasizes the impossibility of untying history and historicity. The historical narrative necessarily partakes of specific forms of articulation of the past, present, and future. As has been maintained throughout this book, in its modern articulation, historicity promotes a progress-oriented historical narrative that the temporal turn in contemporary art has not hesitated to put in contention. The work of Canadian born, Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas is one of the pivotal materializations of this reconsideration. As most of the literature has converged to make manifest, Douglas’s video and filmic production is sustained by a unique investigation of the historical narrative. It declares its necessity and persistence while performing its crisis and near-exhaustion. The narrative only forms on the screen by being deformed, through a complex exploration of multiple viewpoints that overlap but never meet in any significant, durable way, as well by a complex exploration of looping structures, fictional insertions, repetitions, and permutation devices, and techniques of randomness. These narrative operations have been insightfully regrouped by cultural theorist Mieke Bal under the prefix “re-” to indicate how they partake of a return: repetition, remake, research, repression, reciprocation, resurrection, reconfiguration, the concern with and activation of the revenant and the residue.5 As Bal suggests, this return movement also corresponds to a forward movement by which the artist articulates a political art of “possibility.”6 In this chapter, I want to push Bal’s insight to clarify the role of the historical narrative in this movement—a movement which is shared by all the artistic practices examined in this book. The return/ forward movement of Douglas’s historical narratives revolves around modernity: the narratives return to its different modernisms; its diverse utopias of emancipation; its colonial thrust; its regime of historicity (a regime that relies on the forgetting or exclusion of subjects and events that do not fit its progress-oriented articulation of the past, present, and future). The main claim of this final chapter is that Douglas’s production returns to modernity as a condition, a discursive rhetoric,7 a historical period and a historicity (return movement). Yet it returns

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to it not as a condition of the past but as a reality that persists unsolved in the present. Insofar as it remains unresolved (this is one of its main traits) it is experienced by the spectator as still active in contemporaneity. The video and film installations steadily perform the irresolution of the historical narratives by which modern history is known to us. In so doing, this chapter argues, they dismiss any presumption that modernity is behind us; they make the past endure into the present to eventually raise the question (leaving the spectator with that very question) of what is to be done with this modern legacy for the future (forward movement)? Similarly to Melik Ohanian’s September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007 video/film work which perceptually inserted the spectator in the unresolved mnemonic gap between Chile’s present and past so as to invite her to initiate a historical narrative that would never lose sight of the mnemonic gap, Douglas’s installations bring to the fore the necessity of a renewed historical narrative. There is no history without historical narratives, but not all historical narratives will do. The underlying challenge of this aesthetics is to elaborate historical narratives that make room for multiple and mostly conflicting narrative perspectives, multi-layered and fragmented plots, random permutations, fictional inclusions, and unresolved stories. This elaboration is not set into play to promote a relativistic or cynical view of historical discourse but to presentify the modern regime of historicity that sustains it. Our question will be: how does this presentifying occur? My main hypothesis is that its occurrence primarily comes from the installations’ lateralization of the Braudelian construction of longue durée (a notion that will be explained further down, which basically refers to the historiographical construction of immobile stretches of time to identify changes that require hundreds of years to unfold), as well as from the installations’ renewal of the sublime tradition. This alternative regime of historicity is conditioned by a temporal passing experienced as interminable—setting up temporal passing as an endless “becoming present of past events and then their becoming future.” This concluding hypothesis allows us to go back to some of the works examined in this book and to draw general conclusions about the aesthetic contribution of the temporal turn to the contemporary concern over historical time. To anchor and clarify this hypothesis, it is useful to stop for a moment and examine Douglas’s first filmic installation to have explored the looping structure in the constitution of the historical narrative: Overture (1986). This examination shows how the loop is much more than a technical device: it in fact grounds the presentifying of modern

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historicity which will come to sustain Douglas’s artistic practice, as well as most of the performance, film- and video-based artistic practices of the temporal turn. A 16 mm single-screen installation, Overture (Figures 1.1 and 7.1) projects in a loop a grainy sequence made of archival footage of a train journey in the Rocky Mountains shot by the Edison Film Company at the turn of the twentieth century (1899–1901). The 7-minute loop consists of a montage alignment of three different (yet similar) film segments of the railway trip. Filmed from the head of a train in movement—by a camera that continuously enters into the landscape—the mountainscape is shown from the standpoint of the locomotive as it circulates around the slopes and, at the end of each segment, goes through the obscurity of a tunnel, to make the filmed journey appear as a seamless flow. The soundtrack consists of a voiceover reciting six different segments from the opening pages of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past 8 as though they constituted an unbroken continuity: I would fall asleep again and, thereafter, would reawaken for short snatches only: just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to stare at the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness; to savour, in a momentary glimmer of consciousness, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole of which I formed but an insignificant part and whose insensibility I should very soon return to share. [/] When I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and blow out the light. My body, too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay. [/] At the same time, my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness. Pleasant and restful enough for my eyes, but even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without cause. I would strike a match to look at my watch—nearly midnight—certainly I was now well awake, but my brain, lingering in cognition over when things had happened and what they had looked like, showed me in perspective the deserted

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countryside through which a traveller is hurrying toward a nearby station. [/] Nearly midnight. The hour when an invalid who has been obliged to set out on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakened by a sudden spasm, sees with glad relief a streak of daylight showing under his door. Thank God it is morning! He can ring, and someone will come to look after him. The thought of being assuaged gives him strength to endure his pain. He is certain he heard footsteps: they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; someone has just turned down the gas. [/] When I awoke in the middle of the night, I could not even be sure at first who I was; for it always happened when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years. These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted more than a few seconds; it often happened that in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. [/] I had lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep. This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke; it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented me from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. I lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils flaring, my heart beating; finally, the ignorance of a waking moment had, in a flash, if not presented me with a distinct picture, at least persuaded me of the possible presence of a room in the uncertain light. The narration unfolds as the images are deployed but not in complete synchronicity with these images. A temporal split sustains the relation between image and sound, insofar as the 7-minute reciting of the Proustian text corresponds to two complete transmissions of the threefold visual sequence. Two parallel yet different durations unfold simultaneously to produce what curator Katrin Mundt has aptly called the “double time” of the installation: this double time structure becomes manifest when the convergence between the visual and the aural breaks midway. It breaks in a specific way: the soundtrack continues as the visual sequence ends and starts again; the break re-mends when the loop is

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Figure 7.1   Stan Douglas, Overture, 1986. 16 mm film installation, b/w, mono optical soundtrack, approximately 7 min (each loop). Installation view, Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

re-launched.9 The temporality of the image/sound bifurcation is echoed in the many corresponding splits occurring in the work: the divide between the visible and the invisible, light and obscurity, the mountains and the tunnel, the exterior and the interior landscapes, consciousness and unconsciousness. These splits are activated as much at the level of the images (the train moves forward in full daylight in the Rockies but regularly passes through the tunnel to expose the spectator to blinding darkness) than at the level of the Proustian extract that describes a psychic state between sleep and dream (whose ambiguity is amplified by the erasure of the sound of the voice at each crossing of the tunnel). Overture elaborates a narrative whose complex temporality relies on its interlacing of at least five temporal parameters. First, the nonlinearity of the narrative. By nonlinearity (a constant in Douglas’s production), I refer to the fact that the installation is devoid of a beginning, a middle,

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and an end. The projection of the film is controlled by a looping device (as most of the video and film installations studied in this book): it is made to go on and on, without interruption. It is also presented in a non-cinematic space: the projection is thus perceived by a spectator who can enter the space and leave at any moment; this spectator is endowed with a mobility that makes her relatively autonomous in relation to the duration of the projection. Moreover, the plot of the narrative is minimal and short, relatively easy to pick up at any time. Second, the repetitive structure of the installation. This structure is not solely controlled by the looped projection of the film but is sustained by Douglas’s montage practice by which the visual footage of the train journey is made to appear twice within the 7-minute timeframe of the sequence. Third, the double time of the installation. This doubleness occurs because of the lack of synchronicity or, to be more precise, the lack of full isomorphism between the duration of the oral narrative and the duration of the visual narrative. This gap constitutes itself at each repetition of the visual loop inside a 7-minute segment of two repetitions, the soundtrack only repeating itself after two completed transmissions of the visual narrative. The visual must be doubled to follow the aural: it is both too short and too fast; it needs to be repeated to meet the slower pace of the aural. Fourth, the temporal split between consciousness and the unconscious. This split supports the modern (psychoanalytical) understanding of the human subject as a split subject, divided between acts and thoughts— a subject who is not fully present to him- or herself. Fifth and finally, modernity understood as a historical period but also as a regime of historicity grounded in the progress-oriented articulation of the past, present, and future. The looped projection unveils this modern temporalization: the past is repetitively put at a distance as it is been replaced by a present that will soon be erased by a new present. But the looped projection not only performs that temporalization, it also exhausts it by repeating the advent of the new—showing the production of the new to be not so innovative after all. All of these temporal parameters converge to disclose modernity’s “progressive” alignment of past, present, and future in relation to one another. The looping device is specifically explored to do just that but also to deploy a historical narrative that exhausts modern historicity by repeating it endlessly. Overture returns to some of the most emblematic inventive moments of modernity: the beginning of film; the Proustian novel; the train as the technology par excellence of accelerated travelling, domesticated nature, and national identities. The

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double time that sustains the installation is inherent to this unfolding of modernity, especially the split between the past and the future— modernity’s distancing between what Reinhart Koselleck has designated as the field of experience (the present past, “whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered” in the present) and the horizon of expectation (the future made present, which “directs itself to the not-yet, to the nonexperienced, to that which is to be revealed”).10 Modernity, as we have seen, engenders with it a new conception of history: one of qualitative separation with tradition; a transcendence over and a negation of tradition. In the modern regime of historicity, the future replaces the past, orienting history towards an indeterminate albeit allegedly better future—a temporalization inseparable from the accelerating pace of the modern world shaped by developments in communications and rates of production, by which “self-accelerating temporality […] escapes into a future” while placing heavier and heavier demands one that future.11 This rule is a rule of breach, interruption, and spacing, not so much an occurrence of history in time than, as Koselleck observes, an occurrence of history through time. The discrepancy is established by Overture: not only does the installation expose us to a past systematically absorbed by a new present, it also deploys vision as too fast in relation to voice, as the latter persists beyond the visual sequence of the train journey. Overture’s world is an accelerated world resisted by oral narration but confirmed by visual narration, disclosing the visual/aural split that Ohanian’s September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007 will invite the spectator to experience from within her perceptual system. The eye which sees in Overture is, after all, the Vertovian camera eye mobilized by a train. The continual movement forward of the train in nature; its incessant movement towards the future; its capacity to show us something new at each microsecond of its progress: these modalities are the progressive principles of a modern world whose temporal passing is accelerated by the development of communication and speed of production, a world where the quantity of time necessary to experience the present “as present” has substantially diminished. This is to say, in short, that Overture returns to the modern regime of historicity: it reactivates its progress-oriented and split articulation of the past, present, and future (return movement). But it does so to loop it and to confirm the interminability of the repeated historical narrative (forward movement). It is the temporality of the loop (its repetitiveness and interminability) which is productive here insofar as it establishes a

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movement forward via a return, what Bal designates as a possibility for the future. Instigating Douglas’s experimentation with the loop, Overture introduces a temporalization that will become crucial to his subsequent reinvention of the historical narrative. It allows us to announce what is to come and what the chapter will be insisting on. The looped projection (the continual recurrence of the sequence) reenacts the Nietzchean question of eternal recurrence—the eternal play of repetition that might structure the universe. It repeats and reactivates the historical narrative indefinitely: it puts off the resolution of the narrative but, in so doing, prevents the closing of the modern past as “past.” The following sections will show that this operation fundamentally reinvents Braudel’s historiographical practice of the long timespan (also called slow time but which could as easily be called long duration). It reinvents it by lateralizing longue durée so that the work may return and return to a unique event—stretching its duration to disclose the infinite (and thus inexhaustible) historical narratives susceptible to represent it. The recombinant narratives initiated by Douglas at the end of the 1990s, notably Klatsassin (2006) on which the chapter will be focusing, are even more consequential in this regard. They launch the temporal parameters (nonlinearity, repetition, double time, the split between consciousness and the unconscious, and the modern distancing of the past in relation to the future) in relation to an overall structure that not only lasts in time but keeps metamorphosing. The looping/permutation logic behind the recombinant narrative propels interminability to a sublime unfolding of historicity which we will need to define. Perhaps more fundamentally, it will allow Douglas to (1) offset the totalizing impulse of the modern historical narrative, what philosopher Peter Osborne has designated as modernity’s impulse to “abstract from the concrete multiplicity of differential times co-existing in the global ‘now’ a single differential (however internally complex) through which to mark the time of the present”12; and (2) affirm the interminability of the historical narrative as a modality by which the “forgotten” and the “excluded” (the allegedly non-historical subject of colonial history) can be recognized as historical. Insofar as most of the artistic practices examined in this book explore the loop as a constitutive component of installational and performative art, Douglas’s work reveals how much the temporal turn presentifies historicity by extending temporality in one way or another, releasing the uncontrollable interminability of temporality, inventing interminability as it were, to modify modern historicity. The suspension of the principle of forwardness is a releasing of interminability.

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The Recombinant Narratives: Klatsassin Douglas’s recombinant video or 16 mm installations—let us mention here Win, Place or Show (1998), Journey into Fear (2001), Suspiria (2003), Inconsolable Memories (2005) and Klatsassin (2006)—have the specificity of deploying interminable narratives without resolution. In these narratives, “time […] falls out of joint with and as a system.”13 The historical narratives performed in these installations are structured by the use of computer-generated algorithms (a computer-generated randomization program) that sequence and recombine scenes with every loop until the exhaustion of all of the possible combinations of the program. Fragments of footage are preordained to occupy changing positions in inter-cut sequences: scenes are thus destined to be repeated to combine with other sequences. The different narrative combinations will only be repeated after hours, days, or years of viewing. The loop, as art historian Iris Dressler maintains, is not a generative mechanism of transition towards the next repetition but a device that creates a crucial point of inflexion by which something arrives “without arriving.”14 Here, “repetition is thus ultimately saturated—almost haunted—with ramifications and permutations, becoming an endless performative act of the different inside the identical, of the simultaneous in the nonsimultaneous.”15 It undermines the coherence of the narrative in a substantial way by multiplying narrative variations that succeed without hierarchy and by inscribing the narratives in a finality without resolution. The total running times of the recombinant installations are indeed longues durées: 1½ hours (Inconsolable Memories: 15 variations, each 5: 39 min long); between 67 and 73 hours (Klatsassin: 840 variations, each of 5 min long); 157 hours (Journey into Fear: 625 soundtrack variations, each about 15 min long); 20,000 hours (Win, Place or Show: 204,023 variations of an approximate duration of 6 min each); Infinity (Suspiria). About Klatsassin (2006) (Figure 7.2) Douglas stipulates that “it takes days for all the permutations to play out. And that makes it virtually impossible for two different viewers to see the same thing the same way—much like the characters in Rashomon.”16 It would take about 6 days to see the piece in all of its variations; and it is the case that our viewing is highly determined by the moment we walk in and out of the exhibition space. The single-screen installation allows for 840 variations, each with an average duration of approximately 5 minutes. This high definition color video projection is a “dub western” (designated as such by Douglas17) made from specific historical facts, namely: the gold

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Figure 7.2   Stan Douglas, Klatsassin, 2006. High definition single-screen video installation, color, sound, 840 variations, total running time 67 hrs. Video still. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

rush that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century in the region of the Cariboo mountains in British Columbia, the most western province of the Canadian territory and the Tsilhqot’in insurgency that was held in response to this feverish migration of workers and investors. The gold rush has been an important one: it attracted thousands of American and European miners, bringing about a substantial development of the road networks to allow prospectors and miners to access the goldfields. One of these roads was to eventually cross the Tsilhqot’in territory located on the Chilcotin Plateau. In 1862, miners coming from San Francisco disembarked from the Brother Jonathan steamship, transporting with them the smallpox virus, initiating a major epidemic that was particularly devastating to the Indian population which had no immunity to the virus. In 1864, Klatsassin (which means “we don’t know your name”), a Tsilhqot’in chief, fought against the men engaged in the construction of the road crossing the Tsilhqot’in national territory (14 men were killed in a day) with the objective of blocking the passage of Americans and Europeans. He was eventually trialed for murder and hanged, accused of having massacred a group of white men. Other prisoners were released, but one Tsilhqot’in suspect was to be transferred to New Westminster for identification. The suspect managed to escape. He was never found. He comes back in Douglas’s Klatsassin, as a corpus delicti.18 This is the point of departure of the installation. The work does not stage the Tsilhqot’in

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insurgency but unfolds six major temporal axes corresponding to different moments revolving around the murder of the deputy sheriff, killed in 1864, as he was transporting the Tsilhqot’in prisoner. These six temporal axes are never clearly delineated and my summary of them can only be approximate: (1) 5 years before (a prospector arrives at the roadhouse; the English innkeeper and a German miner recount the story of the murder); (2) the evening preceding the murder (the suspects and the victim—the innkeeper, the miner, the Tsilhqot’in prisoner, the deputy sheriff, and an alcoholic thief—meet in the roadhouse); (3) the day of the murder; (4) the day following the murder (the trial hears the witnesses; the thief, the miner, and the prisoner offer contradictory testimonies of “what has happened”; a passage from the deputy’s diary proposes another perspective on the events at the roadhouse) (Figure 7.3); (5) various scenes are shown, representing the lives of the three witnesses preceding the murder as narrated by the witnesses during their testimonies (we see the thief engaged in a robbery, for instance; and we learn that the Scottish constable had announced that the prisoner has escaped on his way to New Westminster); and three flashbacks recount various permutations of the murder from various narrative perspectives following the murder; and (6) 5 years later, in 1869 (the prospector and his new partner walk in various landscapes on their way to the Bakerville goldfields; they turn in circles and argue about which direction to take;

Figure 7.3   Stan Douglas, Klatsassin, 2006. High definition single-screen video installation, color, sound, 840 variations, total running time 67 hrs. Video still. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

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the prospector tells the story of the murder of the deputy sheriff which occurred in the area several years ago).19 The endless combinatory possibilities for mixing and interlacing sequences of scenes; the constant permutations of the variations every 5 minutes; the continual changes of perspectives; the reiterated use of flashback; the absence of any common language between the protagonists (no one speaks the same language); the numerous translation errors (the interrogation of the prisoner, for example, leads to fundamental inaccuracies of translation between English, French, and Tsilhqot’in, leading to a false confession of guilt on the part of the prisoner); the multiplication of contradictory testimonies; the difficulty, for the spectator, to clearly differentiate the end of a scene and the beginning of a new combination; the random nonlinear deployment of the five temporal axes of the narrative: all of these narrative features converge to make it impossible for the spectator to know what really happened. They are the aesthetic obstacles by which, to use Ricoeur’s terminology, history ceases to pass.

The Collapse of Testimony as the Cornerstone of the Historical Narrative One of the most pivotal features of Klatsassin’s narrative combinations—certainly the most destabilizing one—is its accumulation of contradictory, false and wrongly translated testimonies submitted to random permutations. These testimonies are impossible to unify. The permutational mise en scène of this accumulation takes its main source of inspiration from Rashômon (1950), a Japanese crime mystery film directed by Akira Kurosawa, especially the film’s representation of contradictory testimonies by four witnesses reporting different versions of the story of the supposed murder (it might be a suicide) of a samurai. This source is fully claimed by Douglas. The similarities between Rashômon and Klatsassin are significant (as well as their differences, as we will soon see). In Kurosawa’s film, the narrative unfolds through a series of flashbacks which appear on screen when the four witnesses recount the double event of the murder of the samurai and the rape of his wife. Each witness is called to testify in front of a judge that the spectator will never see and never hear. The witnesses testify facing the camera, thus positioning the spectator as a judge. As the testimonies pile up in their non-convergence and lose credibility with the uttering of each

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new testimony, the spectator faces the impossibility of distinguishing the false from the true. Klatsassin positions its witnesses in the same way, facing the camera, sitting in front of an invisible judge (is the judge even there?) in relation to whom the spectator acts as a substitute. The installation borrows another significant aspect from Rashômon: its use of flashback—a use which was particularly noticed by western critics at the time of the film’s release in 1950. Rashômon is itself structured as a flashback of flashback, a return on an event, insofar as the testimonies are recalled by two witnesses (a woodcutter and a Buddhist priest) to a commoner, all reunited at the doors of the City of Rashômon. The flashback partakes of a nonlinear narrativity that Klatsassin does not hesitate to exploit and to complicate by the use of the flashforward. Douglas’s return to Kurosawa’s film is not merely an occasion to borrow a cinematic narrative formula. On the contrary, it inscribes the installation in the history of cinema, affirming Klatsassin as a work of philosophical, political, and historiographical reflection. Rashômon is a filmic inquiry on the philosophy of justice. It deals with the relativity of truth, the human propensity to lie, and the unreliability of memory. The notion of the Rashomon effect takes its name directly from Kurosawa’s film: the term is used to designate the subjectivity of perception at the moment of recall and its main consequence: different observers may produce substantially different though equally plausible accounts of a same event. In Kurosawa’s film, the priest listens attentively to the story of the trial narrated by the woodcutter. Confronted to the accumulation of contradictory testimonies, he sees a drifting world, constituted of a human collectivity in loss of intersubjectivity, a hellish world made of beings having lost trust in each other. The film nevertheless ends— which is definitively not the case in Klatsassin—with a scene in which the woodcutter decides to adopt a baby who has just been abandoned at the doors of the city; rain stops; the clouds dissipate to let the sunrays pass, and the woodcutter’s gesture of compassion gives to the priest a renewed faith in humanity. In contrast to Rashômon, Klatsassin is a reflection on the philosophy of justice deprived of existential angst and of any form of spiritual enlightenment. The recombinant repetition controlled by the digital technology reveals, objectively and with detachment, the impossibility to distill truth from the images, the narratives, the testimonies. The interminable multiplication of the permutations and of the narrative variations exacerbates this impasse. Who saw what? Can we ever be sure of what we see, of what we remember? Who is lying? Who knows if one is lying? Are lies an integral part of narratives? Who is telling the truth?

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How does one evaluate the credibility of a witness? And how are we (the spectators) to judge despite our positioning in front of the screen, insofar as we are like them in many ways, never experiencing the installation in a same way, never being in the position to recount it as though it was the same work. Klatsassin exemplifies the reality that historians must face: “the real-world events do not present themselves as neatly encapsulated stories.”20 Ricoeur is certainly one of the pivotal contemporary historians to have reflected upon the question of testimony and its crucial role in the constitution of the historical narrative. His last book, Memory, History, Forgetting (2000), establishes testimony as the point of departure of the historical narrative: “everything starts, not from the archives, but from testimony”; testimony asserts of the factual reality of the event.21 As already suggested in Chapter 2, the witness’s testimony provides for Ricoeur “the description of the experienced scene in a narration that […] confines itself to conveying information;”22 it “gives a narrative follow-up to declarative memory.”23 When narrated, testimony binds together “the reality of the past thing and the presence of the narrator at the place of its occurrence.”24 It takes place in a dialogical exchange with someone else (a judge, a historian, a reader, a spectator, other protagonists of the event), a dialog in which the witness, as victim, observer, or actor, attests that the scene to which she has assisted has occurred. This means that the witness wants to be believed, anticipating as it were the evaluation of the deposition. The witness’s declaration takes the form of a triad: “‘I was there’, he says, ‘believe me,’ to which he adds, ‘If you don’t believe me, ask someone else,’ said almost like a challenge.”25 With these declarations, the witness anticipates and implicitly accepts that the trustworthiness of her testimony will be questioned; that her testimony will be confronted with other testimonies from different witnesses. From then on, when the testimony is gathered and recorded, transformed into a written archive, the complex question of the trustworthiness of the testimony continues. “[t]estimony,” writes Ricoeur, “does not run its course with the constitution of archives; it reappears at the end of the epistemological inquiry at the level of the representation of the past through narrative, rhetorical devices, and images. Moreover, in some contemporary forms of deposition […], it resists not only explication and representation, but even its being placed into some archival reserve, to the point of maintaining itself at the margins of historiography and of throwing doubt on its intention to be truthful.”26 Although the problem of the trustworthiness of the

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witness’s testimony is unavoidable, testimony is indispensable to the establishment of credibility of the historical representation of the past; it proves that something did happen. To resolve the problem of credibility—this dilemma is at the core of Klatsassin—Ricoeur observes that the principal, “at times our only, recourse,” is to proceed to the confrontation of testimonies and evaluate the gaps between testimonies in relation to the event to which the witnesses and the historian refer.27 Klatsassin is utterly historiographical in this specific way: in contrast to the “unproductive” stream and its privileging of weak witnessing, it does not hesitate to confront testimonies. But the installation leaves us with the gaps between them. If, for Ricoeur, “[t]he trustworthy witness is the one who can stay steadfast about this testimony over time,”28 this maintaining is made impossible in Klatsassin (Figure 7.4) not only because of the contradictory testimonies it incessantly accumulates but because of the very nature of the “live algorithm” that enables the random 840 permutations of the narrative combinations. No stability allows us to measure or verify the veracity of what is said, of what has actually happened. The long timespan and irresolution of the re-combinations of the narratives, a duration that inscribes the spectator in an unending temporal passing, exacerbates the testimonial process. The coherence of the historical narrative—“the synthesis of the heterogeneous”; the very coordination of disparate events and the very condition

Figure 7.4   Stan Douglas, Klatsassin, 2006. High definition single-screen video installation, color, sound, 840 variations, total running time 67 hrs. Video still. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

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of the legibility of the multiple—is entirely dissolved.29 The same assessment applies to all the historiographical operations constitutive of the historical narrative, namely the explication/comprehension and representation of the past. Klatsassin liberates the historical narrative from the burden of interpretation which is otherwise the bedrock of the activities of comprehension, explication and representation. The spectator is left to herself, as in front of any minimalist sculpture (let us follow Michael Fried’s assessment of minimalism here).

The Narrative (Without an End), Regardless Although the long timespan (the interminability and irresolution) of the recombinant narratives (about 3 days, 840 permutations) shatters the role of testimony as a cornerstone of the historiographical practice, it nevertheless confirms—unexpectedly—that something has happened. Indeed, the recurrence of the testimonies in time (in contrast to Ricoeur’s call for the consistency of a unique testimony in time so as to confirm its reliability) transforms the event into a fact. The murder and the conflicting relations between the whites and the Indian (the Indian incongruously being the only suspect of the crime amidst a crowd of white settlers and gold diggers) are the only stable referents of Klatsassin. The simple reality of the multiplicity of the witnesses recounting the murder establish the installation as a unique site of reenactment of the Barthesian indexical referent of the photographic image as “that-has-been,” as what “has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred.”30 The spectator will never be in a position to understand how and why this event has occurred, but the reference to murder and conflict is effective. Testimony is therefore not simply rejected; it matters a great deal in its differentiated accumulation. The historiographical operations do not simply vanish either. They change register. This aspect is crucial insofar as the installation invites the spectator not to interpret, understand, explain, or represent the event once and for all, but to go with irresolution—to take up as it were Marc Bloch’s suggestion that the historical narrative is not simply a representation of the past but a representation of humans in time.31 In so doing, however, Douglas’s recombinant narrative puts an end to Ricoeur’s fundamental metaphysical belief that narrativity is the process by which “time becomes human time”; lived time historical time and historical time deep temporality.32 Because of the endlessness, irresolution, and randomness of the historical narrative,

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Klatsassin cannot resolve the aporia between phenomenological temporality (the time of the soul) and objective cosmological time (the time of the world). For Ricoeur, this aporia is resolved by a triadic mimetic trajectory of inscription of lived time in cosmic time, which begins and ends with the narrator, the auditor, the reader, or the spectator: from the pre-figuration (mimesis I) of what in action “is already” a historical figure; to the mise en intrigue (mimesis II) as an operation of configuration and mediation “between events or individual incidents and a history taken as a whole”; to the narrative as a re-figuration (mimesis III) “restituted to the time of acting and suffering” that inscribes the intersection of the world configured at the level of mimesis II and the world of the reader.33 To say that Klatsassin cannot resolve this aporia is to say that it fissures the mimetic trajectory by unfolding a recombinant random trajectory. However, as has already been suggested in our discussion of interminability and as will be more explicitly shown in the next section, the installation keeps (albeit renews) Ricoeur’s commitment to deep temporality. Its production of interminability is a response to what the “unproductive” stream discussed in Chapter 2 strives to counter: the progress-informed historical narrative that erases temporality when it fails to deliver any definitive project. It partakes of Francis Alÿs’s production of a vanishing point that the viewpoint can never reach (an excessive extension of the visual ray of linear perspective made especially manifest in A Story of Deception). To bring back the question of this chapter: how do Douglas’s historical narratives presentify the modern regime of historicity? The answer is that they change the register of the productivity of the historical narrative (that is, the productivity of the historical narrative does not come from the coherence of the testimonies, our aptitude to interpret them, and our competence to represent the past as it was). As spectators, we are not asked to elaborate the convergence of the testimonies; to register the coherence of the historical narrative, its singular directionality, its sense of closure; or to interpret and understand the historical event to which the narrative refers. We are asked to go with irresolution. In other words, we are invited to affectively and perceptually experience a past that does not exist as a resolved past and that, as such, persists in the present, waiting for resolution (a resolution which might never come). The narrative messiness of the recombinant installation is the persisting messiness of the persistence of colonial structures, a messiness already set into play in Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin B.C.’s (1993) reference to the harassment of Japanese immigrants in Canada during World War

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II and in Nu•tka• (1996)’s quadraphonic soundtrack in which voices of two eighteenth-century colonialists vacillate over territorial claims against slow dissolving pans over the coastline of Nootka Island, the homeland of First Nations inhabitants strangely invisible in the images.

Interminability Let us try to be more specific about the productivity of Klatsassin’s historical narrative. It has been the main argument of this chapter that this productivity relies principally on the interminability of the installation. The installation can be said to lateralize Braudelian longue durée. For the Annaliste historian Braudel, the implementation of the long timespan became the historiographical temporality par excellence insofar as it was conceptualized to counter traditional history’s “concern for the short time span, for the individual and the event,” which “has long accustomed us to the headlong, dramatic, breathless rush of its narrative.”34 He writes: “the short time span is the most capricious and the most delusive of all”; in contrast, “it is in relation to [the] expanses of slow-moving history that the whole of history is to be rethought, as if on the basis of an infrastructure. All the stages, all the thousands of stages, all the thousand explosions of historical time can be understood on the basis of these depths, this semistillness. Everything gravitates around it.”35 Opposed to the short timespan of the event, longue durée is a construction of time that embraces large periods of time and geographical amplitudes to reveal the permanencies of a civilization.36 It’s a slowed down, quasi-immobile temporality, “which sometimes almost borders on the motionless,”37 […] sheltered from all accidents, crises, and sudden breaks.”38 Douglas’s recombinant historical narrative is not without lateralizing the Braudelian long timespan in ways that recall the unproductive/ecologizing stream’s lateralization of linear perspective. As performed in Guido van der Werve’s Nummer acht, for example, the lateralization of the perspectival system corresponds to a turning sideways of the network of visual/optical rays, whereby the central optical ray (together with the other visual rays) ceases to unfold from background to foreground to unfold instead in parallel to the representational screen, propelling and splitting the viewpoint to the left and to the right of the vanishing point enacted by the performer. Similarly, Klatsassin (Figure 7.5) removes longue durée from its deep immobilized, quasi-eventless, unfolding (which usually spreads over

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a lengthy historical period) to make it unfold as a frieze structure— as though the installation was a multi-screen projection laid out in space similarly to Ohanian’s Seven Minutes Before and Harun Farocki’s Deep Play or Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades or, again, an assembly of modules from Tatiana Trouvé’s Bureau of Implicit Activities— made of 5-minute narrative stretches that keep expanding sideways (being cut, looped, and recombined) up to 840 variations. The linear forwardness of the narrative is repeatedly blocked but only to unfold vertically in time as other narratives are being added. It goes with the lengthiness of longue durée to historicize short time (the micro-event of a murder, contextualized however within the Tsilhqot’in insurgency) and to display what Braudelian historicity seek to discard: agents, actors, human subjects. The historical narratives, structured as they are by computer-generated algorithms, might not convey much agency to the protagonists of Klatsassin but their testimonies shape the unfolding of the historical narrative. As it lateralizes, longue durée becomes less and less framable as in Nancy Davenport’s Workers (leaving the factory) which displays the increasingly unframable time of labor. It becomes less and less containable. Lacking in resolution, the past is meant to extend into the present. In so doing, it responds to Hayden White’s call for the presentifying of the historical narrative: “To anyone who is sensitive to the radical dissimilarity of our present to all past situations,

Figure 7.5   Stan Douglas, Klatsassin, 2006. High definition single-screen video installation, color, sound, 840 variations, total running time 67 hrs. Video still. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

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the study of the past ‘as an end in itself’ can only appear as thoughtless obstructionism, as willful resistance to the attempt to close with the present world in all its strangeness and mystery. In the world in which we daily live, anyone who studies the past ‘as an end in itself’ must appear to be either an antiquarian, fleeing from the problems of the present into a purely personal past, or a kind of cultural necrophile, that is, one who finds in the dead and dying a value he can never find in the living. The contemporary historian has to establish the value of the study of the past, not ‘as an end in itself,’ but as a way of providing perspectives on the present that contribute to the solution of problems peculiar to our own time.”39 A historical narrative that “fails” to resolve the past as past productively opens the past to the present by disclosing its persistence (its irresolution) in the present, a persistence that Mark Lewis’s filmworks perform by renewing the Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness. It is a historical narrative that posits that the present can only be changed by experiencing it as partially made of a persisting past (O’Neill: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too”40). The lateralization of the long timespan affects the modern regime of historicity in two significant ways: it weakens the totalizing impulse of modern historicity, and disrupts historical continuity. These aesthetic operations are characteristic of the temporal turn in contemporary art, based as they are on a common releasing of the interminability of temporality (partly coming from but of course never simply reducible to the loop structure). Let us be more specific on these two points. I. The weakening of the totalizing impulse of modern historicity The interminable irresolution of the historical narrative is a modality by which modern history “as an end” is fundamentally disrupted, not only a conceptualization of history as a process by which perfectibility will be reached in the future (the discourse of progress) but also a conceptualization of history as a totalizing process of a redemption (the Hegelian emancipation of the spirit; the Marxist emancipation of the proletariat). As Osborne has suggested, the totalizing historical narrative is one that is written in the future anterior, “from the standpoint of what ‘will have been’. […] All such representations ultimately depend for their cognitive redemption upon the future realization of the end in question, although this is rarely understood to be a merely passive process of waiting on history.”41 The speculative projection of the future

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“as the basis for a totalized knowledge of past and present through which that future might be reached, acts as a form of redemption that obliterates those historical events which are not gathered up by its totalizing gaze.”42 Douglas’s recombinant installation deploys a history that does not end through perfectibility and totalization processes. It proposes a history that can integrate the obliterated subjects and events of the modern regime of historicity. It is also a history that admits that there is no human past without loss and losses. II. The questioning of historical continuity To go with irresolution means breaking with the concept of historical continuity. This reassessment of the modern regime of historicity takes one of its most accomplished materializations in Douglas’s Der Sandmann (1995) (Figure 7.6), a two-channel b/w projection made in the disused UFA cinema studios in Potsdam-Babelsberg, featuring sections of E. T.

Figure 7.6   Stan Douglas, Der Sandmann, 1995. Two-track 16 mn film projection, b/w, stereo soundtrack, 9:50 min. Film still. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation 2000.57. © Stan Douglas.

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A. Hoffmann’s short novel (from which the installation takes its title) confronted with the notion of “the uncanny” (Freud used Hoffmann’s story in his 1919 essay “The uncanny”) and the history of a social utopia developed by German physician Moritz Schreber—the Schrebergärten (a complex of small suburban garden allotments established by leasing land for the physical exercise of children). In this installation, two 16 mm films are projected in a loop on a single screen, although they only appear on one-half of the screen, divided by a vertical fold (as the art critic Adrian Searle observes, “the split within the screen is more a crease or a braid than a cut, like the meeting of two currents travelling at different speeds43) that separates but never fully separates the screen in two equal parts. Each film shows the same 360-degree panoramic view of a garden and then of a man reading a letter in the deserted UFA space, with this single significant difference that the two takes show two versions of a Schrebergärten, one preceding and the other following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The two films are projected with a delay of one complete rotation of the studio. Fixing the screen, the spectator is exposed to two views that swallow one another at the vertical fold, showing the old communal garden absorbed by the new (the land is now overtaken by the real estate market) and the new absorbed by the old, without resolution. Historical continuity and the universalizing fluidity of Dolev’s notion of temporal passing as “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past”44 are suspended to reveal how modern progress must obliterate the past to produce the new. The resilience of the narrator’s voice, however, resists this process as in Overture. Even the vertical fold can be seen as resisting the modern obliteration process as it unfolds not as a cut but as a crease. The recombinant narrative of Klatsassin multiplies the vertical fold and propels it as a permuting device that has now the capacity to produce a historical narrative not to the detriment of but as a supplement to the previous historical narrative. Interminable irresolution is messy (the recombinant production of historical narratives is cumulative, excessive) but it has the merit of not obliterating viewpoints and not establishing a hierarchy between viewpoints. It proceeds, although with other means, like Ohanian’s Seven Minutes Before, equalizing the different variations and suggesting their infinite extensivity. These two works confirm White’s insight to the effect that the historian must “recognize that there is no such thing as a single correct view of any object under study but that there are many correct views, each requiring its own style of representation.”45

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Contemporizing the Sublime A small narrative emerges, disappears, and then reemerges again in Klatsassin: the story of the prospector and his new partner circulating in circles in the forest. Each time the scene reemerges, the prospector announces to his associate that they are going in the wrong direction and that he is far from convinced of his capacity to bring them to destination. The narrative piling up of clashing testimonies together with the recombinant permutations of the scenes are not without confirming the circularity of movement enacted by the two protagonists. They invite the spectator to follow a lead, to acknowledge that she might be on the wrong track, to take note that she will be able to engage herself into another lead, ad vitam. The permutations, as we have seen, surpass our capacity of understanding; they collapse the totalizing impulses of the modern regime of historicity. In this regard, they must be seen as generating the possibility of a sublime experience in the spectator. This I believe to be Douglas’s original contribution to the temporal turn. The sublime experience is intimately tied to the spectator’s experience of the interminability of the recombinant narratives. It also requires a secularization and a desublimation of the sublime—a willingness to accept its persisting productivity in contemporary art. As an aesthetic concept, the sublime designates affects of astonishment, fear, and exceedance experienced when the subject is confronted with and overtaken by amplitudes he or she cannot understand. These natural amplitudes are perceived (especially in Kant’s definition of the term) as formless and boundless. As such, it cannot really be perceived. Referring to Nu•tka•, a video installation in which (as stated above) two distinct images of a same landscape of Nootka-Sounds (BC) are interlaced on the same screen (producing a seamless image when in synch, but a split image when pulled apart)—Douglas explains that the experience of the sublime in the natural world always forces humans to confront the question of the position we can adopt in relation to that world: “[a]re you able to assume a position transcending the natural world, or are you subject to its influence, as a part of it?”46 The recombinant technology of Douglas’s Klatsassin, a technology that inscribes permutations in a lateralized long timespan, produces a historical narrative that is humanly impossible to perceive as a whole. It is an insertion of the sublime in the space of the spectator. Clearly, it is the second option proposed by Douglas in his description of the sublime effect of the landscape represented in Nu•tka• (to be “subject to its

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influence, as a part of it”) that is favored, although the first option (“to assume a position transcending the natural world”) is always possible. As stated before in Chapter 3 and to follow Whitney Davis on this specific point, “[n]othing whatsoever makes us see anything in or anything as anything else.”47 But the recombinant Klatsassin supports the former option. This confrontation is critical insofar as it invites the spectator to situate herself within the world she observes. Jean-Luc Nancy proposes a remarkable philosophical version of this question of the “inside” in relation to the “outside,” that can help to better understand the ramifications of the sublime on the historical narrative as Douglas hopes to renew it: And the representation of a kosmotheoros permitting a total view of the world was itself, each time it occurred, dependant on a culture, even if it wasn’t always the same one and if there were several cultures fostering the representation of a universal, divine eye. Such a representation involves a presupposition: namely, that the world could be possessed as an object, as a panorama or a scene that was entirely visible for an ideal or absolute spectator. It’s precisely because, without a doubt, the contemporary world compels us to wander: we are learning that the world is henceforth neither an object, nor a spectacle. A world that I can visualize as a whole world is no longer a world: it’s a universe, it’s a cosmos, it’s a creation, in the most traditional senses of these terms. Today we understand that a world is on the contrary a milieu in which we find ourselves, and which we can only apprehend from the inside. We are in a world, not in front of it. We could also say that we never see a world: we are there, we inhabit it, we explore it, we find or lose ourselves in it […] concepts that are not at all of the same order as “seeing,” which involves distance, the separation of a subject. In the idea of the kosmotheoros, a subject is capable of assuming a distance in the infinite background, allowing it to grasp the world from all its sides. That was the world of perspective—at least enough perspective to remain within the order of seeing. […] The cosmological scheme today is one of an expansion, and more precisely of the indefinite expansion of given finitude […]. An expansion, an indefinite spacing out of space itself. […] The world is getting away from itself— it disjoins from its own unity, from its centrality, and therefore from its own finality as well. [Today, there is] [n]o more productive and oriented time, no more present opened to the absolute—and always time, time flowing in

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every direction at once, backwards, forwards, and sideways. This is not a “revolution”: it’s mutation, a metamorphosis, a caesura too, a shock, an earthquake.48 Whereas cosmological representation relies on the possibility of offering the observer a total view of the world by positioning her outside the observable world—an idealized position that allows her to see the world as a whole—the contemporary world (actual contemporaneity according to Nancy) shows us that it cannot be perceived as an object, a spectacle or a totality. The contemporary world described by Nancy partakes of the order of the sublime, of what he has called elsewhere “the emotion of the subject at the limit” in which the totality “is offered to the feeling of the sublime,” and not made present.49 His observer responds to the sublime by significantly adopting Douglas’s second alternative, that is, by being “subject to its influence, as a part of it.”50 Klatsassin positions the spectator in these very terms: unable to differentiate herself as completely different from the characters of the plot, she is more a historian than a judge, someone who goes with the reality that historians have come to accept: events never present themselves as tidily encapsulated histories. By contemporizing the sublime, Douglas’s recombinant installations propose a historical narrative that is in many ways uncontrollable (isn’t its randomness taken over by a computer-generated program?) but as in any act of indeterminacy it is a determined indeterminacy. Tacita Dean’s and Mark Lewis’s filmworks have wonderfully disclosed this paradox. Moreover, it is an indeterminacy that the temporal turn urges us not to transcend but to go with. Not because it surpasses us but because unsurpassibility is a modality by which the modern past can be felt as persisting in the present and, as such, modifiable in the present, for the sake of a future. The historical sublime (or lateralized long duration) works here as an alternative regime of historicity precisely because of its presentifying effects. * * * The temporal turn, we can now concede, presentifies the modern regime of historicity by keeping the past as long as possible in the present to influence the future. In that process, the present is made interminable. The works examined in this book propose different deployments of interminability. The “unproductive” stream’s ecologization is, by definition, endless. Trouvé’s BIA modules can extend in space for ever;

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Alÿs’s vanishing of the vanishing point is continual and his fissuring of the visual ray keeps opening performers to the sites in which they act, while van der Werve’s lateralization of the linear perspective system thickens and thickens the slice of land on which he walks. Lewis’s potentialization of the modernist quasi-remnant partly relies on the establishment of a phenomenology of perception that extends the present of the image by connecting the just-passing, the now and the just-going. Dean’s films reenact the ruiniste tradition that seek to contest Enlightenment’s conceptualization of history as a progressive, perfectible continuum and to signal the contingency of history—the consequential impossibility to unify history. Reenacting that tradition, it institutes temporal passing as a spectral reality everlastingly waiting for any adequate relaying technology that could pick it up and transform it in that very process. Ohanian’s Seven Minutes Before’s spreading in space inserts the spectator in a binding problem and in an expandable logic of equalized temporalities: the seven-screen projection cannot fit in any Gestalt, cause-and-effect or dialectical resolution of images; it has no privileged frame of reference, no privileged observer. The visual/ audio split of his September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007 is irresolvable and productive in that very irresolution. Davenport’s Workers (leaving the factory) digitally undertakes the spectrality of Dean’s Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4 33 . In so doing, it provides a new home for a modified temporal passing—a temporal passing that has lost, in the area of labor at least, its capacity to be framed. Douglas’s recombinant narratives deploy an irresolvable historical narrative, inviting the spectator to engage in the sublime experience of endless irresolution to make the past matter in the present. If contemporaneity in contemporary art is to challenge the modern regime of historicity, it does so by instituting interminability as the most pivotal feature of historical time.

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Notes

Introduction Craigie Horsfield, in discussion with the author, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, February 7, 2006. 2 Sections of this paragraph were initially co-written by Johanne Lamoureux and myself for the presentation of the Dyschronie de l’image colloquium organized in the context of the ACFAS annual congress in May 2006. For Lessing’s discussion of temporality in the visual arts, see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis, IN and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1962), 19. 3 On the notion of infinite extrapolation in the work of Leibniz, Goethe, Lessing, and others, see Nicholas Rennie, Speculating on the Moment: The Poetics of Time and Recurrence in Goethe, Leopardi and Nietzsche (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005). 4 Michael Fried, “Art and objecthood,” Artforum, June 1967, reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968), 116–47. 5 Terry Smith, “Creating dangerously, then and now,’ in The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society (Second International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville), ed. Okwui Enwezor (Sevilla: BIACS2, 2006), 120. 6 Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: l’image-temps (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985); Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) and Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Marita Sturken, “Imaging postmemory/renegotiating history,” Afterimage 26, no. 6 (May/June 1999): 10–12; Marc Augé, Le Temps en ruines (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2003); Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2007); Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2000) and L’image survivante (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2002); Jacques Rancière, “Le concept d’anachronisme et la vérité de l’historien,” L’inactuel, no. 6 (1996): 53–68; Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Hal Foster, “An archival impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22; Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, 1

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MA: MIT Press, 2004); Edmond Couchot, Des images, du temps et des machines dans les arts et la communication (Paris: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon/Actes Sud, 2007); Giorgio Agamben, “What is the contemporary?,” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 39–54. 7 Let us refer, incompletely, to: Re:Thinking: Time, 2004; Expérience de la durée, 2005; It’s About Time, 2006; Measure of Time, 2006–7; Taken with Time, 2006; Passage du temps, 2007; In the Mean Time, 2007; Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, 2007; Observing Beast, Time, Evolution, 2008; Zero Frames Per Second, 2008; Science and Art: Time of Transition, 2008; The Sweet Burnt Smell of History, 2008; Chantal Akerman: Moving through Time and Space, 2008; Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, 2008; Mapping Time, 2008; Synthetic Times—Media Art China, 2008; Time Crevasse, 2008; Modernism as a Ruin: An Archaeology of the Present, 2009; Time as Matter, 2009; The Future Will Last Longer Than the Past, 2009; Slow Movement, 2009; The Immediate Future, 2009; Survivre au temps/Living Time, 2009; Feedforward. The Angel of History, 2009; Star City: The Future under Communism, 2010; In Praise of Evanescence: Space, Time, and Image of the Everyday, 2010; Past Present Future, 2010; Territories of Time, 2010; Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is Mystery, 2010; Contemporaneity: Contemporary Art in Indonesia, 2010; Yesterday Will be Better—Taking Memory into the Future, 2010; Cross-fades. Reconstructing the Future, 2010; Dump Time. For a Practice of Horizontality, 2011; Jacques Payette: Capturer le temps, 2011; Out-of-Sync: The Paradoxes of Time, 2011; Spare Time, 2011; Passing Time, 2012. 8 Lucinda Barnes, “Measure of time,” in Measure of Time (Berkeley, C.A.: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2007), 21. 9 Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), viii. 10 Ernst Pöppel, “Taxonomy of the subjective: an evolutionary perspective,” in Neuropsychology of Visual Perception, ed. J. W. Brown (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1989), 219–32. 11 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002 [1956]), 90. 12 Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America 71, no. 5 (May/June 1983): 118–31, 187–91. 13 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 99. 14 David Couzens Hoy, The Time of Our Lives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 165. 15 On this point, see Daniel Innerarity, Le Futur et ses ennemis. De la confiscation de l’avenir à l’espérance politique, trans. Serge Champeau and Éric Marquer (Paris: Climats, 2008), 12. 16 Sebastian Zeidler, introduction to Carl Einstein, “Critical dictionary: ‘Nightingale.’ The etchings of Hercules Seghers,” trans. Charles W. Haxthausen, October 107 (Winter 2004): 152. 17 François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 27. Author’s translation.

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308 Notes See François Dosse, “Les régimes d’historicité comme traces expérientielles,” in L’Histoire en miettes. Des Annales à la ‘nouvelle histoire’, ed. F. Dosse (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1997), 6–7, who specifies that, in the modern regime of historicity, history is the exemplification of the “march of Reason towards greater transparency,” realizing itself universally “as an instrument of freedom and human perceptibility.” Author’s translation. 19 Vivian Sobchack, “‘Presentifying’ film and media feminism,” Camera Obscura 21, no. 1 (2006): 67. 20 Irit Rogoff, “Turning,” e-flux journal (0), November 2008, http://www.e-flux. com/journal/view/18 21 Walter Mignolo, in Marina Gržinić and Walter Mignolo, “De-linking epistemology from capital and pluri-versality: a conversation with Walter Mignolo, part 3,” Reartikulacija 6 (2009): 7. 22 See Rancière’s problematization of this notion in Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009). 23 Reinhart Koselleck, “ ‘Space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’: two historical categories,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 259. 24 Koselleck, “Modernity and the planes of historicity,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 22. 25 Miguel de Beistegui, review essay, “Anger and Time: a critical assessment,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 172. 26 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 28. 27 Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’histoire finie,” in La Communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1999), 239 and 250. 28 Terry Smith, “Contemporary art and contemporaneity,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006): 700. 18

Chapter 1 Étienne Klein, Le Facteur temps ne sonne jamais deux fois (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2007), 21–6. 2 On western philosophy’s examination of the relation between time and movement, see Philip Turetzky, Time (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 72–86. 3 David Couzens Hoy, The Time of Our Lives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), vii. 4 Ibid., xiv. 5 This precision and the question formulated below have been taken from the very helpful introduction of the “Time” Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Time 6 Turetzky, Time, 1. 7 Ibid., 3. 1

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On the Kantian inversion, see ibid., 85–9. Turetzky, Time, 86. 10 Ibid., 111. 11 Ibid., 174 and 187. 12 Ibid., 187. 13 Ibid. 14 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 10 and 16. 15 Ibid., 7. 16 Ibid., 37. 17 Ibid., 46. 18 Ibid., 37. 19 On this specific point, see Patrick Ffrench, “‘Time in the pure state’: Deleuze, Proust and the image of time,” in Time and the Image, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 169. 20 Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 1, 12 and 20. 21 Ibid., 14. 22 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 7. 23 Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, 17–18 24 Ibid., 612. 25 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 37. 26 Ibid., 46. 27 Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), viii. 28 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge 1994), 154. 29 Alain Badiou, “Théorie axiomatique du sujet: Notes du cours 1996–1998,” Typescript, 1998, 23.4.97, quoted in Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 116. 30 Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, 114–15; also see Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2000). 31 Jon May and Nigel Thrift, (eds), “Introduction,” in Timespace: Geographies of Temporalities (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 7. 32 Ibid., 8. 33 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 240. 34 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: Notes from South African postcolony,” American Ethnologist 26, no. 2 (1999), 293–4. 35 Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots globalization and the research imagination,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 16. 36 William Friedman, About Time: Inventing the Fourth Dimension (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19. 37 Ibid., 20. Also see Marc Wittmann, “The inner experience of time,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, no. 364 (2009): 1960. 8 9

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310 Notes Friedman, About Time: Inventing the Fourth Dimension, 26. Wittmann, “The inner experience of time,” 1961. 40 Ibid., 1956. 41 David M. Eagleman, Peter U. Tse, Dean Buonomano, Peter Janssen, Anna Christina Nobre, and Alex O. Holcombe, “Time and the brain: How subjective time relates to neural time,” The Journal of Neuroscience 25, no. 45 (November 9, 2005), 103–69. 42 F. Xavier Castellanos and Rosemary Tannock, “Neuroscience of attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder: the search for endophenotypes,” Nature Reviews/Neuroscience 3 (August 2003), 623. 43 T. Bschor, M. Ising, M. Bauer, U. Lewitzka, M. Skerstupeit, B. MüllerOerlinghausen, and C. Baethge “Time experience and time judgment in major depression, mania and healthy subjects. A controlled study of 93 subjects,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 109, no. 3 (March 2004), 222–9. Also see Wittmann, “The inner experience of time,” 1960. 44 May and Thrift, (eds), “Introduction,” 3. 45 Ibid., 5. 46 Edgar Morin, L’Homme et la mort (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1976 [1951]), 368–70. 47 Céline Lafontaine, La Société postmortelle: la mort, l’individu, et le lien social à l’ère des technosciences (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2008), 14. Author’s translation. 48 Antonio Negri, “The constitution of time,” in Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarani (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 24. 49 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 37. 50 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 237. 51 Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “The mirrors of Las Meninas: cochineal, silver, and clay,” The Art Bulletin XCII, no. 1–2 (March–June 2010): 14. 52 On the loss of ruins in contemporary societies, which in turn partakes of a loss of temporality, see Marc Augé, Le Temps en ruines (Paris: Galilée, 2003). 53 Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 245. Also see N. Katherine Hayles, “Cybernetics,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, (eds) W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark. B. N. Hansen (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 147. 54 Hayles, “Cybernetics,” 147–8. 55 Lee, Chronophobia, xiii. 56 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 20. 57 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 183–4. 58 Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, endnote 6 of “Conclusion,” 184. 59 On this specific point, see Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 99. 60 Ibid., 99. 61 Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, 112. 62 See, notably, Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics 38 39

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of Memory (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 1998); Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Yashodhara Dalmia and Salima Hashmi, Memory, Metaphor, Mutations: The Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Joan Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008); Sheila J. Petty, Contact Zones: Memory, Origin, and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2008); Beate Reifenscheid, Memory Traces: Contemporary Art from Finland (London: John Rule, 2010); Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Claudette Lauzon, Precarious Occupations: The Fragile Figure of Home in Contemporary Art (PhD diss., McGill University, 2009). ProQuest (NR61867); Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York and London: Routledge, 2011); Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2002); and Jacques Rancière, “Le concept d’anachronisme et la vérité de l’historien,” L’inactuel, no. 6 (1996): 53–68. Studies by Foster, Godfrey, Roelstraete, and Enwezor will be identified and examined below. 63 Daniel Birnbaum, Chronology (New York: Sternberg Press, 2007). 64 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 9. 65 Hal Foster, “An archival impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 4. 66 Ibid. 67 Mark Godfrey, “The artist as historian,” October 120 (Spring 2007): 143. 68 Matthew Buckingham, quoted in Godfrey, “The artist as historian,” 147. 69 Dieter Roelstraete, “The way of the shovel: on the archaeological imaginary in art,” e-flux journal 4, March 2009, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/51 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Okwui Enwezor, “Archive fever: Photography between history and the monument,” in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York: International Center of Photography, 2007), 11. 74 Ibid., 21 and 22. 75 Ibid., 24. 76 Ibid., 25. 77 Ibid., 25–6. 78 Ibid., 46–7. 79 Reinhart Koselleck, “Time and history,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 102.

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312 Notes Koselleck, “On the need for theory in the discipline of history,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, 6–7. 81 Terry Smith, “Contemporary art and contemporaneity,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006): 701. 82 Terry Smith, “Creating dangerously, then and now,” in The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society (Second International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville), ed. Okwui Enwezor (Sevilla: BIACS2, 2006), 120. 83 Smith, “Contemporary art and contemporaneity,” 692. 84 Ibid., 703. 85 Smith, “Creating dangerously, then and now,” 120. 86 Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 91–2. 87 Ibid., 236. 80

Chapter 2 Tatiana Trouvé, in Francesca Pietropaolo, “In the studio: Tatiana Trouvé,” Art in America 98, no. 3 (March 2010): 88. 2 Ibid. Emphasis added. 3 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Ce temps qui ne passe pas (Paris: Gallimard, coll. “Connaissance de l’Inconscient,” 1997), 11. Author’s translation. 4 Tatiana Trouvé, “The longest echo,” in Tatiana Trouvé (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung, 2008), 9. 5 Ibid. 6 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 55. 7 Tatiana Trouvé, “‘Body without a face.’ A conversation between Tatiana Trouvé and Richard Shusterman,” in Tatiana Trouvé, 117. 8 Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive: une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995), 13–14. 9 Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), viii. 10 For a more detailed analysis of Beecroft’s performances, see my The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Depression in Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), Chapter II. 11 Boris Groys, “How to do time with art,” in Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, (eds) Mark Godfrey, Klaus Biesenbach, and Kerryn Greenberg (London: Tate, 2010), 190. 12 Ibid. 13 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity’s consciousness of time and its need for selfreassurance,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 5. 14 Ibid., 6. 15 Ibid., 6–7. 16 Ibid., 7. 1

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Groys, “How to do time with art,” 190. Boris Groys, “Comrades of time,” e-flux journal 11 (December 2009), http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/view/99 19 Groys, “How to do time with art,” 190. 20 Ibid., 191. 21 Mark Godfrey, “Politics/poetics: the work of Francis Alÿs,” in Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, 18. 22 Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Fable power,” in Francis Alÿs, (eds) Francis Alÿs, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Russell Ferguson, Jean Fisher, and Augusto Monterroso. (New York: Phaidon, 2007), 73. 23 Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Internationale Situationiste no. 2, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (London: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007), 62. On the relationship between Alÿs’s walks and Situationist International, see especially Carlos Basualdo, “Head to toes: Francis Alÿs’s paths of resistance,” trans. V. Martin, Artforum XXXVII, no. 7 (April 1999): 104–7; and Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Fable power,” 77. 24 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 114. 25 Francis Alÿs, quoted in Edward Platt, “Telling stories with a life of their own,” Tate Etc., no. 19 (Summer 2010): 54. 26 Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 27 Russell Ferguson, Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal (Los Angeles, CA: Steidl/ Hammer Museum, 2008), 11–12. 28 Francis Alÿs, quoted in Godfrey, “Politics/poetics: the work of Francis Alÿs,” 9. 29 See David Serving’s video documentation of the performance at http:// vimeo.com/14129166 30 Robert Storr, “Strange attractor,” Parkett 69 (2004): 21. 31 Press release, “Francis Alys: a story of deception opens at Tate Modern,” artdaily.org (August 5, 2010), http://www.artdaily.org/index. asp?int_sec=2&int_new=38658 32 Platt, “Telling stories with a life of their own,” 54. 33 Daniel Innerarity, Le Futur et ses ennemis. De la confiscation de l’avenir à l’espérance politique, trans. Serge Champeau and Eric Marquer (Paris: Climats, 2008), 95. Author’s translation. 34 Godfrey, “Politics/poetics: the work of Francis Alÿs,” 27. 35 Francis Alÿs, “Russell Ferguson in conversation with Francis Alÿs,” in Francis Alÿs, (eds) Alÿs, Medina, Ferguson, Fisher, and Monterroso, 52. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Alÿs, quoted in Ferguson, Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal, 79. 39 Jorge Larrain, Identity and Modernity in Latin America (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2000), 136–7. 40 Ibid., 171. 41 Ibid., 174. 42 Ibid., 140. 17 18

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314 Notes Deyan Sudjic, “Back from the brink,” in The Endless City, (eds) Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (London and New York: Phaidon, 2007), 170. 44 José Castillo, “After the explosion,” in The Endless City, 174. 45 Sudjic, “Back from the brink,” 171 and Castillo, “After the explosion,” 179. 46 Carlos Monsiváis, “Identity hour or, what photos would you take of the endless city?,” in Mexican Postcards, trans. John Kraniauskas (London: Verso, 1997), 34–5. 47 Carlos Monsiváis, in Carlos Monsiváis and Francis Alÿs, The Historic Centre of Mexico City (Barcelona: Turner/MACBA, 2006), 51. 48 Ibid., 51–4. 49 See James Jerome Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1979), in particular Chapter 8; and Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2004), 20–1 and Chapters 3 and 4. 50 See Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers, “The extended mind” (1998), in The Extended Mind, ed. Richard Menary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 27–42. 51 Bruno Latour, “To modernise or ecologise? That is the question,” trans. Charis Cussins, in Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millenium, (eds) Bruce Braun and Noel Castree (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), 232 and 235. 52 Tom Morton, “Guido van der Werve,” in Guido van der Werve: Minor Pieces (Amsterdam: Site Gallery, 2009), n.p. 53 Wim van der Meer, email correspondence with the author, May 19, 2011. 54 Morton, “Guido van der Werve,” n.p. 55 Ibid. 56 Guido van der Werve, email correspondence with the author, May 20, 2011. 57 The Museum of Science, “Exploring linear perspective,” (1997), http://www. mos.org/sln/leonardo/exploringlinearperspective.html 58 Louis Marin, “Toward a theory of reading in the visual arts: Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds,” in The Reader in the Text: Essays in Audience and Interpretation, (eds) Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 314. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 315. 61 Dieter Roelstraete, Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking (London: Afterall, 2010), 2. 62 Richard Long, artist statement in http://www.richardlong.org/ 63 On this specific point, see Roelstraete, Richard Long, 8. 64 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 240. 65 Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 109. 66 Ibid., 111. 67 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 264. 68 Ibid., 259. 69 Koselleck, Futures Past, 22. 43

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Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 165. François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 28. Author’s translation. 72 Miguel de Beistegui, Review essay, “Anger and Time: A critical assessment,” Environment and Planning D 27 (2009): 173. See also Innerarity, Le Futur et ses ennemis, 25. 73 Giorgio Agamben, “What is the contemporary?,” in What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 41. 74 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 18. 75 Ibid., 55. 76 Ibid., 23. 77 Ibid., 24. 78 Mark Godfrey, “The artist as historian,” October 120 (Spring 2007): 143. 79 Matthew Buckingham, quoted in Godfrey, “The artist as historian,” 147. 80 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 138. 81 Ibid., 137. 82 Ibid., 146–7. 83 Ibid., 147. 84 Ibid., 164–5. 85 Ibid., 168. 86 Ibid., 177–8. 87 Ibid., 180. 88 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 17. 89 Ibid., 133. 90 On the necessarily connection (twoness) of performance and documentation, see Jessica Santone, “Circulating the event: the social life of performance documentation, 1965–1975” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2011). ProQuest (NR74781). 91 See Andrea Branzi, Weak and Diffuse Modernity: The Worlds of Projects at the Beginning of the 21st Century (Milan: Skira, 2006); and Charles Waldheim, “Weak work: Andrea Branzi’s ‘weak metropolis’ and the projective potential of an ‘ecological urbanism’,” in Ecological Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi with Gareth Doherty (Baden, Switzerland and Cambridge, MA: Lars Müller Publishers and Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2010), 114–21. 70 71

Chapter 3 Mark Lewis, “Is modernity our antiquity?,” Afterall 14 (Autumn/Winter 2006): 2. http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.14/modernity.our.antiquity 2 Mark Lewis, in Yilmaz Dziewior, “Conversation with Mark Lewis,” Mark Lewis, ed. Yilmaz Dziewior (Hamburg: Kunstverein, 2005), 62. 1

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316 Notes Mark Lewis, The Pitch, 1998, http://www.marklewisstudio.com/films2/The_ Pitch(1998).htm 4 Bruno Latour, “Spheres and networks: two ways to reinterpret globalization,” Harvard Design Magazine 30 (Spring/Summer 2009): 141. 5 Mark Lewis, in discussion with the author, London, October 23, 2010. 6 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 103. On the historical mutation of the functionality of architectural openings, see especially p. 21. 7 Mark Lewis, in “Trying not to make films that are too long: interview with Mark Lewis by Jérôme Sans,” in Mark Lewis Films 1995–2000, ed. Steven Bode (London: Film & Video Umbrella, 2000), 45. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 49. 10 Ibid., 47. 11 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 30. 12 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 77. 13 Ibid., 79. 14 Lewis, in Dziewior, “Conversation with Mark Lewis,” 59. 15 Ibid., 60. 16 Lewis, in “Trying not to make films that are too long: interview with Mark Lewis by Jérôme Sans,” 53. 17 Lewis, in Dziewior, “Conversation with Mark Lewis,” 59. 18 Lewis, in discussion with the author, London, October 23, 2010. 19 See Hubert Damisch, A Theory of Cloud: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 20 Lewis, in “Trying not to make films that are too long: interview with Mark Lewis by Jérôme Sans,” 50. 21 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 40. 22 Ibid. Emphasis added. 23 Christopher Wilk, “Introduction: what is modernism?,” in Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1930, ed. Christopher Wilk (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006), 12. 24 Ibid., 14. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 21. 27 David Watkin, Morality and Architecture Revisited (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), vii. 28 Ibid., viii. 29 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 23–4, and 41. 30 Ibid., 24–5. 31 Ibid., 25, 27, and 31. 3

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Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 191. 33 Ibid., 192. 34 Ibid., 193. 35 Stephen Johnstone, “Introduction: recent art and the everyday,” in The Everyday, ed. Stephen Johnstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and London: Whitechapel, 2008), 12. 36 Georges Perec, “L’infra-ordinaire,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans., John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1997), 210. 37 Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World, trans. Karel Kovanda with James Schmidt (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1976), 44. 38 See, for example, Agnes Heller, Everyday Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); Stephen K. White, ed., Life-World and Politics: Between Modernity and Post-Modernity (Notre-Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989); Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, Second Edition (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); and Rita Felski, “Introduction,” New Literary History 33, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 607–22. 39 Vanessa Muller, “Mark Lewis,” http://marklewis.fvu.co.uk/english/essay. html 40 Lewis, in Dziewior, “Conversation with Mark Lewis,” 62. 41 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 2–3. 42 Lewis, “Is modernity our antiquity?,” 2. 43 Damisch, Traité du trait: Tractatus tractus (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1995), 18. 44 Lewis, “Is modernity our antiquity?,” 4. 45 Lewis, in Dziewior, “Conversation with Mark Lewis,” 62. 46 Lewis, “Afterword,” Afterall 22 (Autumn/Winter 2009): 3. http://www. afterall.org/journal/issue.22/afterword.22 47 Lewis, in Dziewior, “Conversation with Mark Lewis,” 61. 48 Peter Wollen, “Fire and Ice,” The Photographic Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 76. I thank Reilley Bishop-Stall for signaling this passage to me (“Exposing time: movement, duration and temporality in contemporary photography,” Master’s research paper, McGill University, 2010), 11. 49 Lewis, in Dziewior, “Conversation with Mark Lewis,” 65. 50 Ibid., 58. 51 Ibid., 60. 52 Ibid., 59. Emphasis added. 53 Mark Lewis and Charles Esche, “Afterword: art and theatre,” Afterall 2 (Spring/ Summer 2000): 1, http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.2/afterword.art. and.theatre 54 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 87. 55 Mark Lewis, quoted in Jennifer Moss, “The spiritual side of the mundane,” 32

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318 Notes The Vancouver Sun, April 1, 2010, http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/ story.html?id=0766f807-0748-4de7-a7c5-708832c27a87 56 Jonathan Friday, “Stillness becoming: reflections on Bazin, Barthes and photographic stillness,” in Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image, (eds) David Green and Joanna Lowry (Brighton: Photoforum and Photoworks, 2006), 46. I thank again Bishop-Stall for identifying this passage. 57 Friday, “Stillness becoming: reflections on Bazin, Barthes and photographic stillness,” 45. 58 Robin Le Poidevin, “The experience and perception of time,” The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Last modified November 17, 2009, http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/ 59 Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 1 and 3. 60 Ibid., 35. 61 David Couzens Hoy, The Time of Our Lives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 50. 62 William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1890), 609–10. 63 Ibid., 631. 64 Francisco J. Varela, “The specious present: a neurophenomenology of time consciousness,” in Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, (eds) Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 280–1. 65 Philip Turetzky, Time (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 160. 66 Ibid., 158. 67 My reading of Husserl has been facilitated by accounts provided by Turetzky and Couzens Hoy. 68 Couzens Hoy, The Time of Our Lives, 52. 69 Ibid., 51. 70 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. J. B. Brough (Dordrecht, Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 355. 71 Couzens Hoy, The Time of Our Lives, 50. 72 Dan Zahavi “La perception de la durée présuppose-t-elle ou non la durée de la perception?” in La Conscience du temps: autour des Leçons sur le temps de Husserl, ed. Jocelyn Benoist (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2008), 194–5. 73 James R. Mensch, Husserl’s Account of Our Consciousness of Time (Milwaukee, WI: Marquettte University Press, 2010), 73. 74 Turetsky, Time, 167. 75 Evan Thompson, Antoine Lutz, and Diego Cosmelli, “Neurophenomenology: an introduction for neurophilosophers,” in Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement, (eds) Andy Brook and Kathleen Akins (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 40. 76 Varela, “The specious present,” 274 and 273. 77 Ibid., 284. 78 David M. Eagleman, “Temporality, scientific perspectives,” in The Oxford

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Companion to Consciousness, (eds) Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans, and Patrick Wilken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 629. 79 Ibid. 80 Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), 65. 81 Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or on contingency,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, intro. and trans., Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 245. 82 Ibid., 255. 83 Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 58. 84 The term is Davis’s. See ibid. 85 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 5. 86 Ibid., 10–11. 87 Ibid., 22. 88 Ibid., 190. 89 Lewis, in Dziewior, “Conversation with Mark Lewis,” 62. Emphasis added. 90 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 172. Emphasis in original. 91 Ibid., 184. 92 Ibid. 93 Lewis, in Dziewior, “Conversation with Mark Lewis,” 62. 94 Lewis and Esche, “Afterword: art and theatre,” 1. 95 Michael I. Posner and Steven E. Petersen, “The attention system of the human brain,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 13 (1990): 25–42, http://www. annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.ne.13.030190.000325 96 Bernard Stiegler, La Technique et le temps. Tome 3: Le Temps du cinéma et la question du mal-être (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 33. All quotations from this text, author’s translation. 97 Ibid., 36. 98 Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen Barker (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 18. 99 Bernard Steigler, “L’imagination transcendantale en mille points,” January 28, 2002, http://philosophie.scola.ac-paris.fr/C401-02Stiegler.htm 100 Bernard Stiegler, “Le désir asphyxié, ou comment l’industrie culturelle détruit l’individu,” Le Monde diplomatique, June 2004 http://sitecon.free.fr/ stiegler.htm 101 Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, 84. 102 Ibid., 97. 103 Ibid., 85. 104 N. Katherine Hayles, “My article on hyper and deep attention,” January 17, 2008, http://media08.wordpress.com/2008/01/17/my-articleon-hyper-and-deep-attention/ 105 Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, 79. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid., 104. 108 Lewis, in discussion with the author, London, October 23, 2010. 109 Lewis, in discussion with the author, London, October 23, 2010. Also see

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320 Notes Anne Ring Petersen, “Attention and distraction: on the aesthetic experience of video installation art,” RIHA Journal. Journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art, 0009 (October 7, 2010), http://www. riha-journal.org 110 Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 40. 111 Laura Mulvey, “Rear projection: modernity in a special effect,” in Mark Lewis, Cold Morning, ed. Barbara Fischer (Toronto and Vancouver: Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and Vancouver Art Gallery, 2009), 29. 112 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity’s consciousness of time and its need for selfreassurance,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 11. 113 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 140. 114 Ibid., 141. 115 Walter Benjamin, quoted in Murray, Giorgio Agamben, 42. 116 Walter Benjamin, quoted in David S. Ferris, The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 119. 117 Habermas, “Modernity’s consciousness of time and its need for selfreassurance,” 11. 118 Ibid., 11–14. 119 Ferris, The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin, 120–1. 120 Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, 115. 121 Ibid. 122 Moss, “The spiritual side of the mundane,” http://www2.canada.com/ vancouversun/story.html?id=0766f807-0748-4de7-a7c5-708832c27a87 123 Lewis, quoted in Moss, “The spiritual side of the mundane,” http://www2.canada. com/vancouversun/story.html?id=0766f807-0748-4de7-a7c5-708832c27a87 124 Jacques LeGoff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1. 125 Ibid., xii. 126 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 139. 127 Michel de Certeau, “L’opération historique,” in Faire de l’histoire: Nouveaux problèmes, (eds) Jacques LeGoff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 25–6. Author’s translation. On the need to insert the notion and practice of alterity in phenomenology, see Amanda Boetzkes, “Phenomenology and interpretation beyond the flesh,” Art History 32, no. 4 (September 2009): 690–711. 128 François Fourn, “Entre l’histoire et l’oubli: quel projet d’écriture?,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, no. 25, 2002, http://rh19.revues.org/index430.html. Author’s translation. 129 Ibid. 130 Jane Blocker, “Of empty stages and imperfectly deferred memories: Matthew Buckingham’s historiographic method,” paper presented in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, March 24, 2011.

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Chapter 4 Tacita Dean, in “Cinematic spin on a slowly turning world: Tacita Dean offers a peek into her cryptic landscape art,” Washington Post (August 5, 2001), http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-463553.html 2 Tacita Dean, “Interview 007: Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean, (eds) Jean-Christophe Royoux, Marina Warner, and Germaine Greer (London: Phaidon, 2006), 17. 3 Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), viii. 4 James Quandt, “Tacita Dean. Analogue: films, photographs, drawings 1991–2006,” Artforum International 45, no. 3 (November 2006), http://art. forum.com/inprint/id=9720 5 Tacita Dean, quoted in Judith Rodenbeck, “Tacita Dean: Hugh Lane Gallery,” Modern Painters (July/August 2007): 85. 6 Clarrie Wallis, “Introduction,” in Tacita Dean (London: Tate Gallery, 2001), 13. 7 Dean, “Interview 007: Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” 36. 8 Dolev, Time and Realism, viii. This understanding has been recently taken up in Christian Marclay’s single-channel video, Clock (2010), a 24-hour montage of clips from several thousand films including clocks and watches or simply statements on clock time, sequenced to account for the minute by minute unfolding of 24 hours and structured so that the projection conveys the correct time in the time zone in which is it being exhibited. The film, which therefore works like a clock, is a memento mori of analog film—a sort of anthology of the inherent association of analog film and temporal passing (the reiterated presence of the clock and the characters’ preoccupation over the passing of time; the contrast between the film’s constant reference to time and the spectator’s forgetting of time as she/he engages in the story; the temporal pacing of the narrative; the aging of the actors from one film to the next; the pastness of film technology; the irretrievable movement of the apparatus). 9 Tacita Dean, “Film as a medium of time: a conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean: Film Works, ed. Rina Carvajal (Miami, FL and Milan: Miami Art Central and Edizioni Charta, 2007), 57–8. 10 Tacita Dean, “A tribute to Merce,” Art in America 4, no. 10 (October 2009): 52. 11 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 30. 12 Briony Fer, “A natural history of chance,” in Tacita Dean: Film Works, 8. 13 Ibid., 8. 14 Ibid., 8–9. 15 Theodora Vischer, “The story of linear confidence,” in Tacita Dean Analogue: Drawings 1991–2006, (eds) Theodora Vischer and Isabel Friedli (Basel, Germany: Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager and Göttingen: Steidl, 2006), 23. 16 Dean, “Interview 007: Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” 20. 17 Rodenbeck, “Tacita Dean: Hugh Lane Gallery,” 84. 1

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322 Notes See Rina Carvajal, “Film as a medium of time: a conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean: Film Works, 46–8. 19 Dean, “Film is a medium of time: a conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean: Film Works, 48. 20 Vischer, “The story of linear confidence,” 17. 21 Dean, “Interview 007: Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” 15. 22 Ian B. Phillips, “The temporal structure of experience,” to appear in Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality, (eds) D. Lloyd and V. Arstila (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 1, 6, and 10, http://www. ucl.ac.uk/~uctyibp/Structure.pdf 23 Ibid., 1 and 6. 24 Tacita Dean, in Robert Ayers, “The AI interview: Tacita Dean,” Artinfo (June 19, 2008), http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/27914/tacita-dean/ 25 Amelia Jones, “Televisual flesh: the body, the screen, the subject,” in Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, (eds) Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux and Christine Ross (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 305. In this passage, Jones refers explicitly to the televisual screen. 26 Phillips, “The temporal structure of experience,” 1 and 6. 27 Christine Ross, “To touch the other: a story of corpo-electronic surfaces,” Public 13 (1996): 58 and 60. 28 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 127. 29 Ibid., 159. 30 Ibid., 163. 31 Ibid.; on the viewer losing herself in the image, see 184–5. 32 Ibid., 163. 33 Jones, “Televisual flesh: the body, the screen, the subject,” 303. 34 Ibid. 35 Vischer, “The story of linear confidence,” 13. 36 Tacita Dean quoted in Vischer, “The story of linear confidence,” 18–19. 37 Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 29. 38 Ibid., 40. 39 Ibid., 93. 40 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 159. 41 Alois Riegl, “The modern cult of monuments: its character and its origin,” trans. Kurt W. Foster and Diane Ghirardo, in Oppositions Reader, ed. K. Michael Hays (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 624. 42 Michael Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 8. 43 Ibid., 143–4. 44 Ibid., 9. 45 Ibid., 143. 46 Ibid., 144–6. 47 Riegl, “The modern cult of monuments: its character and its origin,” 632. 18

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Also see Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 147. 48 Andreas Huyssen, “Authentic ruins: products of modernity,” in Ruins of Modernity, (eds) Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 18–19. 49 Ibid., 22. 50 Sophie Lacroix, Ce que nous dissent les ruines. La Fonction critique des ruines (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 17–18. All quotations from this text are author’s translation. 51 Ibid., 152. 52 Michael S. Roth, “Irresistible decay: ruins reclaimed,” in Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, (eds) Michael S. Roth with Claire Lyons and Charles Merewether (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997), 1. 53 Charles Merewether, “Traces of loss,” in Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, (eds) Roth, Lyons and Merewether, 25. 54 Jacques Boulet, “Aloïs Riegl. Quelle mémoire?,” in Aloïs Riegl: Le Culte moderne des monuments, trans. Jacques Boulet (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 42. 55 Riegl, “The modern cult of monuments: its character and its origin,” 621. 56 Ibid., 624. 57 Ibid., 629. 58 Ibid., 632. 59 Ibid., 633. 60 Merewether, “Traces of loss,” 32. 61 In his article, Foster explicitly refers to Dean’s work. See Hal Foster, “An archival impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 11–16. 62 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 10. 63 Ibid., 10–11. 64 Ibid., 91 and 84. 65 Brian Dillon, “Back to the future: Tacita Dean and the new nostalgia,” Modern Painters (June 2006): 79. 66 John Ruskin, “The lamp of memory,” in The Genius of John Ruskin, ed. John D. Rosenberg (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 134–5. 67 Holland Cotter, “Oh so quiet,” New York Times (August 21, 2008), E25, http:// www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/arts/design/22dia.html?pagewanted=all 68 Derrida, Archive Fever, 91. 69 John Cage, “The future of music: credo,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 5. 70 James Pritchett, “What silence taught John Cage: the story of 4 33 ,” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art (Barcelona, Spain: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009), 172. 71 Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-AvantGarde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 46–7. 72 Ibid., 53–4. 73 See Caroline A. Jones, “Finishing school: John Cage and the abstract expressionist ego,” Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 643–7; and Jonathan D.

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324 Notes Katz, “John Cage’s queer silence; or, how to avoid making matters worse,” in Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, + Art, (eds) David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 41–61. 74 Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (New York: Schirmer Books, 1974), 2. 75 Eric de Visscher, “‘There’s no such thing as silence …’: John Cage’s poetics of silence,” in Writings about John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 127–30. 76 Austin Clarkson, “The intent of the musical moment,” in Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, + Art, 71. 77 Constance Lewallen, “Cage and the structure of chance,” in Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, + Art, 234. 78 Branden W. Joseph, “Chance, indeterminacy, multiplicity,” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art (Barcelona, Spain: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009), 219. 79 Jackson Mac Low, “Cage’s writings up to the late 1980s,” in Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, + Art, 227. 80 Ibid., 230. 81 Ibid., 230–1. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 232. 84 N. Katherine Hayles, “Chance operations,” in John Cage: Composed in America, (eds) Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 228. 85 Cage, “Preface,” in Silence, 260. 86 Hayles, “Chance operations,” 231. 87 Ibid., 232–3. 88 Ibid., 240. 89 Fer, “A natural history of chance,” 8. Emphasis added. 90 Pritchett, “What silence taught John Cage: The Story of 4 33 ,” 177. 91 Raymond Bellour, “The pensive spectator,” in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007), 120. 92 Dean, in Ayers, “The AI interview: Tacita Dean.”

Chapter 5 Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), viii. 2 Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Foreword,” in Melik Ohanian. Cosmograms, (eds) Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005), 12. 3 Sebastian Zeidler, introduction to Carl Einstein, “Critical dictionary: ‘nightingale.’ The etchings of Hercules Seghers,” trans. Charles W. Haxthausen, October 107 (Winter 2004): 152. 4 Albert Einstein, quoted in Max Jammer, Concepts of Simultaniety: From Antiquity 1

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to Einstein and Beyond (Baltimore, MY: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 94. 5 Jammer, Concepts of Simultaniety, 64. 6 Ibid., 10. 7 Jean Eisenstaedt, Einstein et la relativité générale: les chemins de l’espace-temps (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2003), 32. Author’s translation. 8 Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism, 4. 9 James Ellis McTaggart, “The unreality of time,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 17, no. 68 (1908): 458. 10 Ibid. 11 Philip Turetzky, Time (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 122–3. 12 Ibid. Also see Robin Le Poidevin, “The past, present and future of the debate about tense,” in Questions of Time and Tense, ed. Robin Le Poidevin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 13. 13 My description of the tensed and tenseless camps relies mostly on Dolev’s discussion in Time and Realism, particularly Chapter 1. His book provides one of the clearest examinations of the debate. 14 Michael Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time: Introducing the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 23. 15 Dolev, Time and Realism, 57. 16 Arthur Prior, “Thank goodness that’s over,” Philosophy 34 (1959): 12–17, reprinted in Arthur Prior, Papers in Logic and Ethics, (eds) P. T. Geach & A. J. P. Kenny (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 78–84. 17 Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time, 5 and 8. 18 Dolev, Time and Realism, 35. 19 Ibid., 8. 20 Paul Davies, About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1995), 53. 21 Bradley Dowden, “Time,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (June 11, 2011), http://www.iep.utm.edu/time/. 22 Einstein, quoted in Jammer, Concepts of Simultaneity, 118. 23 Jammer, Concepts of Simultaniety, 116. 24 Kurt Gödel, quoted in Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time, 32. 25 Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time, 54–7. 26 Hilary Putnam, summarized in Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time, 58. 27 Ibid., 54 and 57. 28 Hilary Putnam, quoted in Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time, 58. 29 Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time, 58 30 Ibid., 59–60. 31 Paul Davies, “That mysterious flow,” Scientific American 287, no. 3 (September 2002), 42. 32 Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time, 57. 33 Henri Pointcaré, quoted in Jammer, Concepts of Simultaneity, 100. 34 Jammer, Concepts of Simultaneity, 238–9. 35 Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Space of experience’ and ‘horizons of expectation’: two historical categories,” in Futures Past: On the Semanitcs of Historical Time, trans. Keigh Tribe New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 259.

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326 Notes André Gaudreault, “A few remarks for an alternative history of cinema,” trans. John Kelsey, in Melik Ohanian. Cosmograms, 16. 37 Melik Ohanian, in discussion with the author, Paris, September 15, 2006. 38 Ohanian, in discussion with the author, Paris, September 15, 2006. Also see Léa Gauthier, “Ondes de choc: Mélik Ohanian,” Mouvement.net (September 1, 2004), http://www.mouvement.net/site.php?rub=30&id=8c3e7cfd87bb1f6b &fiche_alias=mouvement: “L’étendue du mur d’écrans dépassant l’envergure de son champ de vision, le spectateur ne pourrait construire aucune relation de cause à effet.” 39 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 295. 40 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 193. 41 Ibid., 194. 42 Ibid., 64. 43 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The end of the world,” trans. John Kelsey, in Melik Ohanian. Cosmograms, 77. 44 Edward E. Smith and Stephen M. Kosslyn, Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), 51. 45 For a useful discussion of binding in cognitive theory, see ibid., 69. 46 Alan Allport, “Visual Attention,” in Foundations of Cognitive Science, ed. Michael I. Posner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 631–82. 47 Michael W. Eysenk and Mark T. Keane, “Attention and performance limitations,” in Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings, ed. Daniel J. Levitin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 372. 48 Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 59–61. 49 This confirms Ohanian’s statement to the effect that he wanted to create an expanse of screens which would supersede the viewer’s field of vision. See Melik Ohanian, “Brasseur d’images,” Le Petit Bulletin (March 2006): 8–15, http://www.petit-bulletin.fr/ 50 Melik Ohanian “Melik Ohanian,” 491, no. 112 (February 2006), http://www.491. fr/Archives%2006/06_Melik%20Ohanian.html. Author's translation. 51 Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time, 91. 52 Ibid., 115. 53 Wolf Schäfer, “Global history and the present time,” in Wiring Prometheus: Globalisation, History, and Technology, ed. Peter Lyth and Helmuth Trischler (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2004), 109. 54 For an operative definition of globalization, see Imre Szeman: “What we understand to be the reality of globalization is necessarily mediated by the apparatus of numerous concepts strung together in an effort to grasp the fundamental character of the contemporary. This characterization of globalization—as an amorphous term for the present, as an analytically suggestive and yet confusing concept that binds epistemology and ontology together, as an impossible yet compelling idea that names the logic that organizes all experience, as a term that is potentially all things to all people and can be bent to multiple purposes—makes it sound like the successor to […] postmodernism. […] But as soon as the connection is ventured, it is clear that 36

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globalization is far from a replacement term for postmodernism.” “Globalization, postmodernism, and (autonomous) criticism,” in Cultural Autonomy: Frictions and Connections, (eds) Will Coleman, Petra Rethmann, and Imre Szeman (Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 69. 55 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 2. 56 Ibid., 47. 57 Steve J. Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004): 4. 58 Doris Salcedo, quoted in “Doris Salcedo à la Tate Modern (London 5),” Le Monde, October 25, 2007, http://lucileee.blog.lemonde.fr/2007/10/25/ doris-salcedo-a-la-tate-modern-londres-5. Author’s translation. 59 Dolev, Time and Realism, 6. Emphasis added. 60 Hal Foster, “An archival impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004), 4. 61 Christian Marclay, “Conversation entre Michael Snow et Christian Marclay,” in Replay Marclay (Paris: Musée de la musique, 2007), 131. Author’s translation. 62 Hal Pashler, “Dual-task interference and cognitive architecture,” colloquium paper, University of California, San Diego, September 23, 2004, summarized in Catherine Bush, “How to multitask,” New York Times, April, 9 2001, http:// dualtask.org/images/08MULTITASK.html 63 Adina L. Roskies, “The binding problem,” Neuron 24 (September 1999): 7. 64 Ibid., 8. 65 Andreas K. Engel, “Time and conscious visual processing,” in Time and Mind II: Information Processing Perspectives, ed. Hede Helfrich (Göttingen, Germany: Hogrefe & Huber, 2003), 141–2. 66 Antti Revonsuo, “Binding problem,” in The Oxford Companion to Consciousness, (eds) Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans, and Patrick Wilken (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 105. 67 Ibid., 101. 68 Andreas K. Engel and Wolf Singer, “Temporal binding and the neural correlates of sensory awareness,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences (January 2001): 17. 69 Revonsuo, “Binding problem,” 102. 70 Engel, “Time and conscious visual processing,” 141. 71 Ibid., 146. 72 Jan Plate, “An analysis of the binding problem,” Philosophical Psychology 20, no. 6 (December 2007): 776. 73 James W. Garson, “(Dis)Solving the binding problem,” Philosophical Psychology 14, no. 4 (2001): 385. 74 J. Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë, “A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, no. 5 (2001): 967. 75 Plate, “An analysis of the binding problem,” 783. 76 Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit 1. L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983), 17. All quotations from this text are author’s translation. 77 Ibid., 161. 78 Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 412.

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328 Notes Hayden White, “Guilty of history? The Longue Durée of Paul Ricoeur,” History and Theory 46 (May 2007): 237. 80 Ibid., 238. 81 Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 22–3. 82 Ibid., 24. 83 Steve J. Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile I: The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), xix. 84 Ibid., xxi. 85 Ibid., xxvii. 86 Ibid., xxix. The simultaneous replay of two cut documents related to the past and the present of Santiago—the tenseless rendering of these two temporalities—forces us to reassess the utopia attached to the final quote of Guzmán’s document: “History is ours, it is the work of the people.” What remains of Allende’s Unidad Popular’s democratic attempts? Was democracy in Chile ever achieved? And, beyond Chile, what constitutes a democracy? On these points see José Del Pozo, Le Chili contemporain: quelle démocratie? (Montreal, Canada: Nota Bene, 2000); and Manuel Antonio Garretón, Incomplete Democracy: Political Democratization in Chile and Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 87 I want to thank Claudette Lauzon for bringing this book to my attention. See Claudette Lauzon, Precarious Occupations: The Fragile Figure of Home in Contemporary Art (PhD diss., McGill University, 2009). ProQuest (NR61867). 88 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, NJ and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 21. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 22. 91 Ibid., 42. The notion of heterophathic identification is borrowed from Kaja Silverman. See Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). 92 LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 42. 93 Ibid., 22. 94 Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire,” in Les Lieux de la mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1997), 25. All quotations of this text are author’s translation. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid., 35. 97 Ibid., 38. 79

Chapter 6 Erin Cooney, The Simultania Project, http://www.simultaniaproject.com Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), viii. 3 Harun Farocki, “Workers leaving the factory,” trans. Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim, 1 2

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in NachDruck/Imprint, (eds) Susanne Gaensheimer and Nicolaus Schafhausen (Berlin, Germany and New York: Verlag and Lukas & Sternberg, 2001), 232–44. 4 Harun Farocki, in Frances Guerin, “Interview with Harun Farocki,” ArtSlant (2009), http://www.artslant.com/ny/artists/rackroom/22329 5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 37. 6 Antonio Negri, “The constitution of time,” in Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarani (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 24. 7 Ibid., 27. 8 Ibid., 28–9. 9 Ibid., 29. 10 Ibid., 33–4. 11 On Peirce’s essays on time and logic, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge: MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 89–90. 12 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allan Sekula: Photography between discourse and document,” in Allan Sekula: Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 191. 13 George Baker, “Photography’s expanded field,” October 114 (Fall 2005): 120. 14 Nancy Davenport, website of Tenth International Istanbul Biennial, http:// www.iksftp.com/10b.iksv.org/english/sanatci.asp?sid=24 15 “Tata profile,” website of Tata Group, http://www.tatamotors.com/our_ world/profile.php 16 “A history of innovation,” website of Norsk Hydro Group, http://www.hydro. com/en/About-Hydro/Our-history/ 17 “Qatalum at full production,” Norsk Hydro Group, http://www.hydro.com/ en/Subsites/NorthAmerica/Media-room/News-and-press-releases/2006/ 18 http://www.hydro.com/en/Press-room/News/Archive/2009/03/ 19 Sergei Tretyakov, quoted in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From faktura to factography,” October 30 (Autumn 1984): 108. For Davenport’s reference to Tretyakov’s aesthetic, see Nicole Klagsbrun, “Nancy Davenport, Workers (leaving the factory),” ArtNews.org, http://artnews.org/nicoleklagsbrun/?exi =10907&Nicole_Klagsbrun&Nancy_Davenport 20 For an excellent analysis of the collective gaze and its relation to the development of the spherical panorama, see Ekaterina Degot, “Olga Chernysheva and the politics of the panorama” trans. David Riff, ArtMargins (May 5, 2006), http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/2-articles/ 160-olga-chernysheva-and-the-politics-of-the-panorama 21 Nancy Davenport, in discussion with the author, November 6, 2010. 22 Allan Sekula, quoted in Pascal Beausse, “The critical realism of Allan Sekula,” ArtPress 240 (November 1998): 23. 23 Sven Lütticken, “Transforming time,” Grey Room 41 (Fall 2010): 42. 24 Nancy Davenport, “In the studio: Nancy Davenport with David Coggins,” Art in America 98, no. 5 (May 2010): 83. 25 Ibid., 85.

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330 Notes

Chapter 7 Stan Douglas, “Diana Thater in conversation with Stan Douglas,” in Stan Douglas, Scott Watson, Diana Thater, and Carol J. Clover (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), 29. 2 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Interpretation (Baltimore, NJ and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 27. 3 Ibid., 57. 4 Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative time,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 169. Also see White, The Content of the Form, 52–3. 5 Mieke Bal, “Re-: killing time,” in Stan Douglas: Past Imperfect—Works 1986–2007, (eds) Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008), 71. 6 Ibid., 83. 7 Walter Mignolo, in Marina Gržinić and Walter Mignolo, “De-linking epistemology from capital and pluri-versality: a conversation with Walter Mignolo, part 3,” Reartikulacija 6 (2009): 7. 8 The title of Proust’s book has been more accurately translated by Penguin in 1995; it is now known as In Search of Lost Time. 9 Katrin Mundt, “Overture,” in Stan Douglas: Past Imperfect—Works 1986–2007, 186. 10 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 259. 11 Ibid., 22. 12 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 28. 13 Iris Dressler, “Specters of Douglas,” in Stan Douglas: Past Imperfect—Works 1986–2007, 20. 14 Ibid., 13. 15 Ibid., 18. 16 Stan Douglas, “Stan Douglas talks about Klatsassin, 2006,” Artforum 45, no. 2 (October 2006), 233. As Stan Douglas states about his Inconsolable Memories (2005) recombinant installation, “People’s impressions of the installation will be completely determined by when they walked in and out of it. […] Everyone will remember the work differently. One person will watch it for half an hour, another will watch it for another half an hour. One person will see one scene first, another will see a different scene first, and so on. There’s an interesting, mutating quality here—actually, it’s a lot like real life.” Quoted in David Balzer, “Stan Douglas’s Inconsolable Memories is a mind-bending history lesson,” April 25, 2006, http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/douglas.html 17 Douglas, “Stan Douglas talks about Klatsassin, 2006,” 233. 18 Dressler, “Specters of Douglas,” 20. 19 Ibid., and Ariane Beyn, “Because history could have gone one way or another,” in Stan Douglas: Klatsassin (Vienna, Austria: Secession, 2008), 35. 1

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Notes

331

George E. Lewis, “Stan Douglas’s Suspiria: genealogies of recombinant narrativity,” in Stan Douglas: Past Imperfect—Works 1986–2007, 47. 21 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 147 and 163. 22 Ibid., 163. 23 Ibid., 166. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 164–5. 26 Ibid., 161. 27 Ibid., 147. 28 Ibid., 165. 29 Ibid., 246. 30 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 77. 31 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putman (New York: Knopf, 1953), 27. 32 Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit 1. L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983), 17. All quotations from this text are author’s translation. 33 Ibid., 106. 34 Fernand Braudel, “History and the social sciences,” in On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 27. 35 Ibid., 28 and 33. 36 Jacques Revel, “Introduction,” in Fernand Braudel et l’histoire, ed. Jacques Revel (Paris, France: Hachette, 1999), 21. 37 Braudel, “History and the social sciences,” 33. 38 Ibid., 45. 39 Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5, no. 2 (1966): 124–5. 40 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002, [1956]), 90. 41 Osborne, The Politics of Time, 35. 42 Ibid., 42. 43 Adrian Searle, “Twelve tubs of popcorn and a gallon of Coke, please,” The Guardian, March 5, 2002, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/feature/ 0,,728606,00.html 44 Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), viii. 45 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, NJ and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 47. 46 Douglas, “Diana Thater in conversation with Stan Douglas,” 9. 47 Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 58. 48 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The end of the world,” trans. John Kelsey, in Melik Ohanian. Cosmograms, (eds) Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005), 77, 81, and 86. 20

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332 Notes Jean-Luc Nancy, “The sublime offering,” (1988), reprinted in The Sublime, ed. Simon Morley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), 47 and 50. 50 Douglas, “Diana Thater in conversation with Stan Douglas,” 9. 49

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations 9/11 2–3, 11 11’09”01-September 11 (Loach) 241 5262 Washington Boulevard (Lewis) 115, 147 aberrant movement 24–5 Abramovic, Marina: Great Wall Walk 73 absolute time 227–8 Accattone (Pasolini) 265 Acconci, Vito 186 Following Piece 73 Ackerman, Chantal 11 actualities 116, 134, 148, 149, 162 Agamben, Giorgio 4, 8, 40, 41, 104, 109, 120, 146, 251 agency 23, 298 age value 191–3, 194, 197–8, 199–200, 202 Airport (Lewis) 137–8, 139, 147, 150–1 Aitken, Doug 11 Alabaster Drawings (Dean) 187, 187–9, 188 Alberti, Leon Battista: De Pittura 75 Algonquin Park 133–4 Algonquin Park, Early March (Lewis) 134 Al-Kassim, Sami 185 Allende, Salvador 238, 239, 251, 252 Allport, Alan 234 Almond, Darren 11 Alÿs, Francis 11, 15, 43, 60, 63–4, 65, 70–87, 88, 89, 92, 104, 107, 109, 209, 296, 305 Bridge/Puente 76, 77 The Collector 70, 70

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Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River 76–7, 78–9, 79 Doppelgänger 71, 73, 79 The Green Line 71–2, 72, 76, 79 The Leak 76 Magnetic Shoes 70–1 Narcoturismo 71 Paradox of Praxis I 71, 71, 76 Politics of Rehearsal 67–8, 69 Rehearsal I 67, 68 Rehearsal II 67 Rehearsal series 67–9, 77 A Story of Deception 80–2, 81, 296 Tornado 82 When Faith Moves Mountains 76, 77, 78, 79, 87 Alzheimer’s disease 32 amodal perception 235 amortality 33 Amos Fortune Road (Buckingham) 164–5 anachronism 5, 42 analog film 166–75, 178–9, 180–1, 194, 197, 201, 202–3, 209, 210, 321n. 8 analytic philosophy 28–9, 37, 230 Antezzo, Matthew 43 Antonioni, Michelangelo: Red Desert 265 anxiety about time 38, 149 aphasia 32 Apocalyse Now 62 Appadurai, Arjun 30 Aranda, Julieta: Two Shakes, a Tick and a Jiffy 10

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334 Index You Had No Ninth of May! 10 Arasoughly, Alia 185 archaeology 42, 70 architecture, modernist 113–14, 115, 118, 121–7, 151–4, 168 “Archival impulse, An” (Foster) 42 archival practices 42–8, 57–8, 107, 108, 109, 201–2, 203, 204, 244–5, 293 Archive Fever 45–8 Aristotle 20, 146 “Artist as Historian, The” (Godfrey) 42–3, 106 art value 199 Atlas Group 11, 42, 43 attention 135–6, 137, 140, 155–8, 181 attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) 32 Augé, Marc 4 Bachelard, Gaston 145 Badiou, Alain 4, 29 Baer, Ulrich 41 Baker, George 270 Bal, Mieke 4, 41, 280, 287 Balcony, The (Manet) 112, 136 Balsa, Rubén Ramos 11 Banewl (Dean) 169, 189 Banner, Fiona 11, 62 The Nam 62 Bar at the Folies-Bergère, A (Manet) 112 Barnes, Lucinda 4 Barthes, Roland 116, 128 Bartleby, the Scrivener (Melville) 146 Bazin, André 136–7 Becher, Bernd 114 Becher, Hilla 114 Beecroft, Vanessa 11, 60 VB performances 60–1 Beharry, Shauna: Seeing is Believing 185 being and creation 25 Beistegui, Miguel de 16–17, 104 Bellour, Raymond 210 Benglis, Lynda 186 Benjamin, Walter 40–1, 149, 151, 158–60, 163, 164, 195 “On the life of students” 158

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Theses on the Philosophy of History 159–60 Bennett, Jill 41 Bergson, Henri 17, 23, 26, 27, 40, 105, 145, 149, 150, 256 Creative Evolution 205 Beuys, Joseph 169 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 154, 201 BIA see Bureau of Implicit Activities (BIA) (Trouvé) Big Bang theory 235, 236 binding problem 234, 240, 244–50, 257, 261–2, 305 Birnbaum, Daniel 42 Bloch, Marc 295 Blocker, Jane 42, 165 Blunt, Anthony 95 Boots (Dean) 169 Born on the Fourth of July 62 Boudreau, Olivia 11 Bourriaud, Nicolas 4 Bove, Carol 42 Bradley, Francis Herbert 230 Branzi, Andrea 110 Braudel, Fernand 287, 297 Breitz, Candice 11 Brentano, Franz 193 Bricklayers Arms (Lewis) 138, 139, 147, 151 Bridge/Puente (Alÿs) 76, 77 Broadway (Horsfield) 1, 1–3, 11 Bubble House (Dean) 168 Buchloh, Benjamin 270 Buckingham, Matthew 11, 42, 43 Amos Fortune Road 164–5 Bulloch, Angela 11 Bureau of Implicit Activities (BIA) (Trouvé) 53–9, 63, 64, 66, 67, 87, 109, 174, 209, 298, 304 Administrative Module 53–4, 55 Archives Module 54 Ghost Matrix 53 Phantom Matrix 53 Reminiscences Module 53, 54 Sand Cell 53 Slips of the Tongue Module 53

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Index Strike Module 54 Titles Module 53 Waiting Module no. 1 54, 55 Butler, Judith 86 Byrne, Gerard 42 Cage, John 174–5, 177–8, 180, 182, 203–9 Calle, Sophie: La Filiature 73 Filiatures parisiennes 73 Suite Vénitienne, 73 Camus, Albert: Sysiphus 67 Carlson, Trevor 177 Castillo, José 84 Centrale (Lewis) 147 Certeau, Michel de 74–5, 107, 164 chance 149, 160, 174, 178, 207, 208 Chaplin, Charlie: Modern Times 265 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon 155 Portrait of the Son of M. Godefroy, Jeweller, Watching a Top Spin 135 Chateaubriand, François-René 195 Chida, Etsuko 217 Chile, 238–58, 328n. 86 see also September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007 (Ohanian) Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Deleuze) 24–7 Circle in Scotland, A (Long) 98 Citizen Kane (Welles) 24 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) 201 Clark, T. J.: Farewell to an Idea 126–7 Clash by Night (Lang) 265 Clay, E. R. 141 Clearbout, David 11 Clock (Marclay) 321n. 8 cognitive science 234, 245, 247, 249 Cold Morning (Lewis) 125 Coleman, James 11 Collector, The (Alÿs) 70, 70 Comaroff, Jean 30 Comaroff, John 30 communication studies 29–31 Complexity and Contradiction in Modern Architecture (Venturi) 122–3 Connor, Steven 189–90

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consciousness, time see time consciousness consciousness/unconsciousness split 284, 285, 287 contemporaneity 5, 14, 17, 48–52, 76, 155, 175, 211–12, 214–15, 237, 245, 257, 259, 260, 304, 305 Content of the Form, The (White) 279 contingency 148–51, 153, 172–5, 182, 195, 198, 202, 205, 207–9, 305 continuity 15, 120, 140, 141, 142, 145–6, 150, 152, 155, 157–8, 163, 168, 172, 213, 271, 274, 300–1, 305 Cooney, Erin: The Simultania Project 259–61, 264 Cooper, Frederick 35, 51–2 Corps Étranger (Hatoum) 185 cosmogram 235 Cotter, Holland 203 Couchot, Edmond 4 Coup d’État, The (Guzmán) 215, 238, 239, 255 Crary, Jonathan 135–6, 231 creation and being 25 Creative Evolution (Bergson) 205 Crewe, Jonathan 41 Crowhurst, Donald 168 Cunningham, Merce see Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (Dean) cybernetics 38–9 Dalmia, Yashodhara 41 Damisch, Hubert 75, 117, 127 Dancer in the Dark (von Trier) 265 Darmstädter Werkblock (Dean) 169, 170 Davenport, Nancy 11, 15 Weekend Campus 270 Workers (leaving the factory) 210, 262, 266, 270–8, 271, 273, 275, 298, 305 Davies, Paul 227, 229 Davis, Whitney 147, 303 Day and Night and Day and ... (Geys) 45, 47, 48

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336 Index Day for Night (Dean) 169 Dean, Tacita 15, 42, 43, 166–210, 305 Alabaster Drawings 187, 187–9, 188 Banewl 169, 189 Boots 169 Bubble House 168 From Columbus, Ohio to the Partially Buried Woodshed 202 Darmstädter Werkblock 169, 170 Day for Night 169 Disappearance at Sea 168, 169 Disappearance at Sea II 168 Fernsehturm 10–11, 11, 169 Green Ray 169, 180 Himmel/See 189 Kodak 166–8, 167, 169, 200–1, 266 Mario Metz 169 Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS 169, 174–86, 176, 179, 183, 190–1, 192, 194–5, 197–8, 198, 200, 202, 203–10, 204, 278, 305 Michael Hamburger 169 Painted Trees 189 Palast 168 Pie 180 Presentation Sisters 169 Prisoner Pear 169 Sea Inventory Drawings 186–7 Section Cinema 169 Sixteen Blackboards 186 Sound Mirrors 168 Still Life 169 The Sun Quartet: Diamond Ring 169 Teignmouth Electron 168–9, 170 Totality 169 Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty 169, 202 death 33 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs) 122 death drive 201–2, 203, 204 de Boer, Manon 11 Debord, Guy 72–3 decolonialization 50

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Deep Play (Farocki) 262–5, 263 Deer Hunter, The 62 Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Le (Manet) 112 Deleuze, Gilles 4, 34, 37, 40, 51, 105, 268 Cinema 2: The Time-Image 24–7 Deller, Jeremy 43 De Pittura (Alberti) 75 depression 32 Derrida, Jacques 29, 57, 201–2, 204 Deserter, The (Pudovkin) 265 Devauz, Julien 82 Diderot, Denis 195 Didi-Huberman, Georges 4, 42 digital animation 274 digital media 30 digital technology 180–1 Dion, Mark 11, 42 disappearance 168–72, 180, 181, 190, 191, 194, 199, 201, 202 see also loss Disappearance at Sea (Dean) 168, 169 Disappearance at Sea II (Dean) 168 discontinuity 40–1, 120, 140, 141, 145–6, 150, 152, 155, 157–8, 163, 213 distraction 135–6, 137, 140, 155, 157, 181 Doane, Mary Ann 116, 149, 150, 172 Emergence of Cinematic Time, The 148 documentary phase 107–9 Doherty, Willie 11 Dolev, Yuval 5, 6, 60, 222, 226, 243, 301 Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (Alÿs) 76–7, 78–9, 79 Doppelgänger (Alÿs) 71, 73, 79 Dosse, François 34, 40 double time 283, 285, 286, 287 Douglas, Stan 10, 15, 42, 237, 250, 279, 280–305 Inconsolable Memories 288, 330n. 16 Journey into Fear 288 Klatsassin 109, 287, 288–300, 289, 290, 294, 298, 302–4

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Index Nu•tka• 297, 302 Overture 45, 46, 46–7, 48, 281–8, 284, 301 Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin B.C.’s 296–7 Sandmann Der 300, 300–1 Suspiria 288 Win, Place or Show 288 Downtown Tilt, Zoom and Pan (Lewis) 124, 129, 131–2, 132, 138, 147 Dressler, Iris 288 Durant, Sam 42, 43 duration 2, 23, 25, 26, 105, 117, 135, 136, 140–3, 145, 163, 185, 205 see also longue durée dyslexia 32 E. Horsfield. Well Street. East London. August 1987 (Horsfield) 45–6, 47, 48 Eagleman, David 145 East Paris Emotion Map (Nold) 74 ecologization 16, 64–5, 87, 110, 209, 211, 304 editing cut 150–1 Einstein, Albert: special theory of relativity 212, 216, 220, 226–8, 230 Eisenstaedt, Jean 220 Emergence of Cinematic Time, The (Doane) 148 empathy 254–6 Empire (Hardt and Negri) 268 Engel, Andreas K. 245–6, 247 Enlightenment 3, 195, 196, 305 environmentalism 35 Enwezor, Okwui 42, 45–8 Esche, Charles 135 eternalism 224 see also tense/tenseless Et in Arcadia Ego see Shepherds of Arcadia, The (Poussin) Europa 51 (Rossellini) 265 event, philosophy of the 29 everyday 116, 123–4 excessive time 66–7 expectation 16, 103–4, 159–60 experience 16, 103–4, 159–60

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337

Export, Valie: From the Underdog File 73 extendedness 119–20, 141, 147, 155, 163, 211, 213 failure 62–3 Fan, Fiona 43 Farewell to an Idea (Clark) 126–7 Farocki, Harum 11, 15, 42 Deep Play 262–5, 263 Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades 262, 265–7, 266, 267, 298 Fast, Omer 43 Fer, Briony 180, 181 Ferguson, Russell 77 Fernsehturm (Dean) 10–11, 11, 169 Ferris, David 160 Fight, The (Lewis) 147 La Filiature (Calle) 73 Filiatures parisiennes (Calle) 73 film: actualities 116, 134, 148, 149, 162 analog 166–75, 178–9, 180–1, 194, 197, 201, 202–3, 209, 210, 321n. 8 and contingency 148–51, 153 détournement 116, 117 digital post-production of 117 digital technology 180–1 end of 115, 174 intermediality of 116, 119, 120, 127–36, 143, 174 intertemporality of 119, 120, 127–39, 174 as modernist remnant 114–15, 120 photographic dimension of 116, 128–33, 168, 274 and pictorial stillness 116–17, 133–6, 168 and Quattrocento perspective 117–18 and rationalization 148–9 and temporal passing 166, 171–5, 181, 184, 186, 190, 191, 194–5, 196, 197–8, 201, 202–3, 205, 208

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338 Index viewing setting 118 see also line constructions; walking performances Final Days 103 Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary 112 Following Piece (Acconci) 73 Ford Motor Company 272 fort-ga game 154, 260 Fortune, Amos 165 forwardness, suspension of see suspension of forwardness Foster, Hal 4, 42, 43, 201, 244–5 “An archival impulse” 42 Fourn, François 164 Freud, Sigmund 256, 260 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 154, 201 Civilization and Its Discontents 201 “A note upon the ‘mystic writing-pad’” 201 “The uncanny” 301 Friday, Jonathan: “The ontology of the photographic image” 136 Fried, Michael 3, 135, 295 Friedberg, Anne 115, 151 Virtual Window, The 232 Friedman, William 31 From Columbus Ohio to the Partially Buried Woodshed (Dean) 202 From the Underdog File (Export) 73 Full Metal Jacket 62 future 5–6, 14, 66, 102–5 see also temporal passing Gaillard, Cyprien 11 Garson, James 249 Gaudreault, André 231 Gelder, Tim van 143 geography 34, 35, 37, 233 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 8 Geys, Jef: Day and Night and Day and ... 45, 47, 48 Gibbons, Joan 41 Gibson, James J. 86, 97 Gillick, Liam 11 globalization 30, 50, 84, 237, 262, 268–9, 271–2, 274, 326n. 54

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Godfrey, Mark 42–3, 48, 68, 78–9 “Artist as Historian, The” 42–3, 106 Goldenrod (Lewis) 147, 148 Gómez-Barris, Macarena 251 Gomis, Jean 217 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix 11 Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (Paik) 260 Gordon, Douglas 11 Graham, Dan 11 Great Wall Walk (Abramovic and Ulay) 73 Green, Renée 42, 43 Green Line, The (Alÿs) 71–2, 72, 76, 79 Green Ray (Dean) 169, 180 Griffith, D. W.: Intolerance 265 Ground Zero 2–3, 11 Group of Seven 133 Groys, Boris 65, 66–7, 69, 75 Grush, Rick 143 Gubser, Michael 193, 194 Guerin, Frances 267 Guzmán, Patrick, 328n. 86 Coup d’État, The 215, 238, 239, 255 Obstinate Memory 241 Habermas, Jürgen 66, 75, 159–60 Haj-Ismail, Roula 185 Hallward, Peter 25–6, 29, 40 Hamburger Hill 62 Hannah, Adad 11 Hansen, Mark 4 Hardt, Michael: Empire 268 Harper Road (Lewis) 115 Hartog, François 13–14, 34, 103, 212, 231 Harvey, David 30, 35, 99 Hashmi, Salima 41 Hatoum, Mona 186 Corps Étranger 185 Unemployed 74 Hayles, Katherine 156–7, 207, 208 Heidegger, Martin 23, 25, 140 Heygate Estate works (Lewis) 125–6 Children’s Games 125–6, 147 Tenement Yard 125, 126 Hidden (Ohanian) 8–9, 9, 10, 213–14, 232, 233, 261

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Index Himmel/See (Dean) 189 Hirschhorn, Thomas 42 historical narrative 250, 258, 279–305 historical time 5, 13–14, 17, 34, 40–1, 57, 88, 102–5, 109, 119, 211, 258, 261, 305 historical value 199–200, 202 historicity: regimes of see regimes of historicity and temporality 7–8, 9, 15, 144, 158–65 and temporal passing 5–7, 12, 50, 181, 198, 244 historiography 43–5, 106–9, 160–1, 163, 253–5, 279–80 history: and the everyday 124 and loss of time 65–6 and memory 256–7 and modernism 123, 127 and postmodernism 123 and time 5 see also historical narrative; historical time Hoffmann, E. T. A. 301 Horelli, Laura 43 Horn, Roni 11 Horsfield, Craigie 42 Broadway, 1, 1–3, 11 E. Horsfield. Well Street. East London. August 1987 45–6, 47, 48 Hoy, David Couzens 8, 20, 23, 142 Hsieh, Tehching 11 Hubble, Edwin 235 human time 226 Husserl, Edmund 23, 121, 141–3, 144, 145, 155, 193, 299 Huygue, Pierre 43 Huyssen, Andreas 4, 41, 195 I Ching 207, 208 impotentiality 146 Inconsolable Memories (Douglas) 288, 330n. 16 indeterminacy 203–8, 304 indexicality 149 indiscernibility 24–5, 27 indivisibility of time 26

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inhabitability 114, 125, 126, 210 Innerarity, Daniel 78, 104 In Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) 46, 47, 282–3 intentionality 142–3 interested time 19, 26, 27, 28, 39–40, 50, 82 intermediality 116, 119, 120, 127–36, 140, 143, 174 interminability 281, 286, 287, 288, 296, 297–301, 304, 305 intertemporality 119, 120, 127–39, 174 Intolerance (Griffith) 265 Iron Man, The (Wajda) 265 Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed 196 I Want a Baby (Tretyakov) 276 Jaar, Alfredo 11 Jacobs, Jane: The Death and Life of Great American Cities 122 Jaguar Cars Ltd 272 James, William: The Principles of Psychology 141 Jameson, Fredric 30 Jammer, Max 228, 230 Janssens, Veronica 11 Johnstone, Stephen, 123–4 Jones, Amelia 184, 186 Jones, Caroline A. 206 Joseph, Branden W. 177, 205, 206 Journey into Fear (Douglas) 288 Journey to the Moon (Méliès) 273 Kant, Immanuel 20, 22, 302 Kanwar, Amar 11 Katz, Jonathan 206 Katz, Leamdro 11 Kawara, On 11 Khan, Idris 11 Killers, The (Siodmak) 265 Klatsassin (Douglas) 109, 287, 288–300, 289, 290, 294, 298, 302–4 Klein, Étienne 19, 20, 95 Kodak (Dean) 166–8, 167, 169, 200–1, 266

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340 Index Koester, Joachim 11, 42 Koselleck, Reinhart 16, 34, 48–9, 66, 102–3, 104, 230–1, 286 Kosík, Karel 124 Kosslyn, Stephen M. 234 Kracauer, Siegfried 151 Kuntzel, Thierry 11 Kurosawa, Akira 291–2 labor 33–4, 265–78, 298, 305 LaCapra, Dominick 253, 254–6 Laclau, Ernesto 105–6 Lacroix, Sophie 195–6 Lafontaine, Céline 33 Lamartine, Alphonse de 7 Lamelas, David 11 Lanes and Double Tracks (Long) 98 Lang, Fritz: Clash by Night 265 Metropolis 265 Laocoön (Lessing) 3 Lapointe, Lyne 9 Larrain, Jorge 82–4 lateralization of linear perspective 86–102, 110, 297, 305 Latin America 76, 80–6 see also Chile Latour, Bruno 88, 114 Lauzon, Claudette 41 Lawson Estate, The (Lewis) 124–5, 147 Leak, The (Alÿs), 76 Le Corbusier: Plan Voisin 122 Lee, Pamela 4, 38, 39 Lefebvre, Henri 124 Le Goff, Jacques 164 Leigh, Gustavo 251 Lemaître, Georges 235 Leonard, Zoe 42 Le Poidevin, Robin 137 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 136, 264 Laocoön, 3 Lewallen, Constance 206 Lewis, Mark 11, 15, 111–39, 140, 141, 143, 144–6, 147–8, 149–55, 157, 159, 161–5, 168, 174, 181, 213, 258, 299, 304, 305 5262 Washington Boulevard 115, 147 Airport 137–8, 139, 147, 150–1 Algonquin Park, Early March 134

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Bricklayers Arms 138, 139, 147, 151 Centrale 147 Children’s Games 125–6, 147 Cold Morning 125 Downtown Tilt, Zoom and Pan 124, 129, 131–2, 132, 138, 147 Fight, The 147 Goldenrod 147, 148 Harper Road 115 Heygate Estate works 125–6 Lawson Estate, The 124–5, 147 Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night, Skating 123, 125 North Circular 124, 125, 129, 130, 135, 147 Outside the National Gallery 138, 147 Pitch, The 114, 115 Prater Hauptaller: Down and Dusk 115 Queensway: Pan and Zoo, 129–31, 130, 131, 147 Rear Projection: Molly Parker 115, 123 Roundabout 138 A Sense of the End 115 Smithfield 113, 151–2 Spadina: Reverse Dolly, Zoom, Nude 111–14, 112, 113, 116, 117, 123, 126, 147 TD Centre, 54th Floor 151, 152–4, 153, 154 Tenement Yard 125, 126 Two Impossible Films 115 Upside Down Touch of Evil 115 Walworth Road 147 Willesden Laundrette 129, 132–3, 133, 136, 147, 161–3, 162 Lied der Mignon (Schubert) 67–8 linearity, suspension of 211 linear perspective 59–60, 63–4, 69, 75–82, 104, 109, 216, 296 lateralization of 86–102, 110, 297, 305 line constructions 76–80, 97–9 Line Made by Walking, A (Long) 97–9, 98 Line of Destiny (Muñoz) 61

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Index Lissitzky, El 276 Lloyd, Dan 143 Loach, Ken: 11’09”01-September 11 241 Locke, John 22 Lockwood, Michael 224–5, 228–9 Long, Richard: A Circle in Scotland 98 Lanes and Double Tracks 98 Line Made by Walking, A 97–9, 98 Positive Negative 98 Six-day Walk over All the Roads, A 98 longue durée 16, 281, 287, 297–8, 299 Lorenz, Hendrik 228 loss 65, 66, 149, 166, 260 see also disappearance Lumière brothers 116, 134, 148, 149, 162 La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon 265, 273 Ma, Ming-Yuen S. 185 Mac Low, Jackson 207 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 112 Magnetic Shoes (Alÿs) 70–1 Manet, Édouard: The Balcony 112, 136 Bar at the Folies-Bergère, A 112 Le déjeuner sur l’herbe 112 Marclay, Chris 11, 245 Clock, 321n. 8 Marin, Louis 87, 93, 94–6 Mario Metz (Dean) 169 Marks, Laura 191 Skin of the Film, The 185–6 Mars Clock, The (Ohanian) 235–6 Marx, Karl 33, 268, 269 Massey, Doreen 105–6 Matta-Clark, Gordon 39 Splitting 217, 231 May, Jon 29, 33 McCarthy, Paul 186 McLuhan, Marshall 186 McQueen, Steve 11 McTaggart, J. M. E. 22, 28 “The unreality of time” 222–4 Measure of Time 4 media skin 182–90, 191, 197, 200, 202, 208 Medina, Cuauhtémoc 68, 80, 82

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Méliès, George: Journey to the Moon 273 Mellor, D. H. 226 melody 142–3 Melville, Herman: Bartleby, the Scrivener 146 memory 34, 41, 48, 103, 159–60, 240–2, 251–3, 254, 256–7, 292 Memory, History, Forgetting (Ricoeur) 250, 293–5 Mendoza, Cesar 251 Mensch, James 143 Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (Dean) 169, 174–86, 176, 179, 183, 190–1, 192, 194–5, 197–8, 198, 200, 202, 203–10, 204, 278, 305 Merino, José Toribio 251 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 23, 140 Metropolis (Lang) 265 Mexico City 84–5 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 276 Michael Hamburger (Dean) 169 mind and time 20, 23 Miniature Long March (Qin Ga) 74 mirages 80–2 Model of the Bureau of Implicit Activities (Trouvé) 58 Modern Architecture (Museum of Modern Art) 121 modernism: and architecture 113–14, 115, 118, 121–7, 151–4, 168 definition of 121 failure of 122, 126–7, 149 and history 123, 127 and modernity 121, 127 potentiality of 146–58, 162–3 remnants of 114–15, 120, 121–7, 138, 146, 158, 164, 174, 305 modernity: and the future 66 and historical time 88, 102–3, 109, 119 in Latin America 76, 80–6 and loss of time 65–6 and modernism 121, 127 and the past 66 and postcolonialism 34-5

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342 Index and the present 66, 287 return to 280–1, 286–7 and the ruin 195, 197 and the temporal turn 16–17 and tradition 160 see also regimes of historicity Modern Times (Chaplin) 265 Mofokeng, Santu 43 Monk, Jonathan 43 Monsiváis, Carlos 85 montage 259, 260–78 monuments 191–4, 197–8, 199–203 Mootoo, Shani 185 Morality and Architecture (Watkins) 122 Morelli, François: Translantic Walk 74 Morin, Edgar 33 Morton, Tom 89–90 Mouradian, Gaguik 217 mourning 2, 168, 171, 185, 253–4 Muller, Dave 43 Mulvey, Laura 158 Mundt, Katrin 283 Muñoz, Oscar 60, 61 Line of Destiny 61 Project for a Memorial 61, 62 Nam, The (Banner) 62 Nancy, Jean-Luc 17, 29, 233, 237, 303–4 Narcoturismo (Alÿs) 71 narrative, historical see historical narrative Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night, Skating (Lewis) 123, 125 Negri, Antonio 33–4, 37, 262, 265, 268–9, 277 Empire 268 Time for Revolution 268 neoliberalism 30, 83–4 neuroscience 31–2, 143–4, 145, 245–6, 247, 249 new time 23, 103, 160 Newton, Helmut 61 Newton, Isaac 20, 227, 228 Nietzsche, Friedrich 23 Nochlin, Linda 7–8 Noë, Alva 86, 140, 234, 248, 249

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Nold, Christian: East Paris Emotion Map 74 nonintentionality 205, 207, 208, 209, 210 nonlinearity 284–5, 287, 291, 292 non-time 56–9, 65, 69, 82, 109 Nora, Pierre 256–7 Norsk Hydro 272 North Circular (Lewis) 124, 125, 129, 130, 135, 147 Norwegian Pollution Control Authority (STF) 272 “Note upon the ‘mystic writing-pad’, A” (Freud) 201 now time 149, 158–60 Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright (van der Werve) 87–92, 89, 90, 91, 96–7, 98, 104–5, 297 Nummer negen. The day I didn’t turn with the world (van der Werve) 99–102, 100, 101, 102 Nu•tka• (Douglas) 297, 302 Nyman, Michael 206 objectivity 24, 37–8, 193 obsolescence 166–72, 194, 209 Obstinate Memory (Guzmán) 241 Ohanian, Melik 15, 48, 211–22, 226, 229–58, 263 Hidden 8–9, 9, 10, 213–14, 232, 233, 261 Mars Clock, The 235–6 Peripheral Communities 213, 214, 232, 233, 261, 267 September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007 215, 216, 230, 234, 238–58, 241, 242, 261, 281, 286, 305 Seven Minutes Before 179, 214–15, 215, 216, 217–21, 218, 219, 230, 231–5, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 244, 257, 261, 298, 301, 305 O’Neill, Eugene 3, 7, 13, 14, 299 “On the life of students” (Benjamin) 158 “Ontology of the photographic image, The” (Friday) 136

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Index ontology of time 224, 226, 243 opticality 12, 110, 117, 215–16, 238, 242 O’Regan, Kevin 249 Osborne, Peter 17, 159, 160, 287, 299 Outside the National Gallery (Lewis) 138, 147 Overture (Douglas) 45, 46, 46–7, 48, 281–8, 284, 301 Paik, Nam June, 260 Good Morning, Mr. Orwell 260 Wrap Around the World 260 Painted Trees (Dean) 189 Palast (Dean) 168 Pan-American (Ross) 74 Panofsky, Erwin 93, 94, 95 panorama 231–2, 235, 236, 257 Paradox of Praxis I (Alÿs) 71, 71, 76 Parkinson’s disease 32 Parreno, Philippe 11 Pasolini, Pier Paolo: Accattone 265 passage of time see temporal passing past 5–6, 14 and historical time 102–5 and modernity 66 recent 114–15, 118, 120, 137 see also temporal passing Peirce, Charles Sanders 269 perception: amodal 235 and the binding problem 234, 245–50, 257 and ecology 86, 88 and globalization 237 phenomenology of, 3, 120–1, 138, 140–1, 142–3, 144–5, 146, 147, 155, 157–8, 159, 163, 305 and potentiality 118–20 subjectivist dimension of 192, 193–4, 292 temporality of 12, 180–1 Perec, Georges 124 Peripheral Communities (Ohanian) 213, 214, 232, 233, 261, 267 perspective, linear see linear perspective perspective, Quattrocento see Quattrocento perspective

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Petersen, Steven E. 155, 235 Petty, Sheila 41 phenomenology 142, 226 of perception, 3, 120–1, 138, 140–1, 142–3, 144–5, 146, 147, 157–8, 159, 163, 305 Philips, Ian B. 181, 184 physical time 20–1, 172, 226 Pie (Dean) 180 Pietropaolo, Francesca 56 Pinochet, Augusto 240, 251, 252 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 195 Pitch, The (Lewis) 114, 115 Plate, Jan 249 Platoon 62 Polder series (Trouvé) 58–9, 66 political ecology 35 Pöppel, Ernst 6 Portrait of the Son of M. Godefroy, Jeweller, Watching a Top Spin (Chardin) 135 Positive Negative (Long) 98 Posner, Michael I. 155, 235 postcolonial studies 34–5 postmodernism 123 post-mortal society 33 post-opticality 216, 217, 237 potentiality 16, 40, 113, 114–15, 119–21, 126, 127–8, 137, 140, 146–58, 162–3, 165, 174, 198, 211, 305 Poussin, Nicolas: The Shepherds of Arcadia 93, 93–6, 94 Prater Hauptaller: Down and Dusk (Lewis) 115 present 5–6, 12–13 depreciation of 65 duration of 2 extended 119–20, 141, 147, 155, 163, 211, 213 and historical time 102–5 and modernity 66, 287 specious, 141, 144 see also temporal passing Presentation Sisters (Dean) 169 present era 103–4 presentism 13–15, 49, 212, 213, 224 see also tense/tenseless

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344 Index preservation and renovation 35–6, 200, 203 Prigogine, Ilya 208 Principles of Psychology, The (James) 141 Prisoner Pear (Dean) 169 Pritchett, James 205, 209 productivity 57, 59, 97, 104, 110, 154, 195, 296, 297 Project for a Memorial (Muñoz) 61, 62 Proust, Marcel 23, 256 In Remembrance of Things Past 46, 47, 282–3 public time 33, 78, 250 Pudovkin, Vsevolod: The Deserter 265 Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin B.C.’s (Douglas) 296–7 Putnam, Hilary 228, 230 Qin Ga: Miniature Long March 74 Quandt, James 167–8 Quattrocento perspective 117–18 Queensway: Pan and Zoom (Lewis) 129–31, 130, 131, 147 Raad, Walid, 11 42, 43 Rancière, Jacques 2, 4, 42, 118, 210 Rashomon 288, 291–2 rationalization 148–9, 172–5, 182, 191, 194, 197, 202, 207–8 real time 21, 148, 150, 280 Rear Projection: Molly Parker (Lewis) 115, 123 Red Desert (Antonioni) 265 reenactment 41 regimes of historicity: and contemporaneity 50, 51 ecology 64–5, 88 and historical narrative 279–80, 296 longue durée 281, 304 modern 5, 57, 63, 88, 92, 118, 166, 174, 181, 191, 197, 202, 212, 285, 286, 299–300, 302 potentiality 118–19, 146 ruination 171, 175, 191, 195, 197, 202, 210 simultaneity 211, 257–8, 262

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and suspension of forwardness 10–12, 15, 92 and the temporal turn 12–17, 49 Rehearsal series (Alÿs) 67–9, 77 Politics of Rehearsal 67–8, 69 Rehearsal I 67, 68 Rehearsal II 67 Reifenscheid, Beate 41 Reitdijk, C. W. 230 relativity, special theory of 212, 216, 220, 226–8, 230 repetition 67–9, 77, 86, 87, 285, 286, 287 retention 142, 144–5, 154, 155–8, 163 return movement 280–1, 286–7 Revonsuo, Antti 246, 247 Ricoeur, Paul 2, 34, 107, 108–9, 164, 244, 279–80 Memory, History, Forgetting 250, 293–5 Riegl, Alois 175, 185, 191–4, 197–8, 199–200, 202 Riley, Bridget 38 Roelstraete, Dieter 42, 43–5, 97 Roemer, Ole 220 Rogoff, Irit 15, 16 Rohe, Mies van der 122, 152 Rosenzweig, Franz 40 Roskies, Adina 245 Rosler, Martha 39 Ross, Douglas: Pan-America 74 Rossellini, Roberto: Europa 51 265 Roth, Michael S. 196–7 Roundabout (Lewis) 138 Ruff, Thomas 42 ruination 16, 171, 173–5, 182, 190, 191, 194–8, 199, 200–1, 202, 207–8, 209, 210, 211, 305 Ruins, The (Volney) 196 Ruskin, John 203 Sala, Anri 11, 42, 43 Salcedo, Doris: Shibboleth 243 Saltzman, Lisa 41 Sanabria, Felipe 70 Sandmann, Der (Douglas) 300, 300–1 Schilder, Paul, 189

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Index schizophrenia 32 Schneider, Rebecca 41 Schreber, Moritz 301 Schrebergärten 301 Schubert, Franz: Lied der Mignon 67–8 Sea Inventory Drawings (Dean) 186–7 Searle, Adrian 301 Section Cinema (Dean) 169 Seeing is Believing (Beharry) 185 Sekula, Allan: Untitled Slide Sequence 276 sense experience 22 Sense of the End, A (Lewis) 115 September 11, 1973_Santiago, Chile, 2007 (Ohanian) 215, 216, 230, 234, 238, 241, 242, 261, 281, 286, 305 Serres, Michel 189 Seven Minutes Before (Ohanian) 179, 214–15, 215, 216, 217–21, 218, 219, 230, 231–5, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 244, 257, 261, 298, 301, 305 Shäfer, Wolf 237 Shepherds of Arcadia, The (Poussin) 93, 93–6, 94 Shibboleth (Salcedo) 243 Sholem, Gershom 40 Shovlin, Jamie 43 simultaneity16, 211–58, 259–78 Simultania Project, The (Cooney) 259–61, 264 Siodmak, Robert: The Killers 265 Situationist 72–3, 124 Six-day Walk over All the Roads, A (Long) 98 Sixteen Blackboards (Dean) 186 skin 182–90 Skin of the Film, The (Marks) 185–6 Smith, Edward E. 234 Smith, Terry 17, 49–51 Smithfield (Lewis) 113, 151–2 Smithson, Robert 38, 39, 202 Spiral Jetty 202, 217 social networking 259 social time 32–3 sociology 32–4

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Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon, La (Lumière brothers) 265, 273 sound see visual/aural split Sound Mirrors (Dean) 168 space and time 29–30, 105–6, 117–18, 216, 220, 227, 228, 231–2, 233–4, 269, 274 space-time compression 99 Spadina: Reverse Dolly, Zoom, Nude (Lewis) 111–14, 112, 113, 116, 117, 123, 126, 147 specious present 141, 144 Spiral Jetty (Smithson) 202, 217 Spitzer, Leo 41 Splitting (Matta-Clark) 217, 231 Stengers, Isabelle 208 Stern, Steve 240, 244, 252–3 Stiegler, Bernard 181, 245 Technics and Time 30, 155–7 Still Life (Dean) 169 stillness 116–17, 133–6, 168, 177–8, 179, 180–3, 186, 190, 209–10, 271, 276–8 see also suspension of forwardness Story of Deception, A (Alÿs) 80–2, 81, 296 Sturken, Marita 4 Sturm, Hendrik 74 subjectivity 20, 22, 24, 36–8, 98, 110, 140, 192, 193–4, 292 sublime 16, 48, 50, 88, 167, 281, 287, 302–5 succession 23, 141 Suite Vénitienne (Calle) 73 Sujir, Leila 185 Sun Quartet: Diamond Ring, The (Dean) 169 suspension of forwardness 7–12, 15–17, 18, 41, 61, 63–4, 75, 90–2, 140, 171–2, 179, 180–2, 211, 242, 243, 258, 287 see also stillness suspension of linearity 211, 212, see also nonlinearity Suspiria (Douglas) 288 Sussman, Eve 11 Sysiphus (Camus) 67 Szeman, Imre 326n. 54

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346 Index Tata Motors 272 TD Centre, 54th Floor (Lewis) 151, 152–4, 153, 154 Technics and Time (Stiegler) 30, 155–7 Teignmouth Electron (Dean) 168–9, 170 temporal difference 273, 274, 276–7 temporality: and historicity 7–8, 9, 15, 144, 158–65 and history 40–1 of perception 12, 180–1 as real time 21, 148, 150, 280 vs. time 18, 21–2 see also intertemporality; time temporal passing: and archival practices 43–4, 47 extendedness 119–20 and film 99–100, 118, 166, 171–5, 181, 184, 186, 190, 191, 194–5, 196, 197–8, 201, 202–3, 205, 208 finitude of 36–7 and historicity 5–7, 12, 118, 198, 244, 305 as interminable 281, 304 perception of 31–2, 141, 227 as a remnant 171, 173, 174, 191, 205 shrinking of 30, 31 and subjectivity 23 and unproductiveness 56–7, 60, 86–7, 87 see also duration; tense/tenseless; time consciousness temporal turn: and the archival impulse 42–8 and contemporaneity 49–52 and discontinuity 23, 40–1 and historiography 43–5 and lateralization 95–7 and modernity 16–17 as non-progressive 6 and regimes of historicity 12–17, 19, 49, 304–5 and the sublime 302 and suspension of forwardness 15–17

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and technology 30 tense/tenseless 28–9, 212–13, 221, 222–31, 240, 242, 243, 257, 258 testimony 2–3, 108, 109, 290–5 Theses on the Philosophy of History (Benjamin) 159–60 Thompson, Evan 143 Thomson, Tom 133 Thrift, Nigel 29, 33 time: absolute 227–8 anxiety about 38, 149 and change 20, 23 definition of 18, 19–24 distortions of 31 excessive 66–7 hierarchization of 20–2 and history 5, 65–6 human 226 indivisibility of 26 interested 19, 26, 27, 39–40, 50, 82 and labor 268–70 liberation of 22 loss of 65, 66, 149 measurement of 48 and mind 20, 23 non-phenomenal 18, 21–2, 23 objective accounts of 37–8 ontology of 224, 226, 243 phenomenal 18, 20, 21–2, 23 physical 20–1, 172, 226 physics of 212 psychological 20–1 real 21, 148, 150, 280 recent exhibitions 4–5 and sense experience 22 and space 29–30, 105–6, 117–18, 216, 220, 227, 228, 231–2, 233–4, 269, 274 subjective accounts of 37–8, 140 vs. temporality 18, 21–2 see also duration; historical time; temporal passing; temporal turn; temporality time consciousness 121, 140, 141–5, 155–6, 299 Time for Revolution (Negri) 268

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Index time gap 45–6 time-image 24–7 time studies 18–19, 28–36 analytic philosophy 28–9 communication studies 29–31 digital media 30 history 34 neuroscience 31–2 philosophy of the event 29 political ecology 35 postcolonial studies 34–5 preservation and renovation 35–6 psychology 31 sociology 32–4 Tornado (Alÿs) 82 Totality (Dean) 169 tradition and modernity 160 Translantic Walk (Morelli) 74 trauma 41, 253–7 Tretyakov, Sergei 275 I Want a Baby 276 Trier, Lars von: Dancer in the Dark 265 Trouvé, Tatiana 11, 15, 60, 69, 74, 82, 104, 107 Administrative Module 53–4, 55 Archives Module 54 Bureau of Implicit Activities (BIA) 53–9, 63, 64, 66, 67, 87, 109, 174, 209, 298, 304 Ghost Matrix 53 Model of the Bureau of Implicit Activities 58 Phantom Matrix 53 Polder series 58–9, 66 Reminiscences Module 53, 54 Sand Cell 53 Slips of the Tongue Module 53 Strike Module 54 Titles Module 53 Waiting Module no. 1 54, 55 Truman, Harry 68 Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (Dean) 169, 202 Tsilhqot’in insurgency 289–91, 298 Tudor, David 177 Turetzky, Philip 21, 22, 142, 143, 223

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Two Impossible Films (Lewis) 115 Two Shakes, a Tick and a Jiffy (Aranda) 10 Ulay: Great Wall Walk 73 “Uncanny, The” (Freud) 301 Unemployed (Hatoum) 74 unpredictability 27, 29, 140 unproductiveness 56–69, 75, 76, 82, 86–7, 88, 97, 100, 104, 106–7, 109, 110, 118, 119, 154, 174, 211, 216, 294, 295, 304 “Unreality of time, The” (McTaggart) 222–4 Untitled Slide Sequence (Sekula) 276 Upside Down Touch of Evil (Lewis) 115 Utterback, Camille 11 vanishing point 59, 63, 76, 79, 80, 82, 86, 87–8, 92, 95, 96, 99, 100, 110, 117, 118, 296, 297, 305 Varela, Francisco J. 141, 143, 144 Vattimo, Gianni 110 Véliz, Claudio 84 Venturi, Robert: Complexity and Contradiction in Modern Architecture 122–3 Vidler, Anthony 39, 123 viewpoint 59, 63, 76, 79, 86, 87–8, 92, 95, 96, 99, 100, 296, 297 Viola, Bill 11 Virilio, Paul 30 Virtual Window, The (Friedberg) 232 Vischer, Theodora 180 vision and loss 260 visual/aural split 215, 216, 238–9, 245, 247–9, 250, 257, 258, 283–5, 286, 305 see also binding problem visuality, optical vs. haptic 185–6, 191 Volney, Constantin-François Chasseboeuf de 195 Ruins, The 196 waiting time 56–9 Wajda, Andrzej: The Iron Man 265

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348 Index walking performances 63–4, 70–5, 85, 87, 90–2, 96–9, 104–5 Walworth Road (Lewis) 147 Washington Post 166 Watkins, David: Morality and Architecture 122 weak urbanism 110 Weekend Campus (Davenport) 270 Weibel, Peter 73 Weisbach, Werner 95 Welles, Orson: Citizen Kane 24 Werve, Guido van der 11, 15, 60, 63–4, 104, 107, 109, 209, 305 Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright 87–92, 89, 90, 91, 96–7, 98, 104–5, 297 Nummer negen. The day I didn’t turn with the world 99–102, 100, 101, 102 Weyl, Hermann 230 When Faith Moves Mountains (Alÿs) 76, 77, 78, 79, 87 White, Hayden 250–1, 298–9, 301 Content of the Form, The 279

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Wilk, Christopher 121 Willesden Laundrette (Lewis) 129, 132–3, 133, 136, 147, 161–3, 162 Wilson, Jane 11 Wilson, Louise 11 Win, Place or Show (Douglas) 288 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 195 witnesses see testimony Wittmann, Marc 31 Wölfflin, Heinrich 12, 216 Wollen, Peter 128 Workers (leaving the factory) (Davenport) 210, 262, 266, 270–8, 271, 273, 275, 298, 305 Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (Farocki) 262, 265–7, 266, 267, 298 Wrap Around the World (Paik) 260 You Had No Ninth of May! (Aranda) 10 Young, James 41 Zeidler, Sebastian 216

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