KAREN WARD Artist

ONCE UPON A TIME:                                                                                                        June 2013

Western communities became "modern"' just as soon as they had succeeded in producing a bourgeoisie that was both numerous enough and competent enough to become the predominant element in society.

[At the end of the 19th.century] an unprecedentedly prosperous and comfortable Western middle class was taking it as a matter of course that the end of one age of one civilization's history was the end of History itself ... at least as far as they and their kind were concerned. They were imagining that, for their benefit, a sane, safe, satisfactory Modern Life had miraculously come to stay as a timeless present.  (1)

In the 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the opening scenes surround the unveiling of a new commemorative railway clock in the New Orleans Railway Station.  When the clock is commissioned it starts to run backwards.  The blind French clockmaker Monsieur Gateau explains that he has purposely made the clock to run backwards, in a vain attempt to rewind time “so that the boys lost in the war might stand again and [come] home ...”.  We as the cinematic audience see the large clock’s second hand start in an anti-clock wise motion. And in synchronistic cinematic time Benjamin Button is born, in the evening of Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, destined to live life in reverse, growing younger as he matures.  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button screenplay by Eric Roth was far more empathic and plausible than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s odd short story.  Roth devised the idea of the backward running clock to make manifest the rationale for what was to become Benjamin Button’s curious life.  

Monsieur Gateau’s act was one of symbolic intent, of creating a thing of beauty his clock, that was to be a constant reminder of the nihilistic, inhumanity of World War 1, the war to end all wars.  But in retrospect perhaps the blind clockmaker was the only one who could see into the future.

In reality Eric Roth’s idea for the backward running clock could have come from Prague’s famous Old Jewish Town Hall Hebrew Clock, which has Hebrew numerals instead of Roman numerals. And as Hebrew is read right to left, the clock runs backwards. So, perhaps Monsieur Gateau’s sentiments were not far off the mark, as this clock too now is a reminder of the Jewish pogroms during World War 2.

Time has been measured by mankind  since ‘time began’, or at least since the ancient Egyptians developed shadow clocks using obelisks.  Then came sun dials, water clocks, hourglasses, bell clocks and from the 14th. century the development of clock ‘mechanisms’.  As cities developed so did the need to organise and control people and by the time of the Industrial Revolution the ‘clock’ was indispensable. 

The British sociologist Anthony Giddons writes:

... within the pre-modern period time and space were always strongly located in terms of physical place.  The turning of night into day or the passing of the seasons served to act as localised markers for time and space.  With the invention of the clock time we could say has become separated from space, and that time and space have become empty phenomena.  The pulling apart of time and space can be visualised in calendars, railway timetables and maps.  The devices enable time and space to be co-ordinated without any reference to notions of place - they are abstract notions of ordering social activities.(2)

In 1884 the International Meridian Conference convened in Washington DC in the United States of America to determined a prime meridian upon which to base international time zones. Greenwich Observatory was adopted as the international zero meridian longitudinal marker for all navigational purposes and for railway timetabling.  No longer could time be a localised, it needed to be internationalised. 

Developments in transport and communications in Britain [as in other countries] during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had profound consequences for the economy, society and culture. The railway's impact, for example, was noticeable by the 1830s and 1840s, most significantly in the increased speed of the trains with consequent dramatic reductions in travel times between places. The effect was to shrink national space. The 'annihilation of space and time' was a common term used to characterise the experience of railway travel in the mid-nineteenth century. The metaphor of 'annihilation' evoked the sudden impact and violence of the railway as it overturned existing notions of time and distance. On the one hand, the railway opened up new spaces and made them much more accessible. On the other, the railway seemingly destroyed space and diminished the uniqueness of individual places.  The uniqueness of place was further eroded by the introduction of uniform railway time.  Growth of the railway network, the consequent complexity of railway scheduling and the wish to avoid accidents, gradually made the existence of multiple local timetables untenable, and led railway companies to introduce ‘standard time’ along their routes. 

The railway was intimately associated with developments in communications technology, particularly the electric telegraph and the telephone. These technologies inaugurated simultaneous communication and a phase of 'time-space convergence'. (3)

Steam trains developed as an industrial then egalitarian public transport systems across the developed world in the early 1800s. Trains and people were organised and synchronised.  And with that came the construction of the grand railway stations, architectural masterpieces, with their grand central clocks and a bevy of the smaller arrival and departure clocks.  Train travel became romantic.  

We only have to remember the romantic impressionistic work by Monet in his La Gare Sainte-Lazare, arrivee d’un train, Paris 1877. With the majestic glass roof of the station and the trains hissing and spluttering steam and smoke, the very excitement that was early train travel was seductively portrayed.  And no one can forget Agatha Christie’s Death on The Orient Express published in 1934, and of its ensuing film and television manifestations, that has immortalised the romance of train travel.

In 2009 the National Gallery of Victoria, staged the blockbuster exhibition Salvador Dali: Liquid Desires.  This was an unprecedented success with people queuing for hours to see this exhibition; not a normal occurrence in Melbourne. This reflected the public’s love of Surrealism, but most specifically Dali’s work.  For the general public Dali epitomises the eccentric genus.  And one of his most famous and loved works, which unfortunately was not in the exhibition, is The Persistence of Memory painted in 1931.  This is a very small painting, only 24cm. x  33cm., yet most people who have never seen this work, believe that it is large, “larger-than-life”, such is its intrigue and celebrity.  

The Persistence of Memory is about time. Surrealism was very much about the unconscious and the dream world, and Dali was very well read up on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. In this work three clocks melt, as if they were ‘cheese’, while a four clock is being eaten by ants.  These dream images support the timelessness of dream stages, time arrested, time for absurdities to develop and perform. Dali was a master craftsman and a master at painting the uncanny. The strange sleeping creature in the foreground, is possibly an anthropomorphic image of Dali’s own profile.  If so, Dali is presenting himself as a hapless creature asleep, in a world of his own making. But not too far from home as he has painted the Catalonian coast line in the background.  

In 1939, the Belgium Surrealist artist Rene Magritte painted his La Durée poignardée, in which he combined the image of a clock and a steam train, both emblems of the rupture in time and space perceptions.  Though, Magritte ‘domesticated’ the issue. 

This is a intimate work.  It depicts a bourgeois room with wood panelling, wooden floor, and a marble fireplace.  On the mantel piece are two candlestick holders without candles and a clock. Behind the clock is a large mirror in a simple frame.  Yet, there is something uncanny about this mirror, as if it has ceased to reflect life; reflecting only one candlestick and a partial glimpse of the back of the clock. It is as if this room has no depth, no life. But then, Magritte has painted a steam train issuing out of the fireplace - unexpected, off-putting and bizarre. However, this train makes no noise - all is silent.

Time according to Freud is stopped, arrested in dreams. Magritte did not necessarily agree with the psychological interpretations of art, but his paintings were frozen moments of memory and fantasy, displacement and disorientation. 

Magritte loved the juxtaposition of disparate objects and contradictory titles.  His friends in Belgium were mostly writers and he “actively searched in the dictionary for enigmatic titles for his elusive pictorial configurations”.(4)  “Magritte speaks of his titles as word-images superimposed upon picture-images”.(5) The English translation of La Durée poignardée,  is Time Transfixed, though this translation worried Magritte as a more correct translation was “ongoing time stabbed by a dagger”.  The correlation between the verbal title and the visual images was extremely important to Magritte. And considering that this painting was painted in 1939, it is perhaps a prophetic title given what was ahead of mankind. In 1939 the world was at war again.  Thus, perhaps there is a possible further reading of this mysterious work.. There is a portentousness about this work; as if it was saying stop time, stop the future and beware of what you dream.  Trains transformed from vehicle of pleasure into vehicle of death during World War 2.  

The  World Wars of the 20th. century redefined people, nations, countries and the very fabric of life as it was once known.

And as times change, so does art and culture.  

Rail travel may have overturned existing notions of time and distance, but it too was overturned by the motorcar and the airplane. Gare d’Orsay in Paris, the first electrified urban rail terminal in the world was built for the 1900 Exposition Universal.  It ceased to be used as an inter city service in 1939 as the shortness of the station’s platform was incompatible with the increased train sizes, due to the increase in train travel. This closure may have also reflected the German occupation of France, in particular Paris in 1940. Notwithstanding, in 1986 it was redeveloped internally, in a some what unattractive brutalist architectural style into the tourist mecca, the Musée d'Orsay.  Today the beautiful station clocks are still admired for their intricate design and size.  They are now beautiful anachronisms in a digital age. 

The American artist Edward Ruscha seems to straddle this period in time.  Born in 1937 and at the time of writing this essay, he is still alive, well and working.  

Edward Ruscha is the laconic American Midwestern boy of few words, especially about any deep meaning inherent in his work.  “Throughout, [his writings and interviews] Ruscha gently mocks as a vainglorious illusion the idea that art might play a political role. The only thing he wants to do, he writes, is induce a bit of "head-scratching." (6) Notwithstanding, he has always been a shrewd observer of the art of his time.

I am more firmly rooted in issues of abstract art than I am with things figurative, yet I use figurative objects. This is a contradiction that is never resolved but does not confuse me.(7)

His large flat paintings saluted Greenbergian flatness; while positioning himself as the Los Angeles pop artist, using the banal images and texts of that uber - commodity, celebrity driven city.  Ruscha had initially trained as a graphic artist and this technical background coupled with his astute observations of mass media, movies, vernacular language and the Los Angeles ‘scene’ became the subject matter of his works. 

[C]ommerical art, with its careful planning and precision, provided Ruscha with the means to extend the boundaries of painting by passing it into a dialogue with diverse aspects of culture including linguistics. (8)

Like Magritte, who Ruscha admired, he painted ‘plausible paintings from improbable [choices or] combinations of objects’ (9) while his large painting format emulating the cinematic wide screen. In his 1989 painting Five Past Eleven.  Ruscha chose to paint only an aspect of the Roman numeral clock with the unexpected and unexplained piece of bamboo cane crossing the clock face at an oblique angle. This large work 150cm. x 370cm. has a cinematic presence, and may well resonant with some as a past filmic memory. Ruscha is interested in memory and plays with the observer’s perceptions and remembrances of relationships between texts, palindromes, objects and ideas.  

...the presence of text in Ruscha’s art is part of a larger strategy that serves to underscore the nature of representation as primarily a visual and object oriented experience grounded in the relationships between an artwork, a spectator and the different spaces in which images operate for us as viewers.  In his paintings and books [he] repeatedly addresses the dynamic between the pictorial space, the mental space, and the actual space that structures our encounters with works of art as objects. (10)

In ways though Ed Ruscha is an anachronism as he is still a painter in the digital age.  

However, time and the clock continues to be the subject of digital art making, so called time-based media works.

[C]ontemporary art works that include video, film, slide, audio or computer based technologies are referred to as time-based media works because they have duration as a dimension and unfold to the viewer over time.(11)

Dutch designer Maarten Baas has made several time-based performance videos based on the clock.  Grandfather Clock is a 12 hour video loop of a grandfather clock, which has a flat screen television unit installed in the face of the clock, of a previously recorded performance.  During the day long performance an actor ruled lines for the arms of the clock, for each minute of the day, and as each minute transpired he erased that time to redraw the next minute. This mindless but compulsive act was both marking time and erasing time, visually enacting the duality of our existences both physically and mentally, as time is a mental and cultural construct. 

Baas’ Sweeper Clock is a 24 hour clock performance.  In this real-time video two men, in blue suits, sweep two lines of dust and debris, each line representing either the hour or minute hand upon the grey concrete clock-face.  This performance is shot from high above the circle, so the men are reduced in size and importance, while they toll away at making their rubbish lines straight as per the traditional clock arms.  They then start braking their lines in oder to sweep it into the next time phase. They do this act silently, time after time in a methodical dance with time. Like Baas’ Grandfather Clock, Sweeper Clock has the same surrealist absurdity to it, being equally frustrating and fascinating to the viewer.

Christian Marclay’s The Clock 2010 is “a 24 hour cinematic montage that keeps real time by splicing together 1000’s of film [and television] scenes, each one including  [either] a wristwatch, a wall clock, a clock tower or some other [physical] representation of time”.(13) It took Marclay and his team three years to collect and edit the images into this ‘masterpiece’.  Big Ben and railway station clocks naturally loom large, as urban expressions of the importance of time and punctuality. 

The Clock is a homage to 20th century film and television history, surveying over 70 years of cinematic production.  The Clock both insinuates time and manifests time as it requires the dedicated spectator to experience visually, cognitively and physically the 24 hour digitally synchronised video to local time. 

The Clock ‘s endurance factor prohibits many from lasting the distance and this and other such time-based works are now viewed in snippets on YouTube. But as in all things visual the ‘real-thing’, the physical experience is always the best.

We are constantly checking time to substantiate who we are, and where we are positioned in space and time.  The clock metaphorically and physically illustrates our finality.  Hence, we are now time obsessed.  Our language reflects that we are now;  on time, beyond time, time poor, time obsessed, time orientated, time deprived, time wise, timed out!

Even the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland was time obsessed:

I'm late, I'm late, 

For a very important date. 

No time to say "Hello, Goodbye".  

I'm late, I'm late, I'm late.

END NOTES:

1. Arnold Toynbee as cited in Perry Anderson 1998 The Origins of Postmodernity, London : Verson  Publishers, pp.5-6.
2. Anthony Giddons as cited in Nick Stevenson, 2003, Cultural Citizenship:Cosmopolitan Questions, Maidenhead London, Open University Press, p.12.
3. Jon May and Nigel Thrift (eds.) 2001 Timespace:Geographies of Temporality, London, Routledge. p.108-109.
4. John C. Welshman, 1995, Modernism Relocated, St. Leonards Australia, Unwin & Allen, p.20.
5. ibid., p. 84.
6. Book (Best of 2002) Artforum International, Vol. 41, Issue 4 December 2002, p.43+
7. www.modernartoxford.org.uk/whats-on/ed-ruscha/about
8. Sally Shelbourne, Lisp 1968, www.ngv.gov/feature/ruscha/ruscha05.htm
9. Ben Stoltzfus, 2012. Magritte’s Literary Affinities: Baudeliare and Poe, Intertexts, Vol. 16, No. 2.
10. Ken D. Allen,  Ed Ruscha Pop Art and Spectatorship in 1960’s Los Angeles. The Art Bulletin, Sept. 2010
11. www.guggenheim.org/time-based-media-art
12. Simon Stamp www.domusweb