song of nature, the very thing we place at the origin of our
Mutations of Time
in Contemporary Art
Pol Capdevila
The last of its species
You look it in the eyes, and in its dull, vacant stare
you find your deepest nostalgia. He could finish you off in
a swift, unstoppable charge. And yet there it is, still, doci-
le, seemingly biding its time at nightfall. Is it even aware
of being the last white rhinoceros and that any struggle to
keep its species from disappearing along with it is in vain?
A Runaway World (2017), the two-channel video
installation by Diana Thater, depicts the last specimen of
an animal species slaughtered by human greed for the
decorative and folkloric value of ivory. The images show
the artist standing near the animal as it grazes. Armed
guards keep watch nearby, but the animal, once wild and
dangerous, shows little sign of vitality. Its low energy is in
tune with the dark blue and purple of the walls in the
exhibition room, which are also the hues of melancholy
of the visitor. At the time they visit the exhibition, that
creature is already gone from the face of the Earth. One
more species paving the road of the natural catastrophe
brought about by man.
The greatness and danger of the animal, its seniority
as a species, its mythical appearance, are savage nature
incarnate. Its extinction, on the other hand, reminds us
of the times we live in: the last moments of a long natu-
ral history that human beings are bringing to a close with
their activity on the planet. The memento mori posited by
Thater in her work is not only an allegory for our own de-
mise as living creatures; it also forces us to face the swan
species and that, as civilisations developed, has become
our other. The image of a far-gone creature presented by
the rhinoceros stands then for the end of time, a time that
is already over or about to run out.
In his main book dedicated to nature, Aristotle
explains about the effect of time on seemingly unchan-
ging objects that “this is what, as a rule, we chiefly mean
by a thing’s being destroyed by time”, which is why he
concludes that “It is clear then that it must be in itself,
as we said before, a cause of destruction rather than of
coming into being”.1 The Middle Ages personified this
quality of time in the figure of Father Time: a winged old
man, carrying crutches and a scythe, fusing together the
deity of Kronos (Saturn to the ancient Romans) with the
chronos notion of time. In later iterations, such as Jacopo
del Sellaio’s Triumph of Time, the character is also equip-
ped with an hourglass.
Run and begone
Although it is true that the representation of time
has been associated to death in every era, death was not
always synonymous with the end. Christianity and other
cultures believed in an afterlife, thus making earthly death
relative, subordinate to a higher path. However, modern
secularization brought about a change in societal values,
a need for redemption or some sort of fulfilment on Earth,
an ecstasy capable of pulling people out of the misery of
time. It’s a paradoxical trap; a delirium of reason. Modern
man, with its Faustian pact with the devil, frantically chases
after a full existence, racing to try all possible experien-
ces. And the more experiences he devours, the smaller
an effect they have and the greater the need for new dis-
coveries and novelty becomes. Modern man thus enters
a vicious circle. The quest for spiritual peace spurs him
towards a headlong rush towards uncertainty.
The rest of the story is well-known: a productive
system based on the commercialization of
154 155 a certain promesse du bonheur (Stendhal) 1. Aristotle. Physics. “Book IV”.
 flourishes through consumer goods; angst as the modern
condition par excellence expands. Best case scenario,
the end of the headlong rush ends up in spleen, a peevish
temper, a vital apathy, as described by Baudelaire in Les
fleurs du mal.
Life becomes a race, and speed, the defining trait
of our vital rhythm. Speed can be fun and exhilarating at
first. A nature lover such as Turner paid homage to it in
Rain, Steam and Speed (1844). In this oil painting, the
steam engine vanishes into the landscape as steam and
fog fuse together. The keen eye of the London painter
forced the lines of perspective to better convey the fee-
ling of speed, but the best reflection of speed is the loss
of shape with which the painter finished his depiction
with large blurs of white and brown.
Baudelaire knew very well the consequences of at-
tempting to portray “modernity [, which] is the transient,
the fleeting, the contingent”.2 Speed and fleetingness go
hand in hand with loss of the consistence of reality. The
swift impressionist brush portrays the effects of light at
the cost of turning objects into mere surfaces. Futurism
distorts the outline of objects under the effect of speed. In
order to portray the movement of a woman going down a
flight of stairs, Duchamp outlines only part of her silhouette
at various points of her descent. Even more so than in
Étienne-Jules Marey’s photographic experiments, in Nu
descendant un escalier Nº2 (1912) Duchamp captures mo-
vement at the expense of the solidity of the human figure.
A loss of shape is also affirmed in physics and in film:
the faster you go, the more you resemble light. And the
limit, as shown in the final scene of 2001: A Space Odis-
sey (1968), is becoming light and stepping out of time. In
Kubrick’s film we see how the cosmic landscape offering
itself to the astronaut David Bowman changes as speed
increases, transforming light spots first into colour lines
and finally into shapeless blobs. The astronaut ends his
journey outside of time, witnessing his own
2. Baudelaire, Charles. deathbed and birth.
The Painter of Modern Life. The way I see it, the main issue lies
London: Phaidon, 1995. not in becoming lighter, but in losing one’s
presence. Paul Virilio has hinted at that particular effect
of speed. We end up always thinking of the next stop, pic-
turing the place where we currently are not. Modern man,
born from haste, lives for the future more than the pre-
sent. He is known for not inhabiting the here and now. But
not only does he walk past everybody else, his life goes by
in daze, as if in a prolonged state of picnolepsy.3
Here and now, all the way to eternity
One of the effects of modernity, thus, is losing the
subject in the quagmire of haste and causing reality to
vanish into thin air, according to Marshall Berman. In the
face of this, various cultural reactions trying to take back
presence and solidity have sprouted. Taking back the
body as an object and as a subjective organism. Taking
back space for immediate experience. Taking back the
present’s own time: duration. Thus, instead of moderni-
ty’s time structure, which is based on a non-continuous
accelerating rhythm, we see the birth of artistic expres-
sions that reclaim continuity, flat and monotonous as it
can sometimes be. From the vitality of fleetingness we
return, going back to Bergson, to the vitality of duration.
An early example in the visual arts are some of
Andy Warhol’s films: Sleep (1963), running over five
hours, or Empire (1964), eight hours and five minutes.
In the latter we can look at a static black and white shot
of the famous skyscraper until the cows come home.
The projection time is slower –16 frames per second– than
the shooting time –24 frames–, which
makes the subtle changes in the sky and 3. Virilio, Paul. Aesthetics of
the lighting even harder to notice. Accor- Disappearance. Semiotext(e),
ding to the pop artist, he meant to make 2009. Jonathan Crary has
visible “the passing of time”. studied in detail the close link
This idea has been taken to ex- between hyperactivity and
tremes by David Claerbout in a work of light sleep, both distinctive
mythical dimensions, for it intends to last a traits of modern life. See his
thousand years. Opened in 2016, Olympia book 24/7: Late Capitalism
(The real time disintegration into ruins and the Ends of Sleep (Verso
156 157 of the Berlin Olympic stadium over the Books, 2014).
 course of a thousand years) (2016-3016) recreates in
exact detail the Berlin Olympic stadium and shows how
it would slowly decay in real time, were no human hand
to intervene. The projection consists of a slow conti-
nuous circular track shot around the stadium and uses
a software originally made for videogames to recreate the
climate of the city and the weather decay it would bring
about to this building commissioned by Hitler in 1934.
Alongside these images are stills of little details to appre-
ciate the growth of weeds and wildflowers or the rusting
of metal pieces.
In works like this, the viewer comfortably sits down
to look at a seemingly unchanging image; an image that
only appears unchanging to the threshold of human per-
ception, which has evolved to be aware of more dramatic
changes. Only when comparing the image on the screen
with the one on their memory can viewers become aware
of the changes in the object and, thus, of the passage of
time. As it happens, though, the image projected on the
screen keeps engaging the perceptive senses, and thus
memory is cast aside and the attention focuses on the
present. A monotonous, boring present that soon be-
comes unbearable. A present that brings to surface a
deliberate consciousness that, when trying to take notice
of changes, is left frustrated and empty. It is true that
the passing of time is felt, but it is uncomfortable and
tedious. Perhaps that is why this present is laden with
potential subversion, as Peter Osborne has argued.4
At any rate, in these moments the passing of time
becomes a true burden, and that old platonic defini-
tion of time as a “moving image of eternity” (Timaeus)
takes on a new meaning. In our eyes, those who have ar-
gued Bergson’s concept of duration in works like these
are wrong. The French philosopher would have a hard
time processing these endless visual con-
4. Osborne, Peter. tinuities into his concept of duration. To
Anywhere or Not at All. Philo- him, length, being the opposite of space,
sophy of Contemporary Art. could not have a spatial expanse and it
London: Verso Books, 2013. therefore concentrates past and pre-
See last chapter. sent in an unconscious spot of the mind.
Bergson’s psychological time could associate ancient
events with new experiences through similar elements
and it did not consist of a lineal duration going through all
moments in time in a monotonous, flat manner.
Paradoxically, it is entirely possible that the artistic
form that really succeeded in constructing time as length
is performance art, where each moment of a piece is dif-
ferent to all others and of major importance. A perfor-
mance is an expression of process art in which all phases
in the action are essential. And therein lies the paradox:
while it has been described as the highest form of ephe-
meral art and is therefore defined by its fleetingness, its
internal time structure is, precisely, duration. The per-
formance The Artist is Present (2010), which Marina
Abramovic carried out during her retrospective at the
MoMA in 2010, no matter how spectacular, took good
care of the essence of performance: presence and du-
ration. Presence of the bodies of the artist and each of
her visitors, sitting face to face, staring into each other’s
eyes. Duration of all the hours and minutes that the exhi-
bition was kept at the museum, and extremely laboured.
An intense duration, that makes each moment in the work
crucially important and causes it to evolve: we see vigour
at the onset, strength and endurance after a few weeks
and physical and mental weariness towards the end.
Duration is not flat; it transforms the work.
Shall we playfully disassemble the puzzle?
Another reaction to the sped-up time of modernity
has come hand in hand with artistic trends related to theo-
retical and cultural criticism. These practices, rather than
positing an experience of time that is structurally different
from chronological time, have deconstructed this model
in some of its elements. With that, they have allowed us to
become more aware of how the time of the clock is struc-
tured, while at the same time opening up ways of escape
for other temporalities.
In some of his works, the American artist Dan
158 159 Graham analysed the smallest unit of chronological time:
an instant. Present Continuous Past(s) (1974) is a video
installation in a little room with three walls. Two of them
are covered with mirrors, and on the third one are a video
camera and a monitor that shows the images taken by the
camera with an eight second lapse, the maximum amount
of time for what psychology describes as the immediate
present. Thus, the viewer can see their own reflection in
the mirror, while, on the screen, his own image appears on
the border between present and past. Eight seconds later,
the screen will display the image of the mirror reflecting
the screen where the viewer appeared, thus creating an
infinite regression to pasts bordering on present. The dia-
chronic multiplication of reflections usually encourages
the visitor to play with their own iterations. And so a game
of confusion between the immediate present and the past
begins, a sort of short-circuit of perception manifesting
the duality of the moment in which present and past can
be one or the other depending on who moves and how.
As a reflection on other aspects of chronological
time, William Kentridge built a large installation together
with the science historian Peter Galison, which they pre-
sented in Kassel in 2017 for dOCUMENTA (13). The Re-
fusal of Time (2012) consisted of a multi-channel installa-
tion which built on several aspects of chronological time:
images of pacemakers and repeating actions set an irre-
gular, dehumanized time. In front of these images, social
scenes from late 19th century South African culture, when
the use of timepieces was still rare, were comedically re-
presented. Thus, the chronological discipline that is do-
minant in western cultures, which forced the use of time
zones around the globe during that period, was confron-
ted with the temporality of other regions. The work ended
with a kind of black whole swallowing up all the diffe-
rent characters and their distinct ways of life, concluding
perhaps how meaningless these time models, whether
hasty anxiety or cheerful celebration, are before the fate
of the universe.
The modern culture of progress has established a
relationship of maximum efficiency between the clock
and the accumulation of wealth as the only desirable one.
Any use of time must be governed by the equation in
which a good use thereof implies higher earnings and
greater success in life. Thus, life must consist in an on-
going reaping of successes; any deviating narrative falls
straight into mediocrity or social failure. Before this
temporal-narrative stereotype of modernity, art has also
intervened with its own critical vision. One of my fa-
vourite examples is Martí Anson’s Fitzcarraldo (2005)
project at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona.
It was a rather peculiar project. For starters, on the ex-
hibition’s most significant day, the opening ceremony,
there was actually nothing to show. The room was empty.
Martí Anson was expecting a number of crates contain-
ing planks and tools to arrive, but the shipping agency
was delayed and the order was not delivered on time.
Since there was nothing to see, perhaps the atten-
dees went on to discuss the title of the exhibition. Fitzcar-
raldo references a Peruvian merchant who meant to import
cork from the Amazon to fund the construction of an
opera theatre in Iquitos, next to the jungle. In order to do
that, he had to carry a ship over a mountain through the
Amazonian thicket. He was successful, but ultimately
didn’t succeed in the cork trade. It is likely that many peo-
ple know this story from the outrageous film that Werner
Herzog made about the merchant in 1982, in which the
character tries to get over his megalomania repeating the
feat, but with a ship ten times heavier than the original.
Herzog would end up referring to himself as a conqueror
of uselessness. In this context, the development of Martí
Anson’s show at the art centre must have roused lots of
expectations, though not exactly innocent ones.
The artist, bringing back the fishing tradition from
the town where he was born, Mataró, and in his usual line
of defending craftwork in the fine arts, intended to build
a Stela 34 sailing boat with his own hands. After the ope-
ning of the project, which, as has already been mentioned,
left a vast empty space at the disposal of the attendees,
the materials were promptly delivered, and Anson got to
work. Mishaps happened one after another: a hand injury,
160 161 more delays with shipments… Three months later, the day
 of the closing ceremony arrived and the vessel wasn’t fi-
nished. But the worst was yet to come. The project’s fate
would run mysteriously parallel to the story about a fisher-
man from Mataró who built a boat inside his house and
when he tried to take it out he realized it was too large to
go through the door. He had to disassemble it. Like the
fisherman’s boat, Anson’s Stela 34 was merely a couple
of inches wider than the door, enough to force the people
accompanying the artist on his last day at the art centre
to pick up axes and saws and hack to shreds the result of
months of work…
A tragic fate, we could say. And yet these aesthe-
tics, which we could call aesthetics of failure, illuminate
many of the parameters along which the time structures
of art move: the narrative implicit in an exhibition, with its
key dates –opening and closing days–, the need to dis-
play a finished material object, the subordination of the
artist’s work to that object, the role of the visitors as mere
spectators… Were it not for the failure of Fitzcarraldo, 55
dies treballant en la construcció d’un veler Stela 34 al
Centre d’Art Santa Mònica (Fitzcarraldo, 55 days wor-
king on the building of a sailing boat Stela 34 at Centre
d’Art Santa Mònica) the time parameters of an institution
as important to art as the white cube would hardly have
manifested. Failure as a way to awareness. Works like this
one remind us that scheduling and planning are to suc-
cess what a stumble is to change of direction and surprise.
And yet, is the destruction of the Stela 34 a meta-
phor of time as a destructive force? Do we have any means
of escape between a time ejecting us towards death or a
time allowing us to absurdly run away as fast as we can if
we bow down rigidly to the discipline of production?
You dance, too
The performance element of many of the works
that have been mentioned may guide our reflection. These
works are, at their core, based on the action of a subject,
not on results or consequences, and subvert the theologi-
cal structure of goal-oriented human activity. That way,
everything happening in the “during” is highlighted;
a whole multi-faceted universe of nuances appears, en-
riching the field of both experience and reflection. More-
over, a space of intersubjectivity in which the artist and the
audience blur the line separating the active and the pas-
sive role appears. Let’s try to dig deeper into the notion of
time implied in this sort of art forms. Taking into account
the previous elements, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s pheno-
menology can provide us with a few ideas to advance.
The French philosopher posited a concept of time closely
linked to the concept of action. This concept is central in
his phenomenology of perception, from which he draws
his reflections about time.
Perception is not the mere product of human sensi-
tivity –as empiricism claims– or the result of the activity of
the mind –idealism–. To Merleau-Ponty, the starting point
lies neither in the object or thing itself nor in the mental
structures that configurate the world. Merleau-Ponty
suggests going off from experience as a given thing to
understand the reality and activity of the world. Only
through that can the abstract entities of subject and ob-
ject, and mind and body, be generated.5 All experiences
are bodily experiences. Veering away from the positivist
idea of the body as an organic object or mechanism, he
suggests that it needs to be understood as a being always
in position, both active and receptive. It has no clear boun-
daries and the devices with which it interacts with the en-
vironment can, through habit, become defining parts of it.
From this perspective, the philosopher does away
with the well-known metaphor of time as a river we sail
on with a boat, for in this metaphor time likens something
outside of us that we are subject to. According to Merleau-
Ponty, time does not predate the subject. It is not like
a line on which we can place an event. Neither is it a
natural passing measured by clocks and calendars. And
neither is it a merely interior phenomenon
that we generate at will through memory 5. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.
and expectations. Time is neither com- Phenomenology of perception.
pletely external nor completely internal. Routledge: London, 2013.
“It is of the essence of time to be in pro-
162 163 cess of self-production, and not to be.”6 6. Ibid.
Human action and perception are the very acts that make
time go by, the ones that, when happening together with
the environment, make time happen. Therefore, we do
not create time; rather, we fuse with it when we act.
A significant part of contemporary art is commit-
ted to audience participation and endeavours to influence
the future through actions in the present. The Blood Mill
(2017) was a project that Antonio Vega Macotela deve-
loped for dOCUMENTA (14) in Kassel. In Karlsaue Park, he
built a 1:1 reproduction of the mills installed at the exit
of ore mines in Latin America to mint coins. In these
mills, when the animals operating the mill died due to
the high altitude of the mines, they were replaced with
enslaved natives. They were known as blood mills be-
cause of the stains left by the slaves’ injuries. Unlike
the original mills, the one Vega Macotela built –which
was commissioned to a Swiss clockmaking company–
was powered by the Kassel visitors, mostly white-skinned
and upper-middle class. As the visitors moved the blades
of the mill, it minted coins in a currency that the artist
named “teio” while, at the same time, a virtual replica –a
kind of bitcoin– was created. The value of these bitcoins
would be established the day they went to market in the
autumn of 2017. Their sale would fund activities related to
the decolonizing mind of the project.
The circular movement of the mill is reminiscent of
other movements that we relate to time: from the Sun’s
apparent daily rotation across the horizon to the turning
of the hands on a clock’s face. However, the mill’s rota-
tion isn’t automatic, but powered by the energy of its
European visitors, all descended from a colonizer culture.
However, this inversion of roles not only subverts the
sense of the story, but also imbues it with an active ele-
ment. In this mill, movement creates an economic value
that has a cultural effect in future actions against the le-
gacy of domination. It turns history into a living thing, em-
bodied by the visitors and, more than a past to know, it
becomes a past whose effects it tries to subvert through
the audience’s actions and participation.
164
A vision analogous to that of time as a constructive
process, though more essentialist and phenomenological,
lies at the heart of many of the works by Alicja Kwade.
Clout-Count is a large circular structure of speakers emit-
ting sometimes on one side, other on another, the sound
of a heartbeat –the artist’s own– alternating with the tic-
king of clockwork. The work does not stand for a body or a
mechanical device: those are not there to be regarded from
afar. The sound installation articulates the beating heart,
the most vital of all organs, with a mechanical device.
The loud volume and the ambiance they create envelop
the visitor, who internalizes the beating heart and the
mechanical device as a single, inseparable experience. As
a visitor, your heart and the clock are now a unit in the
production of time.
You hear the sounds, but are unable to determine
the pattern. Sometimes you believe the mechanical clicks
you hear punctuate series of beats, other times the beats
are the ones signalling the beginnings and ends of the
series. You interiorize these sounds and believe you are
making them yourself, focused on a creative present. The
spatial layout is also unpredictable. You try to dive into it
and integrate the installation device as part of your own
sensitivity, like a phenomenological body of your own.
Perhaps you can feel how your heart beats alongside of
it and the clock is part and parcel of the same machine
human being, spontaneously creating time. Sometimes,
your heartbeat itself goes through the speakers clockwise,
while other times it indiscriminately bounces from side to
side. There is no pattern to be found. You cannot look at
the work from the distance of reason, nor can you listen
to it as a hard drive recording. You seem to spontaneously
evolve along with the work.
This post-human era in which technologies –at
whose deepest essence lies the clock– integrate our bo-
dies, it is senseless to reject the clock as an instrument.
Rather, it needs to merge with a new reality that reclaims
its temporality as an inseparable part of our action on
reality. Perhaps that is one of the ways to dance into new
165 times. Times of creation, not only of destruction.