Hannelore Paflik-Huber

Zeit ist ein Trick des Geistes
Konzepte von Zeit in der Gegenwartskunst
VOLUME 222

Time is the central parameter of our lives and a major object of study in every branch of science and scholarship. Research undertaken in neuroscience in the past few years, for instance, has identified the center of our consciousness of time in the brain. Art, too, has responded to the findings of scientific disciplines, especially since the early twentieth century: Marcel Duchamp’s revolutionary painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) dates from the same period as Albert Einstein’s publications on the theory of relativity. In 1967, the atomic clock was adopted as the measure of time at the thirteenth meeting of the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris; around the same time, the question of our inner clocks and subjective perceptions of time was taken on by many artists, including Christian Boltanski, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Nancy Holt, On Kawara, Bruce Nauman, and Roman Opałka, who grappled with key concepts of time such as its measurement, memory, or the idea of the lifetime. 

Nowadays, as research into black holes enables us to date the inception of the world with ever greater precision, as scientific studies have located the sense and consciousness of time in the human brain, many artists, including Francis Alÿs, Rosa Barba, James Benning, Tacita Dean, Black Quantum Futurism, Julian Charrière, Pierre Huyghe, Sharon Lockhart, Philippe Parreno, Anri Sala, and Karin Sander, realize works of art that take inspiration from these insights and themes and make time their focus. They outline models of time, draw time, weave narratives, wait, capture time in the now, extend the present, become guardians of time, visualize the ephemeral, and strive to represent the origin of the world and that impossible object: infinity. 

The new volume in the FUNDUS series by the art scholar Hannelore Paflik-Huber discusses specific works to show how aesthetic knowledge is generated and presented in relation to the concept of time in contemporary art. In addition to the analyses of specific works, the author offers an introduction to the subject of time and its place in art scholarship.