Fast TimesChronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s by Pamela M. LeeReview by: Robert SlifkinArt Journal, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Spring, 2005), pp. 109-111Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20068370 .Accessed: 26/08/2012 00:50

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Fast Times

Robert Slifkin

Pamela M. Lee. Chronophobia: On

Time in the Art of the 1960s. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 394 pp., 67 ills.

As the earth's rotation and our own mortal

ity make daily and perhaps disturbingly

evident, there are few subjects seemingly as timeless as time itself. Despite time's

intractable, ever-advancing force, the experi ence of time has been shown to be both a

highly subjective and a socially constructed

phenomenon. For example, E. P.Thompson has argued convincingly that nineteenth

century industrialization brought about

drastically new conceptions of lived time, as rationalized work schedules replaced the

environmentally structured calendar of

agrarian labor. ' Pamela Lee, in her ground

breaking and erudite new book Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, extends this

analysis into the twentieth century, arguing that the introduction of new information

based technologies in the 1960s dematerial

ized and greatly accelerated this process of

industrial rationalization, leading people to

experience "a marked fear of the temporal"

(8) and, more to the heart of her thesis,

shaping the major aesthetic debates and

artistic production of the period. Lee's book

not only provides a new set of terms to

reassess the art the 1960s, replacing the

overrehearsed narrative of Greenbergian modernism with the historically specific discourse of technology, but also suggests how this nexus between technology and

time continues to play a crucial role in our

own equally uncertain moment in history. Lee begins her inquiry with an extended

introduction that sets the philosophy of

Herbert Marcuse against the Los Angeles

County Museum of Art's 1971 exhibition

Art and Technology as differing approaches to

understanding technology's influence in

postwar America. Created in an effort to

bridge the supposed "two cultures" of art

and science put forward by the English novelist and scientist C. P. Snow, the Art

and Technology project coupled some of the

leading artists of the time, such as John

Chamberlain and Roy Lichtenstein, with

industrial and media giants like RAND

Corporation and Universal Studios. Yet what

Lee finds most interesting about the project were the examples of failure and miscom

munication between the corporate world

and the artists. While the corporate man

agers imagined such a relationship as a

means to soften their public face, they were

typically not ready to accept proposals like

Chamberlain's to challenge their established

bureaucracies by disconnecting all office

telephones for a day.

Against the exhibition's rather superficial

attempt to relate these apparently disparate realms, Lee presents Marcuses writings as

another, albeit more ominous, model of cor

respondence, indicating that technology and

art were in fact already much closer than the

LACMA curators had suspected. In his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argues that the arts and other forms of culture were

gradually and subtly being colonized by the

administrative logic of "technological ratio

nality." In a society in which the dominant

cultural values are shaped by institutional

forces like RAND (an example Marcuse

cites in his book), the difference between

the structure of free time and labor time

is blurred. Within this world of pervasive rationalization and accelerated temporality the most promising models of resistance

are quickly integrated into the hegemonic industrial culture and, more important to

Lee's argument, historical discourse becomes

narrow and in certain cases suppressed.

"History," according to Lee, "is obscured

by the language of technological rationality as is the subversive potential of memory

along with it" (33). Herein lie the stakes of

Lee's argument. In a culture in which rapid

change becomes normative and thus nearly

unnoticed, to acknowledge the passage of

time, and the transformations that occur

during its interval, is to

expose the hidden, oppres sive character of technolog ical rationality. In such a

world, time becomes a sig nificant vehicle for cultural critique as well as the site for contested views

of history.

Anyone familiar with the canonical lit

erature of 1960s art criticism is well aware

that time, and specifically how works of art

were experienced in time, was a central

theme in the aesthetics debates of the peri od. This subject was most famously and

clearly stated in Michael Frieds 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood," which, due to the

author's polemical "chronophobic" stance,

serves as the natural entry point for Lee's

first chapter. Fried vehemently opposed what

he saw as an emerging theatricality in mod

ern art, most notably in works associated

with Minimalism in which the beholder's

presence was foregrounded. Contrasting the temporal "presence" of these "literalist"

works, Fried extolled works of art that the

viewer apprehends in an immediate flash,

creating a certain "presentness" of experi ence. Investing his trenchant prose with

morality usually heard from the pulpit (he

prefaced the essay with a quotation from

Jonathan Edwards concerning God's perpet ual re-creation of the world), Fried set the

terms in which both his followers and

detractors would argue aesthetic merit for

many years. In order to understand why time was

crucial to Frieds aesthetic theory, Lee recog nizes the essentially reactionary nature of his

essay.2 Fried's anxiety about a durational aes

thetics was in fact quite similar to Marcuse's

grim assessment of technology's coloniza

tion of everyday life. The phenomenological

experience engendered by a Minimalist

object is, Lee suggests, "the time of the

work of art now understood as a system" (39). In other words, Fried's insistence on an

autonomous and medium-specific work

of art that was eternally "present" was predi cated upon a sharp distinction between art

Reviews

109 art journal

and life, and life in 1967 was beginning to

be refracted through the systematic prism of

information technology. First popularized in the 19 cos by writers

like Norbert Wiener, systems theory, or

cybernetics, analyzes the control of human

and mechanical systems for the transmission

of information. Lee's reading of the literature

on cybernetics is vast and knowledgeable

(evidence of her own attempt to transcend

the "two cultures"), and she provides a con

vincing case for the influence of such think

ing in the art world of the late 1960s. Major exhibitions like MoMA's Information (1970) and the Jewish Museum's Software (1969) drew upon cybernetics rhetoric to account

for the apparent "de-materialization of the

art object," and artists like Robert Smithson

and Hans Haacke invoked such theories in

their work and writings. As an attempt to

expand the understanding of causal relation

ships through the creation of self-regulating structural models, cybernetics can be seen

as an extension or transformation of

Greenbergian formalism, replacing such

presumptively universal criteria as flatness

or presentness with an admittedly arbitrary structure that could be altered and expanded in order to incorporate new information. Yet

because systems create equivalencies among

objects and texts, they provide an alternate

model of the aesthetic object, no longer

"present" or autonomous, but fettered to an

endless chain of contingencies, and most

important, acknowledging the object's his

torical and social construction.3

Lee's own historicism in her analysis of Fried's essay is certainly one of the most

valuable contributions of her book, offering a needed first step in revisiting both "Amer

ican type" formalism and Minimalism (and other strands of antiformalist art from the

1960s) in terms of their social contexts. By

recognizing the temporal contingency that

pervades all media in the age of information

technology and by relocating the terms of

the debate from aesthetics to technology, Lee's analysis identifies similarities between

Fried and his opponents. Both sides can be

seen as responding to the same forces of

rationalization: Fried eschewing technology and attempting to protect art as the last

refuge for the tradition of radical critique in a corrupted culture, and the Minimalists

(and most notably, Robert Smithson, who,

Lee acknowledges, was Fried's best critic)

engaging with the encroaching technology in order to forge new spaces of resistance

from within that culture. Invoking Fried's

Harvard mentor Stanley Cavell, Lee exposes the sublimated temporal logic within both

men's ostensibly formalist aesthetics. In his

book The World Viewed (1971) Cavell argued that film's automatic recursiveness, that is,

its ability to spontaneously acknowledge its

material limits (according to Cavell, to pho

tographically reproduce the world in time),

provides the viewer with an experience of

seeing without being seen?an experience similar to Fried's "presentness." Yet, building from Rosalind Krauss's concept that such

recursiveness involves a constant revision

of a medium's limit conditions, Lee recog nizes the trace of cybernetics even in such

doggedly formalist criticism, further proof of it being "an increasingly important model

of temporality in the postwar era" (61 ).4 Seen from our current information-age

perspective, Lee's argument stressing the

technological sources that imperceptibly directed the artistic production and criticism

of the late 1960s is persuasive and, more

over, timely, investing the works and texts

with a new and prescient relevance.

Chronophobia follows this art-historical

nexus of systematic time and technology in

three admittedly selective case studies. As in

the introduction, Lee confronts her chosen

subjects by reading them against a variety of philosophical texts in order to reveal the

temporal discourse surrounding them. This

model works best when the selected texts

are contemporaneous with the art she dis

cusses, as in the chapter in which the pow erful somatic experience engendered by

Bridget Riley's paintings are read in light of Marshall McLuhan's conception of the

prosthetic nature of new technologies. Lee

argues that the critical anxiety surrounding

Op art and the general trend to feminize its

reception was predicated upon the fear of

the new information technology's ability to use visual means to control the body

through space and time (with television

being the most obvious example). By con

trasting Riley's own unwillingness to address

the bodily aspect of her art with the work of

Yayoi Kusama and Carolee Schneemann, Lee

suggests an alternate model of art produc tion that exposes the gendered and historical

subjectivity of perception, thus revealing the

interconnectedness between a systematic

approach to art and the project of de-center

ing the individual subject. Lee's method proves less persuasive

when she brings into service Martin

Heidegger's protosystematic conception of

"world," which the author explains as "the

intricate net of our everyday activities, our

use of language?and how we are enmeshed

in a series of meaningful relationships with

things and beings" (90). She employs the

concept to interpret Jean Tinguely s elabo

rately staged events of mechanical self

destruction as the surprising marriage of

nuclear Armageddon and mass entertain

ment. Tinguely s use of television and kineti

cism to create new models of understanding and even remaking the world certainly make

him an appropriate subject for Lee's study, but without the compelling connections

between the art and the technological or

philosophical discourses of its time provided in the other chapters, Lee's interpretation remains on the allegorical rather than the

historical level, providing an interesting new

reading of the work but not contributing to the book's larger thesis.

This is not the case with Lee's final

intervention, which examines the relation

ship between Robert Smithson's gnomic

essay from 1966, "Quasi-Infinitudes and the

Waning of Space," and George Kubler 's 1962

study of the historical evolution of form,

The Shape of Time, and more generally Wiener's

theory of cybernetics. For Lee, these three

texts share what she calls "the phenomena of noncontemporaneity" (223), a sense of

not being of one's time, which she claims

was pervasive in 1960s culture. Kubier

rejected the biological and progressive

metaphor of style in favor of a discontinuous

and open-ended model in which a series

of formal possibilities is always present and

a form's ultimate value can only be deter

mined in hindsight. According to this model,

past works resonate because of their contin

uing pertinence to present forms; some have

stronger ties than others, yet there always remains the possibility that a nearly forgot ten form will become newly important due to future forms. Kubler 's and Wiener's

simultaneously "nonlinear, recursive, and

multidirectional" (24c) models of causality

provided Smithson with a visionary model

of time that took into account the possibility of future oblivion or entropy of any present

form, as well as the more radical prospect

I I 0 SPRING 200?

that long-held forms (and cultural values

for that matter) could be overturned and

replaced by a wide array of alternatives.

Projects such as Smithson's, which seek

to reclaim historical understanding as non

teleological and nontotalizing, certainly

align Lee's reading of these works within

recent studies that have identified the 1960s as the crucial moment of transformation

from modernism into postmodernism.5 Yet

Lee's insistence on grounding her analysis in

the relationship between cultural production and technological rationalization places her

account within the longue dur?e of modernism,

formed from the dual pressures of industri

alization and the culture of spectacle in

which we still live. As these forces took on

less material forms in the second half of the

twentieth century, artists found new means

to continue both their dialogue with this

world and their search for uncolonized

spaces of expression within it (through timeless "presentness" and, as in Lee's con

cluding examples of Andy Warhol's films and

On Kawara's Today Series, in seeming endless

ness). The "temporal turn" for which Lee

argues moves the discourse of modernism

away from such dichotomies as abstraction

and figuration by returning the image to its

pre-Albertian existence, in which meaning is produced not by visual similitude or, con

versely, by optical purity, but by serial corre

spondence.6 In a world where seeing no

longer means believing, it is the repetition and reification of the image (as well as the

possibility of its oblivion through various

forms of suppression) rather than its mater

ial appearance that define its credibility.

Chronophobia marks a strong first effort at

recognizing how the effects of technology have shaped artists' understanding of lived

time and their experience of the world,

and should be read not only by those who

study the art of the 1960s, but by anyone interested in the ideological use of history in a technocratic society.

1. E. P. Thomspon, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38

(December 1967), 56-97. 2. Jonathan Edwards's theological conception of

"presentness" was equally reactive, responding to the Deist conception of God as a clockmaker

who abandoned his creation after its conception. I am indebted to Matthew Chambers for pointing this out to me.

3. These aspects of systems theory played an

important role in the early writings of Michel

Foucault and Umberto Eco, who saw systems respectively as a means to destabilize the unified

subject and as a way to invest formal and semiotic

analysis with historical specificity. 4. Rosalind Krauss, "A Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 5. See, most notably, Hal Foster, "The Crux of Minimalism," in The Return of the Real

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 6. For another example of this figurai model, see

Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Ang?lico: Dissem blance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Robert Slifkin is a PhD candidate in the history of art at Yale University.

Reading Thai Art

Internationally Brian Curtin

Steven Pettifor. Flavours:Thai

Contemporary Art. Bangkok: Thavibu

Gallery, 2003. 130 pp., 79 color ills., 2 b/w.

$30.

Steven Pettifor's Flavours: Thai Contemporary Art

is the first survey to capture Thailand's con

temporary art scene in terms of what the

contemporary means: how artists of this

and recent generations can be situated in

regard to current notions of Thai experience and identity and broader questions of

impact and significance outside this country. Thailand was represented at the Venice

Biennale for the first time in 2003; the

annual Asian Contemporary Art Week in

New York City and similar events generate interest in and knowledge of Asian art in

major cultural centers; and the international

profiles of artists such as RirkkritTiravanija, Navin Rawanchaikul, and the late Montien

Boonma signal an optimism within and

without for the future of Thailand's upcom

ing artists. Pettifor's book aims at a recog nition of this increasing exposure of Thai

artists outside their country and, further, the

efforts of artists within "to make themselves

known on the global stage" (28). Pettifor

moved to Bangkok in 1992, the year of a

bloody coup, witnessed the economic col

lapse and its aftermath from 1997, and is

part of the ongoing periods of rapid devel

opment and commercialization in a country that is otherwise known for a stable contin

uity of traditional values and beliefs. This

is the backdrop against which he profiles

twenty-three artists, ostensibly representing the scope of the local art scene.

Whatever the diversity of the work of

these artists, Pettifor partially unites them

with a notion of Thai identity by means of

common themes such as urban commercial

ization, the modern erosion of traditional

Thai and Buddhist values, Southeast Asian

iconography, and critiques of particular

ideologies of national identity. This partial union is further underlined by his inevitable

insight that economically unstable countries

become prey to colonizing cultural influ

ences, and therefore a resistance to assimila

tion needs to be marked; Pettifor quotes Thai

I I I art journal