ARTBOOK BLOG

RECENT POSTS

DATE 4/25/2024

The Strand presents Joshua Charow launching 'Loft Law'

DATE 3/31/2024

Behold the photographic work of Jay DeFeo, born OTD in 1929

DATE 3/30/2024

Seminary Co-op presents the Chicago launch of Danny Lyon's 'This Is My Life I'm Talking About'

DATE 3/15/2024

A gorgeous and compelling new exploration of bodega culture from rising star, Tschabalala Self

DATE 3/15/2024

Vintage girl power in ‘Las Mexicanas’

DATE 3/14/2024

Celebrate Pi Day with 'Einstein: The Man and His Mind'

DATE 3/12/2024

Kindred Stores presents Anita N. Bateman on 'Where is Africa'

DATE 3/12/2024

Hot book alert! ‘God Made My Face’ is NEW from Dancing Foxes Press and Brooklyn Museum

DATE 3/11/2024

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents the launch of 'Richard Nonas'

DATE 3/7/2024

Letterform Archive Press presents 'The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928–1930' with Gennifer Weisenfeld

DATE 3/7/2024

Visions of the Black figure in ‘The Time is Always Now’

DATE 3/7/2024

Rizzoli Bookstore presents Chloe Sherman and Noelle Flores Théard on 'Renegades: San Francisco, The 1990s'

DATE 3/6/2024

Yelena Yemchuk to launch 'Malanka' at Dashwood Books


EXCERPTS & ESSAYS

MING LIN | DATE 12/1/2011

Documenta Notebooks: William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison, The Refusal of Time

Though not always explicit, a preoccupation with time has inherently been a factor in western works of art.  Drawing from it's religious antecedents, works of the early modern period attempted to immortalize their creators, securing both the notion of the individual and the place of the artist within the canon - both essential parts of the modern nation state. Art, by providing a material imprint, acted as proof of ones existence and as a window into a higher realm of thought. For a moment, art harnessed time, froze it, and used it to project certain ideas about how society should organize itself.
In The Refusal of Time, artist William Kentridge and physicist Peter Galison explore the ways in which time has been utilized as means of control. The first of two essays describes the event which set the precedent for systems of measurement to be exact and standardized.  At the end of the 19th century, 18 countries agreed to recognize the meter and the kilogram as common units, based on a meter stick and a weight chosen at random and then buried in the earth. From this moment on, Galison writes: "every atom and asteroid, every galaxy and giraffe, would be given in terms of those two metal objects deep below ground." A craze for conventional forms of all measurement ensued, time above all.  A standard time zone was established in europe and soon extended to the colonies as well. 
Documenta Notebooks: William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison, The Refusal of Time
But over time the inherent value of the meter and the kilogram has been degraded, the kilo loosing fifty millionths of a gram over the past 120 years. To Galison this suggests a universe "populated by the inexistent, failed objects that are, for their lack of reality, the most real of all" -meaning that the systems of value that govern us as are complex, elusive and arbitrary. Einstein, in his theory of relativity, claimed that every person carried his or her own time, this being contingent on movement, and thus he proposed a relation between time and space. A re-examination of time finds it to be defined by procedure and process rather than an absolute simultaneity. Galison concludes that presently, time and the rational frameworks which it is understood to be a part of are vestiges of an "obsolete science," a mere illusion. A contemporary notion of time is one that bears the human mark upon it. It is determined not by the rhythms of some unfathomable object, but by the blood coursing through our veins.
Documenta Notebooks: William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison, The Refusal of Time

Artists since the 1990s have increasingly emphasized the temporal rather than spatial in visual representations. Gerhard Richter's blurred and saturated paintings, for example, allude to the condition of memory - a product of time that is constantly in flux. In these compositions, the visible movement of the brush across the events depicted conveys the passing of time. William Kentridge's video works similarly illustrate the relation between space and time. His videos are comprised of pencil drawings drawn on a single sheet of paper, then erased or altered, and then redrawn, enacting a narrative where traces of lines and erasure denote process. In the Documenta notebook, Kentridge's sketches contemplate time as physical and spatial and therefore, alongside Galison's writings, demonstrate that time does not stand alone but is interconnected with space and other human forms of measure. This is not to do away with time altogether, but to reveal its constructed nature so that new forms of governance may emerge. 

Documenta Notebooks: William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison, The Refusal of Time
Documenta Notebooks: William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison, The Refusal of Time
Documenta Notebooks: William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison, The Refusal of Time
Documenta Notebooks: William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison, The Refusal of Time
Documenta Notebooks: William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison, The Refusal of Time
Documenta Notebooks: William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison, The Refusal of Time

William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison: The Refusal of Time

William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison: The Refusal of Time

Hatje Cantz
Pbk, 7 x 9.75 in. / 48 pgs / 29 color.