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Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts
Spring/Summer 2000, Volume 27, No.1Timekeepers
Guest Editor: Joanne Chan
Table of Contents • In This Issue •
$8 each (no discount)
OUT OF STOCK
In This Issue
by Joanne Chan
Portfolio: Timekeepers
Time Passages
Lynn Yarris
A Visit to Casa Azul
Steven Jenkins
Measuring Time
Berin Golonu
The Bends
Glen Helfand
Book Review
Apollonia Morrill, Borders and Others/The Politics of Documentary
Tony Mendoza, Cuba–Going Back. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999
Geoffrey James, Running Fence. Vancouver: Presentation House, 1999
Books Received and Noted
Books Received
In the Gallery
Recent Exhibitions at SF Camerawork
Screen Grab: The Net Bazaar
David Goldberg
in this issue
Timekeepers
"Captain’s log, Starship Enterprise, stardate 48650.1."
Time Trekkers
Trekkies abound in this lifetime, grasping onto the fictional representation of life outside our galaxy and time outside our collective consciousness.
Although the course of the Star Trek television series has lasted three decades of our time, these generations of space travelers exist in a time that we cannot comprehend: a place of time warps, space-time continuums, pulsars, warp speeds, nebulae, transporters, and wormholes; where "warp speed" takes people through light-years of space so quickly, time begins to fold onto itself.
In the movie Star Trek: Generations, the villain of the story concocts a deadly plan to facilitate his own return to Nexus, a place where time has no meaning and everything is idyllic. Captain Picard, himself transported to Nexus, realizes in a blissful moment that nothing is real and that he must return to reality to save his crew, and himself. Captain Kirk, slain almost a century ago in battle, is transported forward in time to assist Captain Picard in this daring mission to thwart the villain. The very concept of moving forward in time after one’s death is difficult enough to grasp. Then ponder one question more, as the Star Trek screenwriters suggest that events take place at the same time in parallel universes - thereby allowing a man who existed a hundred years ago to step into a future century and alter the course of its history. Time ceases to be linear. It warps and spins, runs along side, and doubles back on itself.
No wonder Star Trek has been followed religiously for so many years. It creatively ponders the very issues that physicists and mathematicians, historians and theologians, have been trying to understand for centuries. What is really the beginning of time? What existed before the beginning of time? If moments in time are measured by determining a beginning and an end, how do we possibly measure our existence as a species when our atoms will constantly be regenerated into different forms, through infinite time? Is there an afterlife - a Nexus?
Science of Time
It is quite fitting that we look to fictional stories about space to grasp the notion of time in its most scientific terms. Time, as defined by the laws of physics, is as vast as space, and is as difficult to understand. Isaac Newton theorized that time is "absolute," thereby stating that there is a single universal time, valid without relation to location, space, or individual experience. Albert Einstein overturned Newton’s theory with the theory of relativity, which was born of his philosophical questioning of the experience of time and how time differs based on the location of the observer. Time, scientifically speaking, is directly related to space.
In this issue, Lynn Yarris grounds our understanding of the history and science of time in his article "Time Passages." Yarris lays the foundation from which we can begin to view, question, and deconstruct the mysteries of time through artistic practice.
Questioning Time
In layperson’s terms, we understand the measurement of time through seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, and centuries. Time give us measure. It defines our history. It is the thing by which we organize our lives and our civilization. Yet, what are we measuring our lives upon? The Gregorian calendar, which begins at year 1, as the birth of Christ? A Christ who for much of the world’s population holds little significance? The founder of our calendar, Pope Gregory XIII, was more concerned with determining the dates for Easter and the movable feasts than he was interested in its scientific accuracy.
Or what of the duration of a minute? What if we were to decide all together that the duration of a minute actually lasts the equivalent of a minute and a half? Better, yet, what if we were to bundle minutes differently? We could revert to the Chinese system of 200 B.C. Although the Chinese also measured their day by 12 hours, they ticked them off as double hours, each given the name of an animal - for example, 7-9 p.m., bear; 5-7 a.m., hare; and midnight was the hour of the rat. I might ask a friend to "meet me at the bear for dinner - but I need to be home before the rat." This model would never work for us in this wireless, technologically precise civilization.
It was the nineteenth-century railroads in the United States that prompted the beginning of our obsession with standardized time. From city to city, the information most communicated over telephone and telegraph lines was the "exact" time. Without this synchronization, everyone would have missed their train. But with this technological advancement came disadvantages and dismay. In Faster, James Gleick writes,
It brought serious aftershocks - time zones, dividing neighbors along the boundaries, and daylight saving time, dividing city dwellers from farmers. Artificial, constructed, industrial-age time gave people a sense of its presumed opposite, natural time, a flow unbroken by machines, punctuated only by the swings or cycles of nature, and thus gentler in its effect on our true selves.
TIMEKEEPERS
This exhibition presents the work of ten artists who explore the meaning of time by calling into question its very definition. The work is divided into three sections: "Memory," "Measurement," and "Warp."
Time is defined by human experience.
It is in you, my mind, that I measure time. …As things pass by, they leave an impression on you. It is this impression which I measure. Therefore this itself is time or else I do not measure time at all. - St. Augustine
In "Memory" the artists take an Augustinian approach to defining, or deconstructing, time. Dennis Begg, Judy Gelles, Cheryl Owens, and Lucy Puls explore nostalgic moments, both personal and borrowed. Begg creates precious three-dimensional objects made of digitally altered found photographs, exposing our impulse to parcel and cherish memories as treasures. But are these really our memories, or idealized tokens that help us define our existence? Judy Gelles has taken a series of annual family portraits that poignantly record the passage of time through memories of shared moments (family reunions), rites of passage (graduation, college), and moments of loss (the death of a family member). Cheryl Owens collects and alters her family’s pictures by blurring and warping the surface. In doing so, she questions the way we remember and shows how memory is not absolute; rather, it is held and constantly modified by the individual’s perception. Lucy Puls creates frozen time capsules of familiar objects: wind-up clocks, computers, afghans, and toys embedded in amber resin. These objects take on an anthropological meaning and pull at our heartstrings to remember objects that were once familiar to our everyday lives.
In this issue, Steven Jenkins’s self-reflective article, "A Visit to Casa Azul," provides us with relational moments of his memory. Fact or fiction, his writing encourages the reader to stop and reflect on her own memories and how they may shift from reality to dream-state, past to future. Jenkins asks, What is worth remembering?
Time is defined by its measure.
Our quest for the precise time of day may go down in history as the greatest obsession of the twentieth century. - Anthony Aveni, astronomer and anthrolopologist
In "Measurement," Bruce Cannon, Michael Henderson, and Tongsue Ly identify different methods of measurement. Bruce Cannon’s work incorporates noetic time-that which is measured in terms of human life. Noetic time is defined by birth and death and by our linear life experiences. Cannon’s Reflection is inextricably linked to the piece’s owner, whose life is chronicled and displayed by the "mirror" on the wall. Michael Henderson’s work also touches on this notion of time, as anonymous voices narrate a black-and-white film during a walk along an urban street. These sound bytes describe moments in time that are relevant to everyone, yet different from person to person. Tongsue Ly measures time through the weaving of a spider web-or rather, through her string sculptures. Here, the timelessness and cycles of nature are called into question, as a spider’s overnight weaving might question how long one has been sleeping. In nature, time weaves a complicated and nonlinear path, always changing, always moving.
In this issue, Berin Golonu’s "Measuring Time" explores how we, as a society, are defined and ruled by the clock. Our obsession with absolute time, atomic time, and the acceleration of time affect the way we experience time-the way we experience our lives.
Time is defined by space.
Sometimes we "wonder" quite spontaneously about some experience. This "wondering" seems to occur when an experience comes into conflict with a world of concepts that is already fixed in us. - Albert Einstein
Einstein discovered that time, space, mass, and speed are all interwoven and affect one another. We cannot experience one independent of the others. Einstein also proved that time can be warped and that time can slow down near a black hole. Many of the Star Trek principles are actually grounded in scientific theory and are scientifically plausible. In the "Warp" section-Timekeeper-Jim Campbell, Kathryn Dunlevie, and Barrett Langlinais create interactive moments of time warp. Campbell creates a mirror of sorts that reflects another viewer’s image in your place as you stand before it. He thus forces you into a time warp, projecting you forward into the subsequent viewer’s reflection. Dunlevie utilizes both photography and paint to create illusions of space and time. On her panels, one views a warping world of shared spaces and multiple moments in time. The disparate moments seamlessly weave into one another and create an illusion of order in an orderless world. Langlinais wavers precipitously between perpetrator and investigator in his video Revert, warping our notion of forward movement and our belief in the "before and after."
In this issue, Glen Helfand’s "The Bends" reminds us of familiar time warps in American culture: movies, concerts, drugs, and, of course, artistic expression. His examples show us that disorientation and disorder are the symptoms of time warping, both in life and art.
We are left feeling uneasy, as if we were no longer sure of our place in time. Or our space in time…Or our time in space?
Joanne Chan, editor
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