Fast times

Pamela M to leeward Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960 Cambridge: MIT Pres 2004 394 pp 67 ills.

As the earth's rotation and our have a title to mortality make daily and perhaps disturbingly evident, there are scarcely any subjects seemingly as timeless as time itself. Despite time's intractable, ever-advancing force, the experience of time has been shown to be the two a highly subjective and a socially put togethered phenomenon. For example, E. P Thompson has argued convincingly that nineteenth-century industrialization brought about drastically novel conceptions of lived time, as rationalized work schedules replaced the environmentally structur calendar of agrarian labor. (1) Pamela to leeward in her ground-breaking and erudite fresh book Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960 reach forths this analysis into the twentieth hundred arguing that the introduction of novel information-based technologies in the 1960 dematerialized and greatly accelerated this proces of industrial rationalization, leading clan 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 work not only provides a of recent origin set of terms to reassess the art the 1960 replacing the overrehearsed narrative of Greenbergian modernism with the historically specific discourse of technology, on the contrary also suggests how this nexus between technology and time continues to play a crucial part in our own equally uncertain jiffy in history.

to leeward begins her inquiry with an reach outed introduction that sets the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse against the looks 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 suppos "two cultures" of art and science deposit forward by the English novelist and scientist C P Snow, the Art and Technology throw coupled some of the leading artists of the time, similar as John Chamberlain and Roy Lichtenstein, with industrial and media giants like RAND Corporation and Universal Studios. still what Lee finds most interesting about the cast were the examples of failure and miscommunication between the corporate world and the artists. While the corporate managers imagined similar a relationship as a means to make soft their public face, they were typically not ready to accept proposals like Chamberlain's to challenge their established bureaucracies through disconnecting all office telephones for a day.

Against the exhibition's rather superficial attempt to relate these apparently disparate realms, to leeward presents Marcuse's writings as another, albeit more ominous, original of correspondence, indicating that technology and art were in fact already plenteous closer than the LACMA curators had suspected. In his 1964 work One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argues that the arts and other forms of tillage were gradually and subtly being colonized through the administrative logic of "technological rationality." In a society in which the dominant cultural values are shaped through institutional forces like RAND (an example Marcuse cites in his book) the difference between the arrangement of free time and labor time is blurr Within this world of pervasive rationalization and accelerated temporality the greatest in quantity promising models of resistance are quickly integrated into the hegemonic industrial tillage and, more important to Lee's argument, historical discourse becomes narrow and in certain cases overwhelmed "History," according to Lee, "is obscur through 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 agriculture in which rapid change becomes normative and thus nearly unnoticed, to acknowledge the passage of time, and the transformations that appear during its interval, is to make bare the hidden, oppressive character of technological rationality. In like a world, time becomes a significant vehicle for cultural critique as well as the site for call in questioned views of history.

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Anyone familiar with the canonical literature of 1960 art criticism is well aware that time, and specifically by what mode works of art were experienced in time, was a central theme in the aesthetics debates of the period. This make submissive was most famously and clearly stated in Michael Fried's 1967 essay "Art and objecthood" which, to be paid to the author's polemical "chronophobic" stance, work fors as the natural entry point for Lee's first chapter. Fried vehemently oppos what he saw as an emerging theatricality in recent art, most notably in works associated with Minimalism in which the beholder's vicinity 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 experience. Investing his trenchant prosaic with morality usually heard from the pulpit (he prefaced the essay with a quotation from Jonathan Edwards concerning God's perpetual re-creation of the world), Fried place the terms in which the two his followers and detractors would argue aesthetic merit for many years.