May 04, 2004
Time, Technology, and Art: Interview with Pamela M. Lee
by Nader Vossoughian
In her recently published Chronophobia (2004), Pamela M. Lee argues that time represents a seminal, if neglected, preoccupation of post-war modern art. This concern, she says, has everything to do with the rise of automation technologies during the post-World War II era. The work of Andy Warhol and others like him anticipated growing anxieties about the past and its relationship to the present, she argues, suggesting that we have yet to come out from under the shadow of the ‘60s. Indeed, in her estimation modernity might be seen more generally as a process of convergence between innovation and obsolescence, one in which questions of temporality play an increasingly important, if indeterminate, role.
Q. My first question to you is to do with the theme of chronophobia. Why was it such a uniquely ‘60s phenomena? How might it be contrasted with perceptions of time during the 1970s? Can Gordon Matta-Clark also be said to have been a chronophobic artist?
A. The anxiety about (as well as fetish for) time is not a new phenomenon; nor is the twining of the temporal and the technological I outline in the sixties historical record. As I point out at several places in the text, modernity is itself a confrontation with the temporal, and we can certainly go back much further in mining this genealogy. But the '60s offer a very particular case study in this narrative: you could say it registers a decisive acceleration of this question. The historical emergence of the information age and the ideologies of control underwriting the rise of systems theory suggests something that comes close to a paradigm shift in the way in which time is both organized and projected.
The perception of time in the sixties (or rather, its projection) does not so much contrast with the '70s as it instantiates it, sets it into motion. And you are right to see a connection between this project and Matta-Clark's enterprise, although I would hesitate to call Matta-Clark a chronophobic artist. Certainly his work addressed questions of the timely and untimely as a function of the built environment: his work was an architecture of time (to borrow an expression of his father's).
Q. I was fascinated by your discussion about automation and mechanization. Mechanization, you observe, was born of the machine – the urge to rationalize the factory and workplace. Automation, by contrast, had more to do with communication and control. While both developments attempted to foster efficiency, they did so by radically different means: mechanization regulated the production of things, while automation affected the production of thoughts; not just what we see, but how we see. Am I correct in characterizing your account of the rise of automation technologies in this way? If so, how and why did the rise of technologies like cybernetics affect our perceptions of time?
A. You are right to characterize the distinction in these terms, although I do hope my writing preserves the contemporary problems of periodization around machine-age and automation technology in the early 1960s. In the chapter that deals most explicitly with this issue - on the kinetic artist Jean Tinguely - I suggest that parsing mechanization and automation along the lines of prewar and postwar technology - to lay a claim for a decisive historical break between the two - is to repress the enormous controversies attending the introduction of automation in the public sphere: indeed, it is precisely the seeming indivisibility of mechanization and automation that produces that anxiety.
John F. Kennedy’s quote about automation is to the point here. He states, “The major domestic challenge of the Sixties… is to maintain full employment at a time when automation is replacing men.” Because, of course, no one knew just to what extent processes of automation would alter the character of production, it remained indivisible during the Sixties from the discourses of labor typically associated with the machine age.
As for the rise of automation technologies and the art of the 1960s: many artists working under the rubric of "art and technology" in this period embraced the structural possibilities that were a function of automation (as in, for example, early CGs, video and its internalization of feedback) but the artists and critics that interest me respond mostly to its temporal implications, such as repetition, seriality, autopoesis, recursiveness, etc.
Q. To what extent does the fear of time thaIt you trace throughout your book still resonate with us today? Do you think that the rise of the internet and the cell phone have further dislocated our sense of time?
A. The fear of time - or the problematic of time - is one of the great hangovers we still suffer from the sixties. I write about this in the conclusion when I take up millennial anxieties around Y2K. What also bears repeating is the quasi-site-specific dimension of this book: the fact that a large part of it was conceptualized in the Silicon Valley where I teach; and where a certain resistance to, or ignorance of, recent history is endemic to large sectors of the student populace. I would hardly say this condition is exclusive to undergraduates, but is rather emblematic of the culture's ideology of presentism. To wit: consider the White House's absolute repression of the recent past; in particular, the "other" forgotten war in Afghanistan, the declarations about the end of major combat in Iraq last May, and, of course, the first Gulf War, which many people seem resistant to thinking has anything to do with our present situation (if they think about it all). This is not to forget, either, the inconvenient historical detail of Saddam Hussein's support from certain higher-ups in the U.S. government not too long ago.
Indeed, much of the book was written in the shadow of the dot-com bubble economy and its immediate aftermath. I was implicitly responding to the rhetoric of acceleration, endless technological progress and institutionally enforced obsolescence that repeatedly accompanies these economies.
As I write you now during my daily commute - on my laptop - and plan to send this off to you via wireless airport technology - I can only say the rise of the internet plays an enormous share in the current iteration of this chronophobic scenario. Let's just say the economy of time is one that academics struggle with constantly; and it is both marked and facilitated by our relationship to these quotidian forms of communications media.
Q. Agglutinations did an interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko recently. Wodiczko is an artist who uses video projects in public spaces to foster dialogue and "testimony." Like Tinguely, he appears to want to use technology as a tool for automating - and animating – artistic production. But if Tinguely's attitude toward time is an apocalyptic one, suffused with Cold War anxieties about nuclear destruction, Wodiczko's seems rather optimistic, utopian even, as though technology will help us "get through," even transcend, both the present and the past.
A. I am very interested in Wodiczko's work, although I wouldn't class him in the same art historical genealogy as Tinguely. And while I agree with you that testimony - especially the question of what is historically repressed within social discourse – is critical to what he does, I'm not sure I see his project as utopian. I've always thought of Wodiczko's work relative to critical strategies of montage; in this way, he's much more like a Matta-Clark in his projection of multiple and contradictory perspectives on contemporaneity. One can make a strong case for a socially therapeutic element in his work (as one could for Matta-Clark as well), but what compels me about Wodiczko's practice is its confrontation with anachronism: the way those images and voices return, uncannily, to haunt the appearance of immediacy that is the present. In that sense, Wodiczko certainly has a great deal to say about temporality, if not at all in the same register as the artists I consider in my book.
Q. In the conclusion to your book you make a case for "slowness and the ability to parse one's own present." Could you elaborate this point? Do you see any escape - artistic or otherwise - from the 60s “predicament”? What role do the arts have to play in this regard?
A. Slowing down, at least the way I discuss it in a Warhol or an On Kawara, represents the antithesis of returning to a mythic past. Slowing down implicitly problematizes our relationship to contemporaneity without imagining one can escape its very conditions or achieve distance from our own historical embeddedness: it's a means to think through the opacity (or transparency) of the present. The brilliance of Warhol and Kawara is that they exploit the structural mechanisms of technological acceleration - and the narratives of futuristic prognostication - in the service of slowness.
My larger point is that we can't, nor would we want to believe that we could, escape this predicament. We can, however, become more entrenched, "dig in our heels" in a manner of speaking, which is the possibility that slowness offers as a mode of critical intervention. I find it very interesting that Stewart Brand, who was so instrumental in thinking through the liberatory consequences of systems theory in the 1960s, is now engaged in this very problematic with his Clock of the Long Now Foundation.
As for the question of recent art: contemporary art is absolutely obsessed with the 1960s (just take a glance at the Whitney Biennial) and the issue of time is explicit for many practitioners. Some of this, I suspect, has to do with the proliferation of time-based media in the galleries, but I think it goes further than that: there's an encounter with duration that suggests that time has dethroned space in contemporary artistic production. I confess I have doubts that art "fosters productive change in our daily lives" at the level of social work or strategy. There are, of course, exceptions. But I hasten to add that this takes nothing anything away from the formative, projective and even phantasmatic capacities of works of art. Works of art are their own proposals or propositions, their own speculative gambits; and that is more than enough for me. (Good art, also, finds its audience anywhere, regardless of media or institutional context.)
Pamela M. Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. She is also the author of Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (1999).