2MOVE (the exhibition)

Heringa/van Kalsbeek, Untitled

Marclay, The Clock

It's About Time! Reflections on Urgency

Introducing Time's Thought-Image: An Octopus

Having resisted attempts to define concepts discussed so far, it is not with time, or temporality, that I am going to start saying what it is. We all know, or think we know, live in, are subjected to, the self-evident dimension of life we call time. But in spite of George Kubler's brave 1962 attempt to argue for the contrary, time has no form, no shape; it is not a thing. It can leave shapes, in the sense of historically specific styles, which is more in line with Kubler's essay, but time itself is formless. It can be used in rhythm, which can sometimes create the impression or feeling of form, something we take from music and rhythmic poetry. But it is not time that has that form; it is the music, verse, or even the rhythmic breathing that has a form.

Formlessness does not entail invisibility, however. The choice is not to either see fully shaped forms or to see nothing, but, as Silverman puts it, to learn to practise a ‘visual habitus’ that enables us to see what, by lack of recognisable form, seems invisible (see the introduction to her 1996 book). Although she proposes this not in the context of time but of an ‘ethics of vision’, the idea of a visual habitus can be brought to bear on time. In general, as the time passing in the everyday, ‘all the time’, time is so self-evident that one would not wonder about its potential form. It only accedes to awareness when its apparent flow is interrupted. This can be due to nature or man-made disasters, traumatogenic events, which change the course of time, in one way or another, or to an exceptionally intense experience.

Formless as it is, time is culturally ubiquitous. And it exerts great power over society and individual lives. Therefore, I give it a (metaphorical) form, to make it concrete in a thought-image. Traditionally, time is represented as an arrow, going in one direction. This metaphor is burdened with simplifying consequences: briefly, a one-liner, unidirectional. Narrative could easily be considered such an arrowsubjected cultural form. And so could film.