Call for Submissions: Artlink issue: The Spaces of Time

Guest Editor: Ben Eltham

Artlink covers contemporary art in Australia and through its networking with the national and international scene, provides a context for evaluation and analysis. It regularly produces Special Issues on specific areas, and undertakes major theme-based features.

Artlink is calling for submissions from art writers and critics for its forthcoming Special Issue, ‘The Spaces of Time’ to be released on 1 March 2009.

Background: the spaces of time

According to many scientists, time is a dimension: the chronological axis on which our spatial constructions must eventually map out. However, unlike spatial dimensions, time is not immediately discernible: to sense it accurately we require instruments like clocks. Time travel has fascinated the imagination for centuries, from Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkel to Woolf's Orlando, Phillip K. Dick's Martian Time Slip and onwards to the science fiction movies and TV shows of own time. The social construction of time has also changed markedly over the centuries: as E.P. Thompson famously pointed out, time was not a major consideration of the British working classes until changing industrial relations conditions transformed the dominant equation from ‘time passed’ to ‘time spent.’ Somewhere in that process, our modern distinction of ‘work’ and ‘life’ was born.

It's not surprising that artists of all stripes have been fascinated with the movement and direction of time. Vladimir Nabokov said ‘Nobody can imagine in physical terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time is not reversible.’ Yet Jonathon and Christopher Nolan's Memento and Martin Amis' Times Arrow employ reverse chronological narratives to give us precisely this subjective impression.

Time is intimately related to travel. In the 18^th century, the British Parliament sponsored a lucrative prize for an accurate chronometer that could measure longitude at sea, and it was the introduction of railway timetables in the 19th century that spurred the adoption of 'standard times' throughout national jurisdictions. This spatial relationship of time is beautifully analysed in Frances Yates' The Art of Memory, who observed that in both classical times and the middle ages, rhetoricians and entertainers would memorise long speeches and performances using well-known public buildings like cathedrals.

L.P. Hartley said ‘the past is a foreign country‘ and the art historian and critic confronts this reality every time she engages with an ancient or near-contemporary work. Artists themselves also feel the passing of time: in one of his early books, Walter Benjamin said ‘the artwork is the death-mask of its conception.’ Indeed, because of time's directionality, the theme of time has often been associated with concepts like memory, decay and entropy – perhaps best essayed by J.G. Ballard in his short story ‘The Voices of Time.’

In contemporary art there many artists who explore this ubiquitous dimension. The sound artists of the musique concrete school were interested in the cut-and-paste mechanics of time-based sonic experience; in a different medium, so is Tim Hawkinson with his drip gadgets. Melik Ohanian's ‘Seven Minutes Before’ explores a revolutionary moment-in-time that Walter Benjamin would have instantly recognised. Ohanian's work was one of many at the 2005 Lyon Biennale that explored what a group of European historians called the ‘longue duree.’ The 2005 Lyon Biennale, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerome Sans, also featured temporally engaged work by Martin Creed, Terry Riley, James Turrell, Douglas Huebler and Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija. And there is much Australian and Asia-Pacific art which explores these themes including Todd McMillan's poke at Caspar David Friedrich in ‘By the sea’ and Daniel Crooks' time-sliced trams and trains.

Call for contributions

This issue of Artlink will explore the way contemporary Australian and Asian-Pacific artists explore the theme of time. Questions for discussion include:

• What is the nature of time and how is it explored by art and artists?

• How does art help us to understand the lived experience of time?

• Can time ever be understood without the aid of technology?

• Is time now different to past time? Is our world really speeding up, and if so, what does this mean?

We are looking for articles from Australia and the Asia-Pacific about:

• Australian artists and designers (in any medium) working with themes of temporality, duration, memory and decay

• Art practices, collectives, trends and movements that address the theme of time

• The mediation of temporal lived experience through the intersection of art, science and technology

• Social and cultural trends related to the changing nature of time in modern life.

Payment is AUD$300 per thousand words. Please send expressions of interest (a brief abstract of your proposed piece including examples of art works and artists) as soon as possible to Ben Eltham at ben.eltham@gmail.com or call him on 0422 987 538. Commissioned texts are due by November 2008.