Chronophobia:
On Time in the Art of the 1960’s
by Pamela M. Lee
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
336 pp., illus. 67 b/w. Trade, $34.95
ISBN: 0-262-12260-X.
Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg
andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com
Technology is widely recognised as one
of the major forces of modernity and one
of the key ways in which our experiences
of time is constituted. Pamela Lee’s
ambition in Chronophobia is to
study the relationship between the art
of the 1960’s and the technology
of the period. In doing so, she identifies
an experience of time common to both,
and she calls this experience "chronophobia".
The term describes an experience of unease
and anxiety about time, a feeling that
events are moving too fast and are thus
hard to make sense of. The result is an
experience of being outside time or of
"not being entitled to time"
as E.M. Cioran describes it.
This book is, therefore, a study of one
of the central problems of modernity,
but unlike many other approaches to this
issue, Lee considers it in a relatively
brief period——the 10 years or
so that constitute the 1960’s——and
she examines the experience of time in
the works of artists of that period as
well as some of the major writings on
art of the period. This approach has much
to commend it. Lee is able to identify
complex and subtle relationships between
art and technology that would escape any
study on a larger scale. She can also
consider a diverse range of work by artists
such as Brigid Riley, Carolee Schneemann,
Jean Tinguely, Andy Warhol, and On Kawara.
The period she has chosen is especially
interesting today as we look back to the
emergence of our contemporary media culture.
Lee’s reading of Michael Fried’s
seminal essay, "Art and Objecthood",
articulates the concept of time contained
within it. She contrasts Fried’s
aesthetic and ethical concept of "presentness"
with the experience of duration, or "endlessness",
which Fried railed against in the minimalist
sculpture of the period. For Fried eternal
time is a sort of timelesssness and a
negation of time because it is ahistorical.
Lee shows how Fried’s antipathy to
minimalist sculpture is not only aesthetic
and ethical but also a profound rejection
of the experience of time it embodies.
Lee then studies the relationship between
minimalism and technology and identifies
the link between the two as systems analysis.
She finds that this connection reveals
the central problem of Fried’s essay——the
concern with the communicative structure
of the art work and the concept of time
within it.
Her reading of Fried’s much-discussed
essay is fresh and innovative while ultimately
confirming it as an impassioned defence
of a fast disappearing concept of art
and, perhaps, as one of the last great
moments of high modernist art. This reading
of Fried, thus, demonstrates a rupture
in the experience of time in the 1960’s
art world and, Lee would argue, also in
the larger social world.
It is in this ambition to speak for the
social world outside that of the art community
that the book is more problematic. To
justify her claims that the art of this
period reflected and critiqued experiences
of time in society more generally, Lee
cites a number of popular books, such
as Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock,
and claims that the concept of time they
espouse is chronophobic as defined in
her book, and their popularity means that
their concept of time was widely shared.
This type of evidence will not support
such claims as it is too anecdotal, it
lacks a defined concept or theory of the
relationship between art and society,
but, above all, it does not draw on any
of the work in this area in the social
sciences or in critical social theory.
For this reason, Chronophobia will
appeal to students of contemporary art
and art history and those studying the
recent history of media and the creation
of our digital age from a cultural studies
or literary perspective.. Despite it’s
interdisciplinary subject matter, its
arguments will be less compelling to those
approaching this subject from history
or the social sciences.
