![]() The continued pulsation of our hearts and the ticking of clocks denote our freedom from an eternal present. Like the catch and release of the valves of the heart that allow blood to flow between its chambers, setting the basic rhythm of life, the escapement of a watch regulates our sense of the flow of time. 2 It denotes the mechanism in mechanical watches and clocks that governs the regular motion of the hands through a “catch and release” device that both releases and restrains the levers that move the hands for hours, minutes, and seconds. EscapementĮscapement is a horological or clockmaking term. ![]() Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan, Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind), 1988. Escape is a resonant word in the vocabulary of clockmaking. When possible, escape is up a hatch and down a corridor between and occasionally beyond longitudes, to places where the hours chime epiphanies. Sleep is besieged by wakefulness, hunger is fed by stimulation, and moments of dreaming and lucid alertness are eroded with the knowledge of intimate terrors and distant wars. ![]() Circadian rhythms (times to rise and times to sleep, times for work and times for leisure, times for sunlight and times for stars) get muddled as millions of faces find themselves lit by timeless fluorescence that trades night for day. The soft insidious panic of time ticking away in our heads is syncopated by accelerated heartbeat of our everyday lives. In the struggle to keep pace with clocks, we are now always and everywhere in a state of jet lag, always catching up with ourselves and with others, slightly short of breath, slightly short of time. Day after day, astride minutes and seconds, the hours ride as they must, relentlessly. Any reflection on contemporaneity cannot avoid simultaneously being a consideration of time, and of our relation to it. We could see this “reticence,” this “refusal to historicize,” as a form of escape from the tyranny of the clock and the calendar-instruments to measure time, and to measure our ability to keep time, to keep to the demands of the time allotted to us by history, our contemporaneity. It is tempting to think of this dual obstinacy-to face the storm and not be blown away-as an acute reticence that is at the same time a refusal to either run away from or be carried away by the strong winds of history, of time itself. If Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, celebrated in Benjamin’s evocation of the angel of history, with its head caught in turning between the storm of the future and the debris of the present, were ever in need of a more recent annotation, then old man Ivens in his chair, waiting for the wind, would do very nicely. ![]() It takes stubbornness, obstinacy, to face a storm, and yet also a desire not to be blown away by it. The Old Man and the Wind: Joris Ivens’ FilmĪt the very beginning of Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan’s film Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind), we see a frail Joris Ivens sitting in a chair on a sand dune in the Gobi Desert, on the border between China and Mongolia, waiting for the arrival of a sandstorm.Įlsewhere in the film, an old woman-a wind shaman-talks about waiting for the wind.īuffeted as we are by winds that blow from so many directions with such intensity, this image of an old man in a chair waiting for a storm is a metaphor for a possible response to the question “What is contemporaneity?” Simultaneously an assertion and a reticence to name one’s place in time, it is this equivocation that we would really like to discuss. In speaking of the “hesitation in developing any kind of comprehensive strategy” for understanding precisely what it is that we call contemporary art today (in the wake of the last twenty years of contemporary art activity), the introduction to the series speaks of its having “assumed a fully mature form-and yet it still somehow refuses to be historicized as such.” 1 We would like to begin by taking a sentence from the formulation of the problem that set the ball rolling for this lecture series.
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