‘Anachronic’, ‘Polychronic’ and ‘Monochronic’ Sites of Time in Relation to Installation Works by Contemporary Visual Artists: Moyra Davey, The Copperheads series; KutluG Ataman, The Portrait of Sakip Sabanci; and Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance: Time. “Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.” - Walter Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory”1 Contemporary artists have increasingly used archival research in the creation of their artworks, in order to discover and to question historical truth, characteristic of the so-called “historiographic turn”2. The historiographic “turn” in contemporary art emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century. It is explored by a number of artists and characterised by depictions of archival research into historical representation. It acts as an attempt at grasping the cluttered fabric of the world, and was inaugurated by the events of September 11 2001 and the “war on Terror”, and can therefore be seen as essentially the art of the Bush era.3 The artists referenced in this essay have undertaken various forms referencing the past, associated with archaeological excavation, memorialization, and repetition, but not all of the artists included in this essay work against chronological and sequential time. Visual art represents a multitude of things at different instants in space and time. Visual art is creative art whose products are to be appreciated by sight, including photography, film-making, performance and installation.4 The examples of visual art presented here relate to the ‘anachronic’ or ‘heterochronic’ site of time depicted in the photographic works of Moyra Davey’s Copperhead series; polychromic time in Kutlug Ataman’s The Portrait of Sakip Sabanci; and monochronic time instilled in Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950) Time Clock Piece (One Year Performance, 1981-1982). Certain theorists, for example Giorgio Agamben and Mieke Bal, have proposed fundamental ‘anachronic’, ‘heterochronic’, ‘monochronic’ and ‘polychronic’ understandings of history, and artists have uncovered or extended the field of the notion of time to the extent that the very concept of the contemporary has been brought into question. 5 1 Benjamin, Walter, (1999) “Excavation and Memory,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodnet Livingstone et al. Cambridge, MA:BelknapPress of Harvard University Press, p. 576. 2 Roelstraete, Dieter, (2009)The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art. E-Flux. Journal #04 [online]. Available from: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/04/68582/the-way-of-the-shovel-on-the- archeological-imaginary-in-art/ [Accessed 20th December 2016]. 3 Roelstraete, Dieter, (2009) After the Historiographic Turn: Current Findings – Promontory. E-Flux. Journal #06 [online]. Available from: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/06/61402/after-the-historiographic-turn-current- findings/ [Accessed 1st November 2016]. 4 English Oxford Dictionaries: Visual art [online]. Available from: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/visual_art [Accessed 10th December 2016]. 5 Groom, Amelia, (2013) Time: Documents of Contemporary Art, MIT/Whitechapel Gallery, pp.12-25. 1 Copyright Sarah F Janavicius Moyra Davey, Copperhead series, 1990 “Of what use, then, is the monumentalistic conception of the past, engagement with the classic and rare of earlier times, to the man of the present? He learns from it that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”6 Moyra Davey (Canadian b. 1958, lives in New York City, United States) is a visual artist, who works in video and film-based photography. Her photographs are intimately scaled and shot on film, and are a contemplation of time. She is known for creating photographs of her surroundings, depicting seemingly minor objects of the ordinary every day which are usually overlooked. Her photographs depict an awareness of how time passes in a domestic setting. Davey records the accumulation of dust under the bed; dust in the grooves of a record on a turntable; a close up of a stack of books from the 1990s; or a tube of ointment for athlete’s foot, signifying touching signs of humanity, the out of fashion, the outmoded and the untimely.7 Davey’s work unintentionally reacts to questions published by editors of October, in the spring issue 2002: ‘the obsolescent, the “outmoded”, the nonsynchronous, discarded forms, marginal mediums: which appear to be resources of interest to contemporary artists and their projects. How does obsolescence figure in your work? […] Does it serve constructive purposes in your work – i.e., the making of a new sort of medium or form?’8 […]. Davey describes her work as ‘anachronistic contemporary’ Nietzschean with notions of untimeliness (Unzeitgemässig). Nietzschean ‘untimeliness’ is characteristic of the German philosopher. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations), sometimes translated as Unfashionable (or Unmodern) Observations. […] and particularly referencing his ideas: 'the quest for self-determination leads to Nietzschean nihilism'[…] illustrating the Nietzschean belief that art can give form and closure to the meaninglessness of existence.9 The notion of accident has had many meanings, from “decisive moment” to “photographing to see what something will look like photographed.” As Davey quotes “But is this an anachronism for contemporary work, decades 6 Nietzsche, Friedrich, (1997) “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 69. 7 Barliant, Claire, [n.d.] Moyra Devey: Copperhead No. 57, Collection online. Guggenheim [online]. Available from: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/26690 [Accessed 11th December 2016]. 8 Baker, George, ed., ‘Artist Questionnaire: 21 Responses’, October, no. 100 (Spring 2002) p.7. 9 Ibid (Refer to footnote 5), p. 174. 10 Davey , Moyra, (2008) “Notes on Photography and Accident” was originally published in Helen Molesworth, ed., Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey, Yale University Press, [online]. Available from: http://murrayguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Davey_Notes_on_Photography__Accident.pdf [Accessed 28th December 2016]. 2 Copyright Sarah F Janavicius after the ethos of the street?”10 The choice of objects becomes in Davey’s words, “a memento mori and a tangible index of time passing.”11 This ‘memento mori’ notion reminds the viewer of their mortality and the fragility of the human condition.12 Her photographs also communicate an implicit challenge to the existing parameters of digital imaging technology. Moyra Davey, Copperhead Grid, 1990. The American one-cent coin has portrayed a revered icon profile of the late President Abraham Lincoln, since 1909, the centennial year of his birth. The one-cent coin is known colloquially as the Lincoln penny and is usually the smallest denomination within the currency system.13 Davey’s The Copperheads is a series which was initiated by the post stock market crash of 1987 and comprise one hundred Chromogenic prints of Lincoln pennies shot between 1989 and 1990, exhibited as an installation, and frequently installed in a grid formation. In Davey’s words “I shot the pennies on a copy-stand with a raking light; I would take the film to the lab in Chinatown that made small, white bordered prints. Though I was not making much revenue from them, I thought of the Copperheads in some way as my own counterfeit, a deeply satisfying reverie of self-sufficiency, a bit like the shit-to-gold fantasy whereupon the dirtier and grimier the penny, the greater its potential for transformation and surprise” (2010).14 Davey considers her work as a personal archaeology of the self, but amounts no less to close visual examinations of external material world objects of everyday life.15 11 Dugan, Jess, (2008) “A Conversation with Moyra Davey,” Big Red and Shiny I, no, 79 www.bigredandshiny.com/cgi- bin/BRS.cgi?issuelissue79&sectionlarticle&articleiINTERVIEW_WITH_MOYRA_25527598. 12 Tate, [n.d.] Memento Mori. Tate [online]. Available from: http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online- resources/glossary/m/memento-mori [Accessed 27th December 2016]. 13 Picone, Kiri (2014) The Intriguing History of the American Penny [online]. Available from: http://all-that-is- interesting.com/intriguing-history-american-penny [Accessed 2nd January 2017]. 14 Davey, Moyra, (2012) The Opticparable Wordpress [online]. Available from: https://opticparable.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/moyra-davey/ [Accessed 29th December 2016]. 15 Roelstraete, Dieter, (2016) The Way of the Shovel. University of Chicago Press, pp. 82-91. 3 Copyright Sarah F Janavicius Each coin is photographed and then extremely magnified, each portraying a profile image of Abraham Lincoln’s visage as a fragmented, scarred and pitted portrait with an alien, foreign disposition. The worn out surfaces of the penny images are individually unique in character, appearance and impression, each penny presented as a unique object opposed to their original function as objects of exchange. These images represent an ‘anachronist’ notion of time, giving the appearance of a collection of found objects from an archaeological dig, also referencing the contemporary era by large-formatted compositional photography. Davey writes “When I began collecting pennies for the Copperhead series, I’d just moved to New York, had no money and was thinking a lot about the psychology of money: Freudian ideas that equate money with excrement; the Potlatch custom of shaming a rival with extravagant gifts and squandering of goods (the title of the series comes from the Kwakiuti & Haida ritual of tossing “armloads of coppers into the sea”); and misers […]16 The one-cent piece or Lincoln penny is of little worth because not only is it of the smallest denomination, but also because many billions of these coins were minted.