Chronophobia: On Time In the Art of the 1960s (review)

Technology is widely recognized 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 1960s 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—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 timelessness 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 artwork 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 defense 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 1960s art world and, Lee would argue, also in the larger social world.

It is in this ambition to speak for the social world outside 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 that 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 and 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 its interdisciplinary subject matter, its arguments will be less compelling to those approaching this...