Pamela M. Lee: Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (2004)

“In the 1960s art fell out of time; both artists and critics lost their temporal bearings in response to what E. M. Cioran called “not being entitled to time.” This anxiety and uneasiness about time, which Pamela Lee calls “chronophobia,” cut across movements, media, and genres, and was figured in works ranging from kinetic sculptures to Andy Warhol films. Despite its pervasiveness, the subject of time and 1960s art has gone largely unexamined in historical accounts of the period. Chronophobia is the first critical attempt to define this obsession and analyze it in relation to art and technology.

Lee discusses the chronophobia of art relative to the emergence of the Information Age in postwar culture. The accompanying rapid technological transformations, including the advent of computers and automation processes, produced for many an acute sense of historical unknowing; the seemingly accelerated pace of life began to outstrip any attempts to make sense of the present. Lee sees the attitude of 1960s art to time as a historical prelude to our current fixation on time and speed within digital culture. Reflecting upon the 1960s cultural anxiety about temporality, she argues, helps us historicize our current relation to technology and time.

After an introductory framing of terms, Lee discusses such topics as “presentness” with respect to the interest in systems theory in 1960s art; kinetic sculpture and new forms of global media; the temporality of the body and the spatialization of the visual image in the paintings of Bridget Riley and the performance art of Carolee Schneemann; Robert Smithson’s interest in seriality and futurity, considered in light of his reading of George Kubler’s important work The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things and Norbert Wiener’s discussion of cybernetics; and the endless belaboring of the present in sixties art, as seen in Warhol’s Empire and the work of On Kawara.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 026212260X, 9780262122603
394 pages

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John Grayson (ed.): Sound Sculpture: A Collection of Essays by Artists Surveying the Techniques, Applications, and Future Directions of Sound Sculpture (1975)

Sound Sculpture is the first publication to deal completely with this new art form. It’s a collection of over 30 articles and essays by an international cross section of Sound Sculptors who define and outline the field. It’s also a definitive introduction to the history of Sound Sculpturing. Included are over 150 photographs and drawings illustrating the construction of such unusual projects as: how to build a Western Gamelan (Balanese ‘orchestra’), examples of giant environmental Sound Sculptures, Sound Sculpture designed for a new ‘people’s music,’ and so on.

Contributing artists include Harry Partch, Bernard Baschet, François Baschet, Stephan Von Huene, David Jacobs, John Chowning, Walter Wright, David Rothenberg, Lou Harrison, David Rosenboom, Bill Colvig, Corey Fischer, R. Murray Schafer, and others.

Publisher A.R.C. Publications, Aesthetic Research Centre of Canada, Vancouver, 1975
ISBN 0889850003
196 pages

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Oliver Grau (ed.): MediaArtHistories (2007)

“Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today’s media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines—film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images.

Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp’s inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms—machine, media, exhibition—and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the ‘trained eye’ of art history.”

With texts by Rudolf Arnheim, Andreas Broeckmann, Ron Burnett, Edmond Couchot, Sean Cubitt, Dieter Daniels, Felice Frankel, Oliver Grau, Erkki Huhtamo, Douglas Kahn, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Machiko Kusahara, Timothy Lenoir, Lev Manovich, W.J.T. Mitchell, Gunalan Nadarajan, Christiane Paul, Louise Poissant, Edward A. Shanken, Barbara Maria Stafford, and Peter Weibel.

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
Leonardo series
ISBN 0262072793, 9780262072793
475 pages

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