Abstract

Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art presents a major study of time as a key aesthetic dimension of recent art practices. This book explores different aspects of time across a broad range of artistic media and draws on recent movements in philosophy, science and technology to show how artists generate temporal experiences that resist the standardized time of modernity: Olafur Eliasson’s melting icebergs produce fragile temporal ecologies; Marina Abramovic’s performances test the durations of the human body; Christian Marclay’s The Clock conflates past and present chronologies. This book examines alternative frameworks of time, duration and change in prominent philosophical, scientific and technological traditions, including physics, psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience, digital theory and selected environmental sciences. It suggests that art makes a crucial contribution to these discourses not by ‘visualizing’ time, but by entangling viewers in different sensory, material and imaginary temporalities. Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers is a contemporary art historian and curator based at the University of Auckland.