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Amelia Groom

this is so contemporary!

In Shakespeare’s play Julius Ca esar (1599), Brutus – while plotting to assassinate theemperor – is interrupted by the striking of a clock. Shakespeare was without doubt fullyaware that silent sundials marked time in ancient Rome, and the invention of themechanical clock came more than a millennium later. The charge of anachronistic error here would itself be an anachronistic error, since in Shakespeare’s time it wouldn’t have

been perceived as an error at all. Our present notion of historic realism is a historicallyspecific construct, and for many centuries prior to its advent artistic representationswere overtly anachronistic without jarring their audience. Christ was depicted incontemporary garb throughout the Middle Ages, for instance, and there are countlessother images from the pre-Enlightenment canon that overtly disregard accuratechronology.

With the Greek roots of the word suggesting something ‘up against time’, our conception of anachronism presupposes a homogenous and irreversible temporalsequence, with all points fixed to their proper coordinates in an orderly procession. Aglaring anachronistic anomaly in historic representation generally amounts to anembarrassing blunder, or a joke – as with the tenth-century peasant in Monty Pythonand the Holy Grail (1975) earnestly explaining his village as an ‘anarcho-syndicalistcommune’.

But whether or not we like it, the present always makes itself present in attempts toreconstitute other times. Any scholastic historical account or fictional tale that requiresconstructing an imagined past (and there is no other type of past) will have somethingout-of-place – most conspicuously in its physical objects, cultural references, manners,turns of phrase or hairstyles. Once the present catches up, futurism also finds itself subject to anachronism – as evidenced by the many books and films nominally set in the21st century or later that refer to the Soviet Union or the World Trade Centre as if theystill exist. Part of the pre-internet 1989 film Back to the F uture II ’s charm is itsassumption that fax machines are still ubiquitous in 2015. True fidelity to a time that isnot our own simply isn’t possible, and anachronism always already resides in the

present, compos ed as it is of various r emembered pasts and anticipated futures.

In his Untimely Meditations (1876) Friedrich Nietzsche demanded “the capacity to feelunhistorically .” In recent years, other philosophers have called upon us to acknowledgeand s trategically deploy anachronism: Giorgio Agamben and Michel Serres are

particularly lucid on the instabilities of c hronology and the multiplicity of disjunctivetimes that make up the present. They find unrealised potential in the archaic andobsolete, suggesting that old objects, techniques and ideas might just be waiting,unsatisfied with the limits of their epochs.

With growing awareness of the temporal complexities at play in every work of art, thediscipline of art history also appears to be tentatively adjusting to new thinking on non-linear time. Critical debates on issues of temporality in this thing we precariously name‘contemporary art’ are being led by Terry Smith, Keith Moxey and others. Following

the dynamic discontinuity of Aby Warburg’s approach to images in the early 20 th

century, thinkers such as Georges Didi-Huberman are envisaging crosscutting methodsthat embrace what is variously termed ‘polychronic’, ‘heterochronic’ and ‘anachronic’readings of art history. Concurrently, there has in recent years been a wave of

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exhibitions that seek to do away with correct chronological sequence and the confinesof cultural context, in order to suggest that the time and place in which a thing wasmade should not shut it off from other times and places.

Some examples: In 2009, Turner-prize winner Mark Wallinger’s exhibition ‘The RussianLinesman’ at London’s Hayward Gallery suggested surprising correspondences

between vas tly different objects s panning two millennia, w ith the artist’s own Time And Relative Dimensions in Space (2001) – a life-sized gleaming mirrored replica of Doctor Who’s T.A.R.D.I.S. – bringing home the notion of traversing multiple space-times froma single point. The 2003–9 touring exhibition ‘History of History’ (which was variouslymanifested in museums across the US and Canada before culminating at the 21stCentury Art Museum Kanazawa in Japan) saw the Japanese contemporary artist andcollector of East Asian antiquities Hiroshi Sugimoto establish conversations betweennew works and pieces of material culture from distant pasts. For his 2010 ‘solo show’at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, ‘Intolerance’, the Dutch artist Willem de Rooij

presented a series of animal portraits fr om the Golden Age of Dutc h painting alongsidefeathered ceremonial headdresses from 18th-century Hawaii, referring to the display as

part of his ongoing wor k w ith ‘spatial collage’.

More examples: In 2004 Mike Kelley’s ‘The Uncanny’ at the Museum Moderner Kunstin Vienna had the likes of Christo and Paul McCarthy alongside medieval reliquaries,anatomical models and anc ient Egyptian grave furnishings. Simon Starling’s exhibition‘Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts)’ at London’s Camden ArtsCentre last year slipped between different histories in the present as the artist re-stagedworks from CAC shows of the last half-century. Earlier this year at The NationalMuseum of Denmark, artist Julie Sass and curator Milena Hoegsberg invited 28 artistsand writers to respond to the museum’s prehistoric collection. Aptly titled ‘Shaped byTime’, this exhibition set up fragmented pasts in dialogue with the present in order toconsider the construct of history and reveal its malleability. And at the more high-profileend of things, last year’s Venice Biennale, curated by Bice Curiger, included paintings

by Tintoretto amongs t its line-up of new art, and the cur ator of this year’s Documenta,Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, similarly proposed that all things in the visual field can betreated as con-temporary (literally ‘together with time’).

Making no distinction between art that is old and art that is new, the Museum of Oldand New Art opened in Australia last year, housing David Walsh’s enormous privatecollection. Currently on show there is ‘Theatre of the World’, an exhibition by theFrench curator Jean-Hubert Martin that brings together objects spanning four thousandyears of history, with a display model that harks back to the wunderkammers of Renaissance Europe (and Andre Breton’s atelier at 42 Rue Fontaine in Paris) in its overtdisregard for the conventions of cultural and historical context. Martin has spent severaldecades provoking outcry for his experiments with de-compartmentalising art objects,including the controver sial and blatantly anachronistic exhibition ‘Artempo’ at thePalazzo Fortuny in Venice, 2007 (co-curated with Mattijs Visser and Axel Vervoordt).His argument is that while orthodox art historians tend to stubbornly grasp at thecategories they have retrospectively invented for art, artists have never treated art assomething that fits neatly into chronological sequence, with one thing being influenced

by w hat was before and developing into what c omes next.

Similar sentiments were expressed in the early 1960s by the Mesoamerican art historianGeorge Kubler, whose book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things(1962) famously resonated with the likes of Robert Smithson, Ad Reinhardt, John

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Baldessari, Robert Morris and other US artists associated with Minimal, Conceptual andLand Art. Dismissing the rhetoric of progress in favour of more chaotic models of time,Kubler outlined how artistic innovation, replication and mutation never unfold in a single,unbroken direction. History’s movements are turbulent, and art will always refuse to tella fixed, unified story. The Shape of Time showed us that our segmentation of the past is

purely arbitrary and conventional; an imposition of linear order on something that isinfinitely more fluid and complex.

Another well-known, vehement opposer of sequentialism and the rigid categorisation of art is Jorge Luis Borges. ‘The true intellectual refuses to take part in contemporarydebates,’ he wrote in his 1941 essay ‘Two Books’, because ‘reality is alwaysanachronous’. Continually returning to the ways in which times overlap and the presentreworks the past, he also wrote that ‘each writer creates his precursors’ (‘Kafka andhis Precursors’, 1951). This is true not just of literature; all worthwhile art modifies our

conception of what went before it, and what comes after it. Kubler also remarked thatas one’s knowledge of Auguste Rodin forever changes one’s understanding of Michelangelo, historic time is always at once progressive and regressive.

Expressing greater pride in the books he read than the books he wrote, Borges wascertainly one of the best (most committed, curious, imaginative, sensitive, thorough and

grateful) readers of the 20 th century. Immersing himself in the literature, philosophy andtheology of Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norsetraditions, he also followed contemporary Argentinean writers and read translations of

Near and Far Eastern texts . But he w ouldn’t have approved of the d ivisions made in thatlast sentence: he read everything as coevally alive in the present, loathing the idea of categorising a book according to date, place or literary school. In the same vein, theessays and stories he wrote would form extraordinary links between obscure thoughtsand images of disparate origins that shared no commonality in time or space,demonstrating his insistence on the oneness of things beyond the illusions of individuality.

I like the exclamatory title of Tino Sehgal’s work for the German Pavilion at the 51 st

Venice Biennale in 2005 so much that I plagiarised it for the title of this article. Drawingon contemporary art’s peculiar insecurity about its own contemporary-ness, it indexes afundamental paradox – in one sense nothing can exist and not be contemporary; inanother, any new thing that enters the realm of existence is immediately relegated to the

past. When we are presented with old art and n ew art together on equal terms, divisions become slippery and the past is made available for communicative interaction w ith the present. We form new assoc iations, and poss ibly face up to contradictions we’d rather not acknowledge. The inclusion of things in displays of contemporary art that areneither strictly ‘contemporary’ nor ‘art’ is not, as some have suggested, a mere fleetingcuratorial trend. It’s part of a broader growing awareness of the anachronism inherentin all time. After the failed productive-progressivism of Modernity, we’re dealing withthe fact that then and now and later aren’t proceeding along a flat line; they’reunpredictably and disobediently tangled up with each other.

Article published in Frieze Masters Issue # 1, October 2012

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