Chronophobia

On Time in the Art of the 1960s

Pamela M. Lee (Professor of Art History, Stanford University)

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English

MIT Press
17 February 2006

Theory of art; Art & design styles: from c 1960

Series: Chronophobia

An examination of the pervasive anxiety about and fixation with time seen in 1960s art.

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 repect 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.

By: Pamela M. Lee (Professor of Art History Stanford University)
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 203mm, Spine: 19mm
Weight: 816g
ISBN: 9780262622035
ISBN 10: 0262622033
Series: Chronophobia
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 17 February 2006
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Inactive

Pamela M. Lee is Carnegie Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Yale University and the author of Object to Be Destroyed- The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, Chronophobia- On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Forgetting the Art World (all published by the MIT Press) and The Glen Park Library- A Fairy Tale (no place press).

Reviews for Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s

"""In whose time do you and the work of art exist? Pamela Lee has written the founding question for a new criticism."" Molly Nesbit, Department of Art, Vassar College"