Is there a future?
I’ve been thinking about time often lately, especially since making the TYRANNY performance experiment. What is time, and why does it only move in one direction? Originally, I was interested in time because of its ties to production and capital. Being productive is a fucked up idea today. If you produce, then you are probably in the 99%, which means you get very little from this economic system.
[ i took these photos on sunday at the queens museum during a talk by photographer andew moore. capital and art—i have many thoughts on that, but for starters, read this article, UMBILICAL CORD OF GOLD, by my friend Eleanor Heartney on artnet ]
[ a detail from ‘national time clock, former cass technical high school building, 2009’. most of the photos in this exhibition were taken in deteriorated parts of Detroit. see other great deteriorated Detroit photos in this blog, which also illustrates an issue with this kind of photography—someone else can come around and take the same picture/s. and what does that mean for novelty and value? ]
Time in English
one expression i find curious is ‘spending time’. in an economic system, an expense, or a reduction, is not a positive thing. why does ‘spending time with friends’ imply the disposal of time—a negative verb? if I want to resist capital and production (let’s hang out) then i should also aim to resist time.
from a sociological view point, the following Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts (RSA) video by Professor Philip Zimbardo illustrates how the world divides into time zones, as well as religions, in a way that directly influences the terms of production. This is one way to explain why Germany has to bail out Greece and not vice versa, but it does not explain why the NY stock market sky-rocketed yesterday because of this news. National time is still very much off in this country, as well as in many other countries.