Making Time

Abstract

This chapter considers the different temporalities within the contemporary art museum and explores how externally funded research affords thicker care time to enable an engagement with works that challenge the structures, systems and temporalities of the museum. Drawing on the idea of a “timescape” introduced by the sociologist Barbara Adam, it considers the “timescapes” of conservation practice and thinking, of the museum and of artworks, and how these different and sometimes conflicting temporalities impact our practices of care.

1 Introduction

In 2022 the three-year research project Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum drew to a close.¹ The project had been funded by the Mellon Foundation and had spanned two epoch defining events, the global Covid 19 pandemic and the mobilisation against racism following the death of George Floyd in 2020.

During the years that spanned the life of the project, we conducted two rounds of formative evaluation where we considered the value of the research to the museum, the participants and the field. Some achievements were easy to quantify: papers given, publications produced, videos made, displays hosted, new procedures and protocols developed and adopted, complex issues with specific artworks or groups of artworks resolved. Other impacts were harder to pin down, such as learning, the transformation of our thinking and approaches to our practice, and how we as individuals had been changed during this time. However, in conversations with staff the value they most commonly identified was that the project bought time, allowing for a different temporality to enter into the “timescapes” of their work in the museum.

I will explore this idea of “buying” or “making time” through the lens of the work of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, in particular her thoughts on soil time in her book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (2017) and the concept of a “timescape” as developed by Barbara Adam (1998, 2008).

2 Timescapes

Barbara Adam has identified seven features of timescapes: timeframes, temporality, timing, tempo, duration, sequence and the temporal modalities of past, present and future (Adam 2008). In her 1998 book Timescapes of Modernity, Adams writes: the concept of a timescape “stresses the temporal features of living. Thinking with timescapes, contextual temporal practices become tangible. Timescapes are thus the embodiment of practiced approaches to time” (Adam 1998, p. 10).

During the pandemic the normal rhythms of our lives changed. For those not involved in frontline work, the day was no longer punctuated by a commute, the normal markers of milestones in our lives and the lives of our friends, colleagues and family disappeared, our worlds both shrunk and expanded through online communication, and people wrote songs to be shared on the internet called things like ‘The Keep Going on Song’ (Bengsons 2020) expressing a common experience for many white-collar workers and families who were locked down. Before the pandemic the project Reshaping the Collectible had explored ideas of care, in particular in relation to the social networks surrounding and sustaining particular artworks we were studying (Geismar 2022; Laurenson 2022). During the pandemic, as making relationships visible and mapping the social took on a different meaning, our work had a very particular quality that highlighted and questioned the idea of “care time” as the temporal dimension of care understood as “the fostering of the endurance of objects through time” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, p. 171). The experience of working together through the pandemic caused us to reflect on what care time had meant before the pandemic and what it might mean now.²

The aim of Reshaping the Collectible was to look at works that did not fit easily into the museum and to learn from them. During the course of the project, I came to see that a common feature of the works of art we focussed on within the project were that they, in different ways, resisted and refused the timescapes of the museum and served to expose these assumed temporalities. Understanding more about the temporalities at play more generally within the project therefore took on a new importance.

How can Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s work on time help inform our understanding of these multiple temporalities in the museum? In her discussion on time in her study of “soil time”, Puig de la Bellacasa identifies three different temporal scales within the dominant timescapes of society that are deeply entangled: the epoch frame, embedded time and embodied time. She sees epoch time as marked by the linear imperative of progress that harbours a fear of regression. Embedded time is understood as time that is embedded in practice and that is paced to a productionist ethos. Embodied time is our everyday experience of time which Bellacasa argues is focussed on an uncertain future but calls us to act now. Embodied time is characterised by what Puig de la Bellacasa calls “restless futurity” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, p. 175).

The author also argues that care time entails “making time” and in getting involved in the diversity of timescapes that make up the web of more than human agencies. This idea of “making time” points to different experiences of time such as the feeling of “timeless time” or “thick time”, both of which convey a sense of time which does not have any of the highly structured constraints of embedded time and productionist timescapes, and open up different possibilities for attention and care. It acts as a disruptive intervention within the dominant temporal landscape. “Making time”, I will argue, echoes what was made possible through the grant funding of a research project, and by the acts of resistance or refusal performed by some artists and their artworks.

3 The Timescapes of the Contemporary Art Museum

What are the features of the timescapes of the contemporary art museum, the context in which the research project performed its magic of “making time”?

In any visit to a conservation lab, you will encounter close, painstaking work taking place in the service of objects. Most commonly for museum objects this takes the form of slow cleaning, stabilisation or repair, often under magnification. For time-based media conservation this might be careful monitoring of video signals, or checking the grading of a film, or the significance of a section of source code, adjusting the mechanics of a film projector, or recalibrating the sound to a specific display space. This type of concentrated work is also sometimes encountered despite and within the hustle and bustle of a very different tempo, for example while a display or exhibition is being installed and can feel at odds with the other paces and schedules encountered in the museum.

The contemporary art museum holds within it an inherent tension between its different timescapes that often feel at odds with each other. We encounter the timescapes associated with acts of care and repair, sitting alongside a more frantic world of spreadsheets, targets, art fairs, openings and deadlines and also the timescape of the museum as an institution that transcends current time to be able to carry its collections into the future.

In her 2009 paper ‘Contemporary Museums of Contemporary Art’, conservator Jill Sterrett provides an account of the “brisk tempo” of the timescapes of the contemporary art museum. Anticipating Bellacasa’s idea of embodied time, she writes “Contemporary art is about now and, as such, museums of contemporary art are called upon to keep pace. To operate in the present means to value agility; keeping current is, after all, key to being about whom we are today” (Sterrett 2009, p. 223). She notes that museums are in competition with other aspects of the leisure industry and dark galleries are frowned upon and installation times are compressed. However, she also notes that trust in the museum is based on a longer view. “In the museum, it is the notion of temporality that situates art within a context; approaches it and describes it as part of a larger, discursive continuum.” Sterrett goes on to advocate for variable speeds “rapid cycles of engagement paired with sustained follow-through, in-the-moment presence coupled with reflection, breakneck speeds that work in tandem with strategic pauses” (Sterrett 2009, p. 227). This acknowledgement of alternative and multiple temporalities characterises what it means to effectively care. To take time to observe and respond effectively, it is one of the competencies of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, pp. 195–203).

The rhythm of museum activity, for those who focus on the collection, is dictated by programmes of display changes, exhibition, loan and acquisition. Each activity has a timeframe structured through meetings that follow a pre-determined schedule within the year—pushing decision making through a structure until they reach the committee that ratifies the decisions. These structures determine the tempo of the work of the museum, the insistence of set lead times for a loan, the petitioning about workload and clashes of major activities across sites, resulting in the co-ordinating of complex timing of a range of different events. Some of the decisions made during these meetings, such as whether to display, loan or acquire a work, will impact the life of a work and its care very directly. All works of art entering the collection at Tate go through an acquisition process preparing the work for its life in the museum. This is often the time when for some objects they will receive the most attention in their new museum life.

There are pressures associated with this workload. For example, works must be ready for shipping, exhibitions must open on time, acquisition work must be completed so artworks can be paid for in a timely manner. Reputations, relationships and money are at stake. During the 1990s the museum sector in the United Kingdom went through a moment defined by managerialism which sought to make public sector activities more aligned to commercial practices. Managerialism argued that management was context independent and was a set of skills that would improve organisational performance regardless of the context (Palmer 1998). In response to this belief and under pressure to demonstrate that its government grant was well spent, Tate launched a programme called Effective Tate and employed a firm of consultants who questioned staff in the Collection Care Division about their standards of care. Their approach challenged cultures of care within conservation, a department that had previously confidently articulated its ambitions in terms of providing the highest standards of care. It was during this time that the conservation department introduced timesheets for its staff.

This type of productionism reduces what counts as care to a managerial set of tasks to follow. In this environment there is a risk that care time is devalued as “unproductive” (Adam 2004, p. 127 cited in Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, p. 208). Deeply engaged and transformative acts of care can be understood as acts of resistance to managerialism (Singleton and Law 2013). Conservators working in this context often feel guilty about exploring “thicker”³ care time in their work. This is in part because working in a culture of scarcity, caring for one artwork means the potential neglect for another, but also because the more open and responsive nature of that encounter is hard to contain within the way in which time is allocated for specific tasks to be completed.

Sitting alongside this parcelled and productionist idea of present time, is the idea that the museum is an institution designed to transcend the timescale of a human life and support the survival of objects into the future in the form of a “permanent collection”. This ability to transcend time is linked to the structures of the museum which present a sense of what Ariella Azoulay has identified as a timelessness which renders invisible the fact that the structures of the museum and the archive have been created by human beings. The effect of this sense that they have always been there is to make it hard to imagine changing such structures (Azoulay 2019, p. 190). Azoulay links these elements of the museum and the archive to “imperial and colonial practices and imaginaries that promoted detachment, standardisation, perpetual movement, external and superior goals, and investment in the future, the parcelling out of time and mastering of time’s fictive unity” (Azoulay 2019, p. 193). Again, the responsiveness of care time to the specifics of a work of art can act as a point of resistance to these imperial and colonial practices.

Many of the strategies for protecting collections operate on a scarcity model where a work is seen to have a limited life span, such as the number of hours it can be exposed to a certain light level, before it is in effect “used up”. Reversing this logic and making visible the value brought about by bringing an artwork into dialogue with people, other artworks, and practices of care through attention in the present, helps us to examine and question their underpinning logic.

In her 2020 paper the focus on preservation for future generations was questioned by the conservator Jane Henderson. In her paper ‘Beyond Lifetimes: Who do we exclude when we keep things for the future’ (Henderson 2020) she challenged a foundational idea in conservation thinking, which privileges a future generation, who, as Henderson points out, will probably be from a very similar demographic to our current museum visiting audiences, over drivers to widen participation within current generations by providing greater access now. To challenge this idea is to challenge the “restless futurity” of conservation’s framing as a professional responsibility to focus on protecting things in the present to ensure they have a future—a future that promises to be better and more important and valuable than the present.

So, although this notion of the future is fundamental to the idea of the museum and its purpose, it raises interesting questions as to what care time is excluded in its future focus that has traditionally placed care for current generations and their access to collections at odds with care for the collection.

4 Timescape of Works of Art

It their book Anachronic Renaissance Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood (2010) write:

The work of art is a strange kind of event whose relation to time is plural. The artwork is made or designed by an individual or by a group of individuals at some moment, but it also points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, perhaps or to a prior artefact, or to an origin outside time, in divinity. At the same time it points forward to all its future recipients who will activate and reactivate it as a meaningful event. (p. 9)

The art historian Martha Buskirk has picked up this theme in her book The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art writing that “the transition of a work of art’s initial appearance to its extended life as an object to be preserved, collected, and contextualised as part of a historical narrative involves a complex process of negotiation” (Buskirk 2003, p. 12).⁴ This constant negotiation requires a different relationship to time for many art objects, one that acknowledges their unfolding and becoming and resists the idea of fixity.

The relationship of the temporal modalities of past, present and future as described by Nagel and Wood does not however acknowledge the challenge of any material object to fit within the timeframe envisaged by a museum and its “permanent collection”. In his paper ‘On the discrepancy between objects and things. An ecological approach’ (Dominguez Rubio 2016), Fernando Domínguez Rubio highlights this expectation of the temporality of a museum object which is at odds with their materiality. In his account of the biography of the painting known as the Mona Lisa painted by Leonardo da Vinci c. 1503, Domínguez Rubio illustrates the struggle and labour involved in the maintenance of the “object place” of works of art—labour that enables them to remain art objects rather than becoming simply a “thing”. Care in this context is seen as the fostering of endurance of art objects through time, defying their material temporalities and the inevitability of change.

Some objects are even more at odds with the temporalities of the museum than Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Fernando Domínguez Rubio carried out extensive ethnographic work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and in his account of his time at MoMA he identifies a group of artworks as “unruly objects” which do not docilely comply to the temporalities and regimes of care within the art museum (Dominguez Rubio 2014, 2020). Such works can act as points of resistance or at least friction within the dominant timescapes of the museum.

Time-based media works of art (works of art for which the primary artistic medium includes video, audio, film, slides, software or performance) are inherently unruly, challenging the timelines assumed by the regimes of care within the art museum. Time-based media works are impacted by dependencies on technologies which are subject to rapid technological change and obsolescence dictated by industries whose operating logic is unconcerned with preservation but conform to an industry driven temporality related to innovation and profit. Performance artworks often depend on complex memory ecologies and networks of care outside the museum to sustain them. Careful storage as a preservation strategy is not an option for these works whose demise cannot be slowed by common museum technologies such as the control of temperature and humidity, light, pests and carbon scavengers. Instead, they require ongoing maintenance and care, for, for example, the migration of electronic signals, the timely emulation of obsolete platforms, conversations with the artist as to possible modes of intervention that might enable a work to continue to be displayed. These works do not do well with attention being portioned out according to the standard rhythms of display which are unlikely to be frequent enough to respond to their needs.

Urgency is created around these works in the risk of loss, uncertainty about the use of unproven materials for making art, obsolescence of skills, materials and technologies on which these works futures rely, and the disintegration of networks of care on which they might depend outside the museum. Within contemporary art there is also urgency related to the transition of a work beyond the death of the artist.

To ground these thoughts, in the following I want to touch upon three different works that challenge and resist the timescapes of the museum which were studied as part of the research project Reshaping the Collectible: When artworks live in the museum. Within the project a group of works which very directly resisted the structures and temporalities of the museum were a group of 15 net based artworks which were commissioned by Tate between 2000 and 2011. These works had been commissioned but not acquired by Tate and sat disconnected from the main site (Bayley 2021; Haylett 2021).

One of these works is Shilpa Gupta’s Blessed Bandwidth which is a work that addresses issues related to state control and religion. Blessed-Bandwidth.net, 2003 is a multi-part net art work that has been described by the artist as a “space which considers what it indeed ‘real’ against the background of growing up in a place torn apart by riots on the basis of which god you worship”, it consists of a website with interactive elements and downloadable content. The website provided users with the chance to receive a “blessing”, via a network cable which the artist had taken to religious leaders and places of worship to be blessed. It also provides an opportunity to outsource the time involved in religious worship, by having someone else do it for you.⁵ In engaging with this work, the visitor chooses their religion and place of worship. The visitor can download a god onto their computer who will pop up during the day asking for attention “Feed me, Thrill me, Love me. I am your God.exe and I will love you back.” The visitor to the site can also contribute a diary of their sins. The technologies on which this work depends include Flash for which Microsoft ended support on 30 December 2020 (Bayley et al. 2023) (Figs. 1 and 2).

Fig. 1

Screenshot of Blessed Bandwidth provided via the artist’s website, accessed 29 Jan 2023 (© Shilpa Gupta. Courtesy the artist)

Fig. 2

Screenshot of Blessed Bandwidth provided via the artist’s website, accessed 29 Jan 2023 (© Shilpa Gupta. Courtesy the artist)

Websites have an advantage over other works which depend on schedules of display as a means to ensure they receive the care and attention they need, as they could potentially be permanently on display online. To remain fully operational this website would require a routine of maintenance and upgrades common to the work of those who maintain websites. Often this care work remains with the artist and their network as they carry it into the future through a regime of regular small or large adjustments.

However, this work was conceived by Shilpa Gupta as a time bound project, disrupting the idea of an art object as a thing that persists over time, confounding the museum and its mission. How might we respond to this very different timescape? Does this work persist as a fragment, an incomplete record of its former self? Or might a desire emerge to develop a different form of the work that might conform more closely to the temporal logic of the museum?

In their work with the artist Ima Abasi Okon, which has been so powerfully written about by the conservators Libby Ireland and Jack McConchie (Ireland 2022; McConchie 2022), Okon challenged the conservators to slow down, to work to a different timescale so they might better understand the work and so Okon might better understand the museum.⁶ This included a resistance to technologies of the recorded artist interview which Okon perceived as a tool to separate her from the work, and one that also brought about a delay. Instead of storing an interview as a record for future interpretation, because the artist had asked the conservators not to record the interview, they would meet after each conversation and work together to agree what they had heard, immediately working to agree their understanding and interpretation of the conversation. The inability to rely on a recording created this moment of shared reflective practice and the need to engage in the present with what had been said. This served to change the tempo and the temporality of their work.

The selection of works by Okon that came to Tate also came with a reading list from the Chisenhale Gallery where they were first shown,⁷ which provided its own pace, as those involved formed a weekly book group to work through the list in a structured and scheduled way. This created a very particular rhythm to the week for those who participated, as the texts were challenging, the task time consuming and the deadline of having read the alloted text in time important (Figs. 3 and 4).

Fig. 3

Installation view Ima-Abasi Okon’s display at Tate Britain, London, 2021. Images 3 and 4 show two ends of the same room, facing east (above) and west (to the right) © Ima-Abasi Okon. All rights reserved 2023. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Seraphina Neville, Tate

Fig. 4

Installation view Ima-Abasi Okon’s display at Tate Britain, London, 2021. Images 4 and 5 show two ends of the same room, facing east (above) and west (to the right) © Ima-Abasi Okon. All rights reserved 2023. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Seraphina Neville, Tate

Similarly, instead of carrying out a test install in an attempt to identify the possible future configurations of the sound and sculptural elements, learning was carried out over the days of the install, less compressed than usual due to the conditions of the pandemic. In this process the possible configurations were not closed down but instead it was agreed that those decisions would be made over time during the life and lives of the works as they unfolded, allowing for indeterminacy, ceding control and acknowledging uncertainty (McConchie 2022) These experiences disrupted the standard logic behind the processes of acquisition and display but led to a richer relationship to the care of the work.⁸

In the case of Tony Conrad’s Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain (1972), the work to understand the parameters of this experimental sound and film performance when it came into Tate’s collection involved understanding its fifty-year history, tracking its biography since it was first performed in 1972 and gathering memories from those involved as performers, curators and engineers in the production of performances of this experimental work. The time afforded by the research project allowed an expansive range of encounters with different moments in the history of the work, including transmitting the embodied knowledge of past performers to new performers, the acknowledgement of the limits of documentation in this task and the importance of this body-to-body transmission. This involved a recursive time of returning and looping back on memories and experiences that resisted short cuts (Figs. 5, 6, 7 and 8).

Fig. 5

Photograph taken from the performance of Tony Conrad, Fifty-One Years on the Infinite Plain 1972–201336, Live Arts Week II, Bologna 16 April 2013. The image shows a clock, a diagram with notes and timings and a Persian rug (Photo: Francesca Liccardi)

Fig. 6

Feedback session after the new performers had played for the transmitters, Tate Liverpool, May 2019. Left to right violin transmitter Angharad Davies, long string drone transmitter Rhys Chatham, curator Xavier Garcia Bardon, in the background registrar Stephen Huyton and research manager Kit Webb (© Tate, Roger Sinek)

Fig. 7

Catherine Landen, George Maund and Emily Lansley performing Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain by Tony Conrad, Tate Liverpool 2019

Fig. 8

Hélia Marçal (centre), Ana Ribeiro (centre right) and Louise Lawson (right) interviewing violinist Catherine Landen (furthest right) while being recorded by Will Wilkinson (with camera) and Aya Kaido (with boom microphone) during the fieldwork experiment, Tate Liverpool, 15 May 2019 (Photo: Roger Sinek)

5 Conservation, Maintenance and Repair

As we have seen in the short descriptions of these practices of care in relation to these examples, care for these works of art involved patterns of maintenance and care that are at odds with a scientific discourse of breakthrough, where progress is made by breakthroughs that have the potential to change everything. The work of conservation described in this chapter is not heroic but reflects practices of care that require continuity in everyday acts of attention and negotiation. The evolution of conservation practice is not linear, and we learn from older forms of care and from forms of care from non-western traditions that have been overlooked by western conservation practices. It is a practice that chimes with the words of Stephen Jackson who calls for practices of maintenance and repair that are more than functional and instead moral—and evoke “a very old but routinely forgotten relationship of humans to the things in the world; namely an ethics of mutual care and responsibility” (Jackson 2014, p. 231).

6 Conclusion

Conservation has scope to develop or champion different relations of care: the social, aesthetic and spiritual value in our practices of care. It is possible to change the timescapes within which we work. What I am advocating here are multiple approaches that allow for different timescapes to operate alongside each other. Museums are ambivalent about how to include, value and cultivate thicker care time, they struggle with how to value this within the management of time that is dominated by an official productionist discourse, and it feels a little subversive but mainly naïve to champion what is seen as a luxury within this culture. However, in the public imagination this is what is expected of museums.

As Puig de la Bellacasa writes, “Care time suspends the future and distends the present, thickening it with myriad multilateral demands” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, p. 207). She calls for a rearrangement and rebalancing of relations between a diversity of co-existing temporalities. To simply begin to notice the different temporalities at work within the museum and around artworks starts to bring them into focus and adjust our modes of care. What I like about this recalibration that comes with paying attention to different temporalities, and this desire to allow for and create different possible timescapes through our practices, is that it speaks to something important to many of those who work closely with the conservation and care of artworks within the contemporary art museum. It suggests that there is an ethical demand to acknowledge, value, champion and allow space for different temporalities to emerge and be acknowledged in a world at risk of only being validated by productionist ideas of time.

Whilst these moments can be found in other places within the museum, when time is made, and different and slower timescapes of care time are able to emerge, Reshaping the Collectible created this space within the project, and this was acknowledged as perhaps the most significant contribution of the project by those who were touched by it. I would like to pay tribute to the funders and all of those involved in the research for the quality of their response and their attentive, responsible and capable evolving practices of care.⁹