Seeing time

Abstract

How does time make itself evident? The easy answer is to point toward timekeepers. Chronicles trade in epochal time of years, decades, and centuries; calendars pinpoint dates, days, and weeks; mechanical timekeepers indicate hours, minutes, and seconds; and the sun’s position in the sky tells us whether it is morning, afternoon, or night. We see the time when we consult these various devices. This special issue about “Seeing Time” is not focused on the innumerable ways that people have told the time; instead, it addresses representations of time as both an object (a fixed moment conveyed by a timekeeper) and as a subject (a variable agent whose passage in and of itself may effect change). The distinction between the two is often elusive. As Roland Barthes famously observed, photography simultaneously a) conveys the viewer’s distance from a past moment and b) induces a hallucinatory experience of that moment as still present, something ‘false on the level of perception, true on the level of time’ (115). That duality extends beyond photography into other visual media, as one might gather from the cover image of this special issue (see also Figure 1). Instead of the modern age’s ubiquitous clock-watcher gazing at a timepiece, Man Ray’s sculpture presents the timepiece as returning the viewer’s gaze (for more about clock-watchers see Sauter 2007; McCrossen 2013, 18–31 and 41–62; for more about clocks as objects see Birth 2012). Man Ray meant for the metronome to remind him of time’s relentless beat, duration, and passage. He paperclipped the eye to the metronome’s hand to underscore his sense that time literally kept him under watch, unblinkingly rendering its judgment. First created in 1923, and originally titled “Object to be Destroyed”, it appears here in the form of its 1964 replica, of which a hundred copies were made. The new title, “Indestructible Object”, announces the sculpture’s refusal to remain within the past (for its complex history, see Lee 1999; Mileaf 2004). While the work objectifies specific moments of the past – those signified by the date of its creation, recreation, and documentation – it also casts its unblinking gaze on the viewer’s ever-shifting present. Another way of acknowledging time’s dual role as the object and subject of representation is to observe that the visual representation of time itself has a history. That history is the subject of this special issue. “Seeing Time” explores some of the many different ways that early popular visual culture made its audiences aware of the many opportunities and imperatives to tell the time, even as time altered those opportunities and imperatives. Each essay in the issue addresses the long nineteenth century, the period during which