On Time

It was evening and I was at home. The light was scraping its last bits over a fading sky. Earlier that day, I had decided that I would try to think about death. I’d read that it made you happier—not death itself, but the repeated acknowledgement of it. To look plainly at its bare inevitability, I’d read, would make one enjoy life more fully. As a photographer, I understood this as a statement of contrast—something I was accustomed to thinking about. I decided I would give it a try. I waited until the day had settled—my partner was working and the dogs were quiet—then, lying supine on the couch, I closed my eyes and began searching the backs of my eyelids for some sense of the end. For a reason I can’t explain, when I tried to conjure this feeling, I began to picture myself falling off a train. It’s worth noting here that I have never fallen from a train; the feeling is as alien to me as death itself, but it persisted.

For several nights I repeated this exercise. Each evening, on the couch, the image of the train would return. As days passed, though, I became distracted by details. The train, for example, was matte black, and it sped steadily through a pitch-dark landscape, making it almost invisible—more visible to touch than to sight. The wind charged past the train at such a pace that it dulled all other sound. And the train cast no light ahead; it raced forward into the dark. Behind it, though, the world lit up into bright reality, as if the train were a zipper opening up some dark fabric to reveal the world beneath it.

Over time, the train got longer. Cars of all sorts—flat beds, passenger cars, boxcars—filled up with people and animals and insects and trees. They moved, if they could, from car to car. Some clung to whatever they could get their hands on. A few even rode precariously on the top of the train, balancing like seasoned surfers—and occasionally, novice ones.

Not at first, but eventually, I started to notice something: little bits, like flecks of ground spice, were blowing off of everything and everyone on the train. I focused on one person—an older man that I’d pulled either from my imagination or from some pocket of memory. His shoulders were thin, his hair coarse and white. The wind blew past him and little bits of his shirt and his hair blew away, glittering in the air before they faded into the distance. Before long, the man began to wobble. He held out his arms to balance, but it was no use. He tumbled off the side of the speeding train and was gone, cast into the colourful landscape we were leaving behind. As I lay there, the train pulling my thoughts through space, I realized that, in spite of all my efforts, it was not death that I’d been thinking about, but time.

The relationship between time and death is explicit—when one ends, the other begins (setting faith and quantum physics aside). I assumed, though, that the contrast I was after when I chose to consider mortality—mine, ours, the planet’s—was between death and life, not death and time. But for weeks time consumed me; I became fixated on its passing. In the heat of my obsession, I tried, somewhat haphazardly, to understand our relationship to time. Of course, time, depending on who you are, where you are, and when you are, can mean many different things. Time is a unit of measure. Time is an experience. Time is saved. Time is spent. Time is wasted. Time is money. Time flies. Or it drags on. Time is a construct, a concept, a currency. Time is attention. Time is value. And for some, time is a medium. Sam Anderson, writing for the New York Times, said: “Nothing on Earth has ever not been about the passage of time — not a film, a poem, a cave painting, a house, a poncho, a comic book, a snowman or a fugue. But some art is particularly obsessed.”¹ What art, I wondered, was “particularly obsessed” with time? Who shared my obsession? I decided, in an admittedly basic gesture, to google art works about time. My search yielded many similar-looking lists. They included works like Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Memory,” Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),” and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled (Perfect Lovers).” (Google, it seemed, made little distinction between artworks about time and famous artworks about time.) The work that recurred most often in my search results was Christian Marclay’s “The Clock.” If you are unfamiliar with it, “The Clock” is a twenty-four-hour film comprised of short clips from films of the last seventy years of cinema. Each clip features a clock or some other explicit reference to time that exactly matches the time at which you, the viewer, are watching the film. For example, at 12:05 p.m. the film cuts to a clip of Richard Gere in American Gigolo. We see Gere’s finger as it cuts a line through some dusty, white cocaine on the surface of a hand mirror. Next to the mirror, a digital clock reads: 12:05. The film continues this way for twenty-four hours and then loops back to the beginning. In “The Clock,” Marclay’s temporal obsession seems at least partially to involve time as a construct and as a social contract. In order to exist in the world—to have jobs, appointments, social engagements, meals—we allow ourselves to be governed by the measurement of time. We align our habits, indeed our lives, with the tick of the clock. And from that unit of measure, values emerge. But Marclay’s film is also about the relationship between a system and a material—how one comes to govern the other, and how easily one can be mistaken for the other. Time and a timepiece, after all, are not the same thing.

“The Clock” is a masterpiece in editing. Through careful, almost-surgical sequencing, Marclay provokes the viewer into creating meaning out of a series of seemingly-disparate scenes. Actors recur (sometimes as the same character, sometimes not), drama rises and falls, patterns emerge. In this way, “The Clock” is also about human rhythms—our insistence on narratives, our need for answers to follow questions. This, unsurprisingly, is not an accident: “Marclay often included several clips from a movie in a single hour, daring viewers to anticipate a big plot turn—which never arrives.”²

There is another kind of time at work in “The Clock,” though, and another kind of story. “The Clock” took Marclay three years to compile and create; he did this with the help of a group of assistants and interns. The amount of time that went into making the films Marclay used as material is seemingly unquantifiable. As a viewer, I’ve been fortunate enough to see “The Clock” on two separate occasions, totalling about two and a half hours. Because of time, and because of timing, I suspect I will never see the whole thing. In order to see “The Clock” in full, I would need to be near a gallery at a time when it was showing, and I would need, by design, to have twenty-four hours to spare. So in addition to being an obsession, time, when mediated by the clock, is also a luxury.

Around the time that I found myself lying face up on the couch trying to imagine my own demise, I also started meeting regularly with a group of artists on Sundays. (The overlap of these two occurrences was coincidental.) The gatherings were never officially named but were often referred to collectively as Art Club or Art Church. The group was created with the intention of forming a space for artists where we could meet, talk about art, and connect with one another on a recurring basis. Ideally, we hoped that through repeated investments of time, a community would form. At our first meeting, as a sort of ice breaker, April Dean, who wrote for Expanded earlier this year, turned to the group and asked: Who is art for? In its asking, it was a simple question, one April asked honestly. But it did not seem to have a simple answer. Collectively, we batted the question around until it eventually resembled something else, and then the conversation shifted and we moved on. But we never did answer the question.

April’s words resurfaced in my mind last year while reading artist Anne Truitt’s fourth and final diary collection, published posthumously as Yield: The Journal of an Artist. In an entry from 2001, Truitt recounts a day when her cousin Alice, who had been visiting Truitt, was preparing to return home. Truitt writes: “Before Alice got on the plane to go home yesterday she told me that she did not at all understand my work and asked me to explain it.”³ In response to the question, she shows Alice “Twinning Court,” a sculpture she was working on at the time, named after a studio she once occupied. “For once in my life, I talked about what I was aiming for,” Truitt says, “about how the scarlet ceiling locked in the scarlet floor, taut along scarlet lines against dense black—how that was my life in the early ‘60s in that alley studio.”⁴ To a reader, the sigh of relief Truitt feels at this moment is palpable: free, at age seventy-nine, to finally describe her work on her own terms. But her cousin still does not understand. Truitt observes: “I could see what it cost her to be honest when she could perfectly well have lied.”⁵ In her studio, she then takes the time to reposition Alice, inviting her to see it from a different perspective. Once repositioned, Alice gasps. Still, though, she isn’t sure what she is supposed to understand.

“That’s all there is—the gasp.”

“You mean I’m not supposed to know that I’m looking at something I will immediately identify?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” a pause. ”Well that’s alright then.”

Was it. Neither of us were, I think, entirely sure.⁶

This conversation, as recorded by Truitt, has stayed with me—the patience in it, the uncertainty. The scene she conjures offers the reader a view of art free of the systems that contain it—like time without a clock.

Truitt is perhaps best known for her minimalist sculptures that look “as if they were carved from pure pigment[.]”⁷ However, Truitt’s work was not simply about how something looked but about how it felt. She was interested in how her biography, her life’s experiences, intersected with the physical objects she was making. Though widely accepted now, this idea—that an artist’s biography is inseparable from their art—was atypical at the time. And much of Truitt’s fame has come posthumously: “Truitt’s hybrid forms are, at last, being recognized as the breakthroughs they were. Her visibility has profoundly expanded since her death, in 2004, at eighty-three[.]”⁸ But Truitt’s work is also about time, maybe even obsessed with it:

I thought to myself, “If I make a sculpture, it will just stand up straight and the seasons will go around it and the light will go around it and it will record time.”⁹

Perhaps Truitt’s life, inseparable from her art, also reveals something about time—not how we measure it or how we experience it, but how we value it. I re-read the exchange she details in her book—between a female artist who would become most successful after her death and a female viewer trying, honestly, to find her way into an artistic experience—with my own temporal obsession in mind. I was left, primarily, with questions: What does it mean for an artist to find success after death? (Arguably, it means nothing to the artist—they’re dead.) What does it mean to equate success with sales? (All of Truitt’s largest sales have occurred after 2004.¹⁰) What does it mean for a viewer—not a critic or a collector or celebrity, just a plain old viewer—to take the time to be interested in an artistic experience? What does it mean for an artist to take the time to offer an unmitigated explanation of their work? Then, with those questions unanswered, I returned to April’s: Who is art for?

Perhaps this question can prove so slippery because of a gap between what the answer should be and what the answer truly is. And perhaps, like Google, we too mistake art for famous art, systemically supported art. Just as a clock can be mistaken for time, the art world can be mistaken for art itself. The distinction, of course, is important. Art as a practice, as an appreciation, as a means of expression, as a mode of communication—this kind of art is for everyone, or at least it should be. Art as a system, as a world, certainly isn’t. Still, with these distinctions in mind, I failed to find an answer.

Time passed. Work was busy. Winter came. Like an echo, April’s question got quieter in my mind, and time, as an obsession, slowly paled. Other ideas—and other deadlines—consumed me. Then, just recently, as I started to reflect on the past year at Expanded, April’s question and my obsession with time revived themselves all at once.

For the last twelve months, I have been the copy editor at Expanded. (Any errors you find are my fault. And the Oxford commas—yeah, that’s me too.) Though I have an academic background in English and technical writing, my relationship to language, like most, started at home. As long as I’ve known him, my father has been committed to proper grammatical structure. It is, you could say, his obsession. He will become fixated on an improper grammatical trend and will try tirelessly to correct it—usually by responding verbally to the radio or the television. (In case you’re interested, his most recent obsession is with the frequent misuse, typically in spoken English, of the word amount in place of the word number.) For a while, one of my proudest memories was of a moment from many years ago when, during dinner, I caught my father misusing the world eldest to describe the older of two siblings. (In English, -est is used when comparing three or more things. When there are only two, you use -er. By his standards, my father should have said elder.) Now, when I reflect on that moment, what I remember most is how I interrupted the flow of his story. Language is a system—one of the oldest. By imposing that system on my father’s story, I inadvertently impeded the very thing language is used for: communication. I, of course, knew what he meant. But rather than listen, I chose to enforce a system that I had inherited.

When I first met with Christina Battle, the online editor for BlackFlash Expanded, about taking on the role of copy editor for the project, we were entering the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Omicron wave was at its peak. Expanded was a new project for BlackFlash, meaning it was, to some degree, being built. As its chief architect, Christina had the power to make decisions about what our system, for the span of our time on the project, would look like. One of the things she emphasized most often was time. Things will get done when they get done, she told me. This meant that deadlines were fluid and that people’s lives mattered more. Embedded in this idea are what I believe to be Christina’s values. Daniel Zalewski, in a piece about “The Clock,” writes: “In Marclay’s hands, clocks became instruments that destroyed contentment.”¹¹ I believe Christina recognized this disruptive power of clocks—indeed of many of the systems that we have inherited, and that we participate in. In her design for Expanded, Christina chose differently: she chose to prioritize the parts of people’s lives that systems often ignore—illness, loss, anxiety, financial uncertainty, loneliness—and to embed those priorities in the system she built. Above all, though, she was prioritizing time. Not as a system, but as a marker of value.

Christina also wanted to emphasize the value of voice. When we first spoke, Christina wanted to make sure that every writer we worked with had the option to reject any suggestion we made. We spoke at length about editing as a collaboration and about the importance of working with a writer’s voice, as opposed to overwriting it. In this way, Christina was acknowledging that language, like all systems, has the potential to reinforce exclusion, bias, and hierarchy.

Many of the systems we live within in contemporary life are not contemporary at all—they are inherited. Like language, we learn them before we realize we are learning them. As a result, their values often become embedded in us even if we later come to reject those values. Challenging systems is often about perpetually asking questions. I believe it is an ongoing act of un-learning. In this way, I see it as maintenance—work that is never done. I believe that when a person’s values clash with a system’s values, the system usually wins. So often, people enter systems with the best intentions—to make a difference. But changing systems from within systems, while those systems continue to churn, is remarkably hard, akin to turning an airplane into a spaceship mid-flight. At the end of the day, staying aloft will usually take precedence over making it into orbit. And, of course, the systems we live in are self-protecting: the people most empowered to make change within them are typically also the people most rewarded by those same systems—they have the least incentive to actually make the change. So even if we enter systems with the best intentions, we often find ourselves working uphill, surrounded by people with opposing goals.

On the surface, Christina was building a new system with Expanded, but that system, like most, was embedded in countless other structures that impose themselves on us daily—capitalism, for example. Yet Christina built a structure for Expanded that tried to both maintain her values and share them. Working with her for the past year, I witnessed an ongoing act of care and maintenance. I watched her repeatedly question the structures that might have incentivized her to make different decisions. (If you have not read her piece about online carbon footprints, you should.) To work with someone—and to work within a structure—that resisted the imposed values of inherited systems was, to say the least, refreshing. It is also incredibly rare. And as I prepare now for that experience to end, I wanted to ask April’s question one more time, with my—and Christina’s—temporal obsession in mind: Who does art make time for? For fear of speaking abstractly, let me define my terms. Here I intend art to mean the system, the structure, the economy that surrounds the practice. And what do I mean by time? Any or all of these: attention, money, luxury, value, patience, experience, consideration, appreciation. I could certainly go on.

So, who does art make time for?

I ask this question not to answer it. Like Marclay, I hint at a plot point that, at least here, will never arrive. Instead, I ask it in order to create a frame. What would it mean to prioritize equity of time? How might this impact who makes a living, how funding is distributed, how long applications are, how we handle deadlines, what values are embedded in the word deadline, what issues we prioritize, how we design websites, how we compensate work, what we think of as work, who gets a say, how we distribute power, how we engage with viewers, how we engage with communities who have less of a platform? And what might a system that took these questions seriously look like? Think about it. Take your time.

Recently, I returned to the couch and tried, after a long hiatus, to find my train again. Time is so often cast as a predator, pursuing us until we eventually tire. I wondered if I, in my attempt to think about death, had cast time in a similar way. It was a relief to realize I hadn’t. Time is not the enemy, it is not a fire that consumes us, not a beast with teeth. It is the engine. It pulls us through space. There is a reason my brain contrasted death with time. It is life. It’s the gasp. It is all we have.

Zachary Ayotte works with image and text. His publications include Notes on Digging A Hole, I Wish U Were Here, and At the Same Time. [www.zacharyayotte.com]

1. Anderson, Sam. “New Sentences: From ‘Fire Sermon,‘ by Jamie Quatro.” The New York Times, February 2, 2018.
2. Daniel Zalewski, “The Hours,” The New Yorker, March 5, 2012.
3. Truitt, Anne. Yield: The Journal of an Artist. Yale University Press, 2022.
4. Truitt, Anne. Yield: The Journal of an Artist. Yale University Press, 2022.
5. Truitt, Anne. Yield: The Journal of an Artist. Yale University Press, 2022.
6. Truitt, Anne. Yield: The Journal of an Artist. Yale University Press, 2022.
7. O’Grady, Megan. “How a Sculptor Made an Art of Documenting Her Life.” The New Yorker, June 15, 2022.
8. O’Grady, Megan. “How a Sculptor Made an Art of Documenting Her Life.” The New Yorker, June 15, 2022.
9. Truitt, Anne. “Contemporary Curated | | Sotheby’s.”
10. Dafoe, Taylor. “Before She Died, Artist Anne Truitt Completed a Series of ‘Sound’ Paintings. Now, They’re Seeing the Light of Day for the First Time.” Artnet News, November 18, 2020.
11. Daniel Zalewski, “The Hours,” The New Yorker, March 5, 2012.