TIME TO TELL Reflections on Patrick Bernatchez’s BlackWatch Project What cargo might have berthed at the Spiral Jetty?[...] My guess is that the cargo was a clock, of a very special kind. In their way, all clocks are labyrinths, and can be risky to enter.(1) With his timepiece BW (BlackWatch, 2010) (2), a black wristwatch consisting of a blank face and a single hand that will take a1,000 years to complete one revolution, the artist Patrick Bernatchez invites us to venture into a labyrinth of time. This watch, the core element of his latest project cluster—provisionally titled Bach to the Future and which is to include works in various media all touching upon the dimension of time—works both literally on time by making it operative for a very lengthy period (from a human perspective), and allegorically through a multifaceted exploration of the 4th dimension as it pertains both to human experience and matters beyond its grasp. I shall take an initial step into the clock maze by focusing on the notion of performative time, and continue onwards on a bifurcating path to examine the BW as a monument made of time, and to finally follow the arrow of time’s flight into a horizon where subatomic, cosmic and experiential temporal modes are forever converging. Entry Path With the BW work Patrick Bernatchez presents a wristwatch—an object that concretely translates an everyday understanding of time—to point to various manifestations of time that escape ordinary human perception. Through an alteration of conventional chronometry (the replacement of the usual 60 second/60 minute/12 hour clock with a single hand to measure a 1,000-year block) the BW radically slows chronometric movement down and makes it imperceptible to the human eye. Yet, the incessant ticking leads us to assume that the timepiece is moving as it measures the indicated time frame with precision. In fact, it is this change of parameters, this stretching of rationally calculated temporal units that enables one to consider time independently of its relation to measured movement. In beholding the BW one is pulled into a contemplation that encompasses both the sensible (the visibility of the watch, its black colour, the audible ticking of the mechanism, the tangible feel of its metallic frame) and the conceptual (the consideration of time as a complex dimension which opens the door to all manner of curious temporal possibilities: time dilation, spacetime warps, wormholes and time travel, etc.). The BW thus employs an apparently ordinary and recognizable perceptible element to lead one into a temporal labyrinth in which the inscrutable face of time emerges in a variety of surprising guises. Like time itself—which is not a material property but rather a structuring dimension and a condition of emergence—being faceless the watch only becomes visible through the effects it imprints on its spatial masks (stasis/movement, growth/decay, order/chaos). The BW’s combination of an ordinary and present object and an extraordinary and abstract time-span thus cleaves a deep rift between perception and cognition that may induce a state of temporal vertigo. Viewed from this angle the BW can be considered a dizzyingly performative artwork, because from the instance the mechanism begins to tick the underlying concept is put into practice and actualized. Through its promised future operations the BW opens a field that contains any potential and eventual occurrence within the duration of its 1,000 year revolution. It is the performance of the traveling hand that is circumscribing the epochal temporal field. Furthermore, this performance derives from the instrument’s intrinsic and self-contained motion through time. In this regard time is not an exterior element which the watch measures, but is intrinsic to its continuous motion: the watch contains time within it, as much as it is in time. The watch’s temporal performance is both pragmatic and futile. It is pragmatic because it puts time into practice, directly and clearly by activating an invented millennial chronometry which uncouples time from its dependency on movement (the lack of apparent movement induces a direct experience of time as duration). It is futile because this unhinging of time from motion obviously creates a situation that makes the wristwatch impracticable for any utilitarian measure. After all what good is a wristwatch that measures a span of time that is imperceptible for any mortal and which will clearly outlast him/her for many centuries? The BW’s operation can only be qualified as pragmatic when viewed within an aesthetic realm that serves to reveal time in its immeasurable, aberrant, abstract, and warped dimension. It provides a pragmatic (practice) glimpse into time in its immeasurable—but no less real—modalities. It is in this regard that Bernatchez can be said to deploy the BW, and its related projects (3), to malleably work time as an artistic “material.” Text Continue here >> (1) J.G. Ballard response to the artist Tacita Dean’s observation that Robert Smithson supposedly created the Spiral Jetty as a means to reach the bottom of the Great Salt Lake, which some consider to have been the centre of an ancient world. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/27/tacita-dean-jg-ballard-art (2) The brainchild of Patrick Bernatchez the BW (BlackWatch) was designed and crafted in collaboration with Roman Winiger a renowned Swiss watchmaker. The works title BW is an initialized form of the watch itself and the respective surname initials of the artist and watchmaker. (3) Though the focus here is primarily on the BW, it must be considered as a central element of an ongoing global project consisting of a variety of subprojects (in various stages of progress, gestation or conception) each of which explores the concept and phenomenon of time from various angles. These projects include (or will/may include) a reworking of Bach’s Goldberg Variations using a prepared piano, a film involving time travel and cryogenics, a two part 20-year periodic video cycle focusing on lived time, a staged struggle between projected light and an energy/time devouring black screen, a cyclical production of pictorial works, and other as-of-yet unspecified artistic projects. Regardless of their eventual form, these projects are inserted into the time field of the BW where they serve to explore the multilayered nature of time.   Bifurcation # 1: Monumental Time The laying out of a 1000-year future performative time opens up many possibilities to weave all manner of manifestations into the temporal fabric. Though the object is spatially unimposing and mundane, in its temporal dimension the BW can adequately be defined as a monument; a monument whose medium is time. Through its monumental millennial extension the work acts as a reminder and admonition of a time to come. Like a spatial monument this temporal extension is intended to outlast mortal individuals, to endure over a time period of historical proportions and stand as testimony for a collectivity, a people or a civilization. In this perspective the BW is indeed a monument, but a monument that (unlike a traditional sculpture) calls upon us to remember, recollect not what is past, but what is yet to come; it is a monument to a future, the contours of which are yet to be shaped by onlookers from hereon in. Furthermore, the BW is an active and rather direct memento mori that is slowly ticking away individual life-spans and those of generations for centuries to come. In opening a vast temporal field practically beyond measure the BW also touches upon an aesthetic of the sublime in its Kantian definition as what is boundless and humanly ungraspable (or barely graspable). However, the BW both contains the contours of individual lived time while also exploding its framework through the grand time dilation. A complex operation that the work effectively performs by yoking a monumental and sublime temporal dimension with a direct and ordinary spatial apprehension of the object that is ultimately hinged on lived, experiential time. Bifurcation #2 Whose Time for When? Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. (4) The BW—with the various projects clustered around it—in many ways encapsulates Borges’ understanding of time as something simultaneously acting upon us from the outside and that constitutes us from within as the very “substance” whereby we are and act on the world. In its abstract scientific conception time is that which is vaster than us, engulfs us and ultimately devours us in its passage (the law of entropy expressed both in the infinitesimal and cosmic dimension), but also our subjective time in its manifold manifestations (relative time, dreamtime, memory, duration, etc.). In the BW project’s multi-media explorations (completed/in progress/or under consideration) the experiential and abstract aspects of time are woven into the same fabric and indicate different aspects of its reality. With its surprising discoveries (time dilation, relativity, entropy, spacetime warps, blackholes, etc.) modern physics has shown to what extent time cannot be severed from our observation and how it changes according to our relative perspectives. Again, time cannot be simply abstracted as a merely external factor. The BW projects presents an artistic grappling with these temporal forces and in recalibrating the measure of time beyond our perceptual threshold it invites us to take the time to wander in its immeasurable maze and entertain other temporal modes, trajectories, stories and rhythms. As a timekeeper and indicator and temporal monument the BW makes time manifest as an allegory in which we are both Saturn and Saturn’s children, both the devourers and devoured of our own time. As a performative and direct unleashing of time, bodily pulsations, fluctuation and multiple sensory perceptions that make up lived experience are not outside the flow of time, but themselves the measure, the clock as it were of one’s becoming in the world. We too are timepieces and timekeepers: we devour time and persist in duration, as much as we are devoured by time and eventually all succumb to entropy. In a world driven by the dictates of productive time and the tyranny of the constant communicational real-time instant, Bernatchez’s radical 1,000-year temporal slowdown is a tonic gesture to welcome all sorts of aberrant spacetime dilations, dreamtime acrobatics and time travel plans and to mingle with whirling subatomic particles, anthropological experience and cosmic expansion in a dance on the arrow of time’s irreversible path. Bernard Schütze, March, 2010 (4) Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time," in Labyrinths: selected stories & other writings, New York: New Directions Publishing, 1967, p. 247. TOP