Everything changes. Objects and people decay, and eventually cease to exist. Our world continuously rips itself apart in an endless cycle of entropy. So on a planet where there is no such thing as 'eternal', how can we not realize that everything is inundated with time? Whether we recognize it or not, all art objects can be argued to be a study of time, or to be inseparable from its destructive influence.

Robertson and McDaniel discuss so many different forms of art with the subject of 'time' that it soon becomes impossible to see anything as outside of it. Some works, like the video artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, rely on movement and change from action to action to demonstrate fleeting moments. Some, like the sculpture artist Heide Fasnacht, only need to capture a single instance to imply the quick passage of time. It does not seem to matter if the piece moves (whether in the gallery or in the virtual reality of film), or if the piece simply hints at movement, all art seems to be controlled by time's forces.

Yet time is itself a man-made concept employed to organize an otherwise chaotic world. Where, then, did it come from? As depicted in these time pieces, it must be this linking of action, of progressive movement to movement, that necessitates our view of time. For the western world, this means a beginning and an end. On an individual level, time holds much significance in the record change through growth; it seems to be the most effective way for western society to mark change. But on a much larger scale, an interesting thing happens: time and all of its records of change cease to matter. The world and everything in it continues its constant state of growth and decay. The past does not matter, the future will never come. In this way, we can make time unmake itself: there is literally no time like the present.

In this aspect, the Futurists were right. The past had no hold over their art; the only direction they travelled in was forward. They succeeded in creating work that, like the efforts of the cubists, collapsed time upon itself into a single point (Cubist work was arguably more successful in this; if a linear view of time was applied to the work of futurism then it could be said their pieces had a discernable beginning and end).

But this entire analysis depends on the definition of time, if it exists, as the recording of movement to movement. Are there other ways to convey time rather than through progression? Time is inexorably tied with decay and death, two themes that elicit deep-seated emotions in human beings. What if it were to be tied solely to human emotion? Can such a creation even be explained, even if it were only on an individual basis? If the work of any artist could convey this more closely to the mark of time than others, it would be that of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Gonzales-Torres' work evokes not a timeline as conveyed by movement, nor a linear progression of sickness and inevitable death, but an earnest, emotional account of the life of a lost love. Of course, this argument would be very difficult to frame in a linear mindset. But the idea that emotion could possibly work as a means to convey time, and be an effective one at that, holds an interesting and much more personal appeal to such an illusory subject.


McDaniel, Craig, and Jean Robertson. "Time." Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2010. 112-129.


Storr, Robert. “When This You See Remember Me.” Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Ed. Julie Ault. Steidldangin: New York, 2006. 5-37