Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art: Beyond the Clock

Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art presents a major study of time as a key aesthetic dimension of recent art practices. This book explores different aspects of time across a broad range of artistic media and draws on recent movements in philosophy, science, and technology to show how artists generate temporal experiences that resist the standardized time of Olafur Eliasson’s melting icebergs, produce fragile temporal ecologies; Marina Abramović’s performances testing the durations of the human body; Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which conflates past and present chronologies. This book examines alternative frameworks of time, duration, and change in prominent philosophical, scientific, and technological traditions, including physics, psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience, media theory, and selected environmental sciences. It suggests that art makes a crucial contribution to these discourses not by “visualizing” time, but by entangling viewers in different sensory, material, and imaginary temporalities.