ESSAYS

End Time Now

In technologically driven late-industrial cultures radical changes have taken place in the social experience of time. Against this context, this essay explores the critical cultural address of contemporary artworks that employ temporal dynamics in order to alter the spectator’s experience and understanding of time. Through an extended reading of Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance ('Time Clock Piece') the essay analyses the use of duration to destabilize the experience of time as linear, progressive and accumulative. The question of the persistence of performance is then articulated in terms of a sensory rupture, not only as it operates upon the forces of capital in the art market, but also the very systems of representation and visibility through which such forces move.

End Time Now is published in Small Acts: Performance, the Millennium, and the Marking of Time, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2000, ISBN 1 901033 57 0.