The philosophy of time can be told as a story of two models: line and circle. On the one hand, the notion of the succession of past, present, and future, the linearity of eschatological narratives of the end, and the utopian idea of progress; on the other, the circular movement of the days and seasons, the eternal-return-of-the-same, and circulation in the economy. Since early capitalism, the clock has united these two models: the circle in its appearance and functionality, but also the idea of determining time as an exact time, acting according to it, and thus “linearly pursuing” a goal in its directionality and use.
In More Clock Work, Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter take apart these models and mechanisms, and reassemble them into new, destitutive (i.e., “non-constitutive,” “non-productive,” “non-goal-oriented”) machines. Installed on white pedestals, five small sculptures in transparent, glossy black enamel at first recall archaic archetypes of industrialization—for example, transmission towers supporting overhead power lines. The title, More Clock Work, suggests a connection between at least three concepts of work: that of the art work, the mechanical clock work, and the archetypical power works modeled by the machines. An “archaic difference” of this sort is emphasized by Martin Heidegger in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” when he distinguishes the fundamental difference between the wooden bridge over the river and the hydroelectric plant in the river: “The hydroelectric plant [Wasserkraftwerk] is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant [Kraftwerk]. What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station [Wesen des Kraftwerks].”1
Of course, the “more” in More Clock Work indicates that Graf and Grüter are less interested in a return to the “old wooden bridge” than in a suspension, a désœuvrement of the economic, political, and social dynamics behind the power station. This can be understood if we look at their “Clock Works” in terms of their destitutive balance of power: the small, pedestal-mounted machines perform no tasks and produce nothing. The jolt of trains passing through Milan, a social but also anonymous outside-without-essence, provides the impetus that drives the machines. The brute energy of the trains is picked up by a hidden sensor and transmitted via cellular network to SIM cards within the fragile machines at Fanta-MLN’s gallery space. Only then do the machines begin to move together, before resting again, one by one. In More Clock Work, this acceleration runs in vain. The movement becomes hermetic. It becomes sculpture, but in its parody of the machine, it substitutes the sign system of the clock. The clock face disappears along with the clock time.2
The Complete Manual of Evacuation (2010), by Japanese director Akira Takayama, provides an interesting parallel to the critique of linear and circular models of time in More Clock Work. Takayama interprets the Yamanote Line, which runs in a loop around downtown Tokyo, as an absolute metaphor for the pace of the city. Trains in Japan are delayed by an average of one minute. Even today they symbolize the precision and optimization of the hypermodernity for which Tokyo first became known. According to Takayama, there are two figures who break out of the time model of the Yamanote Line: the unemployed and the unhoused, who stay stopped against the rush hour in an invisible internal time, so to speak; and the suicidal, who throw themselves in front of the trains, almost always due to stress and pressure from work—their acts of desperation bringing, for a short time, the Yamanote Line to a halt. In More Clock Work, too, one senses a latent attention to the destructive mechanisms of capitalism, to anguished processes of disruption, and in a certain way, to a desire for sabotage, even though the sculptures themselves appear speechless, hermetic and contemplative in the gallery space.
“Movement” is a term used to describe the rotating mechanical elements in a clockwork, but since the late nineteenth century, it has also referred to new visions of communities and collectives. Sigmund Freud spoke explicitly of the “psychoanalytic movement” in 1914, and the term has recurred in art history ever since. In More Clock Work, this movement is concentrated in wheels, loops, spirals, ribbons, and a string from inside the clockwork, whose uncontrolled movements—though incapable of topological description—likewise arise from rotation. In the chapter “The Free Wheel” from his late essay “Voyous,” Jacques Derrida deconstructed these “workings or turnings of a circular machine.”3 Starting from the idea of the motor as the “first mover,” which has determined the philosophy of life since Aristotle, Derrida engages the time model of the ellipse, which has more than one focal point, against those of the line and the circle. The ellipse also presents a counter-model to the isolated self-presence of time in linear and circular models. In this respect, it points to the fundamental problem that certain utopias, such as “democracy” and “community,” may not be achievable as recurrent, stabilized temporal forms or objectives, but follow an aporetic logic instead. Derrida comments:
It seems difficult to think the desire for or the naming of any democratic space without what is called in Latin a rota, that is, without rotation or rolling, without the roundness or rotating rondure of something that turns round in circles, without the circularity, be it pretechnical, premechanical, or pregeometrical, of some automobilic and autonomic turn or, rather, return to self, toward the self and upon the self; indeed, it seems difficult to think such a desire for or naming of democratic space without the rotary motion of some quasi-circular return or rotation toward the self, toward the origin itself, toward and upon the self of the origin, whenever it is a question, for example, of sovereign self-determination, of the autonomy of the self, of the ipse, namely, of the one-self that gives itself its own law, of autofinality, autotely, self-relation as being in view of the self, beginning by the self with the end of self in view—so many figures and movements that I will call from now on, to save time and speak quickly, to speak in round terms, ipseity in general.4
In contrast to this self-centeredness and self-assurance, which he calls “ipseity,” Derrida asks about the “living together” of a future yet-to-come (or democracy). This is notable in the context of More Clock Work not least because the idea for the work came about during one of the earliest encounters between Graf and Grüter, when, during their studies in Zurich, they recognized a shared desire to “build a machine together.”5 Derrida again: “On the horizon without horizon of this semantic disturbance or turbulence, the question of the democracy to come might take the following form, among others: what is ‘living together?’ And especially: ‘what is a like, a compeer [semblable],’ ‘someone similar or semblable as a human being, a neighbor, a fellow citizen, a fellow creature, a fellow woman,’ and so on? Or even: must one live together only with one’s like, with someone semblable?”6
More Clock Work carries the model of an elliptical time. The work not only revokes common notions of how things should be but also juxtaposes common images: the useful machine and the useless one, the coming democracy and the sabotage of its present distorted image, sculpture and living together, stasis and movement. Viewed in isolation, these opposing poles are merely the static foci of the ellipse. But in the course of elliptical time, the terms themselves transform: the means of return are abandoned, the purpose of art is already achieved, and “the dream of something” has at least been symbolized by it.
at Fanta-MLN, Milan
until June 1, 2023
Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter are an artist duo living in New York.
They studied media arts at Zurich University of the Arts and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Recent exhibitions and performances include Kevin Space, Vienna; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Kunsthalle Fribourg; and the Emily Harvey Foundation New York.
Toni Hildebrandt is a writer based in Bern. He teaches art history and philosophy at the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art History and the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the University of Bern, and is guest professor in the Maumaus Independent Study Programme in Lisbon. Most recently, he published the anthology PPPP: Pier Paolo Pasolini Philosopher (with Giovanbattista Tusa).