Dark Stars considers time as a subject in contemporary art, exploring how objects and images bring the past into the present. The exhibition’s title refers to the phenomenon of a dead star’s light continuing to travel through space, appearing to a remote viewer long after it has gone dark. Works by Carol Bove, Michael Byron, Annie MacDonell, R. H. Quaytman, and Cerith Wyn Evans convey a similar sense of duration and delay.
In The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), cultural theorist George Kubler related historians to astronomers, noting that both can only observe signals from past events. At the core of Kubler’s book lies an exploration of how time can be perceived through sequences of changing forms in art—as paths of transmission, replication, and dissipation. A scholar of ancient Mesoamerican cultures, Kubler’s expansive perspective has influenced many artists and theorists, from the 1960s to today. [1]
The striking visual metaphors and philosophical queries found in Kubler’s text are taken as a source of reflection for this exhibition. They are also cited in MacDonell’s film and sculpture The Shape of Time, Revisited (2012), which features an old, crumbling model hand, once part of an antique fortune-telling machine. MacDonell worked with an art conservator to restore the hand and filmed the process, adding a contemplative voice over excerpted from Kubler:
“…however fragmentary its condition, any work of art is actually a portion of arrested happening, or an emanation of a past time. It is a graph of activity now stilled, but a graph made visible like an astronomical body, by a light that originated with the activity...” [2]
Under the conservator’s care, the fortune teller’s hand transforms from shattered relic to gleaming oracle, only to be undone again when the film flips and begins to play in reverse. A plaintive chronological feedback loop results: an object, originally meant to provide a glimpse of the future, worn by the past, and restored to the present. The hand itself, displayed jewel-like, in a mirror-backed vitrine, holds these registers together in prescient composure. About her work, MacDonell writes, “Ideas multiply and disperse in uneven, unpredictable constellations rather than straight lines… The [fortune teller’s] hand is also a stand in for art itself, which has the unusual capacity to create both its own past and its own future.” [3] This relationship between past and future is also explored in R. H. Quaytman’s painting Łódz Poem (1928, Spatial Composition 23.3 Parsecs Away), Chapter 2 (2004). Since 2001, Quaytman has made paintings exclusively in “chapters,” groups of paintings that are carefully hung in relation to one another, and which often relate to the histories of their original sites of display. As a single painting in this exhibition, Łódz Poem… functions as a dispersed element of its initial grouping, created for the Łódz Biennale in Poland. In the early 20th century, Łódz was a center for avant-garde artists including Katarzyna Kobro (1898-1951), who was part of a group advancing a theory called Unism. [4] Kobro considered the relationship of her sculptures to both the space around them and to the viewer’s moving body; ideas which are integral to Quaytman’s conception of the chapters. Quaytman made a mirror-image replica of Kobro’s sculpture Spatial Composition 2 (1928), and used it as the painting’s subject. In this way, Quaytman charts a series of transmissions: the original, the copy, the photograph of the copy, and the painting (another original). A parsec, referred to in the painting’s title, is a unit used by astronomers to measure how far a star is from Earth. 23.3 parsecs is the distance a star’s light would travel between 1928 (the date of Kobro’s sculpture) and 2004 (the date of Quaytman’s painting). Through this delay, Quaytman considers both the remoteness of Kobro’s time and place, and the resonance of her work and ideas in the present.
Michael Byron’s grisaille paintings of ritual and religious artifacts share in Quaytman’s sense of connection; but while Quaytman’s paintings are stretched and processed (they are like waves, oscillations), Byron’s are condensed and singular. Removed from their original contexts, the artifacts have been isolated in museum collections, and further “frozen” by photography. Borrowing the documentary palette of black-and-white, Byron obscures their clear depiction with trompe l’oeil surface textures; Headdress Ornament, New Guinea (2011) appears to be shrouded in a delicate mist, while Couple N.I. (2008) looks as if it has been subjected to blistering heat. The unique process Byron has developed to produce these illusions demands that each painting be completed in a single sitting, often lasting up to 12 hours. Deep, focused looking imbues the works with an energy that corresponds to the time condensed into the objects themselves. Charged with a friction between the language of photography and the materiality of painting, and between symbolic presence and historical classification, Byron’s paintings project a sense of instantaneousness; the figures are animated, enigmatic.
Likewise paying careful attention to singular items, Carol Bove’s Shell Sculpture (2011) presents two vibrantly colored seashells, delicately balanced as if in orbit. Bove is known for the sense of time evoked in her careful arrangements of ephemera and natural forms with symbolic multiplicity. [5] Shell Sculpture calls (vaguely) to mind a range of art historical tropes: the spare radiance of Minimalism, the graphic figuration of kinetic sculpture, and the playful making-strange of Surrealism. The shells convey both the years it took for them to slowly form in the sea, and the millennia of evolution that resulted in their forms; in this way, the piece intertwines cultural and biological time signatures. Though they are the most “natural” of the sculpture’s forms, the shells are also the most perplexing; the base and armature appear humbled by them. Roughly human height, and meant to be experienced in the round, Shell Sculpture actively encounters the viewer, as opposed to being passively viewed. As Bove describes this body of work, “The sculptures are not even primarily visual. You learn about them through your eyes, but their visuality is a secondary feature. The objects in the assemblage have variable textures, temperatures, speeds, and histories. The visual aspect provides important clues about how they feel and what they are.” [6] Bove’s channeling calls to mind one of Kubler’s musings in The Shape of Time, “It is as if things generate other things in their own image, by human intermediaries.” [7]
Cerith Wyn Evans’s wall text installation With the advent of Radio Astronomy… (2004) also explores the connection between the fragile instant and the depth of time. As the piece describes, old photographs of the stars led to minor inconsistencies being mistaken for large astral bodies: “Solar systems identified from particles of dust, galaxies from dandruff.” [8] Wrapping the corner of the gallery, the text engulfs the viewer, echoing the inversion of scale considered in the work. Creating pause to stand before a revelation, the piece leads to further questions: From whose head did those dandruff galaxies drift? And, what of the dusty solar systems now? How do they continue to dissipate, in old texts, outdated maps of the night sky? Wyn Evans considers light as a complex bearer of knowledge and the indefinite; how we see light determines how we visualize the universe, and, ultimately, our place within it.
As Kubler noted, “…time emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by innumerable stages and by unexpected bearers. These signals are like kinetic energy stored until the moment of notice.” [9] The artworks in Dark Stars emerge from such stores of energy, as quietly smoldering beacons. Quiet and meditative, they are the product of the artists’ extended engagement with their subjects. Likewise, they encourage slow looking, and highlight each viewer’s experience as the next point of relay for the ideas they embody.
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[1] Kubler’s book was often referenced by Robert Smithson and plays a prominent role in his essay “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space,” first published in Arts Magazine, v. 41, no. 1 (November 1966), 28-31. Kubler’s importance to Smithson, and his contemporaries, is analyzed in depth by Pamela M. Lee in Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
[2] Excerpt from the voiceover in MacDonell’s film The Shape of Time, Revisited (2012).
[3] Email correspondence with the author.
[4] Łódź is also the birthplace of Quaytman’s grandfather, and is also referenced in The Sun, Chapter 1 (2001), originally displayed at the Queens Museum of Art.
[5] Bove has also favored petrified wood, driftwood, and peacock feathers.
[6] Carol Bove, “To Rescue Time from Photography,” Art Journal, vol. 70, no. 2, Summer 2011, 27-33: 27.
[7] George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962), 62.
[8] Excerpt from Wyn Evans’s With the advent of Radio Astronomy… (2004).
