Edited by Amelia Groom

Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.

This anthology contextualises art that proposes alternatives to the models of linear time that have underpinned both capitalism and progressive modernity. Contemporary art has explored such diverse registers of temporality as ‘wasting and waiting; regression and repetition; déjà vu and seriality; unrealized possibility and idleness; non-consummation and counter-productivity; the belated and the premature; the disjointed and the out-of-synch – all of which go against sequentialist time and index slips in chronological experience.’ While theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Mieke Bal have proposed ‘polychronic’, ‘heterochronic’ or ‘anachronic’ readings of history, artists have opened up the field of time to the extent that the very notion of the contemporary is brought into question.

Artists surveyed include: Marina Abramović, Doug Aitken, Francis Alÿs, Matthew Buckingham, Janet Cardiff, Paul Chan, Jeanette Christensen, Moyra Davey, Dexter Sinister, Olafur Eliasson, Bea Fremderman, Antony Gormley, Douglas Gordon, Tehching Hsieh, Toril Johannessen, On Kawara, Joachim Koester, Lee Ufan, Christian Marclay, nova Milne, Trevor Paglen, Philippe Parreno, Katie Paterson, Raqs Media Collective, Sylvia Sleigh, Simon Starling, Michael Stevenson, Hito Steyerl, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Time/Bank and Agnès Varda.

Writers include Giorgio Agamben, Emily Apter, Karen Archey, St Augustine, Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Hans Belting, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Henri Bergson, Daniel Birnbaum, Yve-Alain Bois, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Didi-Huberman, Brian Dillon, Elena Filipovic, Elizabeth Grosz, Boris Groys, Rachel Kent, Rosalind Krauss, George Kubler, Quinn Latimer, Bruno Latour, Doreen Massey, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Serres, Michel Siffre, Mark von Schlegell, Nancy Spector, Jan Verwoert and Dōgen Zenji.

Amelia Groom is a London-based critic and curator who writes regularly for frieze and other publications. She held a teaching fellowship at the University of Sydney while she was writing her doctoral dissertation in the Art History and Theory department.

Paperback, 240 pages, 210 x 145 mm

ISBN 978-0-85488-215-1

First published 2013

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