12. 5. – 12. 6. 2020 DUM project space

wall clocks, paint, ticking

“To contemplate time – and thus, perhaps, to finally control it – is one of the eternal Sisyphean tasks of the human species.”
curator:Vladimir Vidmar
production: DUM-društvo umetnikov,
co production: Zavod Zet
project suppotrted by:
MOL Ljubljana – cultural department, Internationales Kunstlerhaus Villa Concordia, Bamberg

Dark Times.
The physical and metaphysical category of time, that most defining yet least definable of things, is again the focus of an exhibition by Vadim Fishkin. Fishkin’s practice is always tied to an inner paradox, with its profanation of the sublime on the one hand and its fascinated admiration of the mundane on the other. His work materializes this paradox in the irreducible dualities of faith and scepticism, enthusiasm and irony, optimism and pessimism. For Fishkin, art is a stage for juxtaposing such dualities – not a field of ex nihilo creation or of discovery, but a space where we strive to make sense of the world. Our innate need for understanding is the driving force in Fishkin’s works, and nothing stirs this passion more than the great, eternal questions, which our finite condition makes ceaselessly relevant.

Time is one of the eternal questions to which Fishkin regularly returns in his art. Time as a phenomenon possesses the duality of being both physical and metaphysical – both an object of scientific study, a physical entity, and at the same time a wholly ungraspable and uncontrollable force that shapes every aspect of our existence as finite beings. We view time as the most objective of norms and measure it with precision, yet our experience of it is constantly determined by our subjective impulses and moods: time is short or long depending on the emotional state we are in. Two of Fishkin’s earlier works, A Speedy Clock and Stretched Time, demonstrated the inherent relativity of our relationship with time: the former by accentuating physical references to travelling at the speed of light, with the duration of a day compressed into a single minute; the latter by holding in place a moment that, paradoxically, stretches across its objective duration.

To contemplate time – and thus, perhaps, to finally control it – is one of the eternal Sisyphean tasks of the human species.

With the work Dark Times, Fishkin now adds opaque time to his earlier treatments of the subject. The walls of the gallery are hung with a single straight line of nearly fifty clocks on which the glass of the clock face is painted black. These “blind spots” are accompanied only by the softly ticking clock mechanisms, which remind us that time is still passing in the background even if the logic of its passage eludes us. Dark Times underlines the necessary dimension of the obscure, the opaque, which lies at the heart of our need for knowledge. Obscurantism, however, resides not in time’s opacity but in our own inability to admit the depths of our incomprehension of phenomena such as time. Our incomprehension of “the thing in itself” – of the true nature of time independent of our relation to it – we conceal behind various conventions of “managing” time, behind the various units into which we divide it and the ways we measure it and mark it. The dozens of clocks, which like abstract paintings gaze at us indifferently from the gallery walls yet never let our own gazes enter, suggest the countless ways we try to approach time. We camouflage our incomprehension of the “metaphysicality” of time – the aspect that resists our understanding – in mechanistic rationalizations. The clock mechanisms of Dark Times are, as it were, our own mechanisms for dealing with time’s relentless impenetrability, while the black paint that blocks our gaze points to their limitations. In Dark Times, time is dark because (among other reasons) we refuse to recognize this fact, trying instead to hide our perplexity over the immenseness of time – its immeasurableness – under the guise of measurement.

Time remains unaffected; it keeps flowing regardless of the measurements and divisions we ascribe to it. Not even great epochal events, upheavals, revolutions, and cataclysms, can throw it off course: everything that happens enters time in the same way. But not for us. For us, times will always be good or bad, and sometimes explicitly dark. We will never cease to qualify time, just as we will never cease to measure it or stop trying to grasp its logic. The fact that time is ultimately incommensurate with our cognitive apparatus will never be reason enough to relinquish such ambitions. Quite the contrary, the categorical elusiveness of time only feeds our desire to understand it. Because time is the measure of our mortality, we will never acknowledge its neutrality – times will always be either golden or hard, productive or catastrophic, or dark.
So the remarkable concurrence of the exhibition Dark Times with the present historical moment both is and is not a coincidence.
Vladimir Vidmar