Long Duration Observation (Retrospective)
Overview
After a few hours in Arches National Park, the sublime experience of scale slowly exposes a sublime experience of time.
This happens with a shift of focus: moving from the overall figural forms of the mountains and geological masses to the striations of texture and color on their surfaces. Slowly, one feels a kind of reverse vertigo, as if walking on an ocean floor, realizing that there used to be a ground plane hovering hundreds of meters above one’s head, and that the apparent stillness of the hulking figures and masses of rock are actually falling ever-so-slowly in a hundreds-of-millions-of-years-long process of weathering and erosion.
Like a puzzle of fragments scattered on a table, relations begin to appear. It seems like it should be possible to reconstruct or replace each of the durable hunks of rock into their original position. Meanwhile, one is aware that the dust under one’s feet is probably the residue of masses that have been pulverized into small particles by eons of weathering and erosion.
Examining elements visible in a contemporary landscape, attempt to reconstruct their primordial or previous positions. You may use photographs, drawings, or another medium of your choice.
Instructions
Choose two moments in the entropy of a landscape (natural or urbanistic). One moment should be in the present. The other should be in the past.
Devise a technique (drawing, collage, montage, model, or other) to visually compare the present state to the past state, noting what elements have endured or remain continuous and what have disappeared.
Once these two states have been visuallly established, devise a second drawing system to trace the passage of time between them. (You may need to conduct additional research.) Questions may emerve about whether to integrate these changes into a single drawing or to curate instances to describe changes across the longer interval of time. How long do changes take?
Relevant Tutorials
- N/A
Required Reading:
Bryon Roberts, A Brief History of Time Reversal, 2022.
Optional Reading:
Jon May, Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, 2001.
Robert Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of the Passaic River, 1967.
Uya Kabakov, The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, c. 1977.
Tom McDonough, The Archivist of Urban Waste: Zoe Leonard,
Photographer as Rag Picker, 2010.
Adrian Stokes, The Pleasures of Limestone, 1934
Other References:
Michael Landy, “Breakdown” (link)