by Jon Lackman | 22 January 2007 | Books, Contemporary
In the December 2006 Art Bulletin, James Meyer celebrates Pamela M. Lee’s Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s: “The narrative style … is dazzlingly associative … [it] enlists all manner of sources and evidence to make its case … that Chronophobia opens up more questions than it is able to answer is a sign of its interpretative power. Lee’s study overflows with fresh perceptions and unexpected conjunctures; much recent writing in the area feels lumbering by comparison. To read Lee’s electric prose is to experience a nimble theoretical mind, one that is not afraid to make intuitive leaps … With this study Lee consolidates her estimable reputation as one of the field’s trailblazing practitioners.”
He also writes: “An old bias of the discipline, and of historical studies in general, held that ‘proper’ history must be written from a position of distance … the concerns of proper history continue to haunt the field [of contemporary art history], whose chronological parameters are in constant flux. The art felt to be contemporary by one generation is quickly perceived as historical by another … Why is it that our sense of contemporaneity, during the last decade and a half, has been inextricably bound up in the 1960s? in the stories we tell about the 1960s? These are among the central concerns of Chronophobia … Studies of the art of the 1960s often speak of the ‘factory’ techniques of Minimalism and Pop, allying the serial tactics of these endeavors with an early-twentieth-century mode of commodity production. Chronophobia proposes a more contemporary model–the cybernetic theory of Norbert Weiner–as a more suitable formal analogy.”
