Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don't be subject to the influence of out-of-date concepts of time. Forget hours, seconds and minutes. Accept instability. LIVE IN TIME. BE STATIC - WITH MOVEMENT. For a static of the present moment. Resist the anxious fear to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living. Stop insisting on "values" which cannot but break down. Stop evoking movement and gesture. You are movement and gesture. Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live in the present; live once more in Time and by Time - for a wonderful and absolute reality. (March 1959)
These manifestos were dropped from a plane over Dusseldorf -- though they landed outside the city, in the surrounding countryside, frustrating his nominal plan for their reception.
Peter Selz on Homage to New York (1960) "movement and gesture are demonstrated - not merely evoked. Being very much part of his time Tinguely uses machines to show movement, but he is fully aware that machines are no more permanent than life itself. Their time rubs out, they destroy themselves." (137)
Indeed they can be made to be ultra-mortal, as Tinguely does.
Pol Bury: "We can see that slowness not only multiplies duration but also permits the eye following the globe to escape from its own observer's imagination and let itself be let by the imagination of the travelling globe itself." (Lee 121); in response, Eugene Ionesco: "For Pol Bury there is constant anguish originating from the basic intuition that everything might collapse under us at any moment." (121)
It would be more correct to say that the collapse is precisely the process of movement forward: that the decay of the external objects of the cathedral constitutes the life that it embodies.
Robert Smithson - [1966] Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space
& http://library.mit.edu/item/000173982
Andy Warhol - Empire (1964), Sleep (1964); Kawara:
both are deeply methodical in their temporal operations, and both speak to the logic of the bad infinity. A system with its own laws and limitations is put into place, and we, the audience, are made to watch and to wait. We are made to wait for some figure to emerge from its repetitive ground; to detect the small, almost infinitesimal, incident against the yawning relief of duration. In short, we are made to anticipate, even hope for, the temporal fallout of this bad infinity. And in this perpetual present both gestures stage, they cast a critical eye on the future of the future. (Lee 278)
Hegel has: "This infinity is spurious or negative infinity since it is nothing but the negation of the finite, but the finite arises again in the same way, so that it is no more sublated than not." (Hegel, A. Quality, Encyclopaedia Logic)
~ Deleuze's "Repetition with difference"... we are waiting for the difference...
Kawara's "Title" (1965): "confronted with three laterally organized canvases, done up in hot, hot pink." (Lee 289)
- Lee takes time much for granted here: The hot pink we are seeing is yet a tiny slice of the life of the work. The fading of the pigment will coincide with the fading of the day's memory. Catastrophic events might leave their mark powerfully and indelibly, either in the physical or intellectual realm: a fire in the museum; a drift from human physical presence on Earth; the devaluation of the painting as a mode of artwork/expression/social-trace; the loss of the Gregorian calendar as a meaningful relativistic measurement, etc. But we know, at least, that the pink will fade, and that those who saw his day will die.
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