INTERFACE

In the first of a series of articles about critical writing, Tim Birch explores the idea of making and taking time to write now. If you would like to comment on any aspect of this article please email interface@a-n.co.uk

If you have ever used, read or heard the familiar phrase ‘time will tell’ then take stock: time is telling. Time has fast become the 21st century critic’s most precious resource. In today’s allegedly 24-7 lifestyle, it can easily feel like every second counts. Via computers or handheld devices, the temptation to succumb to writing even one-liners (Twitter) on art is now omnipresent.  

Yet do critics have a compelling something to say every minute of every day? Of course not, much the same as people in all walks of life, going by the boorish Twitter phenomenon. This is why online developments must be embraced with tact, while some of the teachings of traditional print media must remain sacred: fact checking; the objective balance provided by an editorial team; the time allowed for writing, re-writing, reading; and the right to reply, among other conventions.     

The rate of time – a world seemingly speeding up since the millennium – is a key foothold for this article. As far as my overflowing inboxes with their scores of unopened emails testify, the various overlapping art worlds – commercial or artful; capital or provincial; national or international – are spinning faster. Like you no doubt, I have learned to sharply scrutinize via subject lines and preview panes, and then shortlist potential, so as to best use my time.

The sheer scale of invites from galleries, arts news, messaging from artists and arts professionals has noticeably snowballed from when I first wrote about art a decade ago. At that time I was in The Guardian Media Group’s northern office – now I’m sat at home as a feelancer. So location no longer has anything to do with it.  

Considering time itself provides my fundamental argument. In my view, there are two types of time. There is a ‘constant’ mode and one of ‘change’ (to echo U.S. President Barack Obama's buzz word of ’09). The former is the endless flow of mundane moments; the latter is the pivotal point or epochal event.

Both are felt in the endgames and new trends of so-called contemporary art – as such, this construct of a dual nature of time aids me in my criticism. I believe solid, compelling art (just like a full life) must intertwine both timelines as one. For an instant icon, picture a life support machine: its constant line yet its bleeping peaks.

This is nothing new. Ancient Greece gives us chronos, the simple succession of time, and kairos, the moment of a pivotal, high and low, point (e.g. birth, epiphany, death). Perhaps because this is an idea literally as old as time itself it is something that easily gets overlooked or plainly misconstrued. Artists, curators, and in turn critics, often obsess with just one type of time, either relying on hackneyed terms or declaiming a sensation.

My passion for visual arts lies in its proven history of merging chronos and kairos. The mix is arguably inherent in the time-laiden terminology: art history. Pause for thought on the span of centuries that were filled with traditional sculpture and painting - such arduous lifetime consuming activities are chronos (prolonged, sustained, action). Pluck out and ponder a work such as Buonarotti's Last Judgement and, though it has obviously been laboured over in the Vatican Palace's Sistene Chapel, it is evidently about an ending (kairos) - the, ultimate, pivotal moment.

Criticism ought to be aware of the two temporal modes. Indeed the privilege of criticism is to grapple with both. And it is the critic's responsibility to do just that. Yet, crucially, Twitter-style confessional can only elevate chronos to the level of kairos. In other words, I do not believe that pithy one-liners about art, rattled off every few minutes, can ever be the future of art criticism.

What really tells is, in a word, experience. And that, as most walks of life will attest, takes time. Criticism is the long view, the long walk through successive shows and artists, conversations and ideas, drafts and re-drafts. A good critic spends his or her time positively and critically engaged with, artists through each and every step of what is a largely mundane journey.

As we close out the first decade of the 21st century this ‘something’ can be found in blogs as much as galleries as a convenient first port of call, or first look at an artist or group. Blogs and other user generated online writing, by their nature, allow ways into what I have proposed is the long term dialogue required between artist and critic (not the cursory glance, encouraged by new technologies and the speed of life). Online communities can be a resource to draw on as well as contribute to. A switched-on critic can pan for gold among blogs just as they source from artists, art journals, galleries, books, websites. These online resources have stood the tests of time and common sense – they can provide fireflies in the slow, dark times, reporting and commenting on a significant piece or show, auto-destructive one-offs, something new or just something different.

Endlessness (that which literally defeats time of course) is the major plus for online potential: reviews can be uploaded, limitlessly extending the horizons of the page parameters of a print publication.

In the case of Interface its multifarious nature provides an  example of what can be done by embracing the opportunities that online criticism creates. Most obviously in relation to the theme of time, is the fact that Interface’s scope allows for previews in advance of time bound events and reviews slap bang on opening nights (see my own piece, John Moores 25 written largely on the train home from Liverpool and uploaded that same night). However in addition to these first responses to the new, it also has the capacity to record further ongoing debate. A site like Interface has an important role to play as an archive, recording the recent as well as conjuring with new thinking, new ideas and new writing.

This kind of ‘converged content’ steadies our ever faster world. It provides the slow-motion mode that we sometimes need to make sense of this ever faster world. The archive mines the possibilities of the internet – of different voices; of competing narratives both of which broaden the debate and keep it from reducing to an elite point-of-view. In allowing such new, resourceful relationships with users (writers and readers), online hubs like Interface are providing the next step for art criticism.

First published: a-n.co.uk May 2009