IM LICHTJAHR 19HUNDERT SIE HOREN TAGLICH DIE UHR UND

On the Impossibility of Treating of Time
Tempus est ineffabile – time is ineffable. It cannot be made the
object of human thought, feeling, research or art because it
does not possess any properties, concepts or boundaries –
because, to put it differently, it lacks all that which meaningful
discourse or aesthetic treatment are based on. For the heretic
jesuit Leo Naphta in The Magic Mountain, it presents a “general
divine installation/institution” whereby any hope of its
being within the reach of our senses and understanding is
rejected: the power and the essence of time transcend human
categories. / “Time passes”, we say carelessly or consolatory,
out of hubris or spite – for it is us, of course, who are passing
by, passing it by on our mortal path while time lasts motionlessly
and remains completely unperturbed. In this way, time
constantly slights and falsifies every creative willing, every
work, every act of making sense. We cannot step out of time
in order to make it the object of intellectual penetration or the
material of aesthetic formation from a perspective external to
it. Thus already for epistemological reasons we cannot ‘handle ,
this foundation (condition) of being, just as we cannot ‘handle
, its ontic eversion, space. We can be silent about it (à la
Wittgenstein) – or we can premeditatedly plunge ourselves
into a sea of banalities which may however be but another
way of going down the conceptual drain. / To this almost
complete impossibility of grasping time in terms of literature or
philosophy corresponds physics’ magnificent failure of doing
so. Just as in the case of the nature of matter, light and gravity,
it has nothing salubrious to offer, does not provide any models
or images. It can only continually install moving devices and
claim that they are measuring time, constantly emphasizing its
helplessness in doing so – something which, not just since the
idea of spatiotemporal relativity, is sweet nonsense stressing
human limitations, for time is indiscreet and excessive,
without measure. / “The ones I love who desire that which is
impossible!” – This sibylline statement from Faust II may hence
serve as the befittingly paradoxical motto to a commentary
on Wolf Kahlen’s 365 Zeit-An-Sagen as it highlights the deep
ironic seriousness in nevertheless making time the professed
content and explicit title of an artwork: You do so because
you cannot do so. This dialectics of humility and hubris is
replicated in the dimensions and diversity of this year-long
collage, a collage that is a panacusticum spreading into time,
expanding into a temporal space longer than those we are
used to perceive and observe. In this, the temporal change-in-perpetuity
(or perpetuity-in-change) corresponds to the
topic’s rhetorical inaccessibility since all and nothing can be
said about time, just as it is tendentially happening here. /
For this reason, the stupefyingly broad heterogeneity displayed
in form and content by the authors and voices in this work
unfolding in time has nothing to do with postmodern randomness
and fragmentation or with avoiding the object – even
though the artist withdraws from the position of creator and
works indirectly, as moderator and organizer. Quite to the
contrary, the multipartite form manifests the awareness of the
fact that there can be no valid and self-contained statements
about time. You can only hint at time, but never pin it down.
Consequently, Wolf Kahlen’s project is possibly less about
specifying or stating (the) time and more about pointing to
and hinting at it: it does not succumb to the temptation of
mystically disclosing the essence of time. Rather, it can be
understood as an exercise in concentration and attention, as
an artistic meditation in the course of which a larger whole
may be glimpsed from concrete diversity.
Johannes Vincent Knecht
May 2015
Translation Christian A. Wollin
229