Nari Ward’s Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca: On Time and the Return of History by Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D.
It is customary to understand our modern, global sense of time as a universal, even natural, horizon of experience. Western time seems rational, neutral, and beyond the pale of history. Yet, a work of contemporary art such as Nari Ward’s Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca: On Time and the Return of History, recently gifted to the Redwood, suggests all such assumptions may be outrageously inaccurate (Fig. 1). In fact, our current temporal regime is a direct inheritance of European Enlightenment values, science and economics, such that the accelerated, 24/7 culture that we associate with global contemporaneity merely forms the tail end of a massive, global project of regulating time that began in eighteenth-century Europe. There, amidst modernization, urbanization and industrialization, a burgeoning working class was increasingly awakened by factory criers rather than the rooster’s crow, their working day measured by a plethora of (suspiciously slow) clocks.1 In the American colonies, public, mechanized time was already established when the Redwood was built in 1747, and wholly entrenched by the late nineteenth century, when the Ithaca clock company began producing tall case clocks in upstate New York. 2 Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca inhabits the casing of one such Ithaca clock, strategically altering the outmoded timepiece to prompt questions about how time lies embedded in colonial modernity’s regimes of progress and labor, rationalization and control. In this work, now on display at the Redwood, Ward marshals the vintage clock as a Trojan horse, appropriating its traditional facade and air of old-world luxury to install Bakongo culture, temporality and experience in the heart of the Redwood’s historic interior. This centering of African culture is long overdue, not only because the U.S. was built on the forced labor of Africans taken from the Bakongo and neighboring regions, but also because as Robert Farris Thompson, the late, great Yale scholar of the Kongo noted: you will never understand American culture if you don’t understand African culture. In Ward’s clock, the stately shell from Ithaca camouflages a series of covert operations that has transformed its interior: the 12 etc. Win ter 202 2
Figure 1. Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca, grandfather clock case, copper nails, patinated copper panel, African statues, 87 x 18 x 10.5 inches, 221 x 45.7 x 26.7 cm. Redwood Library & Athenæum Special Collections.
clock’s face has been effaced and its insides removed, save a pendulum, trapped in a cavity. Here, deep within the clock’s insides, the artist has placed an image of historical trauma, then closed the door. The clock has now become a container of unspeakable truths, sent into the world to speak of containment (Fig. 2). The Enlightenment did not only bequeath our current horizon of time; it also gave rise to the notion of the “self as container,”3 an idea implicit in the influential model of the Cartesian subject as a thinking, self-reflective entity ruled from inside. The birth of the Enlightenment subject and subjectivity was thus the birth of the individual as a doubled, self-contained conceptual agent, a subject fortified from the objects of the world by a carapace of intellect that constituted humans as thinking subjects of culture, substantively different from, and superior to, the rest of the natural world. Not surprisingly, eighteenth-century clockmakers projected this notion onto the emblems of culture they built, designing standing clocks like human containers: an exoskeleton scaled to a person’s height, grounded by feet, rising to a central waist, with a clock “face,” topped by a “bonnet.” Hands keep time, but the clock as a whole “runs,” its fragile interior mechanics encased, womb-like, in a cavity protected by glass. The design of an anthropomorphized container like a tall case clock materializes not only the period conception of the bounded subject of culture as separate from the world of nature, but also encompasses the larger metaphysical yearning to “keep” and thereby control time through a material aesthetics of containment. But Ward’s clock exposes the ethics that underpins this aesthetics, situating the modern drive to contain and control time as continuous with a colonial-era, technocratic mindset of dominating the land, the natural world, and
