About Time

Hearsay is a strange thing. You are told something, but it quickly becomes vague, translated, changed and reinterpreted – everybody has a slightly different version. The spoken word has a fragile beauty and is the foundation of myth. There are even some artists whose existence is almost mythical.
In 1973 Lucy Lippard published her book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 – the full title is much longer and more explicit.1 A record of an incredible period of change in the history of art, the book remains as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. In it there is a reference to one artist who took the dematerialization of the art object to its logical conclusion: Ian Wilson. I have never seen or, more significantly, heard a work by him: I know about him primarily through Lippard’s book, in which he is cited six times.2 One reference is to a taped conversation with Robert Barry in 1970 and is listed as being part of Barry’s series ‘Presentation of Artists’.

Wilson’s work is very hard to track down, even in terms of documentation.3 He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers4 but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. Wilson’s work functions almost like archaeological or geological evidence: it consists of objects that we examine in order to deduce, from scanty clues, what must have happened.
There is one image of Wilson’s work in Six Years: Chalk Circle (1968)5, his last sculpture – if an infinite edition can be called the last. It is also the work that transformed his practice. The only other tangible piece by him, also from 1968, is Circle on the Wall, which is a slightly raised lump on the wall. Several of Wilson’s contemporaries in the 1960s made statements about not making any more objects with which to clutter the world. Lawrence Weiner said: ‘I do not mind objects, but I do not care to make them.’6 In 1969 Douglas Huebler said: ‘The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.’7 Robert Barry was not only involved with his ‘Presentation of Artists’ works, in which he was absent; he was also making works such as Inert Gas Series: Argon (1969), which were in fact invisible but were represented by photographic documentation. There was a strong drive to reach a position that would negate the art object and replace it with absolutely nothing. This was the position that Wilson arrived at after making Chalk Circle. An interview with Achille Bonito Oliva in 1972 included the following exchange:

O: Why did you leave sculpture for pure reflection? I mean
thoughts, language and speech.
W: The last sculpture I made was a white chalk circle drawn on
the floor. It was more interesting to talk about it than draw it.
O: Why?
W: Because what was interesting about it was that it was a circle
and you can speak about a circle as well.8

Many of his contemporaries had come to the conclusion that text could replace objects. Wilson went one step further and declared he would simply say his work, and in so doing he took a position diametrically opposed to an artist such as Robert Irwin, who at the same time, on the West Coast of America, was establishing a body of work based on the absolute visual impact of the art object. (Lawrence Weschler’s wonderful biography of Irwin was titled Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.9) Wilson had gone completely non-visual; more than that, in presenting works that he described as discussions he sought not just to explain but also to establish the concept of a discussion. This is where he departs from his contemporaries. Most pieces of Conceptual art are, to quote Thomas McEvilley, objects: ‘Theories, of course, are things; they are what Edmund Husserl called Noemantic objects, that is, mental objects. Every thought or concept is an object, and every object has form or aesthetic presence (what does a centaur look like? an angel?). There is, in other words, an aesthetics of thought with its own styles and its own formalism.’10

In other words, most Conceptual works can be said to have a form, which we can still experience aesthetically as a mental object. Wilson’s efforts seem to be directed at establishing something even less tangible than this. In 1968 he decided to take the word ‘time’ as a focus for his new work; this was not a definitive discussion about time as such, but simply a way of establishing the basic concept of the word – not an answer. He chose the word/concept ‘time’ because it is so difficult – too big to act as a mental object: ‘I would be at a gallery opening and someone would ask me: “so what are you doing these days?” I would reply, “I am interested in the word ‘time’.” Later, someone would ask: “But how can time be your art?” And I might have replied, ‘as it is spoken: “time”.’ Another day, someone might have asked, having heard I was using time as my art: “So what are you working with these days?” and I would reply: “time”. I am interested in the idea […] I like the work when it is spoken: “time”.’ And so the work was used over and over again.11 This piece lasted one year.

Wilson’s position seems to me to be closer to that of the Sceptics than to Socrates, who in most of Plato’s dialogues establishes a clear philosophical position. The Greek adjective skeptikos derives from the verb for ‘to inquire’ or ‘to consider’, and this is Wilson’s main focus. As Sextus Epiricus stated in his introduction to sceptical thought The Outlines of Pyrrhonism: ‘Those who investigate any subject are likely either to make a discovery, or to deny the possibility of discovery, and agree that nothing can be apprehended, or else persist in their investigations.’12

Wilson has been persisting in his investigations since 1968. The results so far are not philosophy, they are not even mental objects, just an insistence on oral communication as an art form. There are no records of the discussions, beyond simple certificates which state that a discussion took place on a certain date, at a certain time and location. Like all oral communication, the contents are dispersed so that, while everyone present may remember their part in it, the whole has gone, simply been breathed away. There is also a second certificate that simply states ‘there is a discussion’. Wilson is the most sceptical of artists, but his actions establish the most important idea of all. For when there is no discussion, then there will also no longer be any kinds of freedom. He is still talking, still persisting in his investigations and, like Chalk Circle, this is something that needs drawing over and over again, to make sure it does not disappear.