Intro (1): Introduction to the Exhibit

            Featured here is a show exploring the privatization of time in the 18^th and 19^th century, catalyzed and fashioned by the most infamous combination of machine and commodity: the pocket watch. This item carries not only time, but countless layers of locked up themes and features of which we intend to reveal in the exhibit: A Visual Inquiry of Having Time on Your Hands. The patronage of time gave birth to the modern world, and became the source of inspiration and investigation for nearly all modern cultural figures, from Baudelaire to Marx, from the Futurist to the Surrealists. Lewis Mumford, 19^th century historian, notes in his account “Technics and Civilization” that “the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age… […] it marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire.” The pocket watch, as a self-contained and private timekeeper, became a symbol of newfound agency for wealth and power, but especially gave rise to a new consciousness, a new man engaged intellectually and socially in his groundbreaking urban lifestyle. It is thus our intention to guide you through the cultural transition from the public to the private through the property and personalization of scientific advances, luxurious indulgences, and diurnal consciousness, to reveal the private dimensions contained within the pocket watch and examine the effects they had on men, women and their daily lifestyles. It could be that in the end, we come full circle, to achieve nothing but a waste of time or an evolved outlook on the impact of privatized time.

            There is a long history behind the pocket watch and tracing its path reveals the relationship the people had with the notion of time. Time is, first and foremost, a real scientific achievement. The actors behind the pursuit for precision of watchmaking were considered scientists, that is, proficient scholars in the behavior of mechanics and professionals with their hands. They were the first physicists of our days, and the most talented, for only the finest artists could work in the minute components of the watch. The earliest portable timekeepers were commissioned by royalty in the 16^th century, and came in all sorts of designs including wristwatches and ring watch, watches at the tip of cane, and more. The introduction of the waistcoat by Charles II of England in late 17^th century has prompted men to wear watches as a pendant to fit them in their pockets! From its very roots, the pocket watch is simultaneously a machine and a luxury.

            The privatization of time is a notion to be defined and clarified. Literature exploring the notion of privacy only began in the second half of the 19^th century; people did not find the need or inclination to philosophically explore this notion beforehand. Privacy was thus either a natural obvious event or simply more public than we understand “privacy” today, and in this way have a different conception as to what “private” really means. We take privatization in this exhibition to mean the personalization and individual agency of notions or objects, in this case, of time and the pocket watch.

The rise of the Industrial Revolution was a huge factor on the concept of time and consequently on privacy. The 18^th century pocket watches were favored more for their luxurious qualities than their practical: we characterize this century as using time as a trend. The 19^th century, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution and notably with the rise of railroad transport, watches (without ignoring its fashionable character) increased dramatically in practicality and, eventually, necessity. Travelling was a major factor in the increasing reliance on time, and concurrently on pocket watches, for those who travelled certainly did not carry their grandfather clocks along with them… In any case, the men and women with pocket watches owned time as their own.

The exhibition does not concentrate on the various kinds of pocket watches (for there are many), nor on the various inventions occurring during the rise of pocket watch consumption. Instead, we chose to look at the private, so individual, relationship (notably masculine relationship) with time and the timepiece itself.

Our investigation is thus conceptual. Each visual element in this exhibition serves to support our reasoning. The public is asked to participate with our arguments, to be critical observers of the bridge that we build in the course of each section between the privatization of time and the pocket watch. The sections are stages, or units, towards uncovering the context and the procedure that make time a private commodity: the viewers begin with the question of time as a privatized concept and end with a re-questioning of time as privatized commodity; we begin with the invention of the pocket watch and end with the mass production of the watches and time in general. At the end of the exhibition, the viewers will have reached the end of the watch dial, such that they would have advanced across the circular exhibition with an element of progress, of experience and thus of time. We intend to have time conceptually and consciously present, at all times. The exhibition encourages the viewers to participate in contemplating the notion of their own time and space, and how each of their notions is in itself, a privatization.

            It is with this that we go full circle: we have stepped a little further within and without time to understand more in depth the underlying revolution the pocket watch had triggered.

Intro (2): Exhibition Space

 Fig. 1, Top View

Fig. 2, View from entrance of exhibition

Fig. 3, View of section space, podiums supporting pocket watches, texts accompanied on side panel

Here is the visual layout for the space of my exhibition.

The top view (Fig. 1) depicts an aerial view of the space. The exhibit will be presented in a circular room that will be separated by walls (all that is shaded) in the center and outer portion of the space. The central wall echos the shape of an escapement, the mechanical piece that helped revolutionize the pocket watch in 1675. It is conveniently effective in separating each chapter of the exhibition. Each section is indicated by the hour units that will be incorporated on the floor. They will in shaded or transparent black Roman numerals. Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer walks left (clockwise) towards the first section, once at the end there will be a push door to lead you out. This door also echos the exit pallet which, in the mechanisms of a watch, would shift the escapement over and thus turn the minute hand.

Figure 2 illustrates the entrance to the exhibit to understand how the escapement walls separate each section as subtle but useful guidance for each separate theme ahead. Occasional texts of transition will be located on the wall leading into the next section that is, if a text of transition was placed between section I and II we would see it on the second wall in the back.

Figure 3 shows how we will be featuring the art and text for each section. Pocket watches or watch papers will be placed onto a podium; portraits and other artworks will be placed on the slightly rounded wall. The text describing the theme will be on a large panel on the side, to draw the viewers' eyes. Captions for each object will be printed on a card placed on the podium or under the artwork.

I Machinery & Historical Background

Fig. 1 Brevet d’invention d’Abraham-Louis Breguet,Mécanisme d’horlogerie nommé échappement à force constante - Papier. 0,365 x 0,555 x 0,01 cm, 1798. Paris, Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle, inv. 1BA146 © Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle

Fig. 2 Swiss 14K gold minute repeater moonphase calendar chronograph circa 1890. 

The mechanism of a watch requires three elements: 

          1- a source of energy: from the earliest designs onwards, a timekeeping mechanism relies on the fundamental pull of gravity. For the clock the was a pendulum allowed a continuous and periodic supply of energy. For the watch, a winded spring stored energy in the tension of the spring which provided energy for a couple of months. 

          2- a brake and release mechanism: this was usually mediated by a cog, allowing the distribution of energy to be translated into successions of small motions as repeated series of starts and stops

          3- a regulating device: often called an escapement, this piece an integral part in equalizing the intervals of the start and stop motion, and was the central focus of scientific research for precision in the 18th and 19th centuries

The illustration Fig. 1 features an instructive illustration of a recently improved version of escapement, that of a constant energy escapement. One can see the metal rods pressed against the teeth of the central cog: the latter is the regulating device while the former is the brake and release mechanism. The metal rod accumulates a certain potential of energy to the point where it pushes against the tooth until it's flicked and the cog shifts over to the next tooth. 

These three crucial elements of the portable timekeeper was formally invented in the Middle Ages. The pieces merely had a minute hand to tell time with a 30 plus or minus accurate time, if the watch worked well. 


Introduced in 1675, the balance spring transformed the character of the watch, allowing a more accurate reading of time, fluctuating only by seconds. The two hands that we are familiar with today were brought to surface by 1680, as well as many other systems such as sun-and-moon dials, “wandering-hour” and calendars watches. This trend continued throughout the centuries, as illustrated in Fig. 2. The watch here above is a circa 1890 multifunctional pocket watch, including a chronometer, minute repeater, a moonphase calendar, and indicates the days of the week, date and month.

Horology by the end of the 17th century was proved indispensable for many fields, including astronomy, navy, even the military, where they used watches to calculate the rate of a flying cannon-ball…  

Royalty was the first to commoditize watches. The first kinds are said to be des tours de force, that is, to “impress and impose, not to tell time.” This technology, in its premature complexity, attracted royalty for its ornamental and conceptual aspects more than its practical function. Elizabeth I had a watch fitted into a ring with a tiny alarm that announced the hours by scratching her finger, reminding the queen her monarchic privilege of having time on her hands, literally. 

II The British Commodity & Its Competitors

        
Fig 3. Fine early English 2 hand verge and fusee silver pair case antique pocket watch with personalized dial by Colston, London circa 1700.

Fig. 4 Fine and scarce Dent 18K gold minute repeater antique pocket watch circa 1867.

In late 17^th century Britain, a housemaid gives an account of her master’s pocket watch- the silent thing in a small case is described to be an instrument of the Devil and she views her master as a bearer of black magic. People were undoubtedly familiar with church bells and house clocks, but this little box was, in its silence, quite alarming. The public, so the plebeians inasmuch as aristocrats, were given the time via a number of daily spaces including the night watchman's cry of the hour, or clocks hanging from beds or chimneys, but the main regulators of society where above all the striking of a bell from a church or a turret clock in a town square. 


At the turn of the 18^th century and while the urban scene began to grow, the British bourgeois society developed interest in the time-keeping qualities of their watches rather than the elegance of their presentation. In fifty years, the new techniques of accuracy and reliability granted British watches a reputation that “no other watch was thought to be worth having!” 


Featured in this section is an early British watch (Fig. 3) at its 18th century peak. Having two hands, made in silver and personalized with the owners name on the dial, this watch was of the highest luxury items at the time, even within watch making world. It most likely functioned with the verge escapement, one of the earlier forms of escapement, which caused the timepiece to be thicker. 


The invention of the British Marine chronometer in 1714, a timekeeping mechanism that allowed navigators to translate accurate time into space while resisting the rocking of a boat, established that chronometric mechanisms in general were a symbol of national pride and identity in the British society. From this point onwards, the pursuit for finer time measurement evolved with intensifying speed, for international competition was exponentially felt. By early 19^th century watches circulated throughout countries, there were even specialized watches to regulate soldiers’ march, a watch that told time by giving a little tap, and incorporated alarms and chronometers. It is safe to say that at this point, pocket watches were present throughout the bourgeois society.


In 1860, the first cheap and reliable watch, selling for 20 francs ($150-200), was created by a Swiss inventor G.F. Roskopf. By this time the Swiss had taken the lead on watchmaking, and since then have been the masters of watchmaking expertise. The end of 19^th century, the clock and watch industry was larger than firearm diffusion, men from every social class have seen or owned one, and were, furthermore, a necessity. Trickling down to the working class, a pocket watch (most often stolen) was more valuable than their most expensive waistcoat, cloak or gown and were their most reliable assets, most precious items. 


The highly personalized English watch (Fig. 4) is noted to chime the exact hour by using different tones for each minute, quarter hour and hours. Dent, a renowned British firm and designer of this piece, was the Queen's watchmaker, provided watches for Charles Darwin and created the Big Ben.

II-III A Quarter of Private Time

Watches are judged according to two ideals: the first is the scientific quality in the pursuit for further miniaturization, the smaller/thinner the watch is, more complex and sophisticated. The second is the watch’s decoration: the material, the design and the presence of choice in the ornamentation are all taken into account in judging the owner’s affluence. The next section addresses the latter: decorations and ornateness as primary sources for commodification.

III Time as Trend

Fig. 5, Williamson. A silver and paste-set verge watch made for the Chinese market, circa 1780. Photo Sotheby's 

Fig. 6, Fine English 18K gold lever and fusee antique pocket watch with compensation curb and beautiful multicolor gold dial by Robert Roskell, Liverpool, circa 1810.

Fig. 7, Fine and beautiful 18K gold, pearl and enamel ladies antique pendant watch by Patek Philippe retailed by Tiffany & Co., circa 1889.

Fig. 8, Interesting skeleton verge movement circa 1760 with a painted biblical enamel panel circa 1600 in a purpose made gilt case.

Fig. 9, Fine English 18K gold, enamel and diamond verge and fusee midsize antique watch with matching key and seal in fitted box circa 1780. 

Fig. 10, Fine continental 18K gold and painted enamel verge and fusee antique pocket watch circa 1790. 

Fig. 11, Fine, rare and beautiful 18K gold, enamel and diamond antique verge and fusee continental skull form renaissance style memento mori watch by Romilli circa 1810.

Decorations and ornateness were primarily located on the outer case where it stood available for display. There was no practical purpose to the decorations, instead rendered the watch thicker and harder to wind, but allowed a concrete claim for proprietorship and a lovely opportunity to flaunt one’s wealth. Its embellishments included elaborate engravings of designs or initials, lavish jewel arrangements illustrated by Fig. 5, scenes of painted or colored flowers-buds, crosses, birds, dogs, bucolic scenes, and more… Pocket watches made out of silver or gold were especially sought after, Fig. 6. shows an excessive placement of different colored metals that was most likely very impressive. 

Withdrawing the watch was exposing the level of wealth and taste in luxury, conspicuously invested in the aesthetic appearance of the timepiece. It was, in this sense, a personalized impression of the owner’s social status. 

Social status was an important part of the watch, but other forms of imagery lean towards a more private intention. Fig. 8-10 illustrate the various social functions a pocket watch may adopt: Fig. 8 features  a religious scene with an angel and Joseph giving cherries to Jesus, reminding the holder their social duty in daily Christian charity, A more romantic aspect is Fig. 9, where the hair of a beloved is shown fastened inside at the center, evoking the owner's loyalty for their loved one. A delicately painted bucolic scene in Fig. 10 depicts a fisherman at labor, inciting the sense of arcadia as a reminder of our role as laborers nature bestows us. Certain outer cases induce the owner to contemplate on social duties and/or virtues, such as the following watches.

A curious and popular choice of decoration, notably in the earlier periods of pocket watches, took the form of a momento mori, (skull or cross) such as in Fig. 11. The ticking clock is meant to summon the owner; a reminder that every minute they view is a precious moment closer to their final reckoning, which people at the time seem to take a fondness for. The timepiece, in its innovative form, inquired the owner to reflect on his or her day-to-day existence and virtues, channeling to more cherished depths of contemplation. The item was thus simultaneously a public proclamation for the owner’s prosperity and/or piety and a reflection of private taste.

In each of these varied-styled cases,  the owners favored the watch's appearances over its functionality.

IV Mania Maintenance

Fig. 12, Cahier d’atelier de la main d’Abraham-Louis Breguet - Collection Montres Breguet S.A. © Montres Breguet S.A.

The increasing demand for decoration follows a growing specialization of function in the art of making a watch. Each item, by the 19^th century, represented the production of a team of craftsmen ranging from the gold or silversmith, jewelers, enamellers, chasers, engravers, miniatures for the case and dial, braziers, gilders, and many more. Above all, it required meticulous attention in the principle and execution of the horologist, reserved to only a few of the finest artists like Antoine-Louis Breguet (1775-1823) whose sketch book is featured in this exhibition (Fig. 12). The particular miniaturization of the pocket watch, and the pursuit for miniaturization, demanded a state-of-the-art horological technique. It was viewed as a mechanical feat to work in the small, such that long practice fashions an average working watch and genius makes a piece that functioned for about three years without restoration.

The maintenance of watches is costly, crucial, and above all, frequent. A German 18^th century saying exclaims, “If you want to make trouble for yourself, take a wife, buy a watch, or hit a cleric!” The average watch needs cleaning every year (to add more oil to avoid friction, to wound the spring…) and is sensitive to extreme temperatures and abrupt movements. The mechanical miniaturization and vulnerability of this revolutionary instrument renders it more valued and valuable. 

One of Breguet's most famous inventions was the very first automatic watch (Fig. 13). The case was entirely see-through to showcase the mechanical intricate and triumphant success. 

Fig. 13, Breguet n° B1160 - Montre perpétuelle à répétition des minutes Réplique de la montre Breguet n° 160 dite « Marie-Antoinette » exécutée par Montres Breguet S.A.

V Conceptual Luxury

Fig. 14, A young couple poses for their portrait in the cabinet card photographed by J. F. Rank of Van Wert, Ohio, 1874. 

Pocket watches were never merely jewelry for men. Its conspicuous consumption is stemmed precisely from its combination of machinery and ornament, that is, in the ability to claim chronometry. The pocket watch not only allows the man to carry a symbol of industrial evolution and contemporary scientific successes, but provides the capacity to suggest the owner possessed time and timekeeper. 

Private property of time entails private property of the chronological arrangement of his or her daily actions, such that the holder gains temporal independence from their surroundings. It kindles an indulging sense of self-acknowledgment, self-recognition. The watch becomes a reliable resource of the quantitative inquiry of the self’s motion through space and time, and with this a new notion of independent thinking is born. The watch as a commoditized portable property hence bestows not only material luxury, but conceptual luxury. In a study of the diary of a man named Pepys living in the 18^th century, there is a passage that describes his impressions of his newly obtained pocket watch, “Pepys takes pleasure in what the watch reveals to him about the secret rhythms of his motion.” Indeed, there is a dimension of intimacy in the pocket watch that falls into this conceptual privatization of time. 
Featured here (Fig. 14) is a portrait of a young couple, the man is sitting with a diploma (he most likely recently received) and his watch explicitly displayed as a means to reflect his status as a man of virtue (from the pocket watch, referring to punctuality) and ambitious future.

VI Secrets of Time

Fig. 15a. Example with four-cased watch. 

Fig. 15b. The interior of the watch with four cases.
Fine Edward Prior English silver and tortoise shell giant quadruple cased verge and fusee antique pocket watch for the Turkish market circa 1860. 

Fig. 16a - Demo for watchpaper

Fig. 16b - embroidered watch paper

The watches featured in this section are one of many with four (Fig. 15a) or three cases. The common feature of owning a watch with several cases purports a kind of self-containment, one that takes layers upon layers, like a Russian Doll, to reach the intimate intricacies and essence of time, such that, "the pair case made of the pocket watch a sequence of layered secrets, that began with the pocket itself."
Indeed, the watch holder goes through a passing of adornments from the embellished outer case to the more simple sheen of the inner, and from there to the revealing and marvelous intricacies of the visible wheels, shafts and springs of the movement itself. (Fig. 17) The personification of the watch as a chamber of secrets reflects its function of proprietorship. 

It functioned also as a private treasure, where personalized watch papers were inserted on the back such as Fig. 16a. demonstrates. Their were often used for marketing the watchmakers' firm (Fig. 18), but also used to harbor intimate messages or imagery such as this romantic message in Fig. 16b. 

VII Masculine Subordination

ab

 c

Fig 17a is view of the dial. Hidden under the flap in shown by Fig. 17b is Fig. 17c. Good and scarce Swiss 14K red gold hunting case quarter repeater antique pocket watch with hidden enamel erotic scene circa 1900.

Returning to our loyal figure Pepys goes on to describe how he desires to see, essentially live vicariously through, the horological expert while the latter fixes his watch, Pepys describes how he is “being taught what I never knew before; and it is a thing very well worth my having seen, and am pleased and satisfied with it.” This notion of fascination of the technical advances, has been prevalent from the start of watch making. The watches featured in the exhibition reveal the mechanics of the watch work. Pepys, along with many other watch owners, subconsciously, feels subordinate or inferior to the technical and intricate details of the science, the latter becomes a kind of fantasy, such that Pepys language becomes childish “But Lord, to see how much of my old folly and childishness hangs upon me still, that I cannot forbear carrying my watch in my hand in the coach all this afternoon, and seeing what a-clock it is 100 times. And am apt to think with myself: how could I be so long without one,” or even erotic: His indulgences in the pleasure that his watch reveals: “what I never knew before,” followed by the watch’s compound enclosures, all invite serial disclosures, beginning in ‘desire’ and ending in ‘mightily please and satisfied.’”

It is not a coincidence that the pocket watch was a chamber of hidden erotic scenes. There are a surprising number of watches that reveal under an ulterior flap, painted pornographic scenes such as Fig. 17. The presence of the man behind the fern is interesting, for it prompts the man to select which one to identify with: the one who is doing the act or the one watching afar, not engaged in the "sinful" or undignified act but enjoying vicariously in secret, just like the holder. Furthermore, the woman is looking at the owner of the pocketwatch, interacting with him, as though the owner has the benefit of not being part of the undignified act but still having the woman's attention (unlike the man in the back). This characteristic very much emphasizes the level of privatization in the pocket watch, particularly gendered privatization. It is interesting to see that pocket watches are evidence that privacy and intellectual agency is socially acceptable primarily for men. 

VIII Masculine Superiority

Fig. 18. Fine Patek Philippe 18K gold antique pocket watch circa 1878    

Fig. 19. Johnathan Woollett,Watch & Clock Maker, Maidstone

While Section VII reveals that the scientific complexity of a pocket watch places the holder in a subordinate position, it can also nearly simultaneously advantage intellectual superiority. Pepys goes on to describe how he uses his watch to calculate the time it takes him to walk from his home to work: “[I] do find myself to come within two minutes constantly to the same place at the end of each quarter of an hour.” He thus has the impression that, with his private ownership of time, he is capable to calculate, and to, in turn, build his own private intricacies of his daily life. He has thus the satisfaction of personal intellectual agency to translate his diurnal life into trivial technical language that endows the power to foresee and to understand the daily. Looking into the last disclosure is conspicuously feeding into the pride of a secret (hence private) intellectual proprietorship.


Past the series of personalized or privatized layers lead to the visible mechanics of the watch. It is a tradition anchored from the very first watches of the 17th century onwards that the skeleton be revealable and observable. (Fig. 18) Many watches embrace the skeleton feature and make sometimes have it participate with the decorations by including see through watches, to constantly remind the holder that he owns the scientific triumph. It is as though the revealed mechanism at the core is the holder's deepest secret, such that every holder desires to be the sole owner of the scientific wonder.  Moreover, punctuality at the time was considered a virtue in men, a sign of good character and good manners. As a virtue, punctuality was generally sought after by the male public, for everyone desired to be virtuous. It is this pursuit to be the timekeeper, the bearer of masculine virtue and secrets which is a notion that is directly depicted or referred to in the watch paper of Fig. 19. The man has a classical body and long beard and hair, alluding to wisdom: those who own a watch are indirectly associated to a man of virtue and wisdom. This leads our exhibition towards the next section which is the proprietorship of the pocket watch as particularly gender based. 

IX Feminale Frenzy

Fig.20 Fine, rare and beautiful Patek Philippe 18K gold and enamel repousse pair case ladies antique pendant watch circa 1893.

Women watches come in smaller and thinner models than those of men's. The decorations range from sober bucolic or romantic scenes, such as the one featured here where the young man is teaching the young woman to play an instrument, day-dreaming, reclined, outer case is a cherub and a woman interacting - embodying the ideal romantically driven passively dreaming virtuous woman. It is no coincidence that the style of this watch is of 100-200 years earlier, as if women were slowly appropriating men’s luxuries, but that their secret were simply this romantic bagatelle. According to sources, the general impression with pocket watches and women was that no women were particularly interested in the time. It is written that women watches were fitted with inferior mechanical parts and movements. Often found in the form of a brooch or worn as a choker collar around the neck, it is through the woman that we can confirm that the watch is also explicitly an announcement of private property to claim their position as timekeeper to others. 
The watch, in this sense is a private privilege intentionally arranged to be public.We see here in this fashion illustration that the woman with a watch is at the center, all heads are directed towards her, the one at her right’s hand seems to nearly point out the watch. The attention is discretely on the watch, meanwhile the central woman, holding her friend on the right, with a light grin, her arm is at a discrete level, seems to be absorbed, appearing to be privately anticipating what is in the near future perhaps looking forward to being with the provider of her timepiece who is most likely a man. 

X A Western Daily

Fig. 21 Perrin Cuppy Huffman, Huffman and Barnard Studio, Frankville, Iowa, 1882. 

The privatization of time for both men and women meant a restructuring of the daily life. The watch introduced the possibility of arranging one’s life a way that was once reserved to regulating entire communities. The pocket watch meant the private property of aesthetic taste, of scientific feats, of intellectual agency, and finally of the diurnal. It was a luxury both in material and concept as it conspicuously announces the time and timekeeper. It is by nature a salient symbol of Western civilization. In 1711, Alexander Pope writes in his account An Essay On Criticism, “Tis with our judgments as our watches, none/Go just alike, yet each believes his own:” such individual privilege will inevitably incite excessive horological confidence and puffery, such that standard dictionary of commerce of the mid-18^th century writes “One should put little credence in the common notion most people have of the accuracy of their watches." It is key that literature, so early on, has noted some sort of alertness towards the private control of a chronological spectrum, and even more interesting to view the evolution of our relationship with time via writers. 

Marx puts it as such: “Through the subordination of man to the machine the situation arises in which […] time is everything, man is nothing, he is at the most the incarnation of time. […] Time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things,’” A mal-du-siècle arises in the romantic period, as a response to this restructuring of the diurnal: the virtuous qualities of owning time is put into question, are re-examined and re-defined.

XI What to Say about Today

Soft Watch At Moment of First Explosion, Salvador Dali, 1954 -  Ink on paper, 14 x 19.1 cm - Private Collection.

Entering the 20th century, with the introduction to Einstein's theory of relativity and Freud's subconscious theory, many questions arise regarding the notion of time. Suddenly cultural movements such as the Futurists are interested in stretching time, the time machine, we have artists such as Salvator Dali, who inspire themselves with the idea of memory and time, time and space, etc. It becomes a notion no one is really sure about.
What time means to you does not mean the same to the person next to you. In a sense, the watches from the beginning of the 18th, late 17th century generally fluctuating by 30 minutes, were more honest and more revealing than the time we have today: today every person owns a form of private time, "private" in the sense that it is individually theirs. Technological items such as cell phones, computers, television, alarm clocks will provide satellite and universal time. The precision of time has today become so universal and so accessible that we no longer can speak of a privatization of time in terms of proprietorship. We can, however, still speak of the privatization of time in terms of personal agency, that is, our conception of time and how this plays in our diurnal consciousness.
We will leave you to the following questions: Does its universal accessibility engender a reversal of our personal agency of time?
Should there be a new conception of time that measures our individual perception of the universal time, and if so, how do we privatize this?
We hope you enjoyed our exhibit and to see you again.

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