Featured here is a show exploring the privatization of time in the 18th and 19th 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, 19th 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 16th 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 17th 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 19th 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 18th century pocket watches were favored more for their luxurious qualities than their practical: we characterize this century as using time as a trend. The 19th 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.
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