A philosophical essay on
time, phenomenology and beyond, Daniel Birnbaum's
Chronology was presented in frieze as a “compelling and sophisticated take on the common theme of Deleuzian immanence."
A philosophical essay on time, phenomenology and beyond, Daniel Birnbaum's
Chronology was presented in frieze as a “compelling and sophisticated take on the common theme of Deleuzian immanence.” Whereas many theoretical books littering the bookshops of art institutions are laudations of excess, Birnbaum's convictions presented in
Chronology cut a way through the “caesuras of non-meaning and blankness into the thick web of sense.”
The works of artists such as
Stan Douglas, Eija-Lisa Athila,
Doug Aitken,
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Tacita Dean,
Darren Almond,
Tobias Rehberger,
Pierre Huyghe and
Philippe Parreno are scrutinized as so many attempts to capture the very dialectic of time itself. As
Brian Dillon writes in frieze, “Birnbaum's notion of an art of unpredictable becoming … has its aporias too. A brief aside apropos Matthew Barney – to the effect that his art is all meaning, all of the time – is quite telling.”
This book has been translated into
French by Les presses du réel in 2007.
It also has been republished in a fully illustrated
2nd edition with a new introduction and afterword by the author, annotated artwork illustrations, a special insert by Paul Chan, and flip-book sequences from two films.
Curator, art critic and philosopher, director of the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and director of its
Portikus Gallery until 2010, currently director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Daniel Birnbaum is is also a member of the board of the Institut für Sozialforschung. A contributing editor of
Artforum, he is the author of numerous texts on art and
philosophy.
