One idea upon which nearly all humans agree is that the clock is in charge.
Time is a thief, a cruel mistress, and we will contort ourselves madly to meet its demands. Yet time, as we know it, in the modern day, is actually an arbitrary idea conceived by ancient Egyptians, enabling the earliest industrialization to occur. Since then, humans have been fixated on containing and somehow controlling time.
It’s this idea that has preoccupied Jonathon Keats, a conceptual artist and self-described experimental philosopher based in San Francisco, and fueled his latest creation, a new permanent installation at the Nevada Museum of Art, Centuries of the Bristlecone.
“It seemed to me that one culprit (of modern life), arguably, is time—not time itself, but the way in which we keep and master time,” Keats said. “The clock has allowed us to master the planet, which has ultimately led to unsustainable practices and a system that is completely incapable of supporting the actions and activities we take for granted in terms of how we live our lives.”
Other living things, on the other hand, follow their own rhythms and pacing, responding to their environmental cues, oblivious to the ways in which we attempt to make nature conform to our schedules. Perhaps the greatest example of this is the Great Basin bristlecone pine tree. At the summit of Mount Washington in eastern Nevada is a grove of these trees dating back nearly 5,000 years.
“Bristlecones only exist between 9,000 and 11,000 feet of elevation, so they occur in very unusual, pretty extreme environments,” explained Colin Robertson, senior vice president of education and research for the Nevada Museum of Art. “They have evolved to thrive at that altitude and elevation, despite extreme weather, a very dry climate and inhospitable soils.”
Bristlecones—gnarled, windblown trees with crooked, pointy branches that resemble something from a Tolkien novel—have the longest life span of any living organism on Earth, according to some scientists. This makes them natural calendars and, as Robertson pointed out, the canary in the coal mine—an indicator species that, if the climate warms sufficiently, could cease to exist.
The number of rings in a tree’s trunk not only reveal a tree’s age, but also the environmental conditions: the thicker the ring, the more precipitation that year; light rings indicate early summers, whereas dark rings signify late falls.
One pendulum measures time by the second; the other marks the passage of time based on data from the trees periodically collected by University of Nevada, Reno, researchers.
Thus, in 2015, came the seed of Keats’ idea. Thanks to a co-commission by the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit that fosters long-term thinking, and the Nevada Museum of Art, Keats would create a clock would draw upon data collected from five selected bristlecones of various ages and altitudes, from Long Now’s own preserve, as extrapolated from core samples. The finished clock would become a permanent installation in the Institute for Art + Environment at the museum—which finally came to fruition this summer, a decade later.
The 11-foot-tall dual pendulum clock juxtaposes traditional Gregorian time and bristlecone time. In the center is a plate that serves as a perpetual calendar, making plain the time gap between the two. The pendulums’ movement and finely crafted mechanisms were designed, engineered and fabricated by horologists Phil Abernethy and Brittany Cox. One pendulum measures time by the second; the other marks the passage of time based on data from the trees periodically collected by University of Nevada, Reno, researchers Scotty Strachan and Adam Csank. A life-size image of a Great Basin bristlecone tree is installed behind the clock, based on a photograph by artist and photographer Ian van Coller.
Intended to serve as a 5,000-year calendar, the clock is built with long-lasting materials such as brass dials and pendulums made of invar, a nickel-iron alloy that can withstand extreme temperature changes without contraction or expansion. Specialized electrical mechanisms ensure that the clock continues working despite minor disruptions such as power outages or daylight saving time.
The clock greets guests entering the south-facing museum door to the newly opened 50,000-square-foot, $48 million expansion that houses the Charles and Stacie Mathewson Education and Research Center. Here, guests will find classroom spaces, additional commissioned artworks, and the aforementioned Institute for Art + Environment, a focused research center and library with archive collections from more than 1,500 artists and organizations working on all seven continents. Centuries of the Bristlecone is the center’s showpiece.
As I write this, bristlecone time is running slightly ahead of standard time, a gentle reminder of the increasing effects of climate change. But Keats strives not to make a statement, but to present an invitation to reimagine our sense of time, reframing it as ecological rather than industrial.
“Ultimately, if I had a dream for this, it would be that the clock becomes unnecessary,” Keats said, “that ultimately, we are no longer consulting it, because we are sensitized to the ways in which time manifests, and time is signified all around us, in everyone and everything we encounter.”
Centuries of the Bristlecone by Jonathon Keats is on view in the Institute for Art + Environment, located in the new expansion of the Nevada Museum of Art, 160 W. Liberty St., in Reno. Keats will join the institute’s William Fox for a conversation about the project as part of the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl on Saturday, Sept. 13, from 2:15 to 3:15 p.m. in the museum’s Nightingale Sky Room.
This article was produced by Double Scoop, Nevada’s source for visual arts news.