Time, object, goods
Time, object, goods.
IMAGINE AN OBJECT beyond its physical constitution as a record or storage, temporally constant to some degree, of all the processes that take place during the time it took to produce it. When Robert Morris recorded the sound of an object’s production and added that to the object itself, he limited himself to the sonic traces of the manual production of a wooden box (Box with the Sound of its own making, 1961). But of course, the time someone took to acquire the necessary skills to actually build the object is also part of the total time crystallized in the object. Therefore, an object “contains” not only the time necessary for its production, but also the time necessary for producing the producer and, more precisely, even the time necessary to produce the institutions that produced the producer, naturally referred to only as part of the total amount of time the producer needed for said object and relative to the rest of the time he spent in applying what he learned, albeit differently, somewhere else. We will limit ourselves to the time humans spend with the material – and of course the material itself also has its own historical, geological, biological and cosmic time. Nevertheless, our interest lies in the time that can be valued, and that time translates as hours of labor.