Christiaan Postma’s Clock uses more than 150 moving hands to spell out the hours of the day. It was launched in at Spazio Rosana Orlandi in Milan, and was one of the most memorable objects of the fair. Still photos don’t do it justice – you have to watch the animation to see the numbers emerge from chaos, and then dissolve again as the hour passes.
“The idea was to communicate ‘time’ in another way, to make the viewer think what time is or could be,” says Postma, who is Dutch, but based in Stockholm, Sweden. The result is somewhat cryptic at first glance, but once the idea becomes obvious, it’s hugely charming. It’s a sophisticated concept, with strands of childish delight and adult guile. It undermines the notion of time as a series of increments, a succession of seconds and minutes, and nods towards a more innocent or pre-modern sense of time as a continuum – a shadow moving across a sundial rather than a ticking stopwatch.
But doesn’t that make it impossible to tell the time accurately? “No, that’s not true,” Postma protests. “I think you learn to read the time quite well. The completeness of the word means the completeness of the hour. I’m quite good at reading it now, to within five or ten minutes. The idea is also that using the object makes you change your use of time.”
Postma says that he has been bombarded with offers from high-end galleries since Milan, but he isn’t certain if he would rather present it as a limited-edition object or put it into mass production. “If I can find a producer I can reach more people,” he says. “That was the reason I went towards products, not art. I like to reach people.”
