Time check in the Hall of Hours
ENTER Robert Powell's Hall of Hours at Edinburgh Printmakers and you'll find yourself in a fascinating TARDIS (Time And Distance Relative to Space) that challenges and illuminates intellect and imagination.
His work reflects on human ways of understanding and measuring time, over time. Centre-stage is a striking fifteen foot high clock, with two penduli, and a theatrical, animated automata at its base. Also there are a sound installation; hanging copper bells; and a series of individual prints.
This show is otherworldly, spooky, hypnotic, dreamy, sexy, scary, exotic, and mesmerising. The clock has the air of an exotic palace, full of eastern promise, and could easily be inhabited by Queen Scheherazade, storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights.
Medieval Books of Hours are a major inspiration. He considers how we came to have a seven-day week, and how the days' names morphed from Greek, to Roman, to German to English. Where's the logic?
He re-imagines Edinburgh as a city where time is flexible, just as we experience it anyway, in "The Human Clock", a conical octagon full of people leaning out of windows. Is frustrated Peter Finch one of them, shouting, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!", as he did in Network (1976)?
Powell's four-year-old son is a co-star in this exhibition, thanks to his early fascination with clocks and wheels, and his illuminating insight into the nature of time, dividing it into the present/recent past, and everything that has ever come before. Wonderfully simple!
Dad has delighted in revisiting and retelling classic children's bedtime stories. His imagery reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, Hans Andersen and Grimm's Fairy Tales, of Maurice Sendak and Roald Dahl, playing on children's fascination with the scary, and the dark.
Poets, mystics and meditators aren't far away either, seeking spiritual insights into the nature of time, timelessness and eternity.
Powell quotes Saint Augustine "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it, I do not know." I think, too, of T S Eliot's lines from Burnt Norton, of Alan Watts, and Eckhart Tolle. The clock hands' revolutions turn time into a space. In traditional cultures what goes around comes around. Books of Hours, cycling the seasons, complement the linear progress of time.
As rampant climate change upsets flora and fauna's natural rhythms, and twists seasons out of joint I'm reminded of Perpignan's station clock, by Salvador Dali, melting and warping. Are digital clocks putting us in a timewarp too by denying space for past or future?
Powell intimates that, even with time out of joint, there's always time for fun.
Starting with Adam and Eve, there's a lot of latent sexiness in the Bible. It's in the Books of Hours, and it's here too, but with a puckish playfulness. Love, lust, and sheer delight in nakedness are all qualities that make humans so much more than animals driven by instinct, the necessity to procreate, and continue the species. As humanity faces an existential crisis about our future on this planet "Make Love, Not War", the hippy mantra emerging from the agony of Vietnam in 1968, rings more poignant than ever.
With the Doomsday Clock inching towards midnight, are we destined to be hoist on our own petard: madly clever but lacking wisdom? Or are we spoilt children, crazed by consumerism, racism, and nationalism, hurtling cliffwards like Gadarene Swine, wanting MORE, NOW!
Was Dad's Army's dour Scot Private Frazer right? Is the hour glass half-full, or half-empty? Any advice on how to turn the clock back before Apocalypse, Armageddon or Ragnarok strike gratefully received.
edinburghprintmakers.co.uk/viewing-room/90-robert-powell-hall-of-hours/
www.robertpowellartist.co.uk
NICK JONES
