The Artist's Clock

In a world increasingly governed by the ticking of clocks and the swiping of screens, Iona Lowe's thought-provoking essay invites readers to reflect on how our relationship with time has become both fragmented and commodified. Blending cultural history, artistic critique, and personal insight, Lowe traces the evolution of time from an intuitive, internal rhythm to a rigid system that dictates our daily lives. Through references to surrealist art, Virginia Woolf, and modern digital habits, the piece challenges us to question not just how we spend our time—but who truly owns it.

The clock is an omnipotent force, and it is no revelation that our obsession with it has become unhealthy.

"I am just too busy" is slowly and surely becoming the anthem of the 21st century. Yet, when societal habits are analysed, it highlights that, on average, people spend around four (sometimes eight) hours each day online scrolling through everything from emails, Google searches, and perhaps the largest black hole: social media.

Our online habits show a few things. Firstly, we have no self-control, and it is worryingly easy for large tech companies to figure out how to exploit our dopamine-seeking weakness. Secondly, there is clearly enough time; the issue lies in society's inability to spend it well. While the invention of social media caused a certain amount of creative prosperity, creatives were given the opportunity to remove their reliance on external sources to fuel their success, creating their own businesses through posting pictures, videos, and content online.

However, it has also created a huge void in the deeper, creative fabric of society. Short-form content has pushed artists to tailor their works to dwindling attention spans, favouring aesthetically pleasing "trend-art" rather than making pieces they actually want to create.

But where exactly did our connection to the clock go so wrong? When did we become so controlled by the clock faces which line our walls and wrists, and sit in the corner of our phone screens?

To understand our modern connection to the clock, and our seeming loss of time, it is first important to turn the dial back to before the invention of what many call a "master clock," invented in the 1800s to keep office workers bound to a tight schedule. This marked the beginning of time becoming commercialized because it involved synchronizing the world and standardizing time.

Artists such as Salvador Dalí questioned this confining and repressive master clock. Capturing the temporality of time through his work Persistence of Memory, Dalí drapes his "melting clock" over several different objects in his painting, symbolizing just how fleeting—and pointless—the surrealism movement viewed time. Instead, surrealists were interested in the dream world where time could not constrain us.

Prior to this "master clock," time was measured in strange ways depending on cultural differences. For example, the Greeks used a water clock, which relied on the steady flow of water, and the change in position of the water floats beneath. Other cultures used sundials, relying on the rising and setting of the sun.

Time was a personalized luxury performed in the background of society’s daily activities. Rather than being motivated by the hour, people were motivated by their instincts. Knowing the time of day was a rough luxury, not a specified second. That was, until the world was split into GMT, EST, CST, and other zones, and different countries became separated by hours. The activities we are expected to fill these hours with became conventionalized: eight hours each day should be for work, the rest for pleasure.

As a result, society began to lose its grip on intuition. Workdays became standardized. Time began to define when we could eat, sleep, socialize, and relax. In the modern era, we are also witnessing the breakdown of the boundary between work and home as "WFH-ing" has become the new normal. People are selling themselves in the pursuit of "productivity," forgetting that time is also personal, not just to be optimized for others’ gain.

"In fact, there is a strong incentive to fill these units of time with as much work as possible. As opposed to the duration of life or even the processes of the human body, one hour is meant to be indistinguishable from another."— Jenny Odell

How is all of this affecting artists? Well, any artistic medium is composed of two things: the process and the final product. Both sit at opposite ends of the spectrum—one is meant to be internal (the process), the other external (the final product). There is a clear separation. Yet, as Odell points out, the boundaries between work, play, solitude, and luxury are all blending into one. When I asked a friend, who is also an artist, about this online pressure, I received an interesting answer:

"I enjoy seeing the possessions of other artists, and I think it helps my own work, but I hate having to post all the time."

It is here the issue lies: in the constant pressure to post every part of the artistic practice online, rather than allowing parts of the process to remain free from external pressure. This skews the balance between work, play, and pleasure. The constant pressure to please an audience while also making money to cover bills, studio rent, and living costs becomes a hindrance on what the actual creative goal might be—especially as big metropolitan cities continue to become more and more expensive places to live, and we also see a decline in artist funding. This leaves artists at risk of being unable to break free from creating simply for other people’s desires, and what will make money, rather than what they might want to make.

Around 43% of Brits have a side hustle, which may not seem like an issue, but it only contributes to our dwindling sense of time. What was once a hobby has been turned into an extra way to earn cash, and only heightens the pressure to "make every second count." In the long run, this risks harming the creative practice because it places pressure on a process that does not always thrive when forced. Online voices, both supportive and judgmental, invade the studio space, poking at pieces of work before they are finished and turning them into something the artist might not have wanted.

"A clock was meant to be an hour, no matter where or what the season, just as a man-hour would be expected to be an hour, no matter who the man."— Jenny Odell

One might argue we have forgotten what time is really for. Burdened with the constant need to commercialize our private moments and document every second, there is a risk of turning time into a burden, rather than something to live. Life becomes oriented to tick down towards our next paycheck rather than our next experience.

One of the most profound thinkers and writers on the subject of time was Virginia Woolf. All of her novels explore what the personal clock means for the individual, rather than what the social construct of time represents.

In her short story Mark on the Wall, Woolf clearly demonstrates to the reader that time is nurtured by the individual who reads it.

The story follows the thoughts of a woman daydreaming. The thoughts that come in and out are entirely representative of the randomness of one’s mind, and it is only disrupted by the physical presence of her husband.

Each reader spends a different amount of time reading the text, according to their own personal pace and their own personal clock. We are reminded that time has an element of individuality. It is not just the objective, wall-hanging, tick-ticking clock that hangs in front of or rests on the wrist below us. Just like the way in which we see colours, we are never going to understand how someone else feels the passing of time.

For Woolf, time is not the mechanical tick of the clock. Time is something that exists inside everyone: a personal entity that separates us from the convention of society and expectation. The danger in the modern world stems from the value of our personal clock being overridden by corporations placing value on our time, declaring an hour of our labour only worth £12.

Woolf points out how unbalanced our modern society is. Time has become something we fear will run out, and we spend most of it answering to someone else’s definition of a clock, confining ourselves to the worth employer’s place on our time, confined by the belief that every second of the day must be commercialized, posted, and perfect.

Is it time we take a step back and remember the clock was not always around to tell us how to live our lives, and remember to stop constantly chasing it and start living it instead?

"I am at the old game of catching time between my fingers, as it is running, forever running away."— Sylvia Plath

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Iona is a freelance journalist, based in London. Her pieces have been featured in magazines, newspapers and online for a number of different publications. Her work spans across several different topics, mainly investigating the link between conflict and culture. 

https://thesidenote.substack.com/