Daniel Birnbaum: Chronology (Chinese Version)

A philosophical essay on time, phenomenology and beyond, Daniel Birnbaum’s Chronology was reviewed in frieze as a “compelling and sophisticated take on the common theme of Deleuzian immanence.” Whereas many theoretical books littering the bookshops of art institutions are laudations of excess, Birnbaum’s convictions presented in Chronology cut a way through the “caesuras of non-meaning and blankness into the thick web of sense.” The works of artists such as Stan Douglas, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Tacita Dean, Darren Almond, Tobias Rehberger, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno and Paul Chan are scrutinized as so many attempts to capture the very dialectic of time itself. The book can be seen as “an exploration of the crystallization of time that uses phenomenology as a pretext for saying things about artworks that create their own theories”.

The Chinese version is its first edition of Chinese translation, which includes special contributions from Pak Sheung Chuen and Yang Fudong.

Image and Text: the shop, ©Authors, the shop, 2019