Borrowed Time
‘When a man is asleep he has around him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years…but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused and to break its ranks.’
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
In the closing chapters of Marcel Proust’s extraordinarily long novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, or, In Search Of Lost Time, the unnamed narrator, having struggled all his life (and through 4000 pages) to find his vocation, realises he is a writer and heads home to begin work on the book that is already written; we have just read it. There is also a plot, many delicious characters (2000 in fact), and of course the famous madeleine scene, but this final iteration of time as we are used to encountering it—continuous, chronological and inconsequential—being shifted and made overt is the overarching subject matter of Proust’s work, as well as the slowly accumulative experience of reading it, and something similar is available in this exhibition Borrowed Time. Jeremy Bakker has made a manifestly simple work, about time made visible, but is simultaneously offering us a way to contemplate the experience of time, and revealing something about its subversive power and our propensity to be tripped up by it.
We are very good at overlooking time, or managing to ignore it, for it is mysterious stuff; it expands and contracts and disappears. Consider the clichés we use; ‘the time flew’, ‘marking time’, ‘the time of my life’, ‘the time dragged’. Like all clichés, they ring true and we understand the sentiment or phenomenon they are describing, but they are pretending to be sufficient. They finish a sentence, or thought, rather