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culture

Un musée
Ville de Genève
steadily placing in their extremity tiny bits of material geneve.ch
bearing tiny bits of glue to be transported into the bottle
and painstakingly added to the work under way, slowly,
delicately, gently, but bearing mind that the glue might
start to dry before the piece is properly in place.

How long would such an endeavor take, and is carrying
off such a drawn-out exploit a way of marking off a period
of one’s life? One can only imagine, for the builder may
well have had to take breaks as long as several days in
order to maintain the mental equilibrium necessary to
length of the break, the work in progress stayed waiting, LA COURSE
concentrate and keep a steady hand. But regardless of the

a faithful companion through otherwise solitary hours,
days, weeks… DU TEMPS

3 JUIN - 2 OCTOBRE 2022, GENÈVE
Then there are elegant engraved burnished brass
cylindrical goblets, roughly a liter, made from shell
casings by soldiers in the trenches of northern France
during the First World War, surely as much an effort
to distract themselves from the horrors of the war
as to pass the time which, to say the least, hung
heavy. The idea may seem strange, even perverse,
turning war materiel into household items, but one
can also construe it as an attempt to transform what Having seen these testimonials of marking time, one
was a central tool of the horror into something both might consider a return to the lower level for another
beautiful and useful, a sort of refusal to let the war’s glance at the time pieces.
violence have the last word.
A mounting on the wall of an array of alarm clocks of
And then there is the prison cell, where time hangs all designs and shapes (many quite beautiful) obviously
heaviest. The ingenious ways prisoners have invented to intended for the bedside night table, assembled snugly in
“kill time” have become legendary and, while comparable row upon row, cheek by jowl as it were, the panel almost
to the pass-times of those on the outside, they are limited two meters across and two meters high, is quite striking
to what the prisoners have been allowed to have in their amidst fabulous antique clocks of the seventeenth
cells and have often demonstrated amazing creativity, century. Even more striking, just nearby, is a similar
doing much with little. panel of dozens and dozens of Swatches.

Embroidery there is in abundance, everything from Gathered together in a veritable confederacy of time, all
pastoral scenes to portraits, from the late seventeenth saying the same thing, they seem to mock our effort to
century to today. It is noteworthy that none of it is of a come to terms with what we have contrived to measure
quality one might call art, for it was all done by amateurs, right down to the proverbial fraction of a second. Rather,
some better at it than others, but all devoted to it as a the assemblages seems to suggest that our grasp of what
pass-time rather than as artistic creation. has progressed from being a point of general orientation
to a preoccupation and on to an obsession, however
Today, when electronic devices of all sorts are so readily many time pieces we create, is elusive and will always
available for distraction in one’s free time, it is difficult remain so.
to imagine how heavy the time must have been for those
immobilized indoors for whatever reason. Women,
tethered to the home, were especially vulnerable to musée d’art et d’histoire
vecteesy.com tedium, hence the impressive scope of the embroidery la course du temps
work, but, in a such a world, winter evenings could be
3 juin 2022 - 2 octobre 2022
long for everybody.

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