Some artists, enthralled with the subconscious impulse or forever in pursuit of the now, make a point of working quickly. The oft-cited wish of Alex Katz, 98, for instance, is to paint faster than he can think, and he frequently starts and finishes a painting within the course of a day. Picasso famously completed 1955’s “Visage: Head of a Faun” in five minutes. The approach feels in step with the pace of the world, calling to mind a line from Shakespeare’s “King John” (1623): “The spirit of the time shall teach me speed.”
But artists must also cultivate endurance. They need it to return to their studios day after day, usually without the praise of the public or the promise of financial reward, and they need to believe in their work’s power to last — to outlive them. There are even those who treat time as its own medium, one they use in abundance, hence the term “endurance art.” After Depression-era contests like dance marathons or pole sitting, endurance became a popular source of inspiration for performance artists who pushed their bodies to grueling extremes, as Chris Burden and Marina Abramović did in the 1970s. The subject has grown rarer as the art world has gotten more commercial, but there are still people who immerse themselves in projects that take years and sometimes decades to complete, assuming they have any end date at all. Where more distractible or easily discouraged types might move on — how many pandemic-born sourdough bakers are still among us? — they remain committed to their idea. This way of working seems particularly relevant at a time when we’re hardly able to process one seismic shift before the next one is upon us.
For a glimpse of the long view, T spoke to artists who measure time by a different metric. Since the early 1980s, Nancy Floyd has taken thousands of daily pictures of herself. Terence Koh, having come to regard his existence as one long exhibition (50 years and counting) about the quest for a higher level of consciousness, treats what he wears and how he crosses a Los Angeles street as part of his work. Guerrilla Girls, a group of anonymous activists, have been fighting against inequality in museums and galleries for over 40 years. And Tehching Hsieh, best known for his yearlong performances, like the one in which he refused to go indoors for 12 months, hasn’t made new work since 1999, but even his retirement feels central to his practice. Whether or not he’s making art, he says, he’s “passing time.”
Nancy Floyd, photographer, 68
In 1982, Nancy Floyd was able to buy a second camera with the money she’d made waitressing at the Capitol Oyster Bar in Austin, Texas. Not wanting her old Pentax SP1000 to sit idle, she mounted it on a tripod and decided she’d photograph herself once a day for 20 years. “I was 25 and thought that by 45 I’d be ancient, so why go past it?” she says with a laugh. She was wrong about that — “Weathering Time” is ongoing — but right in thinking that “it was an accumulation that would make [the project] work.” Sometimes, as in a typical family photo album, Floyd appears in the frame with other people, as well as pets. Often, though, she stands alone and proplike. She compares these images to the grids of photographs of industrial architecture by the 20th-century German artist couple Bernd and Hilla Becher, a yearslong project that compels the viewer to look for minute differences from one similar-seeming structure to the next.
When Floyd, who now lives in Bend, Ore., scanned the negatives from “Weathering Time” in 2002, she realized the images were more than a record of her life and aging body, as she’d intended them to be: They also gestured to changes in the wider world. Here’s Floyd in her jogging gear (1982), having taken up running when it became popular in the early ’80s; here she is in front of a “Keep Abortion Legal” sign (1988); next to a TV with Bill Clinton on the screen (1998); wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt (2016).
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