LITMIR.BIZ

      Outside this agricultural and seasonal room in north-west London was a second Ruth Ewan re-creation, hung high on the wall: a clock with only 10 hours. This was based on another Revolutionary and doomed French experiment in the reformatting of time – the decimalisation of the dial, a complete refiguring of the day.

      Four years earlier, Ewan had tried to confound a whole town with her wrong clocks. The Folkestone Triennial of 2011, a show utterly reliant on time passing regularly and predictably, featured 10 of her 10-hour clocks positioned strategically throughout the town, including one above Debenhams, one above the town hall, one in an antiquarian bookshop and one in a local taxi.

      For a few minutes, the 10-hour clock seemed to make sense, or at least as much sense as the 12-hour one. The day was reduced to 10 hours, while each hour was divided into 100 minutes, and each minute split into 100 seconds. (One revolutionary hour was thus 2 regular hours and 24 standard minutes, while 1 revolutionary minute was 1 standard minute and 26.4 standard seconds.) The midnight hour 10 was at the top, the noon hour 5 at the bottom, and, if you were used to the regular 12-hour face, 8 minutes to 4 on the Revolutionary one was in fact anyone’s guess. The French – or at least those French citizens to whom precise time was important in the 1790s and could afford a new timepiece – struggled to come to terms with the new state-imposed clock for 17 months and then shook it off like a bad dream. It remains an anachronism of history, although one to which obsessives will occasionally return, like those who want to put Australia at the top of the globe.¹

      Ewan told me that she wanted to make the clocks because she wanted to see how they would look; she knew of only one working example in a museum in Switzerland and a handful in France. But when she approached clockmakers with her idea ‘I just got laughed at’. After phoning round six or seven clockmakers she found a keen firm called the Cumbria Clock Company (its website announced a specialism in ‘turret clock horology’, and claimed the staff were as happy oiling cogs in the smallest church as they were fixing bigger problems, which recently included work at Salisbury Cathedral and Big Ben). The company also offered services such as ‘night silencing’. The company had never made a 10-hour clock mechanism before, let alone 10 of them.

      Ewan’s disruptive show at Folkestone had a brilliant name: We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted To Be. The title came from a song in the film Bugsy Malone, and Ewan particularly liked the second line: ‘And it’s not too late to change.’ The clocks were ‘an old item, but they also seemed to talk of a possible future,’ Ewan says, putting her finger on the nature of time itself. ‘I wanted to allude to the fact that we had rejected this clock once, but it may come up again.’

      Once the clocks are mounted in a public space, they are ridiculously hard to read. ‘A lot of people look at it and go, “all right, I get it”, but they realize they haven’t fully understood it: they read it as being a 20-hour clock and not a true 10-hour clock. In the course of a day, the hour hand rotates only once, not twice.’

      When we spoke, Ruth Ewan’s energetic obsession with time showed no sign of slacking. She had just started her stint as an artist in residence at Cambridge, where, alongside plant scientists, she was analysing Carl Linnaeus’s great flower clock of 1751. Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, had proposed an intricately arranged display of plants, designed as a circular dial, that would open and close at naturally appointed times of the day to enable accurate (or at least approximate) timekeeping. Influenced by light, temperature, rain and humidity, Linnaeus’s list of responsive plants in Uppsala (60º north) did not, however, all flower in the same season, so the clock – as many attempts at practical demonstration in the nineteenth century showed – remained largely theoretical. But it was time reborn and reimagined, and the names of its components struck a similarly mellifluous air as those seen in France 40 years later. Jack-Go-To-Bed-At-Noon (open at 3 a.m.); Rough Hawkbit (open by 4 a.m.); Wild Succory (4–5 a.m.); Spotted Cat’s Ear (6 a.m.); Marsh Sow Thistle (by 7 a.m.) and Pot Marigold (3 p.m.).

      An artist involved in reinventing time faces dilemmas that do not befall the modern printmaker or ceramicist. The trickiest thing about Ewan’s Back to the Fields calendar show was obtaining the obscure plants and objects that had fallen out of favour in the last 200 years. ‘I thought initially that you could get everything you want online,’ Ewan acknowledges, ‘but I know now that you can’t.’ The last object to join the show was a winnowing fan, a type of basket. ‘Not that long ago they were probably everywhere, but the only place we could find one was in an Oxford professor of basketry’s own collection. You’ll see one in a painting by Millet. It was literally used to sort the wheat from the chaff.’

      One visitor to Ewan’s show at Camden Arts Centre knew more than most about the dislocations of time. Matthew Shaw, a curator at the British Library, had written his Ph.D. on post-revolutionary France and turned it into a book. He had also turned it into a 45-minute talk that began with that famous bit of optimism from Wordsworth: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!’ Shaw explained that the calendar was an attempt to lift an entire nation out of the earth’s existing timeline, to start history afresh and give each citizen a shared and finite collective memory; it was a good way to impose order on a disordered country.

      Shaw examined the calendar’s secular elements (it abolished religious festivals and the saints’ days), and stressed its inbuilt work ethic – the way time was newly arranged to make pre-industrial France more productive in the field and battlefield. The month was split into three 10-day décades, granting only one day off in ten rather than one in seven. With the Sabbath gone, the population found that the new day of rest carried many active obligations. ‘The observant of you will notice there’s a pattern here,’ Shaw said as he guided his visitors round. ‘Every fifth and tenth day there’s something slightly out of sequence, either an animal or an implement. On the tenth day you’re all supposed to gather in your village, sing patriotic songs, read out the laws, have a big meal together – and learn about the pickaxe.’

      This, perhaps, was one explanation for the calendar’s eventual failure. But there were other, more astronomical, reasons, such as a misalignment of the equinox. It was also a calendar that was more than a calendar: it was political, radically agrarian, and imposed its own weighty sense of history. Besides, Shaw observes, ‘it was quite hard to rule an empire with it.’ To complicate matters further, the 12 months had new names too, each selected by the flamboyant poet and playwright Fabre d’Églantine (who was guillotined not long afterwards for financial misdemeanours and his associations with Robespierre; he died on the day of the lettuce). Brumaire (Fog) lasted from 22 October (the day of apple) to 20 November

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