Time Travel (Method)

Definition

Time travel names Anne Massey's research method for the interior: holding one space constant and reading its use across years through the photographic archive — "the same space and its use over sixteen years," with "the images… selected to evoke a certain atmosphere, allowing us to travel back in time." The method's operative idea is that the installation photograph is the interior's time vehicle: each image is "the past, a photograph, an image, a fleeting moment frozen in time, never to happen again," yet a plurality of such frozen moments, read against the constant architectural frame (the French windows, the straw-textured end wall, the tubular steel chairs), reconstructs the interior's temporal life — "a plurality of befores and afters." Its archive for the ICA case is "the ICA archives held at Tate Britain," supplemented by oral testimony (Richard Hamilton interviewed by Dorothy Morland, c. 1977), exhibition catalogues read as rulebooks, and the contemporary re-photograph (the 2014 Comme des Garçons installation, "Image credit: author").

The method's steps, as the chapter performs them: (1) fix the room — its measurements (approx. 16 × 5.5 m), its remodel (Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, 1950), its fixtures (the unit-system screens, the display cabinets, the admissions desk); (2) gather the installation record — one photograph per documented installation or event, each dated and situated (Paintings from Haiti, March 1951; Parallel of Life and Art, September 1953; an Exhibit, August 1957; the performance events, 1957–1967); (3) read each image both ways — for what it shows of the room's social condition ("Members of the public were dressed in overcoats over their suits… rationing still in place") and for what it shows of the interior's spatial re-apparatus (screens in, screens out, Perspex grid, total environment); (4) let the sequence produce the history — social, political, and cultural context "beyond styles, technical innovations, and authorial tropes"; and (5) extend the timeline to the present, where the archive itself returns to the room (the facsimile insertion), so that the method's last image is the interior remembering itself.

The method is also a disciplinary argument: it presents "a challenge to exhibition studies, which does not take the spatial culture of the exhibition space sufficiently into account" — the room, not the artworks or networks, as the primary evidentiary unit — and it addresses interior architecture's own convention problem (the frozen, uninhabited project image) by refusing the single moment.

Related Pages

• plurality-of-befores-and-afters — the method's concept: the temporal ontology it operationalizes.
• temporality — the dimension the method recovers.
• architectural-photography — the method's evidence base: the installation photograph as document and atmosphere.
• exhibitionary-complex — the field the method challenges (exhibition studies' spatial blind spot).
• adaptive-reuse — the method's natural domain: interiors that persist through re-apparatus.
• historiography-of-the-interior — the discipline the method belongs to: interior history written from the room outward.
• spatial-document — the method's museal counter-case: Macken's preserved studio, where the photographs' "then and now" comparison collapses ("it is merely Whiteley's presence in the photograph that reveals the time frame") — the documented interior the plurality-of-photographs method cannot unfreeze.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that demonstrate or theorize this method:

• Time travel (Massey 2018) — the method's source and sole full demonstration: sixteen years, one room, three canonical installation photographs, the performance record, the oral-history interview, and the facsimile return.
• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the method's limit-case witness (read in contrast): the preserved studio whose photographic record refuses to date itself ("then and now" comparisons differing only by the artist's presence) — a photograph-archive without the temporal succession the method's plurality requires.

Open Questions

• The method's atmosphere clause — images "selected to evoke a certain atmosphere" — is also its vulnerability: how is the evocative selection distinguished from a curatorial fiction (cf. Hedges's "somewhere between fact and fiction")?
• Installation photographs exist because institutions photographed exhibitions; which interiors have no such archive, and is the method structurally limited to the documented, public, canonical interior?
• Can the method move from sixteen years to sixteen decades — and what happens to it at the scale of a building's whole life (where Hollis's alteration history already operates)?
• Does the method's unit (one room held constant) survive the room's own physical alteration (the Fry/Drew remodel is itself a before), or must the "constant" frame be redefined at each step?