At various points in the year, I find myself on a train, passing through New York State's old industrial cities--Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Amsterdam, Schenectady, Albany. It is a bit like passing through a graveyard for five hours, and there can be no doubt that the region is filled with some kind of metaphorical, industrial ghosts. The decay is everywhere. Hidden behind the invasive, choking plants, are abandoned freight cars, locomotives, buildings, sidings, homes, barns, depots, warehouses, fences, barriers, telegraph poles, and piles of god-only-knows-what. But it goes beyond the obvious signs of decay. That's easy to see. The entire route is a reminder that the only constant is change.
From Albany north there is a two hour stretch that follows the Erie Canal, a masterpiece of engineering with a life cut ridiculously short by the invasion of the steel tracks that wrap along its banks. While riding on those same tracks, you can watch the remains of the canal glide by on one side, while parts of the the highway system move along on the other. From left to right, you can see the technologies that have taken turns supplanting each other as the dominant transportation-canal, train, auto. I have no idea what will come next, but it seems likely that they'll place it right next to the road, and they certainly wont remove any of the old technologies before doing so. They just stack up like Roman ruins.
So what's my point? I took the photo above in Schenectady through a dusty Amtrak window on one of those New York trips. I thought this was a good image to start off with not to demonstrate any kind of photographic prowess, but to help define what I mean by time-travel in an artistic context. In a world where nothing is really thrown away, and much less is probably recycled, what types of art are here to stay? What will last the course, so to speak? We have now been accumulating objects with human marks for thousands of years. This is especially apparent in places like Schenectady where three generations of art are often visible on one wall (there is the wall itself, perhaps the faded remnants of an old advertizing mural, and often a substantial dose of graffiti).
In the picture above, it is likely that everyone who views it will consider different parts of it the "art." One may consider the car designs, while someone else critiques the architecture, and another analyzes the graffiti. Still another may be interested in the urban planning, the graphic design on the bank logo, or the metal work on the lamps. All of these potential art pieces represent different time periods, but they are crammed arbitrarily into one photograph.
If my own artistic interests are like that photograph, then the only way to explain my influences and inspirations is by "traveling" through time and "collecting" art that means something to me. And that's the idea behind the Time Traveler's Art Review and Guide. It's about sifting through the endless expanse of art that occurred at any given point in time, and extracting the examples that match my own "artistic" identity and persona. With all of the pieces rejoined in one single piece of time, they will form a portrait much like the one above. Except hopefully it will be of me.
-Peter Berris
September 6th, 2012
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