Reading Thai Art Internationally

Abstract

from modernism into postmodernism.5 Yet Lee's insistence on grounding her analysis in the relationship between cultural production and technological rationalization places her account within the longue dur?e of modernism, formed from the dual pressures of industri alization and the culture of spectacle in which we still live. As these forces took on less material forms in the second half of the twentieth century, artists found new means to continue both their dialogue with this world and their search for uncolonized spaces of expression within it (through timeless presentness and, as in Lee's con cluding examples of Andy Warhol's films and On Kawara's Today Series, in seeming endless ness). The temporal turn for which Lee argues moves the discourse of modernism away from such dichotomies as abstraction and figuration by returning the image to its pre-Albertian existence, in which meaning is produced not by visual similitude or, con versely, by optical purity, but by serial corre spondence.6 In a world where seeing no longer means believing, it is the repetition and reification of the image (as well as the possibility of its oblivion through various forms of suppression) rather than its mater ial appearance that define its credibility. Chronophobia marks a strong first effort at recognizing how the effects of technology have shaped artists' understanding of lived time and their experience of the world, and should be read not only by those who study the art of the 1960s, but by anyone interested in the ideological use of history in a technocratic society.