The fact is that spatial form is the perceptual basis of our notion of time, that we literally cannot 'tell time' without the mediation of space.
- W.J.T. Mitchell¹

History is, in effect, a science of complex analogies, a science of double vision […]History in this sense is a special method of studying the present with the aid of the facts of the past.
- Boris Eikhenbaum²

For some in the early 1980s, time seemed to circle back on itself. Shadows of the Vietnam War loomed large as the Reagan Doctrine, at the time still emergent, galvanised late-Cold War CIA and military operations in South and Central America, in particular in El Salvador against the FDR and the FMLN, and in Nicaragua against the Sandinista Liberation Front.³ Images of state-sponsored atrocities appeared regularly in The New York Times, magnifying the long-running history of United States military action elsewhere south of the border. As the crisis mounted, activists across the Americas responded in kind. In New York, political exiles and local sympathisers formed a network of diverse organisations, both small and large, including CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador), Casa Nicaragua, Taller Latinoamericano, INALSE (Institute of El Salvadorian Arts and Letters in Exile) and others, including, in the summer of 1983, Artists Call Against US Intervention in Latin America.⁴ Active between 1983 and 1985, Artists Call broadcast a message of solidarity throughout the art world in a national campaign of exhibitions and other events organized in hundreds of alternative and established cultural institutions across the country.⁵ In New York alone, more than seven hundred artists participated, including many well-known figures.⁶ One of the most remarkable contributions, Timeline: The Chronicle of US Intervention in Centraland Latin America, was made by Group Material, a collective of young New York artists that formed in 1979 and whose members included two key figures in Artists Call (Doug Ashford and Julie Ault).⁷

Timeline exemplifies Group Material's installation practice in a number of key respects, not least in its status as a temporary, one time only project specific to both its time (a two-month period in the winter of 1984) and its place (P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York).⁸ Consistent with the ephemeral nature of many of Group Material's projects, Timeline also exemplifies the collective's curatorial approach to installation art. Filling a room at P.S.1, a loose, salon-style hanging chequered all four walls with a multitude of cultural artefacts, all presented on equal footing: newspaper clippings; press photographs; a scarf and banner from the FMLN and the Sandinista Liberation Front; and artworks made in response to the crisis by close to forty contemporary artists, including little known figures and many prominent ones. Contributors included artists as diverse as Ida Applebroog, Conrad Atkinson, Sue Coe, Mike Glier, Leon Golub, Michael John Gonzalez, Louis Laurita, Faith Ringgold, Nancy Spero, Haim Steinbach, members of Group Material and numerous others. Timeline also displayed original works by historical figures such as Honoré Daumier, Tina Modotti and Diego Rivera.⁹ A selection of agricultural products referenced North-South trade relations: coffee grinds lined the edges of the room; a small heap of fresh bananas emitted a pungent scent; ten large tobacco leaves clung to one wall, while on another cotton sheeting hung in gauzy folds; and sheets of copper were also displayed. In the centre of the room stood a massive, bright red sculpture in the shape of a maritime navigation buoy, which had featured in a recent protest in Washington, DC against US policy in Central America.

Timeline's 'archival impulse'¹⁰ operated much like other Group Material installations: it pooled relevant artefacts to create a chamber for reflection on a pressing matter of public concern, in this case the impact of US military intervention on political, cultural and economic conditions in South and Central America. But in its representation of chronological time, the 1984 project marked an important shift in Group Material's practice. A red band three-inches wide encircled all four walls, hand-painted at intervals with crisp black frets and four-digit numbers enumerating the years of US interventions in the region.¹¹ Though the timeline itself included no explanatory text, its dated trajectory provided a framework in which the multifarious collage of images and objects assembled above and below could come together as a richly reflective, if ultimately abstract, historiography. Mapping a temporal axis onto a spatial one, Timeline introduced the model of factographic installation later developed by Group Material in what has become perhaps their most well known work, AIDS Timeline (1989).¹² Little has been published on the 1984 precursor, or on either work's ambivalent relationship to the graphic form they inhabit, the modern timeline.¹³ This essay explores that ambivalence in the context of the 1984 project, looking closely at its implications for historical representation and spectatorship.

Like Group Material's 1989 chronicle of the AIDS crisis, the 1984 work is anything but a straightforward timeline. Codified in late-eighteenth-century England, this powerfully reductive representational device was linked from the start with the idea of teleology. Its linear horizontal form provided what has recently been described as 'an intuitive visual analogue for concepts of historical progress that were [then] becoming popular'.¹⁴ In its use by Group Material just over two centuries later, seemingly anachronistically within the burgeoning postmodernism of the 1980s, Timeline deftly adapts this Enlightenment-era form, applying it just enough to mark a path away from the anxieties postmodernism harbours for both history and time (the former regarded as the pen of oppression, and the latter seen as too fugitive to chart or trace).¹⁵ But even as Timeline moves towards temporal and historiographic clarity, it is far from a smooth rehabilitation of the early-modern graphic form it marshals. True to its historical moment, Timeline is also shot through with ambivalences of its own. Confronting the certitudes of the timeline with postmodern doubt, Timeline works these two temporalities against one another, and in so doing opens up a very different kind of historical encounter.

History Lessons
The bright red band that extended horizontally across Timeline's four walls hovered at a common eye-level about five feet from the floor. Its vivid colour referenced the palette of post-revolutionary Soviet graphic design (an important source for Group Material's practice generally), and alluded to the blood lost in the struggles in South and Central America. With these overtones, the crimson timeline not only unified the installation's kaleidoscopic visual field, but also commanded attention as its 'red thread' - its single formal constant and most prominent feature (complimented by the giant protest sculpture at the centre of the room).¹⁶ Spanning from 1823 to 1984, the timeline's scope connected current interventions, naturalised in the US Cold War media as necessary or even heroic, with interventions in the distant past, whose moral depravity was easily identifiable in retrospect.¹⁷ By chronicling the patterns of a silenced history of oppression, Timeline functioned as a work of countermemory,¹⁸ reflecting in this regard the 'incredulity' toward master narratives of progress described in François Lyotard's generation-defining book, The Postmodern Condition, first published in English the year of Group Material's installation.¹⁹

If Timeline participated in critical postmodernism by virtue of its subject matter, its 'red thread' cut against the grain. Abiding by the conventions of thetimeline's modern form, its single-axis, diachronic extension suggests continuity and definition where postmodernism insists on multiplicity and fragmentation. However appropriate to Group Material's enduring pedagogical investments, and to the specific site of display in this particular case (a former classroom in P.S.1's repurposed school building), Timeline's measured progression of dates affirms precisely the genre of historical and temporal coherence that the anxious pressures of postmodernism had already scattered and dissolved. Indeed, in Group Material's immediate art historical context, from the 1960s at least through the mid-80s, artistic production in the US often steered clear of historical representation. As Mark Godfrey has argued, in the few instances where historical subject matter surfaces in this period, it tends to place less emphasis on the history it addresses than on the limits of historical representation in a world heavily mediated by press photography and television.²⁰ There are, of course, a number of crucial exceptions, and it is one of the claims of this essay that Group Material's 1984 Timeline helped chart an emergent, countervailing trend of historicism in post-War and contemporary avant-garde practice. Among other artists whose work engaged this historical turn early on, Atkinson, Golub, Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler and Spero informed Group Material's development to varying degrees as mentors or interlocutors, either for the collective generally or for individual members.²¹

Timeline ran counter not only to the historical scepticism that characterizes post-War art production in the US, but also to its 'almost obsessional uneasiness with time and its measure', a prevailing anxiety Pamela M. Lee describes in Chronophobia (2004).²² In 'nonlinear paradigms of seriality', 'recursion' and endless duration, the art of this period strips time bare of historical meaning even while compulsively belabouring its passage.²³ Examples abound: 1960s Minimalist sculpture, which quite radically emphasises time as a factor of perceptual understanding, nonetheless scours phenomenological experience clean of its historical conditions.²⁴ The work of Robert Smithson fragments and refracts time to such an extent that although historical practice flickers insistently in a work like Spiral Jetty (1970), it ultimately drains away, spiralling vertiginously out of our grasp.²⁵ Hanne Darboven's 'temporal sublime',²⁶ from 1968 onwards, only in exceptional cases acknowledges the historical content of the days it endlessly tabulates.²⁷ Likewise, in the white-on-black date paintings of On Kawara's Today series (1966-ongoing), the artist's disciplined registration of days methodically empties time of historical meaning.²⁸

Lee struggles to carve a space for historical agency within the yawning 'temporal extensiveness' she describes.²⁹ But as her account itself suggests, the ultimate effect of these tireless enumerative systems is to clear time of any trace of historical narrative or incident.³⁰ Wan and still, they cast their spectator adrift in a kind of post-historical ennui, a world in which, it seems, nothing much happens or matters and no action seems capable of making much difference.³¹

Timeline forecloses on this cool indifference. Unlike the vacuous metronomic temporality of Conceptual art, or the clean phenomenological time of Minimalism, Timeline pumped its 161-year span full of historical affect. Its resonance as history resulted from Group Material's decision to cross their signature approach to three-dimensional collage with a graphic representation of time. In this regard, however spare the timeline's numerical typography remained throughout (a minimalist, hand-rendered sans serif as reminiscent of Kawara's as of Constructivist graphic design), contextualised by the installation's layered accumulation of display objects, the four-digit numbers registered not merely as abstract symbols of time, but also as moments of history. Likewise, however richly associative the installation's cultural artefacts might have been on their own, only in the context of the timeline's numbered extension do they come alive as historically articulate objects. Consider Richard Prince's re-photograph of a Marlboro ad, mounted in Timeline above the year '1823'. Unlike the vacuous metronomic temporality of Conceptual art, or the clean phenomenological time of Minimalism, Timeline pumped its 161-year span full of historical affect.One of many works from Prince's Cowboy series (1980-92), the image shows a cowboy from behind as he reaches towards a horse's bridle, perhaps about to mount, or else 'breaking' the animal to follow his commands. In the context of the installation, the visual metaphor for conquest suggested by Prince's work directs attention to the mutually reinforcing roots of North American myths of masculinity and expansionist foreign policy. But it is Group Material's wall-mounted timeline that makes these connections register as specifically historical: 1823 is the year the Monroe Doctrine was first introduced, solidifying the US's expansionist position in the Western hemisphere and providing the rhetorical arsenal cited on numerous future occasions to legitimise US interventions in the Americas.

Timeline's commitment to history reflects Group Material's immersion in efforts to support the struggle for self-determination in Central America. By 1982, they had formed relationships with exiled artists and intellectuals from that region, and had plugged into the activities of CISPES, Casa Nicaragua, the Taller Latinoamericano and other organizations that together occupied the first floor of 19 West 21st Street, where, joining these organisations, Group Material rented an office space beginning in the autumn of 1982.³² It was there at the Taller Latino-americano that Group Material presented Luchar! (Struggle!, 1982) the previous spring. An important precursor for Timeline (as well as for Artists Call), Luchar! assembled a range of works made in response to the crisis in Central America, including many by artists later included in Timeline.³³ Not unlike Timeline, Luchar! vividly addressed the realities of torture, state violence and human rights abuses in the region.³⁴ The 1982 project included no timeline or chronology, however, and remained focused on present-tense conditions rather than their deeper historical roots. The year-and-a-half transition between Luchar! and Timeline opened the door to historical time, a shift for which Group Material's involvement in Artists Call and the organisations of West 21st Street was perhaps central. CISPES made the cumulative, historical depth of current events explicit by producing a flyer chronicling the dates of US interventions between 1868 and 1983. - a chronology that contributed to Group Material's move towards the marked historicism of Timeline, which included the flyer as a scaled-up Photostat mounted on the entrance wall immediately to the right of the title.³⁵

Many other points of reference informed Group Material's turn towards Timeline's chronographic ethos. Too numerous to detail fully here, it should be stressed that the collective's historical sensibility extended perhaps less from precedents in the realm of visual art than from popular culture. In this regard, CISPES's flyer joined the many graphic charts and timelines printed regularly in Newsweek, Time magazine and other similar publications. The exhibition design of Charles and Ray Eames also played a role; Mathematica: A World of Numbers …and Beyond (1961) and The World of Franklin and Jefferson (1975-1977) both included wall-mounted timelines, for instance.³⁶ The installations of British Conceptual artist Conrad Atkinson made a strong impression as well. Atkinson's first exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York, Material-Six Works (1979), included wall-mounted displays chronicling various politically-significant histories, including the struggle in Northern Ireland and the nexus of industrial pollution and public health.³⁷

One further precedent should be mentioned here, if only as a heuristic point of comparison: Hans Haacke's Manet- PROJEKT (1974). In this work's ten sequential panels, Haacke charts the provenance of Édouard Manet's 1880 painting Une Botte d'asperges (A Bunch of Asparagus), which had just entered the permanent collection of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. Conceived for (and ultimately censored by) this museum, Haacke's work exposes the Nazi-era career of the painting's previous owner, Deutsche Bank chairman Hermann Josef Abs, who had been a prominent figure in the economic establishment of the Third Reich. A timeline of sorts, Manet-PROJEKT deploys historical chronology to expose the political contradictions of cultural patronage.³⁸ As Haacke pointed out in a 1984 interview, inverting the 'art historian's custom to trace the provenance of a work', provenance serves here not to authenticate the object but rather to expose its underside.³⁹

The forensic historicism of Haacke's work and certainly its prehistory in Soviet productivism share points in common (as well as many differences) with Group Material's practice, including projects such as Timeline and AIDS Timeline. If less concretely factographic than Manet-PROJEKT, and broader in its social and political ramifications, Timeline could be said to extend in part from a similarly historicising, chronographic impulse. Significantly, too, each work explodes the expectations of the traditional historical form it inhabits.⁴⁰

Historical Polysemy
Timeline subjects linear historiography to a series of displacements that initiate the viewer into a mode of spectatorship quite different from the one the timeline customarily invites. If expanding the timeline at an architectural scale is now somewhat common (in museum displays, for instance), it is rare in the larger history of the form, whose power as a synoptic medium more often exploits the disembodied, 'at a glance' scale of the printed page.⁴¹ Pulling this totalising view apart, Timeline recasts the two-dimensional medium in a three-dimensional volume, opening it out to create a chronographic space. Rather than providing a bird's eye view, it implicates the spectator as a subject embodied within time's unfolding. It presents time not only as a linear progression accumulating from left to right, but also as a loop that encircles all four walls, enfolding the past cyclically within the present, and vice versa.

Timeline further dislodges the narrative authority of its form by the uncertain relationships it constructs between the dates charted along the wall and the artworks and artefacts arranged around it. Rather than a chronological survey of objects dating from the years the timeline maps, the majority of visual and cultural material dates from the 1970s and 80s, while the timeline plunges back a century and a half earlier. This means that while some years (especially the more recent ones) are paired with synchronically complimentary objects - Atkinson's For Chile (1973), for example, hangs just after '1973', the year of Chilean President Salvador Allende's assassination - temporal dissonance largely prevails. Mike Glier's Clubs of Virtue (1979) hangs below '1854'; Denise Greene's Revolution #2 (1983) hangs above '1932'; a cover from the X-Men comic book series (published since 1963) hangs just shy of '1823', and inches behind Francisco Goya's print They Carried Her Off (1797-99, plate 8 of Los Caprichos). Even when works appear near their date of production - Daumier's Le Rêve d'un marguillier (The Churchwarden's Dream, 1850), for example, hangs not far from '1854' - more often than not the conceptual distance between numbered events and visual objects demands leaps in cognition to connect the dots across culture and geography, if not time as well. It may not be immediately apparent, for example, that Daumier's caricature of the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century France also illuminates Church politics in the very different context of Central America.⁴²

Group Material, Timeline: A Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America, 1984. 'For Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America', P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Photograph: Dorothy Zeidman. Courtesy the artists and Four Corners Books

In the relative absence of temporal consonance, thematic correspondenceprovides Timeline with a second organizing principle.⁴³ Electoral corruption in El Salvador in '1982' thus finds its counterpart in a 1933. photomontage by John Heartfield,which shows voters driven by intimidation to cast ballots for the Nazi party.⁴⁴ But as the above description suggests, most of Timeline's thematic correlations stretch the imagination just as far, since many objects, rather than cued to an isolated year, resonate meaningfully at any number of points along the timeline's four-wall extension. As apposite as Prince's Marlboro ad re-photograph is for '1823', its aesthetic of Manifest Destiny also reflects the numerous subsequent years in whichUS government officials cited the Monroe Doctrine as a rationale for intervention (including several years listed on the timeline, such as '1954', which references the coup d'état in Guatemala that year,organised and sponsored by the CIA). Likewise, hanging above the year '1896', a poster from Barbara Kruger's series You make history when you do business (1982) precisely describes a much larger historical context of economically motivated military intervention. In Tina Modotti's photograph Hands Resting on Tool (1926), which hangs between '1865' and '1885', a labourer's hands pack the closely cropped frame, simultaneously conceding to work while issuing a silent refusal. The photograph conveys volumes about the exploitation of labour duringTimeline's entire historical span.

As these examples suggest, restless at their given location on the timeline, most objects echo just as meaningfully across all four walls. Their eloquence across time signals the continuity of oppression in the past and present.⁴⁵ By the same token, no single artwork or cultural artefact tells the full story of any one year; instead each intervention appears as an overdetermined complex whose narrative disperses across a heterogeneous constellation of objects. Ultimately, then, the timeline's two-dimensional trajectory serves not as a historical absolute but as a structuring device that encourages viewers to diagram a virtual, three-dimensional web of connections across both space and time.⁴⁶ The installation thereby rethinks the timeline less as a representational form than as an interrogative one, designed as much as anything to provoke the viewer's historical imagination.

Timeline further disrupts the conventions of linear historiography by presenting three different competing timelines. Each chronicles the same general subject matter, without coinciding. Multiplied three ways, the work's rival timelines thus cast doubt on the narrative authority of the work as a whole. At P.S.1, Group Material's red and black wall-mounted chronology vied for attention with the timeline provided by CISPES, which describes interventions between 1868 and 1983, each with a single line of text, and which Group Material mounted in a scaled-up version on Timeline's entrance wall.⁴⁷ The third chronology consists of a series of black-and-white posters designed by New York artist Bill Allen. Group Material elected to display Allen's posters as part of Timeline after having featured them one year earlier in Subculture (1983), an exhibition project organised by Group Material in New York City subways.⁴⁸ Allen's posters each follow an identical diptych format. The right side reproduces a grainy photograph of a soldier confronting another man. On the left side, in simple typeface against a stark white background, the name of a country in South or Central America or the Caribbean floats above the year of a US invasion in that country. If Allen's spare and repetitive image-text aesthetic takes the timeline to the brink of Conceptual art's temporal blankness, its ultimate emphasis is, as one contemporary reviewer put it, the 'harrowing' repetition of the oppression itchronicles.⁴⁹ Moreover, in the context of Timeline the posters formed a dotted line near the ceiling, contributing to the larger work's historical polysemy, where three rival chronologies coexist, highlighting by their differences the problem of historical representation itself.⁵⁰

If Timeline's three chronologies represent history in different terms, they also represent different historical content. The crimson timeline lists only a small selection of dates enumerated in CISPES's version. The latter begins in 1868, while the former begins more than forty years earlier. Many of the dates in Allen's timeline fail to appear in either of the other two (which is only partly explained by Allen's inclusion of interventions in the Caribbean, a region they exclude). On one wall, Allen's timeline lingers at the turn of the century, counting off the years '1898', '1906' and '1909', while below it Group Material's red line rushes ahead to '1954'. On another wall, Allen's timeline roughly aligns with the temporal frame below, with both marking years between 1820 and 1860, but even here the two timelines are syncopated. Only in a handful of instances do their dates coincide.

With three different temporal frames of reference potentially visible at once - the crimson timeline at eye level, the Allen timeline up above and the CISPES timeline on the entrance wall - Group Material's Timeline offers anything but a definitive account of history. Timeline is in this regard as much about exposing the fallibility of historical representation and the impossibility of narrative closure as it is about presenting a fixed and didactic account of the past. Diachronic as a chronicle, it is also synchronous as a spatialised and multiple form. Definitive as a timeline, the work's juxtaposition of conflicting chronologies shows each one as, in part, a construction.

Beyond the installation's representation of time, its existence in time is just as elusive. If the timeline as a form lays claim to the permanence of narrative authority, Group Material's Timeline defies the model once again. Specific to its time and place, when the installation closed in March 1984 the objects it had gathered dispersed forever. From the vantage point of the present, to experience the installation as it once was is impossible. One has to rely instead on the few existing installation shots and the memories of those who witnessed the work firsthand. Even during the course of the exhibition, Timeline emphasised its ephemeral constitution. Bananas ripened, tobacco leaves browned and coffee grinds lost their scent. If these material transformations chart a temporal trajectory, their deterioration and ultimate disintegration suggest decay rather than teleology or linear progress. Counter to conventions of the timeline as a form (as well as to conventions of the art object), the work made itself just as elusive as the historical representation it offered.

As this essay has argued, Timeline occupied the form its title names only by inverting many of its conventions. In exploding the expectations of the formal device it inhabits, the work substitutes a different kind of historical encounter for the one the timeline might otherwise invite. In so doing, it not only succeeds in bringing an occluded history to light but also encourages its viewers to think critically and historically about the present, and about the role of narrative form in all historical representations. Rather than the fluid and singular voice of the conventionaltimeline, here the historical record fragments and divides, multiplying across an intricate circuitry of temporal registers and visual forms. Neither able to settle on any one object, nor fully trust any narrative voice, the viewer must rely on his or her own historical imagination to make sense of the past.⁵¹ As a work of historical representation, therefore, Timeline casts doubt on the possibility of any single authoritative account.

But if Timeline raises the sceptre of the post-historical, it does so only to prove this notion wrong. Though the work refuses the authority of linear historiography, it remains recognisable as a timeline nonetheless. By combining this form with strategies of abstraction (the lack of explanatory texts and the loose cognitively challenging connections between dates and objects) and multiplicity (the profusion of objects and narrative voices), Timeline exhorts its viewers (as well as its makers) to act as historians themselves. Refusing postmodernism's pessimism towards historical labour and representation, the work insists on the necessity of both tasks, not just for artistic practice but also as modes of spectatorship.⁵²

History is only part of Timeline's lesson, however, for its centre of gravity is an object of political agency, a massive bright red sculpture that had been brandished a few weeks before the exhibition opened at a public protest in the nation's capital. Created by Bill Allen, Ann Messner and Barbara Westermann, the sculpture takes the form of a giant maritime navigation buoy. At the demonstration, its bell rang a repeated toll of warning, marking time not metronomically but according to the jostling movements of protestors holding it aloft by the beams at its base. In Timeline, though silenced and stilled by the exhibition context, the buoy's earlier life was referenced in a photograph documenting the Washington demonstration, prominently mounted on the crimson timeline as the very final image of 1984, the installation's culminating moment, when history slips into the present. The chromatic bond between the sculpture and Group Material's timeline establishes a connection between historical analysis and public dissent in the present tense. The red at the centre also marks time along the walls, underscoring collective protest as a force as constant as the chronicle of oppression itself. In turn, the lessons of history that unfold along the walls ultimately converge at the focal point of collective action, interpellating Timeline's viewers not only as historians but also as potential activists.