‘Clock time’, all about productivity, money and economic growth, threatens to destroy us, says artist Jenny Odell. But there are other kinds of time, and we need to learn to embrace them
enny Odell, the artist and writer, appears on my screen. She’s 35 years old, with long dark hair, a fringe, and big glasses with dark frames. She’s in her kitchen in Oakland, California. She loves nature and for a while she taught art and design at Stanford. In her art she finds objects and images, often on the internet, and arranges them into beautiful shapes. She likes looking at random things and thinking deeply about them.
‘I like to pay really close attention to the things in front of me’: Jenny Odell in Piedmont Park, California.Given the circumstances, I can’t quite greet Odell with either “Good morning” or “Good evening”, because neither would exactly be true. In our conversation, it is both 10.30am and 5.30pm. Clock time is already messing with us. “Time,” I say, “must be just about the hardest thing to think about.” Odell is silent for a while. “Yes,” she says.
Thirty-odd years later, Odell has moved a few miles away to Oakland, where she lives in a large apartment block with her boyfriend and where she still pays close, obsessive attention to the objects around her. Now she tries to make sense of them. “Something is true of all my work, whether it’s art or writing,” she says.
When Odell was a child, she tells me, her mother read her a story about a boy and a ball of thread. “It was from a book that my mom got from a garage sale, which she still has. A witch visits this young boy, who is impatient by nature, and gives him a ball of thread. She tells him that if he pulls the thread, time will go faster and she warns him not to pull it too much, because it only goes in one direction. Like time.
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