Finnegan Shannon’s crip time reimaginings
Every 60 minutes a clock’s hand travels around its face. One hour follows another, and then another and another. 24 times over to make a day.
Our bodies are bound by clocks—by their ceaseless onslaught of seconds, minutes, hours—imposing hegemonic notions of movement through time and space. Rigid schedules without a moment to waste. But what if one’s body moves and functions out of time? Could our clocks move differently, too?
These are some of the important questions New York-based visual artist Finnegan Shannon interrogates in two recent pieces, Have you ever fallen in love with a clock? (2023) and Public Time (2023). These artworks’ reimagined clocks are organized not into 60 discrete tickmarks, but instead seven wide triangles. Each slice is titled with a day of the week—Monday through Sunday—creating an alternative clock that tracks the passage of time on the order of days and weeks, not seconds and minutes. The hand of the clock glides ever so slowly along its face, instead of racing by.
I encountered both artworks at the Zimmerli Art Museum’s 2024 exhibition Smoke and Mirrors. Curated by Dr. Amanda Cachia, the exhibition at Rutgers University features over a dozen disabled artists who explore the idea of “access aesthetics” in their work. Access aesthetics, as described by the exhibition’s introductory text, is an emerging genre in which artists lay bare the inequities in museum design. They highlight the obstacles many disabled people experience navigating museums—challenges rooted in how museum spaces are often crafted with only nondisabled bodies in mind. Their artwork not only exposes these inequities, but probes further: how might accessibility accommodations—like wall texts in braille or in-gallery seating—become sites of aesthetic reimagining instead of mere boxes to check?
Shannon’s artwork invites the viewer to pause—to slow down and watch carefully as time passes. In fact, Have you ever fallen in love with a clock? presents an actual, physical clock installed on the museum’s wall, offering an unexpected moment of waiting and rest as one tries to observe the clock’s hand slowly creep past. Whenever I go to a museum, the layout inevitably drives me to dash from one artwork to another, trying to see as many works as possible. And of course, feelings of museum fatigue set in. But Shannon’s clocks ask us to slow our bodies down, to sit with and meditate on our relationships with time. The clocks shatter normative notions of temporality, demanding we reorient ourselves to diverse ways of keeping time both inside and outside the museum. The emphasis on days and weeks may reflect, for instance, the hours that blur together for someone with chronic pain, or the routines of doctor’s appointments and physical therapy that a person might have.
Who is in time, and who is not? Whose bodies have the privilege of following the clock rigidly, and whose bodies cannot? Or, more powerfully even, how might we reinvent the clock itself, to be a mechanism that spurs love (as the artwork’s title suggests) and not fear?
Shannon’s clocks call to mind disability studies scholar Alison Kafer’s theory of “crip temporalities,” which addresses how “illness, disease, and disability are conceptualized in terms of time, and render normative expectations of time impossible” (428). Crip time, Kafer writes, contests normative presumptions around pace and scheduling, emphasizing how people with disabilities often move through the world on nonnormative timelines that conflict with the supposedly “natural flow” of our ableist society. Shannon’s clocks expand time, stretching it out into new visual shapes and forms within the museum. They play with notions of scale and movement, probing us to consider the aesthetic—even revolutionary—potential of reinventing time instead of fighting to stay in and on top of it.
In Shannon’s artwork Public Time, they explore crip temporality beyond the museum space to imagine a world where their seven-day clocks exist widely. They superimpose their nonnormative clock onto classic images of city architecture, such as the clock tower or town square, to visualize a world freed from the imposing cascade of seconds, minutes, and hours. What other worlds are possible, they ask, when we allow ourselves to imagine them? What would it mean for the world to slow down, and who would be included in this reorientation that normative temporalities frequently exclude?
Looking at Shannon’s day-by-day clocks reminds us that other ways of keeping time are possible—that new ways are realizable in this world, and many people are already living in such alternative temporalities because their bodies demand it. Ultimately, Shannon asks us to consider: how do we make a practice of questioning time and space? And moreover, how do we expand time to encompass the various ways people exist inside and outside, within, through, and against time?
Works Cited
Kafer, Alison. “After Crip, Crip Afters.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 120, no. 2, April 2021, pp. 415–434.
