Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 4B
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

I’m terrible at keeping journals. I admire 

their purpose, but I can never keep up with 

the commitment. I always stop to doodle and 

quickly get sick of hearing myself talk about 

the same things over and over.

Despite the distracting nature, I’m still 

fascinated by the concept of tracking growth 

over time. Some of my favorite artworks are 

those that do exactly that – without a clear 

end goal. Instead of developing an art piece 

based on an argument the artist wants to 

make, these works develop a framework for 

creating and let time take the reigns. Maybe 

the piece does make an argument, but it 

appears organically as the work incrementally 

changes. It’s not the driving force. It’s time-

based, but instead of the “time as a medium” 

mindset of other “time-based” art forms like 

film or performance, this type of work invites 

the force of time to be a co-artist.

Bre Boersma’s 2018 Sunrise Trek project is 

a great example of this. Every morning for a 

summer, Boersma woke up at 5:45 a.m., took 

a picture of the sunrise and created a color 

palette of it. The framework is simple, but 

the results are intriguing. You can take a lot 

of conclusions from this work if you want – 

maybe we should wake up earlier, maybe we 

should appreciate sunrises more, but it’s not 

about the conclusions. It’s about the process of 

letting forces beyond our control drive what 

we make.

There’s a concept that information designer 

Giorgia Lupi calls “data humanism,” which 

champions the collection and visualization 

of subjective, complex and personal data. She 

makes highly rendered, sprawling depictions 

of gathered information that take time to 

interpret. Every one of Lupi’s graphs needs a 

key. Her infographics are beautiful, yes, but 

their delight goes beyond aesthetics. They’re a 

way of telling a story by inviting the listener to 

look closely and put together the pieces.

But not just any story. It’s always a 

personal story, as benign as showing every 

instance Lupi looked at a clock in a day and 

as emotionally heavy as representing the 

daily experiences of a child with a serious 

illness. Lupi knows and embraces the fact that 

these works cannot help but be subjective. 

That’s what communication is: a flawed 

interpretation and subsequent representation 

of a subject. We unavoidably filter everything 

we say, show, write and express through our 

own viewpoints. That’s what art is, too.

At a young age, I switched from keeping 

journals to sketchbooks. I’ve got piles of them 

at home, going back to when I was seven 

or eight years old. A lot of the sketches are 

embarrassing to look at now, and I probably 

won’t ever show them to anyone else. But 

I’m glad I kept them. It’s a record of change 

that I never could have predicted, both in 

the development of artistic skills and the 

development of my own personality. 

I can track my growth over time, from 

drawing princesses as a child up through my 

emo comic book phase as a teenager. I can 

look through these drawings and pinpoint the 

moment I decided to go to art school. I have 

nearly 50 sketches of the same friend over the 

course of four years, showcasing not only my 

friend’s rapidly-changing haircuts, but the 

way our friendship changed over time.

The University of Michigan Museum of Art 

has a piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres called 

“Untitled (March 5th) #2” which consists of 

two lightbulbs, cords intertwined, affixed to a 

wall. Either of the lightbulbs can go out at any 

time. One of them will always go out before the 

other, but the artist and the museum have no 

control over when that happens. It’s a simple 

but profound framework where the outcome 

is determined by time.

Gonzalez-Torres 
made 
this 
piece 
in 

response to the AIDS crisis after the 1991 

diagnosis of his lover, Ross Laycock. It’s one 

of many lightbulb pieces he made in the years 

after, a way to deal with ideas of connection 

and mortality in a time of hurt and uncertainty.

Right now, we’re also living through a 

time of uncertainty. No one knows exactly 

how our days are going to progress or how 

life will change. It’s set a lot of people’s lives 

and art goals into limbo – canceled shows 

and lack of access to materials and equipment 

can be a major setback for professional and 

amateur artists alike. But rather than be 

consumed with frustration at the roadblocks 

to other projects, there’s another option: Start 

something new.

You don’t have to set up a time-consuming, 

complex framework. You don’t have to know 

how or when you’re going to end it. There’s 

something comforting about starting an art 

project without planning the finish. It means 

accepting that you don’t have total control 

over what happens next. 

As someone who revels in careful routine 

and planning, it can be worrisome to give up 

any control. But you can still set parameters 

for yourself. Maybe you photograph all of 

your daily meals. Maybe you record yourself 

playing a song every day. Maybe you make 

color swatches based on your outfits. Maybe 

you stick with a tried-and-true journal. 

Maybe, if you’re like me, you just set aside 

daily time to sketch.

So if you’re stuck in limbo, worrying about 

the future, try starting a routine art practice. 

Let time work with you, and see what happens 

next.

The timeliness of starting 
a new, routine art practice

EMILY CONSIDINE

Editorial Page Editor

99U

As weird as it may sound, time travel 

is a common topic of conversation in my 

family. This is mostly because my sister 

just doesn’t understand it. Any time we 

watch a time travel movie, we end up 

spending hours discussing the logistics 

behind the warped chronology that the 

characters inevitably go through, and 

we usually end up more confused than 

we began. In our terms, to accomplish 

time travel correctly, there have to be 

repercussions for all of the character’s 

actions without unresolved or confusing 

gaps in the timeline. While I am by no 

means an expert in this topic, I’d like to 

think that I do know a little bit about time 

travel in movies, at least enough to explain 

which movies make sense and which ones 

don’t.

I’ll 
start 
with 
one 
that 
doesn’t: 

“Avengers: Endgame.” In the simplest 

of terms, the movie revolves around the 

Avengers venturing into the past to get the 

Infinity Stones that control the universe. 

But it isn’t exactly a simple concept. The 

directors of the film, Joe and Anthony 

Russo (“Captain America: The Winter 

Soldier”), pioneered an entirely new way of 

time travel. Their new method insinuated 

that any change a character made to the 

past didn’t affect their original future; 

rather, it affected a new future. What does 

that mean? To be honest, I’m not sure 

anyone really knows. The best way that I 

could understand it was that any time you 

go back in time and change something, 

you create a new alternate reality. 

This is a fine concept, I suppose, but 

only if it’s consistent … and it isn’t. For 

one thing, if Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, 

“Knives Out”) goes back in time and 

lives a life with Peggy (Hayley Atwell, 

“Christopher Robin”) — which he does 

— wouldn’t that then create an alternate 

reality, or an alternate ‘future’? So how 

does Old Man Steve show up in the 

Avengers’ reality, having lived a life with 

Peggy? According to the Russo brothers’s 

rules, he shouldn’t be able to. Also, when 

Steve and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr, 

“Iron Man”) go back to the ’70s to retrieve 

the Tesseract and Pym Particles, how 

is Tony’s father Howard (John Slattery, 

“Churchill”) an old man when Peggy, who 

is presumably around the same age as him, 

appears virtually the same thirty years 

after we last saw her? Again, it doesn’t 

make sense. I’ll never really forgive the 

Russo Brothers for messing with my mind 

the way they did with “Endgame.”

“Back to the Future” remains one of the 

most iconic examples of time travel and 

does it more correctly than “Endgame” 

does, but plenty of concepts in that film 

remain difficult to swallow, continuity-

wise. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox, “The 

Frighteners”) accidentally goes back in 

time, interrupts his parents’ meeting and 

has to hurry to reintroduce them to ensure 

that he exists in the future. But how do 

Marty’s parents and Biff (Thomas Wilson, 

“The Heat”) not recognize ‘Calvin Klein’ 

when Marty himself grows up to look just 

like him? Shouldn’t they all remember 

the kid that had such a huge impact on 

their lives? After all, ‘Calvin’ helped 

George McFly (Crispin Glover, “Hot Tub 

Time Machine”) and Lorraine Banes 

(Lea Thompson, “Howard the Duck”) get 

together while ruining Biff’s car with 

manure in the process. However, I will 

admit that this film did a pretty good job 

with time travel, especially considering 

the fact that it was such a new idea in the 

’80s. Most of the time travel continuity 

problems in the “Back to the Future” 

franchise stem from the fact that almost 

all the time travelling that Marty and 

Doc do involves either past renditions of 

themselves or the past versions of people 

that they know, thus teaching me that if 

anyone ever does decide to time travel, 

they should not meddle with events their 

ancestors were a part of. In fact, if time 

travel ever does exist, it should only be 

used to passively observe history. 

This brings me to my final example 

of time travel, the movie that does it the 

best … “Mr. Peabody and Sherman.” A lot 

of people might overlook this film due to 

the fact that it’s categorized as a children’s 

movie, but not only is this probably the only 

movie I’ve ever seen that has done time 

travel correctly, it’s also just an awesome, 

entertaining film. Mr. Peabody, voiced by 

Ty Burrell (“Modern Family”), and his son 

Sherman, voiced by Max Charles (“The 

Angry Birds Movie”), use Mr. Peabody’s 

invention, the WABAC Machine, to time 

travel to important historical events to 

teach Sherman about history. This movie 

shows that there are repercussions to time 

travel that go beyond just getting stuck in 

the past, like what happens to Marty. You 

could destroy the entire universe with 

time travel. This is why, in all honesty, 

time travel should just never, ever exist. 

There are too many variables and too 

many ways to mess up everything. And 

there is, unfortunately, no Mr. Peabody 

in the real world to save us all when we 

inevitably screw everything up when we 

try to time travel.

A ranking on time travel:
From the best to the worst

SABRIYA IMAMI

Daily Arts Writer

WIKIMEDIA

B-SIDE

