Better than Christmas

In 1974, works by LeWitt, Ryman, Artschwager and Buren were sealed up inside these steel boxes. Last week they were finally unwrapped and we were there to watch.

Time capsules are a literal anachronism. Invoking a kind of space-age enthusiasm, these items, which we have sent out into the world to transcend time, paradoxically end up being more retro than anything we could have intentionally conceived. Such was the case, at least a little, with the opening of "Time Boxes 2000" at Brandeis University on Feb. 24.

In 1974, Stephen Antonakos, an artist best-known for his neon installations, invited four of his friends and colleagues-the artists Sol LeWitt, Richard Artschwager, Daniel Buren and Robert Ryman-to fill steel boxes he had mailed to them. Each signed a contract, agreeing not to disclose to anyone the contents of their respective packages until the year 2000. All of the artists save Ryman sent their boxes back to Antonakos without touching the exteriors, which were loosely painted with a white wash. Ryman, true to form, could not resist the aesthetic qualities of his monochrome box, so he covered it with masking tape and then varnished it; the tape has since yellowed, but unevenly, giving the surface the same graceful subtlety of his characteristic white painted canvases.

Since then, Antonakos has kept the boxes while the suspense around them grew. He had intended the Time Boxes as a private experience, but decided, as the millennium neared, to exhibit them at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, and to hold the opening ceremony on the school's campus. Antonakos designed the portentously titled "Neon Millennium Room" inside the Rose, where the boxes were exhibited while unopened, and where their contents are now on display. The walls bracketing the doorway are painted in saturated blue and red-orange, and a little vestibule stands between the observer and the room, so that the flickering and buzzing of neon tubes is registered before the blue light of the interior stuns the senses. Pronged triads of blue neon look as though they are pressing through the ceiling, their phosphorescence the kind we latently suspect of causing cancer. The boxes are mounted at eye level on brief supports, as though enshrined in a latter-day temple.

Antonakos selected the four artists (upon whom time has since granted the benediction of fame) because their modes of working were so disparate. Ryman is the consummate painter, whose variations in white paint on all manner of supports are about the empirical discovery of facture. He has said that "there is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint." Artschwager (whose work was exhibited in the Carpenter Center earlier this year) creates objects, often boxes, with no clear function, and painted images based on commercial sources. LeWitt has been an avatar of the conceptual art movement since the 1960s. His geometric constructions, based on mathematical models, often take their form from instructions which the artist has dictated on paper, leaving their execution as an afterthought. Buren has been operating since the 1960s with a vocabulary of 8.7-cm vertical stripes, exhibited in venues both indoors and out, altering their surroundings and offering a subtle form of institutional critique.

It became apparent at the opening ceremony how much the mind rewrites itself over time: only Buren remembered what he had done with his box, while the other three artists were as surprised as the audience by the contents. Ironically, the Time Boxes project reinforces that modernist art historical notion of the artist as seer, able to represent the truth behind experience. We have faith that these creators can distill the very essence of their age; we expect the quiddity of the object to be revealed. Yet these capsules, because of their quarter-century embalming, take authorship away from the artists. Works of art necessarily undergo change when they are parted from their originators-the time capsule is an extreme case of such a transformation. Time, as a signifier, has taken on greater meaning than the material contents themselves. Antonakos's project implies that time is its own artistic agent, enacting unforseeable changes on the object.

Just as Antonakos's other neon installations take on different qualities from the changing effects of light and space, Time Boxes 2000 is about the actuation of the work of art in the surround of time. When the project was inaugurated in 1974, its departure from a concurrent mode of conceptual art, the earthworks movement, could not have been more pronounced. Both forms of conceptual work take on the way changing conditions act upon the art object. But whereas earthworks make a cult of entropy and the dissipation of the art object through time, Antonakos's time capsules are instead about the accumulation of the art object's presence.

During the ceremony, Antonakos described his relationship to the boxes, his growing sense of "the need not to know." As he prepared to open them, he explained that "we gain something, but we lose the wonder and anticipation." Time Boxes 2000 is really meant for an audience familiar with the vocabulary of each respective artist, making the contents of each box, when it was finally pried open, not such a surprise after all.

Ryman had signed a glass artist's palette, complete with dried patches of mixed paint, and wrapped it in the linen he used to stretch his canvases. LeWitt enclosed a tiny white cube, in which was a scrap of paper with ambiguous instructions: "a line, not straight, corner to corner." Artschwager created within the frame of steel a wooden box that opened onto ever smaller boxes. Buren avoided the responsibility of prediction altogether and had given his box to a friend to fill. Inside, the other artist had lined the box with Buren's signature red-and-white stripes. It became clear at the unveiling of Time Boxes 2000 that such a high level of anticipation was difficult to meet.

What have we expected art to do for us in the last quarter century? On the one hand, the Time Boxes seem utterly a product of the 1990s, in their disregard for salability, in the intimate nature of their intent. The boxes are found objects, but personalized as specific gifts for a specific recipient. On the other hand, the project does have the '80s element of hype, the building-up of an event, the sole purpose of which is to create something tangible out of what began as a private activity. And even in the performative nature of the opening of the boxes, we sense a latent 1970s effect of theatricality. But perhaps this inclusivity of concepts is the very representation of art in time. The millennium, artificial construct that it is, provides nonetheless an opportunity for retrospection. And Time Boxes 2000, as a self-contained survey of some issues in the last 25 years of art, is retro at its best.

Stephen Antonakos: Time Boxes 2000, with Richard Artschwager, Daniel Buren, Sol LeWitt and Robert Ryman is on display through March 12 at the Rose Art Museum on the Brandeis University campus, at 415 South St. in Waltham. You can get there by taking the Fitchburg line of the commuter rail from Porter Square to Brandeis/Roberts. Hours are Tue. through Sun., 12 to 5 p.m., and Thu., 12 to 9 p.m. Admission is free.