Welcome to the winter issue of Matter Out of Place: Anachronism.

As we tentatively enter the second month of the new calendar year, there will be a keen sense of time – whether this feels more like a new beginning, or a sense of déjà vu. With a focus on the idea of anachronism, the pieces in this issue look at time with a wide variety of responses.

This was prompted by research I did at the Ruskin for an essay about the tradition of mural painting, and in my piece I have returned to some of these questions: how can anachronism be used as an alternative approach to reading both art historical and contemporary artworks? How does reading against the grain of linear time expand the possible meanings of a work of art? An anachronism is a chronological inaccuracy, something out of place – or rather, out of time. The word has its roots in Ancient Greek ana, meaning backwards or against, and khronos, one of the two Greek words for time, meaning sequential, chronological time. So, an anachronism is something erroneous, or out of harmony, with a particular time. This quantifiable notion contrasts with the other Greek word for time, kairos, meaning a critical or opportune moment. Kairos is something qualitative, referring not to specific events and dates but instead to the experience, or character, of time. Its use in rhetoric to mean seizing upon the right moment to propel an argument, and in weaving to mean the moment when the yarn must move through the momentary gap opened up in the threads, are useful metaphors for applying the concept elsewhere. Artist and writer Paul Chan describes it as a “critical point in time when a crisis or rupture opens up and is catalysed with human will to create new potentials.”

My research took me in the direction of artistic production during political upheaval, crisis, rupture, or revolution; an experience of, or reaction to, political or social crisis. It is worth noting the etymology of revolution and its sense of a rolling or turning back, valuable in rethinking the concept of progress as not always world-shattering, and not necessarily sequential. My essay looks at the more quietly radical realm of narrative painting. I explore the use of anachronism in, or usefulness of applying an anachronistic reading to, the work of two contemporary artists and the ways in which certain techniques or styles of these artists evoke the tradition of mural painting, consciously or through pseudomorphism, where we read something that is not there into the work. In the fiction sphere, a new short story from Stefan Matthews sweeps us into the world of masked balls and espionage in what looks to be mostly Victorian England, while Bryony Moores O’Sullivan has created a segment of a graphic novel set in a future of rechargeable oxygen spheres and illicit plant laboratories. Fred Warren has written a short column on the curious world of skeuomorphs, and an online-only piece about high school Shakespeare adaptations which can be read on our website (chasingcow.co.uk/moop). Tom Beed guides us through the simulacrum with a look at some of Jean Baudrillard’s ideas, and Jack Wightman looks into the Western genre and the ‘man of the West’ as a ‘man out of time’.

Meanwhile in the world of Chasing Cow, we have two new short films that we are working on in a piecemeal fashion, snatching time between lockdowns to workshop and film the scenes. One of these is an adaptation of a sci-fi short story by Philip K Dick, which will involve a large puppet created by our resident puppeteer Bryony. The other is inspired by a Katherine Mansfield short story, ‘The Wind Blows’ (1915), transposing Mansfield’s lyrical story set in colonial New Zealand to a fictionalised, early 19th-century West Dorset. We hope to resume filming and post-production during that mythical springtime we hear so much about, and to screen them in Bridport and online in the summer. Keep an eye out for newsletters and social media for updates.

We hope you enjoy reading the third instalment of Matter Out of Place!