Made shortly before Saar’s seventy-eighth birthday, this assemblage includes years and astrological glyphs on the inner left side that correlate to important dates in her life. The work’s title wittily refers to the timepieces in the sculpture—which, of course, are not ticking; indeed, they are either frozen in time or missing their hands. It also alludes to the artist herself, who is still making art well into her nineties.
Betye Saar
Still Ticking, 2005
Clocks, wood, paint, and white chalk
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California. © Betye Saar.
Brian Forrest
Rachel Federman: Saar uses old clocks, some with hands, some without in many of her sculptures. Her studio was filled with clocks waiting to be incorporated into assemblages like this one. Here is Betye Saar speaking at the Hammer Museum in 2014 about time.
Betye Saar: The game of time is played week by week, hour by hour, day by day. The sands of time are always shifting, drifting as years become decades, and time sends us on the journey to elsewhere to the dark side of the moon.
Audio: The Hammer Museum