Time Capsule: A Concise Encyclopedia by Women Artists

By Robin Kahn

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1881616339
• ISBN13: 9781881616337
• Release Date: December 1899
• Publisher: Creative Time
• Length: 696 Pages
• Weight: 2.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 8.6" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

Review by Susan Inglett, ArtForum, February 1996

Robin Kahn's work as an editor and an artist has entailed a close monitoring of the legacy of creative endeavors undertaken by women; at the same time she has continued to develop her own host of political themes. In Time Capsule: A Concise Encyclopedia by Women Artists, a hefty anthology she conceived and edited in 1995, writings and drawings submitted by women from around the world were arranged according to a charged lexicon, from "abstract porno" to "veils."

ArtsWatch, Ms. magazine, March/April 1996.

To commemorate the Beijing conference on women, artist Robin Kahn was asked to create a public art project using work from 500 artists around the world that would reflect the diversity of images and issues that make up women's lives. The result is Time Capsule: A Concise Encyclopedia by Women Artists (Creative Time/SOS International).

Review by Nancy Princenthal, Nov-Dec 1995 issue

Robin Kahn's new anthology, this one exclusively by women, plays with the notion that history can be written in advance. For the 700-page `Time Capsule: A Concise Encyclopedia by Women Artists' (New York, Creative Time and S.O.S., distributed by D.A.P., 1995), hundreds of women in the "international art community" were asked to submit a page or two, and as with Kahn's previous `Promotional Copy,' which was modeled on the Yellow Pages, anything received by deadline was printed: pictures, prose, and combinations thereof. Kahn is a painter, whose layered canvases of heat-transferred imagery of women, along with a pile of flatiron parts, were recently shown at Susan Inglett/I.C. Clearly, Kahn cares about women's work; she seems to have a keen eye, too, for noncompensated labor. `Time Capsule' has lots of prefatory material by its publishers explaining its public-art purpose, along with two full-fledged introductions, one a parable by Kathy Acker, the other, by Avital Ronell, a jargon-thickened discussion of encyclopedias, time capsules, and why art made by women necessarily defeats both (mutually exclusive) categories. But the anthology is most impressive as a massive demonstration of voluntarism, a kind of flexing of the muscles of solidarity, as at early W.A.C. meetings, though in `Time Capsule' things more or less stop at the point where the legal pad is passed around and everyone writes down her name.