It’s awfully convenient to know what time it is by simply picking up your smartphone, isn’t it? Many people remember a time when, if you didn’t have a watch, finding the time meant seeking out an external source, whether that be the ringing of church bells or turning on the local TV station. Here in East Hampton, that meant Local TV, or LTV, as it is commonly known.
This still image from a 1988 video from the LTV Archive (which contains over 2,500 programs from the 1980s to today) is a parody of an “original time clock” announcement. The original time clock was part of a common practice by which TV stations would periodically announce the time, date, and occasionally the weather between programs. Today, News 12 Long Island sometimes makes a similar announcement.
This spoof features Robert Janz (1932-2021), a New York City artist, and was produced by a prolific local filmmaker, Max Scott, who has been making videos for LTV since the late 1980s. Many of his other projects can be found in the LTV Archive online. In this video, Janz attempts to draw a massive clock face with a charcoal pencil. His efforts are complicated by the fact that his model is constantly in motion, as he tries to keep up with a clock that keeps ticking, despite his efforts to depict it in a static moment.
It was appropriate that Janz was the artist chosen for this project, as his work often focused on things in motion, the ephemeral, change, and transience. He was well known for creating temporary art on the streets in the form of graffiti, water paintings on rock, and reimagined billboards. By cutting and pasting street posters, Janz would make new art out of existing advertisements until those, too, were pasted over by new fliers.
Julia Tyson is a librarian and archivist in the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.
