Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

The Time of the Dark: The Bauharoque: 2050-2099 AD
1997
Ink, lettering, collage on Acid Free Board
40 x 32 in.

Subject: The Nature of Space-Time after the existence of the Space Machine (Perpetual motion: 2063 AD)

Symbol Evocation: Unbridled Repression

Comments: The Bauharoque began at the turn of the second millennium AD and provided the world with a hundred years of the most exciting challenges and solutions the human race has ever known. Nevertheless, one thing is for certain: the Bauharoque ended for all time the genre known as science fiction that had been popular during the Modernist period.

The Bauharoque began, not surprisingly with a complete and literal rejection of the impotent cynicism of Post-Modernism. It directed its initial volley straight at the very heart of what Post-Modernists considered their forte: fashions and fads, a concern for the nature of time and a taste for historicism. This happened in 1995 at the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, where someone demonstrated the first successful time machine as an object-device. Because of the nature of the time machine and the space machine (perpetual motion), for 100 years instrumentality exceeded the ability of the human imagination (even when artificially enhanced) to comprehend their true nature and circumstantial implications. Eventually the blinding ecstasy of the time of the light had to be extinguished by the time of the dark.