Save this story Save Story Save this story This is a specoal edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. Sign up here.
I’m back with another edition of Around the Clock, Box + Papers' fun-loving and free-flowing Friday counterpart.
12 o’clock: “The golden stain of time” is a phrase I’ve been bouncing around in my head like a superball . I came across it while reading about the epic new Bayeux Tapestry exhibit on display at the British Museum.
The tapestry is 900 years old, 220 feet long, and composed of panels that illustrate the 1066 invasion of England by William the Conqueror in full gory detail, with heads tumbling away from bodies and arrows burrowing into eyes. It rocks. The fact that Christopher Nolan hasn’t already cast Robert Pattinson as the lead in an IMAX blockbuster based on the tapestry makes me question if he’s lost a step.
1 o’clock: Being me (a nerd), the part that most frissoned my cortex was the way that the tapestry, by virtue of its ancientness, captures how attitudes toward conservation have looped and changed throughout history.
In the 19th century, when conservationism emerged as a profession, many early adherents thought it was their solemn duty to make old art look new again. They took this idea so far that many experts believe there are elements in the tapestry , like the aforementioned arrow, that were added whole cloth (pun intended) by these overzealous conservationists.
The English critic John Ruskin was part of a minority who believed artworks should be left to age naturally and acquire the golden stain of time . To become…tropical, if you catch my drift.
2 o’clock: So, what does any of this have to do with watches? The golden stain of time has become one of the most bankable qualities in the world of vintage watches. For the uninitiated: “tropical dials” refer to the faces of certain vintage timepieces, whose once-black dials have taken on a soft, brown hue through a combination of age, oxidation, and/or sun exposure. These watches now command a premium from patina-obsessed collectors, to the point that auction houses and dealers now have to be careful to avoid pieces that have been artificially aged to boost their value.
Much like the conservationists of Ruskin’s era, however, it took some time for watch enthusiasts to fully come around on the golden stain of these timepieces.
“The level of patina and wear and degradation is a personal preference,” says Jacek Kozubek of Tropical Watch. He points to this Submariner 5513 as one that might be too degraded for some collectors.
3 o’clock: “I remember a long time ago, in the late 2000s, there was only a small subset of people who enjoyed these,” says Jacek Kozubek, the dealer behind the aptly named Tropical Watch . “I would go to watch shows and be the only one who would seek out these pieces. Eventually, people started showing them to me before putting them out in their booths, because they knew I really liked tropical dials.”
4 o’clock: The term “tropical watch” wasn’t used in an auction listing until 2007 , Tony Traina reported in an issue of Unpolished this summer . The watch, a muddy version of the Rolex Submariner ref. 1680, sold for 50,000 Swiss francs, double its estimated sale price. The descriptor originally surfaced on watch forums a couple of years prior to that IRL debut. William Massena, a former TimeZone moderator who now heads up the brand Massena Lab, told Traina that he and his fellow chatroom regulars thought these brown-dial beauties had been artificially modified at first. “I think the term ‘tropical’ was invented by dealers because ‘brown’ sounded bad,” Massena said.
5 o’clock: “ A study from 2020 found that the tapestry had 24,204 stains, 16,445 wrinkles, 9,646 holes and 30 tears ,” the New York Times reported of the Bayeux Tapestry.
The abiding sentiment that these signs of age should be appreciated stood out to me, because that’s one way that a mass-produced good like a watch can inch closer to feeling like a true work of art. The random effects of oxidation can turn a one-of-a-million watch into a one-of-a-kind creation. The artist, in this case, is the environment—which feels like something an avant-garde artist could get away with saying while taping a trash bag to the wall of a wind tunnel.
6 o’clock: Naturally, this all leads back to the now-defunct department store Montgomery Ward (one of its copywriters created Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1939!) . Marco of @ themattedial shared a watch with a gorgeous dial that looks like it’s made of finely ground coffee beans. Le Gant, the brand behind it, is largely forgotten despite its surprisingly great provenance: the line was crafted by the Swiss heavyweight Zenith as a private-label offering for Montgomery Ward.
@themattedial Marco first learned of these watches when a coworker at Apple wore one to lunch 12 years ago. He immediately started digging for one to call his own, losing several eBay auctions in the process, before eventually striking a deal with an Italian dealer for this very piece that’s now been in his collection for a decade. Scroll through @themattedial, and you’ll find that nearly every one of Marco’s watches shares this Le Gant’s gorgeous chocolatey visage.
“I’ve always had a thing for tropical dials,” Marco tells me. “While vintage Submariners, [Rolex] Explorers, and Omega Speedmasters are iconic in terms of design, examples with tropical dials stand apart to me in terms of rarity and beauty.” For Marco, good aging is defined by honesty. “Natural aging, even heavy aging, is fine. Anything faked or forced is not. I look for signs of tampering, like bubbling paint and other clues that a dial has been baked in an oven.”
@themattedial wishes he could have this Submariner 5513 back
7 o’clock: When it comes to tropical dials, one man’s trash can be another’s treasure. Marco once had a Submariner ref. 5513 originally owned by a Navy pilot. The watch had seen some shit, and Marco believes water entered the case at some point, which left behind a snakeskin-esque stain on the dial. “Some collectors would absolutely consider it junk,” Marco says, “but it had a ton of character, and I sometimes regret trading it away.”
8 o’clock: But not all of the data points in the watches-as-art debate are quite so subtle. In the middle of September, Hublot dropped a watch in collaboration with the mega-artist Jeff Koons . For years now, the brand has eagerly blurred the lines between commerce and art through partnerships with the likes of Daniel Arsham and Takashi Murakami . The Balloon Dog watch transformed Koons’s most iconic work into a watch and spurred a complicated thought: When does art stop being art? A Balloon Dog sculpture sold for $58,405,000 at Christie’s in 2013, and similar pieces have been shown in some of the world’s most famous museums. Since then, they’ve been turned into lamps and printed on H&M handbags. Koons famously works with an entire team who help bring his museum-grade visions to life; in the case of the Hublot watch, they just happened to be in Nyon, Switzerland.
9 o’clock: I’ll ask you another question: When does a watch stop being a watch and only become art? That’s a relevant query when discussing a new series from the artist Dax Martin . Over the last week and change, he’s posted photos of several wrist-worn art pieces that share more in common with Brutalist sculptures than anything at your local watch boutique. One of his creations borrows a circuit board from an Apple TV and looks like a threat to national security.
Dax Martin “The styles of this collection will range from sleek and elegant to completely unhinged and impractical designs,” Martin tells me. “I want people to view the watch in a new and interesting way.” Watches emerged as a perfect medium for the type of art Martin wants to make. “I like experimenting with the design possibilities of using modern and vintage tech with raw permanent materials like concrete and metal,” he says.
Martin plans on producing and selling small quantities of these pieces and tells me a few people have already expressed interest in acquiring them. He says his “watches” will most likely end up on Kickstarter, though, bringing an entirely different vibe to the crush of watch brands that emerged on the platform in the ’10s.
I asked the artist: Are watches art? “I think they can be if there is a handcrafted element to them,” he says. “If they are made on an assembly line, I would say no.”
Michael McGregor 10 o’clock: Are watches art? I’m still not sure. But can watches be part of a work of art? Duh. The Los Angeles-based artist Michael McGregor recently posted a series of really great-looking interpretations of famous watches, from the Rolex Daytona to the Cartier Crash. Even if they’re mass-produced items, they make for pretty subjects.
11 o’clock: Seiko Group was in New York this week promoting a short film at—where else?—the Pace Gallery. They even erected a teahouse on the sixth-floor terrace where they served me delightfully vegetal matcha. The film, The Gift of Time , was meant to showcase the Japanese concept of Ma, i.e. in-between times when we are not buzzing from one thing to the next.
Like our watches, in and out of the many moments of Ma, we humans also acquire the golden stain of time. “Why do people collect these?” Kozubek says of his beloved tropical-dial pieces. “My answer has always been that it all connects back to our own journey that is finite. These dials continue to evolve and degrade in the same way that we do.
Source: Celebrities
0 Comments