Art and Time Research Network

   ‘A work of art is an object, but it is also an encounter with time’

___ André Malraux, 1935

 Some time ago, I came across a slightly tortuous set of tables cataloguing a long history of attempts to ‘imag-ine’, ‘extract’, and define a ‘moment’ or ‘instant’ from time –  a sub-division that privileges a contentious cultural, historical, and teleological construct – the ‘time-line’. According to Medieval Latin, for example, an hour equals four puncta (fifteen minutes) and one puncta is two and a half minuta (six minutes). In Byzantine Greek, an hour is comprised of five lepta or small things (twelve minutes), and one lepton equals four stigmaί – meaning point (three minutes). One stigmai equals two rhopai or impulses (one and a half minutes), one rhopai is comprised of three endeixeis or showings (one minute), and one endeixeis equates to twelve rhipai, or blinks. The blink, at one and a half seconds was comprised of ten atoma (a fifteenth of a second). [1]

The relation between the ‘blink’ and ‘showing’ reappears centuries later in the writing of Dutch painter Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten (1627-1687). Hoogstraten uses ‘oogenblikliijke daedt’ (blink of an eye) to denote an instant.[2] In a blink of the eye, however, the eye is closed, indicating a perceptual lacuna that advocates time thought of as an undetermined perceptual affect, rather than a quantifiable extension – one that exists outside the flow of history. Throughout the history of art, however, we witness one attempt after another, each defined by the dominant technologies of its age, to understand the complex relations between time, perceptual affect, and the art object.

Painting is one such object – one ‘that does not shrink from impossible tasks’.[3] One impossible task attempted by painting is its long endeavor to represent time, to overcome the limitations of its inertia as a static image, through an ability to refer to time – both on its surface, and of the world beyond its edges.

 In 2016, The Rijksmuseum’s blockbuster show Late Rembrandt exhibited a series of digital animations offering audiences the opportunity to experience paintings by Rembrandt in an entirely new way. According to an optimistic publicity release, these animations bring Rembrandt’s paintings ‘to life’.[4] The corpus of Vincent Van Gogh has also been submitted to a similar resurrection by BreakThru Films in their 2016 feature length animation Loving Vincent.[5]  In both of these animations, it is easy to be convinced that what we perceive is real motion.[6] The paradox however, is that each still image occupies a position in space, none of which can be described as being in motion. The static image lies at the heart of an illusory movement and suggests, despite the best efforts of ‘chronophotographie’ and its subsequent incarnations that space is the purview of the static image (painting) and not time. [7] This self evident truth is most associated with enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781). Lessing, by no means the originator of distinctions between painting and poetry does, however, differentiate the boundaries of media along temporal and spatial axes.[8] In Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), Lessing writes:

Since painting, because of its signs or means of imitation can be combined only in space, must relinquish all representations of time, therefore progressive actions, as such, cannot come within its range. It must content itself with actions in space; in other words, with mere bodies, whose attitude lets us infer their action.[9]

W.J.T. Mitchell draws our attention to an alternative translation (from German) of ‘limits’ in Laocoon’s subtitle – one that replaces ‘limits’ with ‘borders’(Grenzen).[10] Lessing’s frontier throughout Laocoon is a heavily guarded one where temporal conditions are deeply entrenched and trespass by painters such as Titian result in ‘an encroachment of the painter on the domain of the poet, which good taste can never sanction’.[11] Lessing develops the metaphor of a frontier between painting and poetry in language more closely resembling international diplomacy than aesthetics:

Painting and poetry should be like two just and friendly neighbours, neither of whom indeed is allowed to take unseemly liberties in the heart of the other’s domain, but who exercise mutual forbearance on the borders, and effect a peaceful settlement for all the petty encroachments which circumstances may compel either to make in haste on the rights of the other.[12]

Lessing demarcates time and space along an uneasy fault line, and friction along fault lines results in a release of energy. Despite Lessing’s plea for an inviolable border, the energetic transgression of boundaries delineated by time and space is imminent in painting, neither peripheral to it, nor confined to any historical period. This Art and Time Research Network site brings together a group of artists and academics for whom the temporal conditions of the artwork are central concerns. These initial contributions are drawn from artists working across disciplines, and present examples of work/research that take ‘unseemly’ but timely liberties in the heart of other disciplines, ‘other’ histories, and other times.

Andrew Bracey, for example, re-paints Fra Angelico’s 1441 Florentine fresco, The Mocking of Christ. Bracey’s relationship with The Mocking of Christ stretches back to 1995, when an encounter with the fresco released an experience of time dilation and the deceleration of the gaze – an enforced slow looking. These qualities are ascribed to certain artworks by Mieke Bal under her term ‘sticky Images’, images that Bal sees as making time its business and its medium, yet is not deployed in the allegedly temporal media. Bracey’s response to The Mocking of Christ limits itself to an exploration of line. I use the word limits here, perhaps unfairly. Bracey’s use of line challenges the fixity of Angelico’s image – historically and materially – at the limits of perception and memory. To move in close to Bracey’s use of line is to encounter the qualities of these lines changing over time – from an apparently monochromatic line, to one bursting with prismatic colour.

Walter Benjamin challenged us shortly before his death, to refrain from ‘telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary’, and instead grasp ‘the constellation’.[13] For M.B. O’Toole, the constellation is French symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem, Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard, (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance). In O’Toole’s reading of Un coup de Dés, linearity is only one agent amongst an ensemble of conflicting and co-existing actors and timelines wherein we encounter a conversation unfolding between O’Toole, Mallarmé, and Quentin Meillassoux. The implications of this asynchronous/fictitious conversation concerning relations between time in painting, and poetry also play out materially in O’Toole’s practice. These coalesce in all of O’Toole’s work –  encompassing meticulously constructed painting, sculpture, filmmaking and the artists book – but most effectively, perhaps, in O’Toole’s cast bronze brush-strokes – objects that O’Toole refers to as ‘gestures’. In freezing, the fluid and sensual ‘gesture’ in time, by ‘fixing’ it in bronze, O’Toole allows ‘vision to reveal what touch already knew’.[14]

Vision, according to Hungarian painter and photographer, László Moholy-Nagy, had been fundamentally transformed by scientific and technological advances such as photography. Danish artist, Rebecca Krasnik, explores the potential for 3D computer-generated simulations to release new thinking on vision and temporality that differ from those associated with traditional lens based media. In On, Towards and in Front of Time, Krasnik’s installation presents what she describes as encounters with ‘a more fluid, mouldable, and indefinite time’.

Ian Heywood’s contribution to Temporalities is twofold. Heywood provides a reading of Pip Dickens’   series of cloud paintings, partly in response to Hubert Damsisch’s A Theory of/Cloud/ (1972/2002). A sense of ephemerality and timelessness are both at play in Dickens’ rendering of clouds. Dickens’ handling of paint moves these images beyond any attempts to capture a ‘moment’ in the ‘life’ of a cloud. Painting according to John Berger in Painting and Time, does not preserve a moment, as it never existed, and Dickens’ clouds part company with strictly meteorological moments in favour of polymorphic images that are ‘more like apparitions than recorded perceptions’. Heywood’s second contribution, his work in progress, Beth Harland’s Proust: Short Extract, provides insight into responses to Proust by the late Beth Harland – specifically the relations between painting, time and memory. Heywood makes the case that for Harland, and in fact all painters, these topics, ‘summarised under the headings of sensation and the inner life – are not simply optional concerns for painters but unavoidable’.

For Christopher Jones, a meticulous material exploration of the ways in which memory can be made visible is central to his practice. Jones’ transforms the discarded and displaced into intimately –scaled objects, a condition he refers to as ‘unmonumental’. This unmonumental condition is at add odds with its ability to ‘go to work’ on their audience in ways that are hard to ignore. Jones’ most recent works, for example, are resolutely eventful in their ability to continually ‘make and unmake’ themselves before our eyes – these are not, therefore, static images. The text accompanying Jones’ recent collages/constructions describes the intimate connection between memory and materials – the complex threads that bind us to the past and hold us in the presence of the present through the act of making.

The present, for Henry Tietzsch-Tyler, is also indivisible from memories of the past. In Tietzsch-Tyler’s case, however, these memories, or perhaps more correctly, post-memories are not his but his mother’s, a 1947 economic migrant from post-war Germany.  Tietzsch-Tyler’s practice, in attempting to parse these memories – and grasp what he terms ‘obfuscations’ as  inheritance – occupies a threshold zone wherein neither the past, present, nor future seem to  have any solidity – ‘a life unlived’. His paintings and the archival material that accompany them seem to wait endlessly at the borders of these fluid temporal zones.

French historian Fernand Braudel, associated with the Annales School, divided time into three zones/categories – structure-long-duree (thousands of years), conjocture-moyenne-duree (hundreds of years), and evenement-court-duree(weeks and days).[15] In Drawing as Erratic, Sarah Casey invites us, like the Roman god Janus standing at the threshold of the present, to regard two directions at once – to regard the past and the future simultaneously. Casey’s first glance encompasses the deep past of Braudel’s first category – thousands of years, while considering the evenement-court-duree – a what next constructed from weeks and days? In Drawing as Erratic, Casey discusses the ways in which a number of research visits to the glaciers of the European Alps and attendant encounters with artifacts of glacial archaeology have released a body of work (drawing) whose processes of making and temporal conditions signify becoming and unbecoming – making and unmaking in ways that function as correlates to glacial processes. This state of flux seems central to Casey’s practice. Casey’s drawings, informed by the deep past, ‘operate’ not only in the present but also, despite the impermanence of the materials she works with, speaks to the future – an uncertain future at the mercy of anthropocentric pressures.

In his essay, With Painting: Spectatorship. Temporality and Modes of Address, Tom Palin asks how past, present and future operate in the interpretive moment of painting’s address. Using Tolstoy’s short parable, The Three Questions(1885), Palin develops a phenomenological argument that identifies the ‘now’ as a Heideggerian and hermeneutic clearing – Lichtung, wherein that which is meaningful becomes operable (painting), and through Tolstoy, a stilled time whose agency is a result of its decoupling from cause and effect – the shedding of guilt (events of the past) and freedom from anxiety (possible futures). This lichtung, to follow Palin, is the only space in which painting’s address can be felt with full force as the pure datum of lived experience, what Hal Foster describes as a ‘sensuous particularity of experience in the here-and now’.[16]

Painting’s address in James Quin’s practice relies upon the continual re-insertion of the past into the present in ways that temporalise the space of their encounter. For Quin, it is the labyrinth, and not the lichtung that functions as a material field in which the temporal conditions of painting are tested. The ‘open’ labyrinth, as Quin describes it, is a timber frame construction without walls following the architectural logic of the recursive maze, into which he places a constellation of paintings on linen and wood; nine repetitions of five images from the pages of a 1969 publication,Discovering Art. Quin’s text for Temporalities examines multiplicity, repetition and timelessness through Deleuze, Bergson, and Benjamin.

According to media theorist and philosopher, Boris Groys, an obsession with our own contemporaneity marks us as different from all of the multiple now’s that have preceded us. [17]The Middle Ages were obsessed with eternity, the Renaissance with the past, and modernity with the future. The future, it seems, is now under considerable pressure. The texts included here, as a means of inaugurating the Temporalities site, offer little by way of answers but will hopefully help to provoke more of what all visual artists respond to  – Timely Questions.

James Quin.

1. See Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The History of Time, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.10.
2. Thijs Westeijn’s, The Visible World: Samuel Van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimisation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, (2009), p. 185.
3. Adrian Searle, extract from “Unbound”, in Unbound: Possibilities in Painting, (London: Hayward Gallery, 1994), pp. 13-17.
4. Six of the twelve canvases from the Late Rembrandt exhibition were animated by CS Digital media for Dutch telecommunications KNP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-3LVTGpv4Q. See also, http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/late-rembrandts-come-to-life.html
5. ‘Loving Vincent will be the world’s first feature length painted animation, with every shot painted with oil paints on canvas, just as Vincent himself painted’. lovingvincent.com/?id/=technique.
6. ‘Loving Vincent employed thirty artists to produce fifty six thousand, eight hundred frames for an eighty minute film. Each frame is an oil painting on canvas.’www.lovingvincent.com.
7. By the 1870’s photography had developed to the point that shutter speeds broke the thousandth of a second barrier, enabling Eadward Muybridge to undertake a study of animal locomotion (1878). At the same time French physiologist Etienne Marey developed a similar process he labelled chronophotographie. See Rebecca Solnit, Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004).
8. Lessing undoes Horace’s Ut Pictura Poesis (as in painting, so is poetry) along temporal and spatial axes. For an explication of Ut Pictura Poesis, See Rensselaer Lee, “Ut Pictura Poesis”, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. (December. 1944), pp. 197-269
9. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting, translated by Ellen Frothingham, (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1873), p. 90.
10. J.T Mitchell, “The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing’s Laocoon”, Representations, No. 6 (Spring, 1984), p. 105.
11. Lessing gives the example of Titian’s Prodigal Son in which ‘his dissolute life, his misery, and repentance’ are depicted simultaneously. Laocoon,100.
12. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting, translated by Ellen Frothingham, (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1873), p. 90.
13. Walter Benjamin. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), in illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1968) 253-64.
14. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the senses (Chichester: John Wiley &Sons, 2012), 46.
15. See Immanuel Wallerstein, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Duree”, translated by Immanuel Wallerstein, Review, 32, (2009), pp.171 – 203.
16. Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex, (London and New York: Verso, 2013), p. xii.
17. See Boris Groys, On the New, translated by G, M. Goshgarian, (London and New York: Verso Books, 2014).