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\u00a0\u00a0 \u2018A work of art is an object, but it is also an encounter with time\u2019<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n ___ Andr\u00e9 Malraux, 1935<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0Some time ago, I came across a slightly tortuous set of tables cataloguing a long history of attempts to \u2018imag-<\/em>ine\u2019, \u2018extract\u2019, and define a \u2018moment\u2019 or \u2018instant\u2019 from time – \u00a0a sub-division that privileges a contentious cultural, historical, and teleological construct \u2013 the \u2018time-line\u2019. According to Medieval Latin, for example, an hour equals four puncta<\/em> (fifteen minutes) and one puncta<\/em> is two and a half minuta <\/em>(six minutes). In Byzantine Greek, an hour is comprised of five lepta <\/em>or small things <\/em>(twelve minutes), and one lepton <\/em>equals four stigma<\/em>\u03af<\/em> – <\/em>meaning point<\/em> (three minutes). One stigmai <\/em>equals two rhopai or impulses <\/em>(one and a half minutes), one rhopai <\/em>is comprised of three endeixeis or<\/em> showings <\/em>(one minute), and one endeixeis<\/em> equates to twelve rhipai, <\/em>or blinks. <\/em>The blink, <\/em>at one and a half seconds was comprised of ten atoma <\/em>(a fifteenth of a second). [1]<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n The relation between the \u2018blink\u2019 and \u2018showing\u2019 reappears centuries later in the writing of Dutch painter Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten (1627-1687). Hoogstraten uses \u2018oogenblikliijke daedt\u2019<\/em> (blink of an eye) to denote an instant.[2]<\/a> 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n Painting is one such object – one \u2018that does not shrink from impossible tasks\u2019.[3]<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0In 2016, The Rijksmuseum\u2019s blockbuster show Late Rembrandt<\/em> 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\u2019s paintings \u2018to life\u2019.[4]<\/a> The corpus of Vincent Van Gogh has also been submitted to a similar resurrection by BreakThru<\/em> Films in their 2016 feature length animation Loving Vincent<\/em>.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 In both of these animations, it is easy to be convinced that what we perceive is real motion.[6]<\/a> The paradox however, is that each still image occupies a position in space, none of which can be described as being in<\/em> motion. The static image lies at the heart of an illusory movement and suggests, despite the best efforts of \u2018chronophotographie\u2019 and its subsequent incarnations that space is the purview of the static image (painting) and not time. [7]<\/a> This self evident<\/em> 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]<\/a> In Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry <\/em>(1766), Lessing writes:<\/p>\n 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]<\/a><\/p>\n W.J.T. Mitchell draws our attention to an alternative translation (from German) of \u2018limits\u2019 in Laocoon\u2019s <\/em>subtitle – one that replaces \u2018limits\u2019 with \u2018borders\u2019(Grenzen<\/em>).[10]<\/a> Lessing\u2019s frontier throughout Laocoon<\/em> is a heavily guarded one where temporal conditions are deeply entrenched and trespass by painters such as Titian result in \u2018an encroachment of the painter on the domain of the poet, which good taste can never sanction\u2019.[11]<\/a> Lessing develops the metaphor of a frontier between painting and poetry in language more closely resembling international diplomacy than aesthetics:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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]<\/a><\/p>\n Lessing demarcates time and space along an uneasy fault line, and friction along fault lines results in a release of energy. Despite Lessing\u2019s 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<\/em> 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 \u2018unseemly\u2019 but timely liberties in the heart of other<\/em> disciplines, \u2018other\u2019 histories, and other<\/em> times.<\/p>\n Andrew Bracey<\/strong><\/span>,<\/strong> for example, re-paints Fra Angelico\u2019s 1441 Florentine fresco, The Mocking of Christ. <\/em>Bracey\u2019s relationship with The Mocking of Christ <\/i>stretches back to 1995, when an encounter with the fresco released an experience of time dilation and the deceleration of the gaze \u2013 an enforced slow looking. These qualities are ascribed to certain artworks by Mieke Bal under her term \u2018sticky Images\u2019, images that Bal sees as making time its business and its medium, yet is not deployed in the allegedly temporal media. Bracey\u2019s response to The Mocking of Christ <\/i>limits itself to an exploration of line. I use the word limits<\/em> here, perhaps unfairly. Bracey\u2019s use of line challenges the fixity of Angelico\u2019s image – historically and materially – at the limits of perception and memory. To move in close to Bracey\u2019s use of line is to encounter the qualities of these lines changing over time \u2013 from an apparently monochromatic line, to one bursting with prismatic colour.<\/p>\n Walter Benjamin challenged us shortly before his death, to refrain from \u2018telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary\u2019, and instead grasp \u2018the constellation\u2019.[13]<\/a> For M.B. O\u2019Toole<\/strong><\/span>, <\/strong>the constellation is French symbolist poet, St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s 1897 poem, Un coup de D\u00e9s jamais n\u2019abolira le Hasard<\/em>, (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance). In O\u2019Toole\u2019s reading of Un coup de <\/em>D\u00e9s<\/em>, linearity is only one agent amongst an ensemble of conflicting and co-existing actors and timelines wherein we encounter a conversation unfolding between O\u2019Toole, Mallarm\u00e9, and Quentin Meillassoux. The implications of this asynchronous\/fictitious conversation concerning relations between time in painting, and poetry also play out materially in O\u2019Toole\u2019s practice. These coalesce in all of O\u2019Toole\u2019s work –\u00a0 encompassing meticulously constructed painting, sculpture, filmmaking and the artists book – but most effectively, perhaps, in O\u2019Toole\u2019s cast bronze brush-strokes \u2013 objects that O\u2019Toole refers to as \u2018gestures\u2019. In freezing, the fluid and sensual \u2018gesture\u2019 in time, by \u2018fixing\u2019 it in bronze, O\u2019Toole allows \u2018vision to reveal what touch already knew\u2019.[14]<\/a><\/p>\n Vision, according to Hungarian painter and photographer, L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy, had been fundamentally transformed by scientific and technological advances such as photography. Danish artist, Rebecca Krasnik<\/span>,<\/strong> 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<\/em>, Krasnik\u2019s installation presents what she describes as encounters with \u2018a more fluid, mouldable, and indefinite time\u2019.<\/p>\n Ian Heywood<\/span>\u2019s<\/strong> contribution to Temporalities<\/em> is twofold. Heywood provides a reading of Pip Dickens<\/span>\u2019 <\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0series of cloud paintings, partly in response to Hubert Damsisch\u2019s A Theory of\/Cloud\/<\/em> (1972\/2002). A sense of ephemerality and timelessness are both at play in Dickens\u2019 rendering of clouds. Dickens\u2019 handling of paint moves these images beyond any attempts to capture a \u2018moment\u2019 in the \u2018life\u2019 of a cloud. Painting according to John Berger in Painting and Time, <\/em>does not preserve a moment, as it never existed, and Dickens\u2019 clouds part company with strictly meteorological moments in favour of polymorphic images that are \u2018more like apparitions than recorded perceptions\u2019. Heywood\u2019s second contribution, his work in progress, Beth Harland\u2019s Proust: Short Extract<\/em>, provides insight into responses to Proust by the late Beth Harland \u2013 specifically the relations between painting, time and memory. Heywood makes the case that for Harland, and in fact all painters, these topics, \u2018summarised under the headings of sensation and the inner life \u2013 are not simply optional concerns for painters but unavoidable\u2019.<\/p>\n For Christopher Jones<\/span>, <\/strong>a meticulous material exploration of the ways in which memory can be made visible is central to his practice. Jones\u2019 transforms the discarded and displaced into intimately \u2013scaled objects, a condition he refers to as \u2018unmonumental\u2019. This unmonumental condition is at add odds with its ability to \u2018go to work\u2019 on their audience in ways that are hard to ignore. Jones\u2019 most recent works, for example, are resolutely eventful in their ability to continually \u2018make and unmake\u2019 themselves before our eyes – these are not, therefore, static images. The text accompanying Jones\u2019 recent collages\/constructions describes the intimate connection between memory and materials \u2013 the complex threads that bind us to the past and hold us in the presence of the present through the act of making.<\/p>\n The present, for Henry Tietzsch-Tyler<\/strong><\/span>, is also indivisible from memories of the past. In Tietzsch-Tyler\u2019s case, however, these memories, or perhaps more correctly, post-memories are not his but his mother\u2019s, a 1947 economic migrant from post-war Germany.\u00a0 Tietzsch-Tyler\u2019s practice, in attempting to parse these memories – and grasp what he terms \u2018obfuscations\u2019 as\u00a0 inheritance<\/u> – occupies a threshold zone wherein neither the past, present, nor future seem to\u00a0 have any solidity \u2013 \u2018a life unlived\u2019<\/em>. His paintings and the archival material that accompany them seem to wait endlessly at the borders of these fluid temporal zones.<\/p>\n French historian Fernand Braudel, associated with the Annales School, divided time into three zones\/categories – structure-long-duree<\/em> (thousands of years), conjocture-moyenne-duree<\/em> (hundreds of years), and evenement-court-duree<\/em>(weeks and days).[15]<\/a> In Drawing as Erratic<\/em>, Sarah Casey <\/strong><\/span>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\u2019s first glance encompasses the deep past of Braudel\u2019s first category – thousands of years, while considering the evenement-court-duree<\/em> \u2013 a what next constructed from weeks and days? In Drawing as Erratic<\/em>, 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 \u2013 making and unmaking in ways that function as correlates to glacial processes. This state of flux seems central to Casey\u2019s practice. Casey\u2019s drawings, informed by the deep past, \u2018operate\u2019 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.<\/p>\n In his essay, With Painting: Spectatorship. Temporality and Modes of Address, <\/em>Tom Palin<\/strong><\/span> asks how past, present and future operate in the interpretive moment of painting\u2019s address. Using Tolstoy\u2019s short parable, The Three Questions<\/em>(1885), Palin develops a phenomenological argument that identifies the \u2018now\u2019 as a Heideggerian and hermeneutic clearing – Lichtung<\/em>, 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 \u2013 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\u2019s address can be felt with full force as the pure datum of lived experience, what Hal Foster describes as a \u2018sensuous particularity of experience in the here-and now\u2019.[16]<\/a><\/p>\n Painting\u2019s address in James Quin\u2019s <\/strong><\/span>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 \u2018open\u2019 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<\/em>. Quin\u2019s text for Temporalities <\/em>examines multiplicity, repetition and timelessness through Deleuze, Bergson, and Benjamin.<\/p>\n According to media theorist and philosopher, Boris Groys, an obsession with our own contemporaneity marks us as different from all of the multiple now\u2019s that have preceded us. [17]<\/a>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 <\/em>site, offer little by way of answers but will hopefully help to provoke more of what all visual artists respond to\u00a0 \u2013 Timely Questions.<\/p>\n James Quin.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n