When Space is Time. The Rhetoric of Eternity: Hierarchy and Narrative in Medieval and Renaissance Art (original) (raw)
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The role played by temporality in the affectivity and interpretation of art has been, in general, an area long and unjustly neglected. This is an omission that I wish to begin to redress in the course of this article. I want especially to comment upon medieval and renaissance art, treating them as key periods in the history of Western art in terms of their open and frequent use of temporal potentials for the furtherance of narrative and other rhetorical, that is, persuasive, ends. Such potentials were to become hidden, employed with terms of temporal presence and belief (and not simply as the external witness of a given narrative process or sacral event). (iii) The two previous stages should permit historians and cultural anthropologists to work upon reconstructions of devotion, meditation, the mentalité of a given artwork's implied audience, and their relations of collective self-recognition or construction of identity. The issue is one of achieving a viewpoint from within a community sharing a pattern of rhetoric, a code of communication.
Time is of the essence: histories, bodies and art
Art History, 2002
Book reviews are always late. Rushing for the deadline, you are already behind time ± the book was conceived, written, designed, printed and published long before you reached it and whatever you write follows on, belatedly. Mieke Bal's Quoting Caravaggio first appeared in hardback in 1999 and so this review is particularly belated in one sense. Yet perhaps this is strangely fitting for a volume which counters any sense of self-assured linear chronology through a sustained engagement with time, quotation, duration and art. If, as Martin Davies argued, the end of the twentieth century was marked by a tragic, selfimposed lateness, a perpetual sense of coming after the event and being left in its wake, 1 Bal's volume provides a strategy for moving beyond belatedness towards a material encounter with history and cultural memory which thinks of temporality as the entanglement of subject and object. Reading this book, you are invited to participate in histories, to make present connections with the past, in and of the spatial and bodily movement of time. What is especially significant for art historians in this encounter is the fact that Quoting Caravaggio enables its readers to engage in its arguments by taking art, history and the histories of art seriously. Quoting Caravaggio focuses on the work of art, attending closely to what art does, rather than what it is. This subtle shift of emphasis has far-reaching ramifications both within the book and beyond its borders. For instance, Bal's volume is beautifully illustrated, yet it is not an illustrated history, if what is meant by that is a text-based thesis on space, time, subjects and objects, lavishly`decorated' by pictures, themselves reduced to texts and`read' in support of abstract arguments. Neither Bal's emphasis upon semiotics, nor her careful visual analysis, suggest that art might be subsumed by text; her argument is far more compelling, pointing towards a position beyond the binary logic which sets word and image apart, and calling for a fuller recognition of the knowledges which are produced by the materiality of art. This stronger position is mapped early in the work, when Bal argues that art works need to be understood as`theoretical objects':`I wish to suggest that such works can be construed as theoretical objects that``theorize'' cultural history. This theorizing makes them such instances of cultural philosophy that they deserve the name theoretical objects.' (p. 5) Quoting Caravaggio unfolds over eight chapters, each tackling a complex conceptual problem around histories, time and the meanings materialized by art. Throughout the volume, art works ± in the stronger sense of the term. Art is never the mute hand-maiden of theory, awaiting the voice of an empowered interpreter to bring it to life; in every configuration of ideas, images and texts, the material call to the sensory, corporeal roots of subjectivity and cognition are brought to bear upon the structure of the argument. Conceived as a theoretical object, art is demonstrated to have an extraordinary capacity to make ideas, and make them. Thinking through and with art renegotiates the parameters of meaning so that spatial embodiment in the world can be seen as a critical precondition of knowledge and the communication of ideas. As Bal writes in the fourth chapter of the volume, meaningful spatiality is intimately entwined with corporeality and location; the embodied subject of history and knowledge does not exist in an empty space, but in a meaningful world: REVIEWS
Aesthetic Forms through Time and in Time-based Arts
In this essay, I analyse how it is possible that aesthetic forms can survive through history and genres. In the debate about the historicity of the aesthetic experience, the two main approaches differ on a fundamental point. On one hand, the symbolic theory, based on the cultural tradition (see from Gadamer to Danto), points at the recognition of the proper conceptual contents of the aesthetic properties in order to explain the possibility of the experience of an artwork. On the other hand, there is the post-structuralist theory, for which in the perception both the senses and their means (see C. A. Jones) intervene. This theory asserts that the medium, previously any conceptual mediation, is responsible for the most significant effects in the aesthetic experience. I will argue why both theories are unsatisfying. The idea I want to defend, and which I will ground with a cognitive model based on biological and neurophysiological investigations, is that there are aesthetic mechanisms that can significantly affect our perception to make it focus upon some specific sensitive properties of the object. These properties are neither merely formal nor are sings for symbols, but are perceptively meaningful and, as such, can orientate the aesthetic experience to concrete symbols or meanings. In doing so, it will be possible to understand why some signs or properties (aesthetic forms) are used along art history in relation to some meanings or topics (like Gombrich suggested). (...)
Facing the real. Timeless art and performative time
This contribution analyzes the uses of time linked to materials in contemporary art practices. In the first part of the argument I consider the significance of the contemporary turning away from the normative idea that time should be external or non-intrinsic to fine or visual artworks. The change in mentality concerning the value of time in these works of art has been especially transforming among artists and opened up new opportunities for their creative work. I am particularly interested in the possibilities of an aesthetic translation of the human experience of time into the so-called spatial artworks through the intervention of changeable, non-permanent or non-lasting materials. When time ceases to be seen as a destructive element whose intervention should be avoided, or as a simple subject that the picture tries to depict, it can then be regarded as any other artistic material or as working inside the artistic materials as an active element that can attain a high impact on the final solution of the artistic process. Consequently, artists, viewers, art conservation institutions and so on ought to acknowledge that the temporal nodes should always count as a significant aesthetic component and that the performative temporal dimension is intimately linked to the amplification of the material possibilities in the creative process. In connection with this, I discuss the blurring of the di erence between the real and the representational in art practices and how that affects the very presence of temporal dimensions. The paper concludes with the proposal of a new temporal level in works of art that modifies (our temporal understanding of) the identity of the work.
Event, Eventing, Eventuality: reflecting on the 'fusion of horizons' in works of art
University of Sydney, 2019
The aim of this practice-based research project is an attempt to understand the perceptual space that occurs when a viewer encounters a work of art. More specifically, it reflects on the in-between space that occurs when viewers interact with artworks that draw on historical events to explore violent conflicts, death and commemorations. The thesis expands on contemporary notions of interpretations with a particular focus on the non-linguistic factors that may convene in the aesthetic experience. It has a dual outcome, consisting of creative and written components. The creative component, Shifting Horizons, is a body of work that was inspired by ancient Chinese burial sites. The artworks are a meditation on cross-cultural burial practices with a particular focus on interaction with the natural environment. As such, they engage with the tension between human transiency and the endurance of the natural environment. By evoking remains of the dead in the landscape, the artworks highlight the notion that landscapes are infused with significant historical dimensions. In its particular way, this body of work is an intermixing of symbolic means employed to point out that in contrast to the surviving fragments of the relics unearthed in the burial pits, the natural world is not a dead world, and perhaps it is most essential to the survival of human life. In making this body of work, I wish to suggest that works of art can act as a potentially transformative vehicle within a wide range of discourses. This is further explored in the written component - Event, Eventing, Eventuality. The text, which is concurrent to the creative component, applies the perspective of hermeneutical aesthetics to reflect on the determinants that may shape the encounter with a selected corpus of contemporary artworks. In addition to critically reflecting on these artworks, the writing draws on texts by a group of scholars – Heidegger, Gadamer, Benjamin, Serres, Deleuze and more - to examine relevant concepts that have been identified in the course of the research. Moreover, this thesis suggests that applying a hermeneutic approach in combination with other, perhaps incongruous, thinkers in the critical traditions, can enrich the processes of interpretations and understanding that are central to qualitative inquiry in general, and particularly so to the discipline of fine arts.
Analytic Aesthetics and the Dilemma of Timelessness
This essay examines certain assumptions underlying Anglo-American " analytic " aesthetics, and more specifically the areas of that discipline that concern themselves with the nature and significance of art. The issues considered here are seldom discussed by analytic philosophers of art themselves – a matter to be regretted, as I will argue – but they are, nevertheless, of a quite fundamental kind and tell us much about the nature of the discipline, the presuppositions on which it is based, and, as I shall argue in the concluding stages, certain factors that isolate it from the world of art as we now know it. The dilemma I address here also affects the other major school of thought in modern aesthetics – the " Continental " school – but in that context it assumes a somewhat different form which would require separate consideration. To keep discussion within manageable proportions, the focus here is placed principally on the analytic school, a limitation that is perhaps less serious than it might seem given that this approach to the philosophy of art is currently quite influential not only in Anglophone countries but elsewhere as well. The dilemma in question concerns the relationship between art (understood in the general sense of the term) and the passing of time, and to avoid possible confusion, it is important to begin by clarifying what is at stake. The issue here has nothing to do with the function of time within works of art – for example, the ways in which the passing of time might be represented in film or the novel, or the role of tempo in music. Those questions are doubtless valid and important and, as one might expect, philosophers of art discuss them periodically, some employing the term " temporal arts " to identify art forms such as music or poetry in which time seems to play a prominent role. The present discussion, however, concerns the external relationship between art and time, that is, the effects of the passing of time – of history in the broadest sense of the term – on those objects, whether created in our own times or in the distant past, that we today call " works of art ". Given that from the moment of their creation, and whether the creator wills it or no, works of art are, like all other objects, immersed in the world of change – changing values, changing beliefs, changing ways of life – how are they affected, if at all? The question is not, of course, about physical change. Objects such as sculptures and paintings are as vulnerable to damage as any others, and if
This paper will explore the notion of James E. Young's 'counter-monument' (1992) as a catalyst to identify the use of temporality in contemporary artworks addressing the issue of memory and historical change. Young defines the counter-monument as the display of new monuments, initially in Germany, that can be defined by a range of both formal and conceptual patterns and characteristics which challenge the traditional monument's iconography. One of the main features in such memorials is the use of temporality as an agent to activate memory in the viewer, a feature also embraced by contemporary artists. Artists working in this field have generated an aesthetic that instils time experiences on the spectator. As a result, a major re-articulation of temporal categories takes place, in which art, memory and memorial practices merge, stemming from the perspective of the present. The works of Micha Ullman, Christian Boltanski, Rachel Whiteread, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Shimon Attie and Miroswla Balka are just some examples of contemporary artists working in this field and will be used to explore temporality and its relation to space, memory and historical change. Their artworks represent an undesirability of leaving the past and present behind, as well as the related requirement to figure out the most productive way not to leave these temporal categories behind. A formal and conceptual analysis concluding in an iconographic examination of the aforementioned artworks will enable me to assess their social, cultural and aesthetic value and explain the equivalence they produce between the temporalization of space and the spatialization of time.