Art and Time

 CHAPTER 1  Empirical Time and Imagination

 "Even the physical identities of works of art, as phases of metamorphic processes themselves, only survive as standing waves of form during the continued existence and coherence of their materials, and then return into the continuum like the sounds of speech. Since we can only recognize change as a function of some kind of continuum, even if only of our own attention, works of art need to be composed of shapes which can read as time-sequences of different kinds."
pg. 19 

 "We need to be on our guard against allowing our noun-based languages to warp our understanding of the reality we experience as time. What we name as "time" weaves together complex threads of highly elusive experiencing, remembering, and anticipating, most of which are not accessible to our everyday consciousness."

"There are good reasons for believing that the science fiction notion of physical time-travel forward or backward is a illusion generated by the intrinsically spatializing language of mathematics. . . to abolish time and transcribe it into the terms of space alone (as is currently fashionable) represents a failure of the scientific imagination..."
 pg. 23

"Information science recognizes that even to speak natural laws as though they exist absolutely, independent of mankind, is a sort of confidence trick. Nature is far too complex for the human mind to grasp. All we can do is observe isolated fragments of it, and then imagine representative models that are simple enough for us to make use of. . . every phenomenon we interpret as a spatial entity we can only know and explore over some period of time, however brief, during which parts of it will have changed."
pg. 24

"The basic fact is that we can witness and study arrangements of form in space, but changing arrangements in time we can only infer through memory."
pg. 25

"We do have general verbs for some time-shapes evoking feelings: 'undulate,' 'swoop,' 'bump along,' 'syncopate,' 'collide'; and some adverbs do the same: 'gently,' 'abruptly,' 'feebly,' 'lazily.' Time-shapes in visual-tactile arts can convey similar intuitions in their own particular terms. Our minds contain a huge reservoir of all these kinds of analogies, and others as well. Ordinary empirical life and pragmatic activity call upon only some of them. The rest lie dormant, unless the arts set them resonating and bring them to life, giving us access to lost regions of ourselves—especially those involving time—and producing the special aesthetic sense of radiant insight."  

"...imagery inevitably establishes internal connections that we can only experience through time and as implying time. . . What artists do is set up in the physical terms of their own media such 'poles,'
which visitors scan over through time to build up their image of the whole work."

"We apprehend the continuum of time and its energies according to four principal modes, each of which acts as a matrix of its own possibilities. . . All the arts—including the static arts—succeed aesthetically when their shapes evoke and combine types of form  specific to each of the modes of time as vividly as possible, although individual artists and cultures may tend to lean toward one or another. The modes are: duration, continuity, succession, and change.They fall into two pairs, each reflecting a particular perspective upon the world. The first pair emphasizes time's continuous, diachronic, and irreversible onward flows; the second the transverse spreading of the flows across space, without which we should never be able to develop any mental image of the world beyond our own immediate experience. In a sense, being fully human consists of being aware of time in all four of its modes.
pg. 26

"Succession means that synchronic grid-arrangements in the universe are abstracted and 'stacked' in a specific and unchangeable sequence, rather like the frames-per-second of which a movie film consists. We tend to think of successive frames as helping to transmit lines of cause-and-effect to following frames. Change means that each successive arrangement is recognizably different from its predecessor in the stack, normally because it succeeds it; and it remains in effect for some span of duration long enough to be recognized as different."
pg. 29

"Western cultures have given such dominance to the second pair of modes, succession and change, that some people have even tended to think of the phenomenal world as a succession of momentary spatial spreads, each changed instantaneously by an imperceptible jump from the last. This idea is canvassed in modern cosmological science. Similarly, one strand of Muslim philosophy interprets the changing world as God continuously creating a repeated succession of total, momentary universal spreads which our faculties are too coarse to discriminate. So miraculous appearances present present no problem, and individual lines of cause and effect are merely apparent. Buddhism also see the world as a series of apparent spreads in this momentary mode; but it holds that they appear in response to the restless grasping of unpacified minds through an immense web of interrelated causality and relationship. The arts of these last two cultures have been profoundly affected by their views of time."
pg. 31

"There is another broad and inclusive idea which treats time as an endless complex of colossal cycles. India, the homeland of Buddhism, developed imagery of immense sequences of universes, containing worlds as numberless as the sand grains of the Ganges, appearing and disappearing like bubbles. Each world in each universe contains, and endures for, its own inconceivably vast span of time. The spans may overlap, but each seems to pass through its own phases of change, growth, and decay. . . Each begins with a 'Golden Age,' after which it degrades progressively until its particular creation is brought to an end. During each cycle virtually the same events repeat themselves, the sheer vastness of each cycle exhausting in human terms all possible modulations and metamorphoses of event: an interesting image of infinity. Reflecting such beliefs, the Indian arts aimed to convey vastness of time and space."

"Images of cyclic time developed in other cultures, presumably for similar reasons. Among them were the Aztec society, whose gigantic 'Sun Stone' is one of the most impressive physical images of the idea we know."

"One particularly interesting insight expressed by Chinese Taoist writers, which was independently formulated by the great European theologian Meister Eckhart (who dies ca. 1327-28),  is that the moment just passed away is no nearer to us in the context of the eternal past than any moment thousands of years ago. Such views suggest that the sustained line we now think of as cosmic history is a human fiction generalized from our individual experiences of living."
pg. 32

 CHAPTER 2: Artistic Imagery of Time

"All human communications formulate and set out an arrangement of sensuous shapes which endures as long as necessary,  apparently unchanged. Other people can then read and respond to those external shapes by forming and structuring a matching mental imagery...The important point is that the communication should remain apparently unchanged physically long  enough for the response to happen. The communication becomes a seemingly extended present which, unlike the actual transient present, can be revisited, scanned many times over and studied. The materials in which the painter or sculptor works are expressly intended to retain the shapes they are given for relatively long time-spans, so they can be visited and read by many people, perhaps repeatedly. Their material shapes exist only as modifications in the gross identities of physical substances."
pg. 33


"As a verb, to 'abstract' is active, meaning 'draw out,' which implies not only some constant element which is isolated and drawn out, the abstraction, but also an existing matrix from which it is drawn out. What is drawn out is a single category indicator or analogical bracket recognized as recurring among a group of concrete instances, and which we classify for some practical purpose by means of the abstraction alone. This constant which we abstract from a series of actual instances identifies a class and is not itself an actual instance of what it represents."

"...abstractions are deemed to be intrinsically impersonal and somehow absolute, more valid and 'real' than the continuum from which real 'instances' are isolated. Logic and the sciences operate with abstract concepts, such as number, genus, and species, which represent relationships, not objects, but can be applied to all sorts of entities assumed to be concrete. Such concepts are usually based upon and profoundly conditioned by what humans identify as distinct and static objects in relation to themselves as subjects. This procedure obliterates experience of the continuum, which may be available in the actual instances represented by a given abstraction."

". . . history...remains essentially abstract narrative about generalized concepts of people, process, event—and hence art—which were in their individual reality radically different from each other. . . reflects the nature of time as succession and change, not as continuum."
pg. 36

"...'concrete universals' embrace and include all the possible instances of given shapes and colors we can individually encounter. Each universal identifies a characteristic percept of personal knowing, according to which we interpret what we see. It constitutes an overall unity, a whole, which appears diffracted through many different things and contexts during each individual's lifetime. In a sense universals are 'prior' to our individual experience of our instances, and so actually help structure our perception of them. Universals may well reflect essential functions of the human brain, in that both 2-D and 3-D shapes, in a way comparable with colors, may correspond to mental constructs rooted in structuring modes of the brain's activity. In this case, too, each universal of shape and color which the 'forms' of art match would be prior to experience, not an 'abstraction' form it. Abstractions are not instances of what they categorize, as are the material shapes of which the arts consist."
pg. 37

"A familiar example of a primitive universal that we inwardly know and that is readily projected is the layout of the human face: eyes, nose, mouth, full-face, or profile. We easily recognize a face in cracks on the wall, an outstanding rock face, the shadowed foliage of trees. Such apparitions are usually called 'simulacra.' We are able to correct and reinterpret such misplaced universals if they are not reinforced by others."

"Examples of artistic universals are: tactile melonlike volumes which may appear in fruits, human limbs, and ceramic vessels; branchings which may appear among growing trees, shapes of lightning, and spreads of river tributaries; nonsymmetrical entities such as triangular layouts, which may appear, say, between tree branches, objects laid on a tabletop, or in folds of cloth. We recognize coherent objects and their artistic projections as aggregates of various kinds of such differentiating universals. Among these, often overlooked entirely, are the asymmetrical universal Gestalten of time. Examples of these are the characteristic diachronic movement-Gestalten by which we recognize one kind of waving branching from another, steam from smoke, or identify a patch we see on the ground as either a wind-blown leaf or a fluttering bird. Such contrasts are what establish the characters of individual universals." 
 pg. 38

"Universals can also be conceived as brackets framing and linking sections of the overall unity of our whole universe which our pragmatic repertoires of abstractions ignore; in fact, even though unrecognized and noncanonical, such universals authenticate the coherence of all our thought and reasoning within sectors of that greater whole. They cross the boundaries of difference and contrast we set up for strictly logical and pragmatic purposes. Thus to recognize universals and build them together could raise image structures to higher stages of coherence."

"While neither voiced sounds nor written words are actual instances of what they mean, visual tactile arts present shapes that only mean anything by being readable as instances of universals, carrying overtones of feeling. These arts can only project kinetic universals by laying them out in terms that are physically spatial and generally static; these only become kinetic when, as with the text in books, we read them over sequentially through time."
pg. 39


"People often assume that a picture or sculpture is only meant to produce a single overall impact, like commercial advertising art which has to overwhelm competing images and capture the wandering, brief attention span of possible consumers. Even some artists have fallen victim to this shallow attitude in competing for purchasers' notice in mixed shows, justified in the name of 'irony' often enough. But this has never been the aim of more profound art, which is rich with variety and invention a visitor can respond to by repeated scanning over a period of sustained attention . . . a work always needs time, perhaps repeated visits, to transform one's inner state."
pg. 44

CHAPTER 3: Lived Time

"To treat art as a documentary record like any other gives it a sense of remoteness from life, of alienation from the sensuously coherent world of human space and time within which every artist works..."
pgs. 46-47

"At the root of art's level of lived time lies the fact that every phenomenal thing exists as a complex of metamorphoses of various kinds: living beings, human-made things, through soil and rocks, to the earth itself. We easily lose sight of this fact, which is basic to art's deeper meaning. Its metamorphic rearrangements of materials and its modes of active shaping embody trains of continuity and change."
 pg. 47

"...to concentrate and withdraw our attention from immediate sense impressions, and deliberately structure in our imagination some phase of time into a conscious whole, is a human, rather than an animal, ability. It involves focusing, framing, combining, and holding constant in our image-stream definite sequences of ideas and  forms, perhaps steering them along a particular route. Such imaginative attention is not easy, but it is the basis of all education  and achievement, as well as meditation. It is also the essential basis of making and appreciating art. By its sustained presence a work of art structures our attention."
pg. 49

"...we need to beware of the way our museum mind tends to lump together all sorts of visual-tactile work under the general heading of 'art.' We need to escape this trap and feel our ways into the different patterns of lived time according to which different works were made. An African Songe mask is rooted in an altogether different realm of lived-time experience from an impressionist or abstract expressionist painting. But the fact that the two were made for totally different reasons and sets of values does not mean that we cannot read and respond to a good part at least of the common human universals—including those of time—their languages of form express. It may certainly mean that we need to discover and explore regions of our own buried memory and response we rarely visit...strongest art . . . challenging our prejudices and self-imagery."
pg. 50

"Though one individual may follow on from the discourse of another, perhaps rejecting aspects of the discourse of that predecessor and emphasizing others, none can ever invent an entire language, as Cezanne above all recognized. For historicists to infer that any artist 'anticipates' another because the later artist decided to pick on and iso0late certain aspects of the discourse of the earlier is a teleological error."

 "Rough sketches may reveal lived-time invention in layers of linear thought, succeeding each other as the image developed. This is the particular interest of sketches, with thus present a strong time element within their structure, beyond any other artform."
pg. 52

Chapter 4: Performance or Reading Time

"The paradigm case of the role of scanning in structural perception is described in the theory of color constancy developed my Edwin Land. This theory proposes that individual colors exist only as constructs in the human brain, not as properties of objects. The colors are generated as the eyes scan the visual field, registering changes in degrees of relative intensity as transitions between red, green, and blue. There are the only color int he whole frequency spectrum to which  the cones in the retina of the human eye are sensitive. So individual color areas do not 'exist' independently: the emerge as our eyes scan the whole field as successive, changing combinations of ratios of red, green, and blue intensity, varying relative to the others. Thus each individual color is partly a function of the neighboring color areas across which the eyes have read. Boundaries, including black outlines, help to intensify what the mind registers as individual colors by exaggerating transitional difference."

"Painters have long been aware that colors are modified not only by their neighbors, but by their places in reading sequences in particular directions across the surface. Paul Klee, for example, during one phase of his career deliberately constructed 'color melodies' along tracks through the color patches he created. He said he learned this technique from Muslim painting, where a similar practice is consciously cultivated. " 

"Art formulates its material resources expressly to direct our scanning procedures and present a second, but organized, nature to us. One of the artist's major skills is to construct scanning tracks based on clearly defined cadences, bot unlike musical scales, and to state them emphatically, even exaggerate them. Clear 'scales' give topic-work part of its coherence, The movements of our scanning (tactile as well as visual) as we read sequences of change and repetitions along continuous "
pg. 65  tracks of attention are what make all artistic surfaces appear 'mobile' or 'energetic,' by virtue of the universals of motion through time they express."
pg. 65

"Major artists build into their scanning tracks a kind hierarchy of importance. They invent principal tracks that gather together groups of subsidiary tracks. These run both along and across 2-D or 3-D areas of differentiated interscan surface, which they articulate. The principal reading tracks are meant to lead the eye of the visitor to encounter principal features of the image in a dramatic order, while subsidiary shapes echo, reinforce, and contribute to the whole effect."

 "What we cal the overall structural coherence of a work (the useful German term is Zusammenhang) is thus a function of the unifying effect of a multitude of coordinated scanning tracks over the artistic sequences, which reveal and condense universals of time. We can see this clearly in the mature work of the French painter Cezanne. This most revered artist severely abstained from adding to his layouts of tone and color any touch of pencil or brush which he could not justify to himself as an element in more than one sequence across the whole picture surface."
pg. 71

"A great virtue of older Indian and Far Eastern views of world and time is that they recognize the forms of both the human inner and cosmic outer to be inseparable at the root. They see what humans witness as outer phenomena as interpretations of an activity in which inner and outer, subject and object, a dialectic elements, neither valid independently of the other. In the West the eighteenth-century German philosopher Kant reasoned abstractly about a somewhat similar view.

Any art springing from a culture that takes the subjective-objective relation as mutual adopts methods of expression which refer as much to the inner as to he outer. Genuine human inner experience includes many things that an abstract outer view totally ignores: particularly the varied and complex experience of actually being human. A basic part of this experience is an intuition of 'nothing' as the background to 'being' in time. Each human entity arrives from what, to it, is 'nothing' into an awareness of a world which reflects its own experience of being in time as continuously passing, yet it recognizes and fears the inevitable return to 'nothing.'"


Art and Time
Philip Rawson
Edited by Piers Rawson
Rosemont Publishing and Printing Corp. 2005