What Is a Temporal Art?

Time in the History of Art, 2018

For several years now, the problematisation of time has been at the forefront of debates in art history. According to the editors of this volume, Keith Moxey and Dan Karlholm, this problematisation offers a way to revive the discipline from its current crises: namely, its perceived irrelevance within the contemporaneity of the present (1). Rather than retaining its traditional focus on putting art objects in their proper chronological places-a focus reinforced by a preoccupation with context (the social, economic, political circumstances under which a work was made)-art history might instead, by embracing the temporal qualities presented by the work/image such as 'anachrony' and 'heterochrony', affirm its relevance for a present that sees itself as 'post-historical' (1). In this way, art history could loosen its inscription as a practice of history still laden with outmoded expectations of objectivity, contextualism, chronological positioning and the 'Hegelian model of progress', to become a reflection on time that is more responsive to the heterogeneous actualities of contemporary practice, discourse and experience. This transformation, Moxey and Karlholm suggest, would proceed through a foregrounding of the singular questions posed by the artwork/image over the broad structures of historical inquiry. With the affirmation that art/image is always more than, or other than, art history, the art historian's leading questions would become: 'what if visual art is in a position to explain and expand history rather than vice versa? What if the artwork grounds history?' (1) The question of the time of art history is thus guided by a questioning of the time of art. Time in the History of Art adds to the plethora of volumes published in the last decade that examine the temporality of art and art history: Georges Didi-Huberman's masterful studies of the anachronistic being of images (such as The Surviving Image:

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.

The question of time has been at the forefront of art historical investigation for several years. The value of Time in the history of Art is in bringing together a conceptually, methodologically and thematically diverse range of viewpoints to present the range of problematics at stake in the questioning. The collection is, however, symptomatic of the challenges and pitfalls of art historical attention to time. First, sustained and analytical attention to philosophies of time are obscured in favour of descriptions of the temporal complexity of artefacts/images/artworks. Thus, despite claims to the contrary, the underlying conceptual frameworks and models of time (including the much-maligned model of chronology) persist. Second, the questioning of time is detached from the questioning of other fundamental presuppositions of art historical study – such as knowledge, representation and fact – and as such only partially enacts the critique of art historical thinking that it claims to stage.

Past and Present, 2019

Transatlantica

Ursula Frohne, Mona Schieren, Jean-François Guiton (Hg.), »present continuous past(s)« Media Art. Strategies of Presentation, Mediation and Dissemination, Wien, New York: Springer Verlag 2005, S. 22-35, 2005

This initiative was made possible thanks to the institutional and personal support of the many people involved in the successful launching of the symposium in Bremen and its subsequent publication. We wish to express deep appreciation to the authors who graciously contributed their essays to this volume. Our sincere gratitude goes to the University of the Arts Bremen and the International University Bremen whose substantial financial support and organizational infrastructures made the conference and this publication possible. Special thanks are dedicated to Prof. Peter Rautmann's and Markus Wortmann's enduring trust in the projects' successful emergence. Furthermore we wish to extend our gratitude to the Filmbüro, Bremen, specifically to Klaus Becker for supporting the symposium and its publication, as well as to The MARS Exploratory Media Lab represented by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss for additional financial backup of the book. Finally the editors wish to acknowledge the translators' engagement and the editorial assistance by Kathryn Gentzke and Jörg Meyer, as well as the numerous individuals who worked behind the scenes and contributed to the exhibition and the publication with their valued professionalism and congenial spirit.

We cannot really coherently trace the origins of art to a definite focal point. Since this is quite impossible to do, we can consider a hypothetical focal point, or nucleus, for the emergence of art as practice. All cultural practices are set in stone by repetitive performance, and we can consider the concretization of art to stem from the same. In order to understand how art reaches a point where it is ephemeral, it is imperative to look at how art evolved with time, and changes in social context. (Dziamski 12) The 'magical nucleus' of art, as described by Ludwinski, gave rise to several techniques and forms, which included the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Neo-Classical. These styles persisted in the cultural framework of mankind for quite a long time, a century or two to be slightly more precise. In the 19 th Century, forms such as Romanticism, Realism and Symbolism came about. All of these were well-defined, and seemed to stick to a particular structural framework when it came to their content. The 20 th Century marked a turning point in the evolution of art, with movements such as Modernism, which is characterized by its vehement desire to break out of the box, and the avant-garde movement. During the era of the avant-garde, the notion of art was torn into different varying perspectives that aimed at defining what the true nature of art actually is. This modified and morphed the notion of art itself, and left a lot of critics dumbfounded. Duchamp's ready-mades are exemplary of this avant-garde aesthetic, and were widely considered as anti-art till the emergence of the neo-avant-garde, which defined and concretized the definition of the

The Medieval Discourse, 2003

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.

2020

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

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2014

Reflections on the relationship of aesthetics to politics tend to circle, almost compulsively, around a relatively stable set of conceptual oppositions, inherited from German philosophies of the late 18th century. This essay proposes an expansion of the theoretical terms of the debate by extending the field of transcendental aesthetics into the domain of historical temporalization. Fundamental art-historical categories may thereby be incorporated, philosophically transformed, into ‘aesthetics’ as forms of historical temporalization: avant-garde, modern, contemporary. The essay expounds two theses, in particular: 1. The historical subsumption of the temporality of the avant-garde by the temporality of the modern: the modern stands to the avant-garde as the negation of its politics by the repetition of the new –‘the new as the ever–same’; 2. the historical subsumption of the temporality of the modern by ‘the contemporary’: the contemporary stands to the modern as the negation of the d...

International Journal of Culture and History (EJournal), 2017

The proposed paper for the Conference is the insight into Latvian artist Jekabs Bine (1895-1955) life and creative work during 20th century first half. Jekabs Bine was one of the artists of the interwar period who focused on idealized depicting of the Latvian image and search for Latvian identity in the legacy of the past. All my research aim is regional identity, going through politics, history and art. How changes of political powers during the first half of the 20th century affected an artist who strongly believed in Latvia's identity. I am deeply interested in researching what was an artist's contribution and role in the making of the Latvian identity? Bine's life and work phenomenon is based on the fact, that the artist dedicated all his life and creative work to find and study the Latvian national identity, in spite of regular political regime shifts in the first half of 20th century. Being politically and socially active about sharing his national beliefs, Bine's personal character traits and success made it possible not only to escape from the Soviet repression, but also to receive international awards and recognition, as well create significant art works in Latvian history of art in the first half of 20th century. The aim of the paper is to reveal the circumstances and qualities of this artist's language in cultural, political and historical context. The research includes the artist's creative experience and the working conditions in the first period of Latvian independence (1918-1940), then followed by the first Soviet occupation (1940-1941), then the German occupation time (1941-1944) and the Latvian inclusion into the Soviet Union (1944). This situation raised the issues of the importance about how artist's creative activities make an impact on the environment and how the environment affects the artist's ability to create and express

Journal of Media Practice, 2010

2011

Visual Arts have started from Antiquity to confront themselves with ideas of Science. We are interested here with the “Science of Vision”, that creates those tools which make us able to represent (even if partially) the “reality” in which we live. In XX Century, Photography, Cinema and Digital Art have opened completely new possibilities of interaction. The aim of this paper is to discuss shortly this issue and present the artwork “Geometric man”.

Renaissance and Reformation, 2016