The Art of Time Travel: An 'Insoluble' Problem Solved

Einstein's and Duchamp's work are quoted for their respective redeening of physics and art. e consequences of this redeenition for contemporary art and historical concepts of art are discussed with a focus on creation, creativity, and style. As an illustration, John Ruskin's interpretation of Venetian Gothic and its reference to economic reasoning is confronted with Arthur Danto's concept of a deenition of art. A discussion of Nicola Atkinson-Griith art work 'Secret of the World' concludes the paper. Einstein published his rst papers on his special theory of relativity in. Although Newtonian mechanics works well enough for objects of moderate size and moving at moderate speeds, it is inadequate to describe the motion of very small objects, such as atoms, or very fast ones, such as cosmic-ray particles. Einstein's special theory and the later developed quantum mechanics bridged the gap. In , Einstein announced his general theory of rela-tivity which replaced Newton's theory in describing very large systems and makes possible investigation of distant planetary systems and the universe as a whole. Gravitation was no longer the same. Mass and energy tuned out to be the two sides of a coin: E = mc. e lapse of time is diierent in diierent frames of reference: time became relative. Einstein's work redeened Physics, if not our conceptions of the physical world. In , the freshly created New York-based 'Society of Independent Artists' organized an exhibition to which Marcel Duchamp contributed a urinal entitled e Fountain. e piece carried the signature of a ctional R.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2003

Townsend Center For the Humanities, 1997

This year, since the Center is moving into a second decade and a new space, not to mention century and millennium, at the Center we are particularly interested in visions and versions of the future. Of course beginnings entail endings, and with that conjunction we are already on the turf of this lecture and lecturer. Arthur Danto's recent book on what he calls the "end of art" is importantly future-looking; his talk is importantly past-oriented because it looks back to the book and to a history of art and a history of the history of art that are in his view over and done with. The paradoxes of time are all in a day's work for a philosopher: If time is a measure of movement, as Aristotle thought, doesn't that mean that it must not be moving itself, in which case, it wouldn't be recognizable as time? But if time moves, how can we talk about past time, which is already gone, or the present, which is moving into a future that doesn't yet exist? Art has its paradoxes for philosophers too: Plato and a long line of philosophers have wanted to banish artists from utopia. They do so with good reason, though not necessarily for the reason most often put forward: that artists create, at best, pale imitations of truth and beauty. The philosophers' problem, one suspects, is that the images of art can be as powerful and persuasive as truth and beauty. Arthur Danto negotiates tensions such as these by living and thinking in their midst, mostly with genial good cheer and certainly with great verve. He has come to inhabit a polyglot and cosmopolitan Middle Kingdom of sensibility: art makers, art historians, teachers, philosophers, and critics of art have come to be so bound up with v

Catalogue for exhibition entitled 'How to Construct a Time Machine' (with essays by Mieke Bal, Alfred Jarry, Peter Osborne, and Marquard Smith) at MK Gallery: How to Construct a Time Machine 23 January - 22 March 2015 This January MK Gallery presents How to Construct a Time Machine, an exhibition of over twenty-five historical and contemporary works that explore how artists play with media in innovative ways to transform our experience of time. What is time? How do we order the past, the present, and the future? Why are artists interested in time? How is art a machine, vehicle, or device for exploring time? How is art a means by which time ‘travels’, and how does art permit us to travel in time? Consideration of these and other questions has provided the exhibition rationale for guest curator, Dr Marquard Smith, Head of Doctoral Studies/Research Leader in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London. The show’s title is taken from an 1899 text by the avant-garde French writer, Alfred Jarry, written in direct response to H. G. Wells’ science fiction novel The Time Machine (1895). Wells invented and popularised a distinctively modern, fictional concept of time travel, with the time machine as a vehicle that could be operated ‘selectively’.Jarry’s response crafted a pseudo-scientific fiction that presents the time machine and time travel as an instance of ‘the science of imaginary solutions’. Taking this idea of the time machine, time travel, and perhaps even time itself as an instance of ‘the science of imaginary solutions’, the exhibition is divided thematically across the galleries and includes works by John Cage, Martin John Callanan, Jim Campbell, Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, Mat Collishaw, Ruth Ewan, Tehching Hsieh, On Kawara, the Lumière Brothers, Chris Marker, Kris Martin, Georges Méliès, Manfred Mohr, Melvin Moti, Nam June Paik, Katie Paterson, Elizabeth Price, Sun Ra, Raqs Media Collective, Meekyoung Shin, Maja Smrekar, The Otolith Group, Thomson & Craighead, Mark Wallinger and Catherine Yass. Film work ranges from George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902), an iconic silent movie which follows a group of astronomers as they explore the moon, to Thomson & Craighead’s The Time Machine in alphabetical order (2010), a complete rendition of the 1960s film version of the Wells’ novella re-edited into alphabetical order. Sculptural work includes Mark Wallinger’s Time and Relative Dimensions in Space (2001), a polished stainless steel version of Dr Who’s ‘Tardis’ police box that simultaneously disappears into the space-time continuum and reflects its own surroundings, and Ruth Ewan’s We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be (2012), a decimal clock which divides the day into ten (rather than twenty-four) periods, echoing a bold 18th century French Republican attempt to redefine and rationalise the day. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, designed by Herman Lelie, featuring an extended Introduction by the exhibition’s curator and a translation of Jarry’s How to Construct a Time Machine, together with essays by Dutch cultural theorist and video artist Mieke Bal and radical philosopher Peter Osborne. The exhibition will be supported by a range of related events including tours by the curator and artists, seminars, academic conferences, and film screenings. See more at: http://www.mkgallery.org/exhibitions/#sthash.agPm6s9U.dpuf

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

Addressed to students of the image–both art historians and students of visual studies–this book investigates the history and nature of time in a variety of different environments and media as well as the temporal potential of objects. Essays will analyze such topics as the disparities of power that privilege certain forms of temporality above others, the nature of temporal duration in different cultures,

Is there a distinctively artistic value that works of art have over and above their aesthetic value? No, Dominic McIver Lopes claims in a recent paper. 1 To frame things in terms of the key distinction that Lopes uses, there are many values in art (it can lead to political change, improve our health, and so on). But not all of these are values of art as art. If there is such a properly artistic sort of value, Lopes thinks, then it is simply going to amount to aesthetic value. Lopes's paper thus presents the case for a form of skepticism about any non-aesthetic notion of artistic value. He canvases various non-aesthetic options for underwriting artistic value. Yet none, he thinks, is successful. He sets up a dilemma: One either collapses the distinction between values in art and values of art, trivially taking all values of the former (political, therapeutic, etc.) to be values of the latter. This would, however, deprive the concept of artistic value of its ability to mark off the distinctive value of art as art. Or else-as Lopes prefers-one equates the work's artistic value with its aesthetic value. Either way, Lopes wants us to dispense with any notion of artistic value that is something beyond aesthetic value.

’Pataphysics Unrolled, 2022

This chapter explores ways to approach the question of pataphysics, taking Alfred Jarry’s life and thought as catalysts for thinking about works of contemporary art. The chapter speculates on how Jarry’s science of imaginary solutions might travel alongside the evolution of creative thought, manifesting in the future that is now, following a vision of speculation that “consists of a ‘what if ’ , that treats this unreal navigation in the most rigorous possible way.” Each of examples in this chapter might also be seen as a speculative suspension of creative thinking, exceptions that are sieves that are also time machines that amplify the duration of aesthetic engagement: by taking the imagination literally; by thinking of pataphysics as a friendship; and by examining how a pataphysical imagination can dissolve the boundaries between the speculative and the real.

Depart , 2015

INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK OF AESTHETICS Volume 19, 2017 Edited by Zoltán Somhegyi RETRACING THE PAST Historical continuity in aesthetics from a global perspective, 2017

Balkan Journal of Philosophy, 2023

Art creates a specific relation to time and especially to the present moment. It opens the experience of the present towards its indeterminacy and emergence. On the contrary, AI does not know the present. It recognizes only the past and future. We could even say that artificial neural networks do not "know" time at all. Instead, they know only logical functions which process patterns of information. Yet, what makes time "time" is genuine transformation, which happens outside of the abstract realm of logic. I support these observations by analysing two works of art: Bill Viola's The Raft (2004) and Hito Steyerl's This Is the Future (2019). While artistic creation opens up the intervals "in-between seconds" for an unpredictable and transformative event to occur (The Raft), AI closes these intervals and fastens the future into predictability calculated on the basis of past data (This Is the Future). Although this machinic operation makes the present even more unpredictable and prone to catastrophes, its potential for transformation seems to be withdrawn.

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2010

The paper argues that something is art only if (i) it belongs to a special kind of internal history and (ii) needs to be understood and appreci ated in the light of such history. This goes against both the traditional view that art has a timeless, ahistorical essence and the historicist view that there can be no ahistorical perspective for understanding art. The paper draws on Hegel's view that art needs to be understood through its history, but rejects the idea that the history of art has an end in the double sense of a goal and an end point. It also rejects Arthur Danto's Hegelinspired claim that the ahistori cal essence of art is revealed at the end of its history and opens the door to a natural alliance between philosophers of art and art historians.

Journal of Value Inquiry, 2013

Not everyone can visit the Barnes Collection in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania. Some people can't afford it, others don't have the time to devote to the visit, even if they have the means. There are also restrictions on the number of people who can park in the suburban neighbourhood, and the Barnes home, where the Collection is housed, is just not built for heavy foot traffic. All of these facts have conspired against the Barnes Foundation, responsible for the Collection-they are in financial trouble. The trustees of the Barnes, however, could pursue a strategy that would allow more people, in different parts of the world, to get to see the masterpieces in the Barnes. They could commission the painting of visually-indistinguishable duplicates of the originals, which could then be displayed in different parts of the world. Happily, this should also please the consortium of various interests who are eager to move the Barnes Collection to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. Albert C. Barnes' last will, which included clauses about never moving the artwork, never displaying it in any place other than in the Barnes building, and never selling any of the artwork, could both be respected, while more interested people can see the works of art. What could possibly be wrong with this plan? We can predict the following response. Art critics near and far would condemn the idea with strong language, accusing the trustees of having lost their minds or, if not their minds, then their sensitivity to the value of originalism and authenticity when it comes to paintings. Newspaper headlines in Philadelphia would accuse the trustees of being Philistines. The critics might explain that it is worthwhile seeing the original masterpieces in a museum, that seeing original works of art has value that cannot be had by looking at posters, photographs, web image searches, and so on. Even visually-indistinguishable

An overview of the work of Jean Gebser and unfolding human consciousness as it relates to artistic endeavour

2017