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Summary Themes of Contemporary Art - Ch4: Time
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Summary of the book: themes of contemporary art. Contains the entire chapter four: time.
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Jean Robertson - Themes of Contemporary Art - Chapter 4: Time- Human awareness of time is deeply tied to our consciousness of our own bodies.
- Art that considers how time is counted and calculated is at the heart of many
significant contemporary works. Conceptual artist On Kawara takes counting time
into the extreme by his works, like his today-series, existing of a painting each day.
Every painting reveals where the artist was when painting it.
- Another way of measuring time can be seen in The Brown Sisters by photographer
Nicholas Nixon. He portrays the sisters every year for forty years. Time is stated by
noting physical changes. The inevitability of human mortality is underlined, but the
overall sisterhood is stressed.
- Our awareness of time comes from personal experiences, societal concepts and
traditions and also from the natural world. In cultures worldwide, the development
of calendars was based on cycles in nature.
- Time is profoundly important in art as a subject, theme and medium.
Changing Views of Time
- Social and technological changes, as well as changes in our understanding of the
physical and psychological universes we inhabit, are reshaping the ways we perceive
and conceive time.
- Linear time provides a view of history as a progression and an improvement over the
past.
- Our concept of time has been altered by the spread of networks that offer
instantaneous information. Social media and the internet shrink space and change
our perception of the fabric of time. This makes us lose our ability to put events in
any temporal or historical context.
- The pace at which time moves within its structure can seem to fluctuate subtly or
dramatically (time can fly by or pass very slow).
- Time’s flow is not a fixed constant and because of the relativity of time, we always
face the decision of what frame of reference to use.
- Some artists claim that time does not exist outside of our own world of history.
- Nowadays, many have, caught up in the matrix of social media, the constant need to
to check for new messages and postings.
Time and Art History
- Time is a vital theme in art history, many artworks tackled the mysteries of time,
particularly the prospects of death, like for example in vanitas-paintings.
- Keeping track of time has long been important to people, for example through
Medieval books of hours. Public clocks began to appear in the 14th century. With
increasing industrialization, people needed to be able to keep track of time more
precisely; speed also became part of the equation. Motion and speed become
important aspects of the representation of time in art, like in impressionism, which
aims at catching moments.
- Joel Meyerowitz, photographer, created a series of photographs showing the
southern view of Manhattan out his studio window. They show the changing patterns
of color and light in the sky and on the expanse of buildings.
- The sense of time that different works of art express can vary widely, in cultures and
religions.
, - Artists also often created art that serves as a visual time machine to the past or
future. Artists who time-travel in their imaginations often tell a story set in that other
time Art history provides a multitude of examples of narrative art, including live
events, but also in static forms like paintings and sculptures.
- A technique for this is a format that represents two or more scenes or incidents from
the same story: an episodic format; like tryptic in the Christian world.
- Episodic art today is seen in comic books.
- But most Western painting since the perfection of linear perspective during the
Renaissance has represented a narrative as events within a unified pictorial space.
More often, artists used linear perspective to render just one important scene from a
story in which the characters are frozen at a dramatic, ideal moment.
- Photography has a special capability for using motion and speed to represent time. It
can reflect the pace of modern life.
- The experiments in still photography and film, which linked the perception of time
with movement in space, paralleled new concepts of time emerging early in the 20 th
century. Meanwhile, cubists fractured time and space in their paintings and futurists
painted a sequence of views of moving subjects. Surrealists slowed time down.
- The passage of time itself also plays a direct role in our thinking about art history. In
some sense, each work remains forever contemporary.
- Time alters the interpretation and theorization of works of art.
Representing Time
- Artists have contemplated the passage of time as well as the nature of time, and
have expressed their thoughts in various forms. Artists working with static media
must find means other than actual movement to represent time. Artists might also
use symbolism to represent time, for example by depicting a clock.
- Time becomes a medium whenever an artwork is not static but moves and
changes. Sometimes the movement is actual, like a moving sculpture, sometimes it’s
an optical illusion, like in a film.
- Time based artforms are central in the current art scene. The term time arts, is used
to refer to performance art and video art. Works don’t always have to reflect time as
a theme, it can also be as an embodiment.
- The film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, called Der Lauf der Dinge, embodies time
by a sequence of events, a chain reaction. Time is not a narrative. It comes close to
representing a real-life experience of time.
- In Heide Fasnacht’s sculpture Demo, time is represented as a single instant made
permanent in the form of a sculpture. It freezes a split second in time, suspending
the explosion of a building in midair. It is one of a series of stop-action sculptures.
The dimension of time is manipulated on multiple levels.
Time as a Medium
- When time functions as a medium, the artist makes the variability or plasticity of
time itself an integral component of the artwork. Performance art is an example.
- Kinetic art is also an ancient form that requires the artist to consider time as a
medium: art that contains moving parts. Physical parts of the art move while
someone is watching.
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