art time and metamorphosis

Art, Time and Metamorphosis

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of questions one can ask about the relationship between art and time. First, there are questions about individual works of art. How is the experience of time portrayed in Rousseau’s Confessions, for example, as compared with A La Recherche du Temps Perdu? Do the paintings of Vermeer or Georges de la Tour possess a sense of stillness and atemporality not found in, say, Rubens or Delacroix? Is the music of many Romantic composers imbued with feelings of nostalgia, or perhaps of aspiration for an ideal future, which is much less evident in Baroque composers such as Vivaldi or Telemann?

These are not simply stylistic questions – questions of artistic ‘technique’. They often go to the very heart of a work’s significance, and one has only to reflect briefly on our experience of time to see why this might be so. For others, our lives are essentially chronologies – a sequence of events, a curriculum vitae; but for ourselves, our past, present and future constitute a much more fluid domain whose components often intermingle, and which rarely take the form of a simple chronology. (André Malraux once described this difference in point of view by saying that we hear the lives of others with our ears but our own lives through our throats.) If one of the functions of art – literature, visual art or music – is to capture our experience as living individuals and not simply as ‘life histories’ perceived from an external vantage-point, then the portrayal of time in a work of art may well be one of its most important and compelling elements, with a significance going well beyond the merely ‘technical’.

There is, however, a second, quite different question one can ask about the relationship between art and time. In this case, one is no longer considering the significance of time in this or that individual work, but the general relationship between art and time – the temporal nature of art. Surprisingly little has been written about this topic in recent times, even in those academic disciplines such as the philosophy of art in which one would most expect to encounter it. A number of interesting aspects of the question are discussed in the present collection of essays. Without trespassing unduly on the ground covered in those contributions, it may however be useful to offer some further comment here as background to the issues raised.

The Western cultural tradition has bequeathed us a conception of the temporal nature of art which is so familiar, and so much a part of how we think about art, that we rarely give it a second thought. We say that a great work of art is one that has ‘lasted’ – unlike an ephemeral work which, like Macbeth’s poor player, struts and frets its hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. By ‘lasted’ we do not of course mean that such works have been able to resist physical destruction. In his recent book What Good are the Arts?, John Carey writes that ‘No art is immortal and no sensible person could believe it was. Neither the human race, nor the planet we inhabit, nor the solar system to which it belongs will last forever. From the viewpoint of geological time, the afterlife of an artwork is an eyeblink…’(1) This remark comprehensively misses the point. Our belief that a (true) work of art ‘lasts’ or ‘endures’ has nothing at all to do with a claim that it is able to resist destruction. (How many great works of the past, one wonders, have been destroyed by wars, natural disasters, iconoclasms, re-use for other purposes, or simple neglect? Indeed, the fragility of many works of art no doubt made them more vulnerable to the effects of time than other more robust objects.) The belief in question is of a quite different order and has to do with the apparent capacity of certain works – a Hamlet, a Mona Lisa, a Magic Flute, for example – not only to impress their contemporaries but also to exert a fascination on subsequent ages, while so many other works have faded into oblivion. It has to do with a power of certain works to transcend time in the sense that, unlike so much else – ranging from the latest fad to beliefs about the nature of man, the gods, and the universe – they are able to escape consignment to what André Malraux aptly terms ‘the charnel house of dead values.’(2)

In a sense, all this is a statement of the obvious: as we have said, the idea that a great work of art ‘endures’ is so familiar to us that we rarely give it a second thought. Yet once we begin to reflect seriously on the proposition, it is surely a puzzling one, and even – if we choose to set aside the abundant evidence in its favour – rather implausible. How, after all, could certain works ‘transcend time’? What precisely does that mean? What property could such works possess that might bring this about? And then, assuming one could answer those questions satisfactorily, what significance might we place on this apparent power to defy the ravages of time, and how might it affect our thinking about the human importance of art? Resolving all these dilemmas is a task beyond the compass of these introductory remarks, but some brief reflections on our Western cultural inheritance, and the world of art as we now know it, may help point the way forward.

It is useful to begin with the Renaissance which was confronted with these questions in a form that made them difficult to ignore. How could it be that the rediscovered works of Greece and Rome – civilisations that had vanished from the face of the earth a thousand and more years ago – seemed suddenly radiant with life, as if, somehow, they had defied the passage of time? What power did these works possess that could make such a thing possible? The answer that was given is familiar to us: the works of Antiquity, like those the Renaissance artists were themselves bringing into being, possessed a demiurgic power called ‘beauty’, and beauty, like the goddess Venus so often chosen as its supreme representative, is ‘immortal’. The works of Antiquity, like the paintings of a Michelangelo or a Raphael, were all works of ‘art’ – a term on which the Renaissance was conferring a new and privileged significance – and each of them bore triumphant witness to the power of beauty to accede to an eternal realm proof against the corrosive powers of time. This thinking was not just the preserve of a handful of intellectuals. It had all the force of a reigning ideology – as powerful and as widely accepted, toute proportion gardeé, as, say, Marxist and post-Marxist explanations of history have been for large numbers of people over much of the past century. Thus, in ending a sonnet with lines such as

Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,

As long as men can breathe and eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee,

Shakespeare was not simply employing a poet’s ‘conceit’. He was expressing a belief that had already become one of the givens of European culture: art and beauty belonged to one and the same realm, and that realm was not subject to the regime of earthly things. It was eternal.

The impression this pattern of thinking has left on Western culture has been deep and lasting. By the eighteenth century when, somewhat belatedly, philosophers began to offer a systematic account of art – to be christened ‘aesthetics’ – the notion of beauty was at the centre of its explanation, and writers took it for granted that the finest works foregathered, along with those of Greece and Rome, in a timeless realm of balance, order and harmony, sometimes called the realm of the beau idéal. In many quarters, moreover, this thinking continues to have its advocates. The vocabulary has altered somewhat, and references to Greek mythology are usually omitted, but for many critics and aestheticians today, art, whether visual art, music or literature, is still explicable essentially in terms of ‘beauty’; and while most writers of this persuasion would, in this materialist age, doubtless shrink from terms such as ‘immortal’, ‘eternal’ or even ‘timeless’, there remains, as we have said, a widespread, if seldom clearly formulated, assumption that a true work of art is one that possesses a capacity to ‘last’ or endure’ which its weaker rivals do not.

The question that confronts us today – the question that largely motivated the conference of which the essays in this volume are the outcome – is whether or not this traditional explanation of the relationship between art and time is still viable, and, if not, what kind of account might be put in its place. For while it seems as true now as it apparently seemed to thinkers in previous centuries that art possesses a peculiar power to endure which other products of human culture do not, the explanation we have inherited from those thinkers has begun to look decidedly threadbare and unconvincing.

Three factors in particular have weakened its hold. The first is the disintegration of the idea of beauty. The proposition that art is explicable in terms of a beau idéal started to lose plausibility in the early decades of the twentieth century when the rubric ‘art’ began to encompass works which no longer seemed to have any connection with such an ideal – that is, when the boundaries of art began to extend beyond Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and their post-Renaissance successors to take in the visual worlds of (for example) Pre-Columbian gods and African masks, modern artists such as Picasso, and pre-Renaissance Western art such as Romanesque sculpture or medieval paintings such as the Isenheim Altarpiece. Advocates of the theory of beauty have, of course, tried to adjust to this new situation by expanding the theory to cover cases such as these, but the result, not surprisingly, has been a concept of beauty so abstract and anaemic that it ceases to be of any explanatory use.

Second, there was the nineteenth’s century’s fascination – which we still largely share – with the idea of history. Though seldom stated simply and clearly, the problem this poses for the traditional explanation of the relationship between art and time is quite straightforward. If something is understood as timeless, then in its essence (one can perhaps make concessions at the margin) it is exempt from change: it is unaffected by the vicissitudes of time and circumstance. If art is timeless, it would therefore be essentially outside history and beyond the reach of history’s explanatory categories. This implication was, unsurprisingly, not acceptable to a number of nineteenth century thinkers. It was challenged very directly by Hegel who placed art firmly within the ambit of history and made it the subject of a teleology – ending, indeed, with art’s demise – and the assaults continued with Taine and Marx and a series of post-Marxist thinkers up to the present day, all of whom have declined to exempt art from the historical process (however conceived). Art, on this view, is fundamentally a creature of its times. No less – and perhaps, some suggest, even more – than all other human activities, it bears the marks of its times, and plays its part in strengthening or subverting dominant ideologies and social arrangements. To locate its essential qualities in a changeless, ‘eternal’ realm removed from the flow of history would be an ‘idealist’ illusion, false to art and history alike.

Serious though it has been, this attack on the notion of timelessness has not been fatal. The argument has its own Achilles' heel which, curiously enough, Marx himself identified, in a passage in the Grundrisse (which, incidentally, many of his followers seem to have overlooked):

...the difficulty is not so much in grasping the idea that Greek art and epos are bound up with certain forms of social development. It lies rather in understanding why they should still constitute for us a source of aesthetic enjoyment and in certain respects prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment.(3)

Due allowance made for a degree of deference to Antiquity which we today would probably regard as excessive (do we still regard Greek art ‘the standard and model beyond attainment’?), the underlying point here is difficult to ignore. The more strongly one insists on the importance of the links between a work and a particular historical context, the greater the difficulty one has in explaining why it should be able to transcend that context and evoke the admiration of subsequent ages, perhaps centuries, or even millennia, afterwards. To choose a different example, Richard III and the countless politico-religious tracts that circulated in Elizabethan England were both, one might say, ‘products’ of the same historical context, but the latter have been long forgotten, except by specialist historians, while Richard III lives on and continues to impress us. History alone, in other words, seems to leave something crucial out of account where the relationship between art and time is concerned. The more heavily and exclusively one relies on it – irrespective of the theory of history one might choose – the more, as Marx seemed to recognise, the temporal nature of art eludes explanation.

Today, however, there is a third factor at work whose implications for the traditional explanation are much more serious. The nature of the problem soon becomes clear if one takes account of the full extent of the realm of art as we know it today. ‘Art’ no longer simply means, as it did for more than four centuries during the reign of the ideal of beauty, the works of the post-Renaissance West and selected works of Greece and Rome. Art today encompasses the works of a wide range of non-Western cultures, many ancient civilizations, and even Palaeolithic times stretching back to the caves of Lascaux, Chauvet and beyond. In addition, it includes periods of Western art itself which were previously regarded with indifference, such as Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic art. How plausible does the notion that of timelessness seem in this new and vastly enlarged world of art? Selected objects from non-Western cultures, such as Africa and Pre-Columbian Mexico began to enter art museums (as distinct from historical or anthropological collections) in the early years of the twentieth century. Yet as we know – even if we easily forget – the West encountered these cultures well before that, and for centuries regarded their artefacts as merely the botched products of unskilled workmanship, or as heathen idols or fetishes. Moreover, even in their original cultural settings, these objects were not regarded as ‘art’ in any sense of the word that resembles its meaning in Western culture today. Their function – their raison d’être – was religious or ritualistic: they were ‘ancestor figures’ housing the spirits of the dead, or sacred images of the gods. The transformation that has taken place over the centuries in cases such as these – from sacred object initially, then to heathen idol or ‘fetish’, and now to treasured work of art, is very difficult to square with any notion of ‘timelessness’ – that is, immunity from change. Time and change seem, on the contrary, to have played a very powerful role, not only in terms of whether or not the objects in question were considered important but also in terms of the kind of importance placed on them. Art as we know it today (and on a reduced time scale, and with certain reservations, the argument applies equally to literature and music) seems, in other words, far less beholden to a quality of timelessness than, as André Malraux has argued, to a capacity for resurrection and metamorphosis, processes in which time has played an integral part.

A further example may help clarify the point. The so-called ‘pier statues’ of biblical figures on the exterior of the cathedral of Chartres are today considered to be among the treasures of world art, on a par with works such as the frescos at Ajanta, the best of Egyptian or Khmer sculpture, and the works of Donatello or Michelangelo. Yet from Raphael onwards all medieval art, including Chartres, was regarded as inept and misconceived (hence, indeed, the term ‘Gothic’) and consigned to an oblivion of indifference where it remained until the end of the nineteenth century. (‘How comprehensively Gothic art was ignored by the nineteenth century!’ André Malraux writes. ‘Théophile Gautier, passing by Chartres around 1845, wrote: “I have not had the time to make the detour to visit the cathedral.” The distance from the road to the cathedral then was four hundred metres.’(4)) The revival of medieval sculpture as art (as distinct from a picturesque adjunct to medieval history) only began in earnest in the early years of the twentieth century – that is, after some three centuries of indifference, not to say contempt. This is not, of course, to condemn those centuries, or to claim that they somehow lacked an ‘appreciation’ of art (an unpromising argument, to say the least, given that the period in question produced many of the major figures of Western art – and aesthetics.) It is, however, to suggest, firstly, that art does not ‘last’ or ‘endure’ timelessly, but rather through a capacity to ‘live again’ despite periods of oblivion; and, secondly, that these ‘renaissances’ (of which the Renaissance was but one example) are inseparable from a metamorphosis. The statues at Chartres were not ‘art’ for the men and women of the thirteenth century for whom they were created, any more than Greek statues of Pallas Athene were ‘art’ for the Athenians who brought offerings to her. They were sacred figures – manifestations of a fundamental Truth – and to place them on equal footing with images from other civilisations (as I have done above) would, for their original beholders, have been unthinkable and doubtless a sacrilege. These works have become ‘art’ for us (and thus comparable with other works) through a metamorphosis in their signification, just as the renaissance of Graeco-Roman works, which were also originally embedded in religious belief, was accompanied by a similar metamorphosis.

This process is most easily discernible over long periods of time, which is why the examples chosen in this discussion have mostly been from the field of visual art where the evidence remaining to us is so much more plentiful. (What do we know of the music of ancient Sumerian civilizations – or even of ancient Greece? What do we know of the poetry of vanished cultures that had no form of writing?) But are we sure that works closer to us in time that seem to have endured timelessly – that is, without perceptible metamorphosis – have in fact done so? Is the Shakespeare who won the applause of audiences in 1600 the same Shakespeare we admire today? He certainly seems to differ from the Shakespeare of eighteenth and nineteenth century audiences, who, it appears, had no objection to his plays being drastically rewritten. Is the music of Vivaldi or Bach that bulks so large in the modern repertoire ‘heard’ in the same way as the Vivaldi or Bach that the Romantics referred to as ‘the old music’? Are we sure that the powerfully inventive, deeply moving Mozart we discover in so many of his later works is the same Mozart the nineteenth century seemed so intent on pigeon-holing as the epitome of ‘classical’ order, balance and harmony? Are we confident, in other words, that works such as these, much closer to us in history, which appear to have been impervious to the effects of time and to have reached us with their original significances intact, have in fact done so? Such works have certainly ‘lasted’ (unlike many others that have not); but how have they lasted? Timelessly, or though a process of metamorphosis?

There is much more to be said on this topic. If our modern concept of art does not depend on the notion of ‘beauty’, on what does it depend? If there was a major expansion in the scope of art in the early years of the twentieth century, what brought it about? If art survives through a process of metamorphosis, how do we explain this capacity – that is, what quality in art makes is possible? And what precisely is the importance of this power of metamorphosis and resurrection for our understanding of the human significance of art? These major questions are beyond the scope of these introductory remarks whose aim has simply been to sketch in the outlines of some of the issues raised by the topic ‘Art and Time.’ As indicated earlier, the topic has suffered from widespread neglect in recent times even in fields such as the philosophy of art in which one would certainly not expect this to be the case. The present volume will perhaps be a first step towards remedying this situation.

(1) John Carey, What Good are the Arts? (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 2005), 148.

(2) André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, Ecrits sur l'art (I), ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 890.

(3) David McLellan, ed., Marx’s 'Grundrisse' (London: Macmillan Ltd, 1980), 45.

(4) André Malraux, Du Musée (Paris: Editions Estienne, 1955), 5. Gautier was an important art critic of the times as well as a poet and novelist.

This essay is the introduction to a collection of essays (see image below) entitled Art and Time recently published by the Australian National University. Jan Lloyd Jones, Paul Campbell and Peter Wylie, (eds.) Art and Time, (Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing 2007). ISBN 9781740971737.

Surprisingly little has been written about [the temporal nature of art] in recent times, even in those academic disciplines such as the philosophy of art in which one would most expect to encounter it.

The belief that a (true) work of art ‘lasts’ or ‘endures’ has nothing at all to do with a claim that it is able to resist destruction ...

... It has to do with a power of certain works to transcend time ...

The answer that was given is familiar to us: the works of Antiquity, like those the Renaissance artists were themselves bringing into being, possessed a demiurgic power called ‘beauty’, and beauty, like the goddess Venus so often chosen as its supreme representative, is ‘immortal’.

The question that confronts us today ... is whether this traditional explanation of the relationship between art and time is still viable, and, if not, what kind of account might be put in its place.

Voodoo mask - Dahomey

Art, on this [historical] view, is fundamentally a creature of its times. No less ... than all other human activities, it bears the marks of its times, and plays its part in strengthening or subverting dominant ideologies and social arrangements.

History alone ... seems to leave something crucial out of account where the relationship between art and time is concerned.

Horses - Chauvet, France. (approx 30,000 BC)

Art as we know it today ... seems far less beholden to a quality of timelessness than, as André Malraux has argued, to a capacity for resurrection and metamorphosis, processes in which time has played an integral part.

Chartres

... Such works have certainly ‘lasted’ (unlike many others that have not); but how have they lasted? Timelessly, or though a process of metamorphosis?