Space and Time in Art

This VERY BIG topic can only be chewed on in small chunks, and that's what I'll offer up here - a small morsel of a very rich meal.

Two-dimensional visual art, which is the form I practice, addresses - or uses - time in a wide variety of ways.  Monet studied how light changes on a cathedral’s façade and in his garden at different times of day and different seasons of the year.  Painting, like his of the cathedral, are sometimes hung in series, one after another in time.  A viewer walking past these separate images is viewing individual moments of light during a sequence of time.  The time it took him to execute them, the different times he executed them, and the time it takes the viewer to pass by and look at this series of paintings are all ways that time is used in visual art.

In Chinese scroll paintings, time is more continuous than it usually is in a single canvas executed using Western forms of composition.  Time flows as the scroll is unraveled and the next chapter of the story is revealed.

Rauschenberg executed very large prints composed of disparate bits and pieces from various points in time in contemporary culture.  Cubism deals with time by making the three-dimensional image flat and therefore takes time and compresses it.  It compresses time since it would take time to walk around the image that’s been rendered flat and therefore the viewer sees all angles at a single moment in time.   Dove Bradshaw, a contemporary American artist, addresses time explicitly in her work.  One way she does this is by executing pieces that actually change with time.

Thoughts?