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?

Space and Time in Life

Space and time are inextricably  linked.  Not only in art, but in the sentient world in which we live.  Six years ago I was involved in a horrific auto accident in which my neck was broken in four places, one of which was a complete severing of my spine.  As my spinal cord didn't snap, but was 'only' damaged, I'm typing this as you would type, I'm breathing, walking, and living a 'normal' life.  Yet, it's a different life one that continues to unfold in surprising ways.


Recently, I became aware of some events surrounding my accident that I had no conscious memory until recently.  Wedged in what turned out to be my car, I saw all white, heard glass shattering and men yelling.  Other than those brief sense impressions I’ve got no conscious memory of smell, taste, touch, or pain.  It’s funny how there are just these other bits and pieces I do recall, like them cutting off my pants in the E.R., certain friends saying they are there, and whomever said that they needed to get me into the O.R.  Besides moments like those, my memory about any other sense impressions is a blank.


The sense impressions I do recall all seemed to occur at connected and distinct moments in time.  It's like how viewing slides used to be - one image than another.  Except there's one key difference.


Normally in life we have a sense of one moment to the next.  We usually recall what we were doing just a second ago, a hour ago, and so forth.  We have the sense of each moment’s part of the day’s movie.  There's a sense of each separate slide being part of a sequence.  That sense of continuity between moments was utterly absent for me.


When it did return, I didn’t actually realize anything like ‘oh, I’ve returned to my movie life now.’   My consciousness just returned to what I guess was normal and that must have included a sense of segmented moments also being part of a “a river of time,” in the words of Andy Goldsworthy.


What I have a felt sense of now, not just an intellectual idea, is that without a sense of time there is no sense of space.  Where this takes me is space will be revealed in time.