Painting and Time
Paintings are static. The uniqueness of the experience of looking at a painting repeatedly - over a period of days or years - is that, in the midst of flux, the image remains changeless. Of course the significance of the image may change, as a result of either historical or personal developments, but what is depicted is unchanging, the same milk flowing from the same jug, the waves on the sea with exactly the same formation unbroken, the smile and the face which have not altered.
One might be tempted to say that paintings preserve a moment. Yet on reflection this is obviously untrue. For the moment of a painting, unlike a moment photographed, never existed as such. And so a painting cannot be said to preserve it.
If a painting 'stops' time, it is not, like a photograph, preserving a moment of the past from the supersession of succeeding moments. I am thinking of the image within the frame, the scene which is depicted. Clearly if one considers an artist's life-work or the history of art, one is treating paintings as being, partly, records of the past, evidence of what has been. Yet this historical view, whether used within a Marxist or idealist tradition, has prevented most art experts from considering-or even noticing- the problem of how time exists (or does not exist) within painting.
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Painters themselves practise a partial answer, even if it remains unformulated in words. When is a painting finished? Not when it finally correponds to something already existing - like the second shoe of a pair - but when the foreseen ideal moment of it being looked at is filled as the painter feels or calculates it should be filled. The long or short process of painting a picture is the process of constructing the future moments when it willbe looked at. In reality, despite the painter's ideal, these moments cannot be entirely determined. They can never be entirely filled by the painting. Nevertheless the painting is entirely addressed to these moments.
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Whereas verbal and musical language have a symbolic relation to what they signify, painting and sculpture have a mimetic one, and this means that their static character is all the more flagrant.
Stories, poetry, music, belong to time and play within it. The static visual image denies time within itself. Hence it prophecies across and through time are the more startling.
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Until the nineteenth century all world cosmologies - even including that of the European Enlightenment - conceived of time as being on one way or another surrounded or infiltrated by timelessness. This timelessness constitued a realm of refuge and appeal. It was prayed to. It was where the dead went. It was intimately but invisibly related to the living world of time through ritual, stories and ethics.
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This questioning becomes more urgent if one realizes that the problem of time has not been, and can never be, solved scientifically. On the question of time, science is bound to be a solipsist. The problem of time is a problem of choice.
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The Place of Painting
To be visible is to be present: to be absent is to be invisible. A voice, a perfume or something microscopic may be present and yet invisible, not because of its whereabouts but because of its natur. The function of painting is to fill an absence with the simulacrum of a presence.
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The visible implies an eye. It is the stuff of the rlation between seen and seer. Yet the seer, when human, is conscious of what his eye cannot and will never see because of time and distance. The visible both includes him (because he sees) and excludes him (because he is not omnipresent). The visible consists for him of the seen which, even when it is threatening, confirms his existence, and of the unseen which defies that existence. The desire to have seen (the ocean, the desert, the aurora borealis) has a deep ontological basis.
- John Berger
Paintings are static. The uniqueness of the experience of looking at a painting repeatedly - over a period of days or years - is that, in the midst of flux, the image remains changeless. Of course the significance of the image may change, as a result of either historical or personal developments, but what is depicted is unchanging, the same milk flowing from the same jug, the waves on the sea with exactly the same formation unbroken, the smile and the face which have not altered.
One might be tempted to say that paintings preserve a moment. Yet on reflection this is obviously untrue. For the moment of a painting, unlike a moment photographed, never existed as such. And so a painting cannot be said to preserve it.
If a painting 'stops' time, it is not, like a photograph, preserving a moment of the past from the supersession of succeeding moments. I am thinking of the image within the frame, the scene which is depicted. Clearly if one considers an artist's life-work or the history of art, one is treating paintings as being, partly, records of the past, evidence of what has been. Yet this historical view, whether used within a Marxist or idealist tradition, has prevented most art experts from considering-or even noticing- the problem of how time exists (or does not exist) within painting.
-------------------------------------------
Painters themselves practise a partial answer, even if it remains unformulated in words. When is a painting finished? Not when it finally correponds to something already existing - like the second shoe of a pair - but when the foreseen ideal moment of it being looked at is filled as the painter feels or calculates it should be filled. The long or short process of painting a picture is the process of constructing the future moments when it willbe looked at. In reality, despite the painter's ideal, these moments cannot be entirely determined. They can never be entirely filled by the painting. Nevertheless the painting is entirely addressed to these moments.
-------------------------------------------
Whereas verbal and musical language have a symbolic relation to what they signify, painting and sculpture have a mimetic one, and this means that their static character is all the more flagrant.
Stories, poetry, music, belong to time and play within it. The static visual image denies time within itself. Hence it prophecies across and through time are the more startling.
-------------------------------------------
Until the nineteenth century all world cosmologies - even including that of the European Enlightenment - conceived of time as being on one way or another surrounded or infiltrated by timelessness. This timelessness constitued a realm of refuge and appeal. It was prayed to. It was where the dead went. It was intimately but invisibly related to the living world of time through ritual, stories and ethics.
-------------------------------------------
This questioning becomes more urgent if one realizes that the problem of time has not been, and can never be, solved scientifically. On the question of time, science is bound to be a solipsist. The problem of time is a problem of choice.
-------------------------------------------
The Place of Painting
To be visible is to be present: to be absent is to be invisible. A voice, a perfume or something microscopic may be present and yet invisible, not because of its whereabouts but because of its natur. The function of painting is to fill an absence with the simulacrum of a presence.
-------------------------------------------
The visible implies an eye. It is the stuff of the rlation between seen and seer. Yet the seer, when human, is conscious of what his eye cannot and will never see because of time and distance. The visible both includes him (because he sees) and excludes him (because he is not omnipresent). The visible consists for him of the seen which, even when it is threatening, confirms his existence, and of the unseen which defies that existence. The desire to have seen (the ocean, the desert, the aurora borealis) has a deep ontological basis.
- John Berger
posted by carly @ 9:32 PM
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