Methodology

This paper will discuss the temporal nature of the artwork, situating its value to the individual and to society within the era of its interpretation. It will discuss the nature of that change through time, and make clear the implied time processes and formal assumptions implicit to interpretative discussion.

The paper will present a series of oppositions, loose theoretical axes of consideration which will be used to categorize and characterize a set of relationships between artist, artwork, and society.

This presentation will be followed by an outline of the life cycle of the artwork:
from the empowering and informing of the artist
to the artwork's conception and construction and exhibition
through its gradual decay and loss within society

The life cycle will be accompanied by a graphic timeline used to generally denote the interplay of artist, artwork, and society, and to make clear the relative time investment in its conception, creation, display, and consideration. This will also provide a structure to convey events of interest -- travel, disaster, discussion, etc. These events, when possible, will be considered relationships between artist, artwork, and society, and will thus invoke the earlier series of oppositions.

With the theoretical framework settled, the discussion will move to individual artworks. The emphasis will be on photography and artworks that make explicit reference to time. Subjects will include Michael Wesely, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Etienne-Jules Marey, Pol Bury, and On Kawara. For each of these artists, a specific artwork will be chosen and described within the timeline/lifecycle framework.

The investigation will begin with a hypothesized normal reference interpretation, making reference to some social discourse surrounding the work. Assumptions underlying this standard interpretation will be successively identified and rescinded, in order to broaden the perceptive frame. In specific, knowledge of the social environment that gave rise to the artwork's creation, and knowledge of the tools used to create the artwork will be disputed. The discussion will consider temporal specificity an assumption of the retrospective evaluation, and will situate the observer at various moments to contrast their assumptions and perceptions.

These examples will be instructive in crafting a larger argument concerning the critical dependence of artworks as temporally encoded messages and in the situation of photography as a medium.

My personal artistic additions to the project will include works meant to frustrate the canonical conceptions of time, and to blur the distinctions made in the oppositions the paper presents.

Joseph Brodsky - [1994] On Grief and Reason
"when a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, [...]. If he encounters a tree, it's a tree made familiar by history, to which it's been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, laying down this or that law [...]. Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up." (1036 lit&writers)

http://library.mit.edu/item/000926877
Unobtrusive measures / Eugene J. Webb
"there are the erosion measures, where the degree of selective wear on some material yields the measure. [...] On the other hand, there are accretion measures, where the research evidence is some deposit of materials. Immediately one thinks of anthropologists working with refuse piles and pottery shards. The trace measures could be further subdivided according to the number and pattern of units of evidence. We might have two subclasses: remnants, where there is only one or a few indicators of the past behavior available, and series, where the is an accumulative body of evidence with more units, possibly deposited over a longer period of time." (36)
-- powerful categories of marks: they seem to be discussing primarily non-intentional acts, but they would apply equally well to intentional aspects of artwork

"physical evidence is, for the most part, free of reactive measurement effects" (50)
-- that is, since people generally ignore its presence, they usually do not think to falsify it.

"With accretion measures, there is the question of whether the materials have selectively survived or been selectively deposited." (50) In other words, whether they are "durable artifacts." (Naroll 1956)

Among other discussions, Webb et al. point to the various effects of social activation through time on the physical surroundings, giving example inference studies. These inferences rely on a foreknowledge of the type of interactions that could take place between the individual participants and the material objects of record.

For instance, in assuming that the erosion rate in the tiles around various museum exhibits is a rough indicator of the popularity of the respective exhibits, we make the assumption of a very limited set of events that affect erosion rate. If there were unknown water damage, or someone who wanted to frustrate the data and eroded ground around certain exhibits, the data gathered would be inaccurate. Critically, there is a major assumption being made: that we can comprehend and enumerate the set of possible effects that can occur to this material object.

If we cannot, or do not, then we can be deceived. Falsification of otherwise innocuous effects of social erosion and accretion provides a fascinating set of possible projects in this realm.

They also discuss methods of simple observation: "exterior physical signs, expressive movement, physical location, language behavior (conversational sampling), and time duration. [...] they are 'simple' only in that the investigator does not intervene in the production of the material." (116)
-- clearly, this is the position of a witness to non-participatory artistic practice: when we speak of interpretation of a work, we are alluding at first to the interior experience of it. When we attempt to clarify and elucidate that experience, we are almost invariably reduced to the kinds of observational discussions Webb &al consider here.

regarding time duration: "The amount of attention paid by a person to an object has long been the source of inferences on interest. [...] the longer the time, the greater the interest" (134-5)
-- why is this only accurate when directed by a person->object? seems to work just as well for attention paid by society: ie, in measuring the interest of a society in a given work of art (see citation web, Stefaner 2009, etc.)
-- indeed this could be thought of as an operational definition of interest: the amount of time given to something (attention is perhaps closer)

often, "the critical behavior is variable over a day or some longer time period. [...] behavior may shift as the hours or days of the week change." (136-7)
-- another fallow ground for a project to frustrate the expectations. self-aware installations that flower only when there is no movement?

"Both [random] time and locational sampling should be employed if possible, [...] population varies over time, and the content of their behavior similarly varies. If one can broaden the sampling base, he can expand the character of material available for study." (140-1)
-- powerfully integrates with the concept of artwork as individual subject of investigation: the 'behavior' of an artwork varies over time in its effects on its environment (people). The character of the material artwork grows in proportion to the attention it receives from society and the locale it affects.

"From symbols and shadows to the truth" - Cardinal Newman (187)

Pollock & Persona
If we take the assertion that Pollock's transitional canvas, Mural was merely an overgrown billboard personal ad, we can reaffirm the closeness of his work and personality. Here we continued to have the pop culture icon, the individual who cultivated a mystique and historicization of his own existence... As persona becomes increasingly important in the arts, we find a fundamental shift in the focus of the historical and perceptual consideration: first pointing towards the work and society that produced it, later solely to the individual (removed from their context). Perhaps the removal of context is inevitable as we attempt to bring the experience into a universally accessible space.

Early Photography

Etienne-Jules Marey
Etienne-Jules Marey : a passion for the trace / François Dagognet
Marey, seeking to characterize the body of animals in motion through time, found inspiration in the new field of physical transcription devices: literating blood pressure, sound, etc. Photography has the disadvantage of not being aprismatic in time, flattening their entire exposure into a temporal blur.

"Marey made it possible for the avant-garde to become receptive to new values: instead of escape into the past, the unreal or the dream, there was the double cult of machines and their propulsion [...]" (148) inspiring Giacomo Balla & Luigi Russolo, Marinetti, and ultimately Duchamp (1912 Nude Decending a Staircase)

"He was obliged to revise his recording methods (myographs, hodographs, dynamagraphs, simultaneous polygraphs, and so on) until he arrived at "optical-electrical capture," which gradually replaced the "mechanical" kind." (175)

"Mareyism contained within it, perhaps unwittingly, the foundations of the modern world it foreshadowed: the signals and fluxes, the multiple tele-inscriptions, the long-range controls and sensitive recorders and, more obviously, travel in the air (airplanes) and underwater; the capacity to preserve traces; abstract art and the crucial domain of audiovisual communication." (163)

-- it was the unique ability to encode and transmit huge amounts of information that allowed for this powerful compression that foreshadowed the whole of the modern world.

Contrast between two horse images: "A track was painted with light crosswise bands alternating with wide black areas. These divisions helped locate, measure, and assess distance traveled and speed, since the time taken was known (chronobiology)." (104)
-- What is really at stake here is the measuribility of discrete time in the photographs. He has already, by discretizing the exposure, provided for the segmentation of the image; this applies labels to that discretization.

Picturing time : the work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) / Marta Braun
Points to the telephone (1876) and wireless telegraph (1894), and the Prime Meridian Conference (1884) as prior transformations in the consideration of time. (p. 278) "And while Sigmund Freud investigated the importance of the personal past and its existence in the present, an even more direct access to the past was given through photography and the phonograph." (Braun 278)

"Underlying Marey's need to grasp and measure was a view of reality as constituted by discrete functions, invisible matter that could be probed and analyzed by the instruments he devised. Bergson's view was, of course, just the opposite: the solid contours of the closely knit images we call the material world, he said, are only a necessary invention of our senses. In reality, matter is in the flux of constant becoming." (279)

Bergson: "But with these positions, even with an infinite number of them, we shall never make movement. They are not parts of the movement, they are so many snapshots of it; they are, one might say, only supposed stopping-places. The moving body is never really in any of the points; the most we can say is that it passes through them." (280-1)
-- this is a fallacious argument: from elementary analysis, we know we can derive continuous functions from the limit points of compact sets. The critical error is a misunderstanding of the concept of an "infinite number" of such positions.

"artists who wished to give form to the new experience of time Bergson so articulately voiced were drawn to Marey's pictures. They were an irresistible and particularly fecund visual source. For artists the attraction of the photographs lay in one important particular: they were the first images to effectively rupture the perspectival code that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. Marey's pictures depicted chronological succession within a single frame. Chronophotography provided a language for representing simultaneity - what was popularly understood to be Bergson's idea of time." (Braun 281)

Others influenced by Marey: Frantisek Kupka, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, and finally Antonio Giulio Bragaglia: "With photodynamism, we have freed photography from the indecency of its brutal realism, and from the craziness of instantaneity, which, considered to be a scientific fact only because it was a mechanical product, was accepted as absolutely correct." (299)

Some Conceptual Reflections

Jean Tinguely - [1959] "Fur Statik" (Manifesto For Statics)

Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don't be subject to the influence of out-of-date concepts of time. Forget hours, seconds and minutes. Accept instability. LIVE IN TIME. BE STATIC - WITH MOVEMENT. For a static of the present moment. Resist the anxious fear to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living. Stop insisting on "values" which cannot but break down. Stop evoking movement and gesture. You are movement and gesture. Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live in the present; live once more in Time and by Time - for a wonderful and absolute reality. (March 1959)

These manifestos were dropped from a plane over Dusseldorf -- though they landed outside the city, in the surrounding countryside, frustrating his nominal plan for their reception.

Peter Selz on Homage to New York (1960) "movement and gesture are demonstrated - not merely evoked. Being very much part of his time Tinguely uses machines to show movement, but he is fully aware that machines are no more permanent than life itself. Their time rubs out, they destroy themselves." (137)
Indeed they can be made to be ultra-mortal, as Tinguely does.

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Pol Bury: "We can see that slowness not only multiplies duration but also permits the eye following the globe to escape from its own observer's imagination and let itself be let by the imagination of the travelling globe itself." (Lee 121); in response, Eugene Ionesco: "For Pol Bury there is constant anguish originating from the basic intuition that everything might collapse under us at any moment." (121)
It would be more correct to say that the collapse is precisely the process of movement forward: that the decay of the external objects of the cathedral constitutes the life that it embodies.

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Robert Smithson - [1966] Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space
& http://library.mit.edu/item/000173982

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Andy Warhol - Empire (1964), Sleep (1964); Kawara:

both are deeply methodical in their temporal operations, and both speak to the logic of the bad infinity. A system with its own laws and limitations is put into place, and we, the audience, are made to watch and to wait. We are made to wait for some figure to emerge from its repetitive ground; to detect the small, almost infinitesimal, incident against the yawning relief of duration. In short, we are made to anticipate, even hope for, the temporal fallout of this bad infinity. And in this perpetual present both gestures stage, they cast a critical eye on the future of the future. (Lee 278)

Hegel has: "This infinity is spurious or negative infinity since it is nothing but the negation of the finite, but the finite arises again in the same way, so that it is no more sublated than not." (Hegel, A. Quality, Encyclopaedia Logic)
~ Deleuze's "Repetition with difference"... we are waiting for the difference...

Kawara's "Title" (1965): "confronted with three laterally organized canvases, done up in hot, hot pink." (Lee 289)
- Lee takes time much for granted here: The hot pink we are seeing is yet a tiny slice of the life of the work. The fading of the pigment will coincide with the fading of the day's memory. Catastrophic events might leave their mark powerfully and indelibly, either in the physical or intellectual realm: a fire in the museum; a drift from human physical presence on Earth; the devaluation of the painting as a mode of artwork/expression/social-trace; the loss of the Gregorian calendar as a meaningful relativistic measurement, etc. But we know, at least, that the pink will fade, and that those who saw his day will die.

On Kawara

On Kawara exists in time. His existence is destined, it seems (and perhaps he would hope), to be condensed into space solely as time. His traces are purely temporal. His accumulations are all with reference to the temporal absolute he supposes.

His work is fundamentally faithful and optimistic. He accepts and acknowledges chance, but does not force the subject. By working completely within an abstracted quotation of time, he would initially seem to disable any of the more fundamental human connections he might make -- certainly he seems to disavow the material focii that have characterized painting for centuries.

If we agree that the image of painters in prior centuries have required a sense of human form and context, Kawara distills another set of assumptions. He trusts not that the visual image of a human will be referentially valid in the future of his work, but that the context of absolute time and the potential for agency will exist. He seems to assert, moreover, that they will be continuous with the current incarnations of these constructions. He gives very little by way of context; these works are fragile.

But in some sense he does not: Pollock never required his audience to know what paint is, and Kawara never requires his audience to be able to place our temporal system relative to their own. If Pollock requires only the presence of visual perception (only the ability to decipher the wavelengths of light coincident at a point), Kawara requires only the ability to decipher his glyphs.

He performs time at many levels: the powerful positioning of himself as a temporal historian (as in One Million Years) is less pronounced in the short term than his personal narrative. As current humans, we approach his work with the knowledge that he is human, that he is existing at these times, and that he is carrying out a complex and continuous personal process. All of his work makes reference to his existence in society. We empathize with his postcards (__) and find traces of his physical presence in all his works.

These traces often contain more subtle nods to the temporality of the work, and his own mortality. He necessarily works within space, encodes within space, and interfaces with the physcal world through objects. His actions specify objects, and these objects are challenged by their aging. With his Nothing, Something, Everything, we glimpse only "Something". The title, his birth, and his mortality, point to the rest of the work. Something, that which we see, is fading, and fading fast. Cracks are appearing. We know it was constructed, by his mind and hand, and there is a sense of exhilaration in our perception of the vastness of the work.

Perhaps we can find that in the aggregate, his conceptual leaps are not so impersonal as they seem. We extend ourselves into his position, and get a powerful picture of what the self is.

Topic (3)

When we consider a work of art, we treat it as a cultural artifact to be interpreted. The work of art as a physical object is a curious entity: it acts as a symbolic representation of the artwork as an active entity. More and more, the interpretation of artwork tends towards their recognition as active in time. As this happens, we tend, more and more, to infer the temporal effects of physical processes from the physical marks made on the object. The interpretive process is fundamentally a placement of the artwork within a greater temporal context.

We place the artwork in time in four ways:
1. We are aware of its physical construction as an object
2. We are aware of its social construction as an artwork
3. We are aware of its personal and intentional construction by the artist
4. We are aware of its symbolic references to time

We approach all physical objects with the knowledge that their present state is entirely informed by their physical history. We see time folded onto the present through the physical history of the object that we infer from the its spatial properties. This is especially true when we attempt to unravel the construction of a sculpture or building and when we consider the unconscious layering of a painting, or the background of a photograph. This can also be what we see when we encounter the effects of aging on the object. Any effect that we do not consider intentional should be considered part of (1).

The artwork is highly dependent on a less immediate sense of the history of a work, namely its social context (2). Interpreting, or assigning a meaning, to an artwork requires a knowledge or at least a conception of the social framework surrounding it. Even considering an object to be an artwork or a part of one requires a social context. This is, of course, a moving target, both through time and across individual perspectives.

We cannot discount the intentionality of the work, especially as it is the source of most of the artistic discourse. Intentionality seems to be the motivating factor that distinguishes artwork from non-artwork, and this requires us to place the work in the biographical context of its author. Intentional marks, the involvement of the work in a biographical context, and other references to the author constitute (3).

Finally, we are often faced with symbolic time (4), both in artwork and in daily life. This is the metered and measurable progression that we see on a clock's face or in the shadows of a film over the course of a day.

My thesis will attempt to show how current work is conscious of these interpretive processes, and how it exists relative to them. I will be considering current photographers and visual artists, showing how their works can be considered objects of physical and social construction, and drawing insight into their meaning from these arguments. I will also be producing and presenting smaller projects of my own that will attempt to challenge, manipulate, and expose these components of the interpretive process. I hope to find new meaning from their reception.