Literature Review

Temporal Reference in Artwork
Almost any artwork that was created without the implicit expectation of object fixity can be considered a reference to time, in the sense that its creation must anticipate the changes that will occur to it in the absence of human intervention. All artwork makes some expectation of its audience and their ability to decode visual or symbolic messages.

Some artworks manifest an expectation of decay or mandate its effects. Others make use of the temporal nature of the audience's encounter with the work by incorporating motion. Works that are the result of elaborate procedures can provide some element of further signification given a knowledge of the process of their generation. The complex interface of photography in particular provides a rich source of temporal encoding in its artifacts.

The most striking works for this investigation will be those at two extremes. On one hand, there are the works whose interpretations are most likely to undergo the most drift over time. In other words, those artworks who make the most assumptions about their audiences. These are in one sense the most fragile: even if their material form is preserved they retain the least of their original impact. The other extreme consists of those works who make the most explicit reference to time, by compressing its effects into a static display or by referring explicitly to our metrics of time. These works are often agnostic to social evolution since they are working to expose social considerations of time and changes in these considerations serve merely to amplify the power of the artworks' statements.

Decay, Drift

• Robert Smithson
  
• Andy Goldsworthy
  
• (Other Land Artists...?)
  
• (plastic art) Naum Gabo [http://www.slate.com/id/2221963/]
  
• Eva Hesse
  

Durational Experience

• Pol Bury
  
• Alexander Calder
  
• Jean Tinguely
  

Elaborate Procedures

• (Gutai Group)
  Kazuo Shiraga's "Challenging Mud" (1955)
  N7429.W45 1997
  
• Adel Abdessemed: Helicoptere
  
• Jackson Pollock
  

Photography

• Alfred Stieglitz
  
• Henri Cartier-Bresson
  
• Hiroshi Sugimoto
  
• Michael Wesely
  

Fragile Interpretive Frames

• Josef Albers
  
• Kazimir Malevic
  
• Michelangelo
  
• Egyptian Heiroglyphics
  
• Primitive/Native Artwork
  

Static Displays of Time

• Etienne-Jules Marey
  
• Harold Edgerton
  
• (Slit Scanning) George Silk [http://www.flong.com/texts/lists/slit_scan/]
  

Reference to Metrics

• On Kawara
  

Final Report Introduction

Abstract
This thesis will propose a framework for interpretation of artworks across large durations. It will explore the effects of time on artworks, and the ways that duration is inferred by observers of the object or experience of the artwork. Given this interpretive setting, the thesis will examine a set of specific artworks through multiple narratives at different temporal interpretive perspectives. These will be synthesized to give a sense of the lifecycle of each artwork, and ultimately to generate broader conclusions involving artworks of various media.

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Introduction
With the late 20th century movement toward performance and social artworks, the encapsulation of artwork within objects has been severely problematized. The object d'arte has given way to the documenting artifact, and the transition points to a more fruitful way of analyzing works of art. The movement can be summarized as the recasting of art objects into the role of art experiences. Such a dramatic shift in our interpretive frame indicates the local nature of artistic intepretation, and generally suggests the need for a broad framework for this kind of thought.

Artwork & Object

Art objects fade into oblivion. Their slide into the past is the subject of significant social fear, fear of loss, fear of physical forgetting. Marc Auge suggests that "Oblivion is a necessity both to society and to the individual. One must know how to forget in order to taste the full flavor of the present, of the moment, and of expectation." (Auge 3) But he laments the omnipresence of the fear of forgetting. If forgetting is a precondition for true appreciation, then the current prevailing aesthetic frame is profoundly warped.

Philosopher James Walton gives a founding definition for aesthetics: "Aesthetic value arguably consists in a capacity to elicit in appreciators pleasure of a certain kind, pleasurable experiences," (Walton 12) and so ultimately our fear is of losing future access to these artistic experiences. So in some sense the fear of time's effects on art objects is the fear of disembodying the artwork, of removing its ability to impact future individuals and society. We attempt to maintain the stasis of these artifacts through time in order to retain and encapsulate the brief individual experience of encountering and engaging with the artwork.

What this attitude neglects is the context-dependence of cultural objects; as the ambient musician Brian Eno describes at a conference on long-term digital preservation, "most objects of culture are very much [...] embedded within context and these contexts are embedded within other ones as well. So a characteristic of cultural objects is they're increasingly context-dependent. And they're increasingly embedded in meta-languages." (MacLean & Davis, 51) Even if we attempt to retain the object, the social experience of the artwork will undergo significant changes as society evolves around it.

Nevertheless, our prodigious interest in the fields of museum and library preservation sciences and especially in digitizing cultural artifacts are indicative of our society's dedication to maintaining the physical state of these objects.

In so doing, we choose one form of evolution over another: we ask society to evolve while attempting to fix the set of cultural artifacts that document its past. We demand that objects remain static so that what changes in artistic interpretation over time is not due to decay and material loss in the art object but rather due to human society's attempts to engage with a universe for which it maintains fixity. Norbert Wiener describes the human process as follows: "The organism [...] seeks a new equilibrium with the universe and its future contingencies. Its present is unlike its past and its future unlike its present. In the living organism as the universe itself, exact repetition is absolutely impossible." (Wiener 67)

Sadly, in our attempt to fix the objective context of our social artistic discussions, in trying to perpetuate the superficial objective qualities of the art document, we neglect the powerful experience we might otherwise have of aging alongside our artworks. We are attempting to achieve the impossibility of repeating experience at the cost of a much longer-term coevolution with the works. We intentionally deny ourselves the comprehension of universal movement through time, perhaps because it indicates our own mortality through identification with the mortality of the artwork. Indeed, we constrict our experience of the artwork to a least common denominator, limiting it to only that which can be experienced by all time.

The Body of Work
The intentional artwork has much in common with the human body. It is, according to philosopher Joseph Margolis, "inseparably incarnate in the physical or biological or similar materials of the natural world; [...] being alterable as a result of historicized interpretation, its attribution affects what we should understand as the 'nature' of anything so characterized." (Margolis 92: http://library.mit.edu/item/000883095) In other words, though generally inanimate, the artwork is perhaps best understood as an embodied intentional act, one that has effects through the audience that encounters it. Its material form empowers the intention.

Sculptor and body theorist Antony Gormley restates this position: "art might not pertain to what is contained in the institution or within the unique object, but within the dynamic between the living and its surrogate body." (Gormley 223: http://library.mit.edu/item/001665328) It is useful and powerful to provide ideas with a conceptual body, since "via our bodily senses the environment enters into the very shape of our thought, sculpting our most abstract reasoning from our embodied interactions with the world." (Johnson & Rohrer 49: We are live creatures, ibid) An art object is the physical shape that results from the intent of an artist made physical. The artwork is the interaction of the body that shape defines with both the artist and society.

The artwork emerges from the interaction of three sets: the artist, the material environment, and the social environment. We can consider the material and social environments to be

The Life of Work
Once we accept the artwork as embodied intention, we find that it has a temporal progression not unlike a human's. There is an emergence, the birth of the artwork, from the interaction between the artist and the environment within which he works. The environment is always partially social and partly material, with a recent drift in artworks away from material as a primary focus and toward social constructs as their media.

Encoded in this process of creation is an interface or set of interfaces between the artist and his environment. The artist necessarily uses pre-organized materials and pre-existing social organizations to create the work, and these devices amplify intentions that the artist has toward embodiment in the environment. Encoded within this initial creative set is a prescription for the future physical evolution of the artwork. We can categorize and name these types of changes. The physical universe guarantees that the material of the artwork will carry forward in time predictably in the absence of social forces.

Our current social environment seems to be one of frenetic preservation, in the hopes of eliminating these predictive material changes. But ultimately the social environment is entirely unpredictable: as much as there is a present and relatively longstanding desire to keep artworks as static physical objects, there is no guarantee that this institutional mandate will persist in the future. Moreover, as we saw earlier, there is a huge amount of context that the observer brings to the experience of an artwork that unavoidably fluctuates over time.

So while we can construct the prototypical life-cycle of an artwork consisting of birth/creation, feedback, exhibition, discussion, preservation, and so forth on into decay, we can hardly be sure of the furthest reaches of our analysis. We know that the continued integrity of old works was hardly assured at their inception, and given the constant changes of the artwork's social setting, predicting its long-term future with any degree of certainty is impossible at this stage. Our best guess is still decay and decomposition of the artwork's material constituents.

Observation and Assumptions
Given this apparent mortality of the artwork, perhaps we can see the value in a holistic approach to the artwork by looking at a number of different interpretations that might arise. In other words, fragments of the artwork's body, as it arises through time and as it emerges from social and material co-evolution.

As the proposed social perspective drifts further from the artist's creative perspective, a corresponding deconstruction of the initial interpretive assumptions will take place. The artwork, we will find, becomes less and less legible or aesthetically valuable; therefore, it will be more and more a gesture in a broader social dialog. It will appear as fundamentally human: a temporary bundle of physical and social messages.

Term's End Notes

African Fractals:

http://library.mit.edu/item/001267457

In african designs, "the central peak of spiritual power is analogous to the central peak of compuational power in the Crutchfield-Smale complexity measure." (174)

"pattern creation through group activity is supported by conscious mechanisms specific to self-organization as defined in complexity theory." (174)

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Time & Bits: Managing Digital Continuity

http://library.mit.edu/item/000931310

Brian Eno: "Since I'm interested in cultural objects, the question that most interests me is: What is the difference between preserving data, with things like tax returns for example, and preserving cultural objects? [...] To give you an example of a cultural object that's extremely difficult to store in digital form, there's a painting by Kazimir Malevic called White on White[...] in 10,000 years time you'd finally dig deep down [...] and you see that. It is absolutely meaningless without some sense of what it was a gesture towards. [...] I would contend that most objects of culture are very much like that, they're embedded within context and these contexts are embedded within other ones as well. So a characteristic of cultural objects is they're increasingly context-dependent. And they're increasingly embedded in meta-languages." (51)

to read: Bruce Sterling - Holy Fire

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Norman Wiener - The Human Use of Human Beings / Cybernetics and Society

http://library.mit.edu/item/000773556

"In connection with machines that there is no reason why they may not resemble human beings in representing pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the large entropy tends to increase." (47)

"The organism is not like the clockwork monad of Leibnitz with its pre-established harmony with the universe, but actually seeks a new equilibrium with the universe and its future contingencies. Its present is unlike its past and its future unlike its present. In the living organism as the universe itself, exact repetition is absolutely impossible." (67)

Kendall Walton - Marvelous Images

http://library.mit.edu/item/001501024

"Aesthetic value arguably consists in a capacity to elicit in appreciators pleasure of a certain kind, pleasurable experiences. [...] 'aesthetic' pleasures include the pleasure of finding something valuable, of admiring it.

Life of a Photograph

The common photograph is a snapshot: a Kodak 'moment'. It is perceived primarily as a representation of a perspective in time and from space, not necessarily as an artwork or even as primarily an object. But the photograph is always an object, and whether or not it is thought of as an artwork, the photograph has a trajectory through time.

The camera is the foremost interface that enables photography: the lens, the shutter, the film or sensor, the enclosure, and sometimes, the flash. This encapsulated system, however, is not independently able to produce a photograph. Though it is the icon of photography, the camera requires a context of both light from the scene that it depicts and a method of reproduction to be a functional intermediary. It is the locus of the greatest control in this process, but it is by no means the exclusive one.

What is it that the camera enables or demands that we do? The use of the camera is an investment of time by an entity in space. It demands time in its preparation for use, in its setup and configuration, in the act of exposure itself, and in the retrieval of the represented image from the device. Retrieval of the representation is an emergence from the camera and the beginning of the process of reproductive printing, which carries its own demands.

The preparation of the camera consists of both the construction of the device and of its media, and of their acquisition and combination by the user. The act of photography would not be possible without the collection and organization of these material goods into a system that enables the representation of light in a physical medium. This is often the most social stage in the production of an artwork, involving the work of countless individuals other than the recognized artist. The physical form of the camera ultimately and completely defines its function. Perhaps because of our inability to locate responsibility in the mass of influences on the device, the other participating members of the design of the camera and film are commonly neglected, and indeed the contributions to camera technology are too vast to include here.

Even if the artist creates her own camera and film, she will necessarily use materials that are manufactured: chemicals, screws, lens glass, etc. It is sufficient to recognize that the artist implicitly and invisibly must rely on a huge set of assistants in the preparation of the camera system. In any case, it is clear that the artist is responsible for the choice of medium and enclosure, and this choice powerfully shapes the resulting representation and reproduction of the image.

The artist or creator is also responsible for the arrangement of the camera and subject in space. The scene can be constructed or spontaneous, but in either case there is a history to the placement of the camera in opposition to the image to be represented. This setup takes place in conjunction with the configuration of the camera and lens. The exposure time, and any change in configuration that occurs during it, determines the amount and position of light that is incident on the sensitive medium.

In considering the object of a photograph, we can see the combination of camera and film (or camera and memory) as one in a series of confluences that enable its construction or affect its objecthood. There are three broad actors at play: the society, the artist, and the material world. Broadly, the interaction proceeds as follows. The society and physical environment are the roots of the photograph: as discussed, society shapes the physical material into the tools and media necessary to conceptualize and begin the photographic process, and the artist's life is shaped by her social condition.

Within the tools and physical media of photography, the photograph's birth is controlled mainly by the artist, though it is of course a physical process. The scene is a physical scene, and the light is reflected within that scene and is incident on the camera's sensitive medium. Upon retrieval of the image representation from the camera, the growth process begins. This is often an iterative process, where the artist creates a physical print in a lab, receives feedback from friends & colleagues, and repeats until conceptually fulfilled. Society, material, and artist are all at work in this stage.

The next stage is that of exhibition, where the work receives public criticism and is displayed or stored publicly. The cessation of growth is marked by the intentional 'completion' of the artwork, at which point the work begins to degrade. Degradation is simply the natural process damage and aging that the artwork incurs due to its existence as a physical object. Reproduction and restoration are some social attempts to prolong the lifespan of the artwork, but ultimately the work will die and decompose into its material constituents. Past the initial public presentation, the artist is often limited in her control over the death & memory process. The artist's only power is to give instructions to the owners and conservators of the work, but these can be either heeded or ignored. Social commentary is even harder for the artist to control.

Perception of the artwork at various points in its timeline is a matter of reconstructing a projection of the work's timeline from that perspective.

Poster

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)