Time in the Visual Arts: Lessing and Modern Criticism Author(s): Jeoraldean McClain Reviewed work(s): Source: The

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 41-58 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430538 . Accessed: 03/12/2012 23:34
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Wiley and The American Society for Aesthetics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

JEORALDEAN McCLAIN

Time

in

the

Visual

Arts:

Lessing
THIS

and

Modern
of

Criticism

ESSAY is a study of the question

time in the visual arts as it is related to a selected body of art and literary criticism which had its origin in Lessing's Laocoon (1766). First of all, it should be remarked that whereas Lessing's famous distinction between literature and art has played a significant role in modern literary criticism, its use in art criticism has been relatively slight. It might have been greater, and indeed it will be one purpose of this paper to show how the two fields of criticism can be brought together. Time as a factor in the visual arts emerged in the Laocoonthrough Lessing's polarization of time and space which led him to identify two separate categories of aesthetic expression, succession and simultaneity. Lessing meant that the visual arts are essentially spatial and simultaneous whereas literature is temporal and successive. (It followed that artists and writers should stay within the limits of their proper domains.) As a result of Lessing's Laocoon, historians have had the means with which to gauge the relative degrees of spatiality or temporality in works of art as well as literature, and literary critics have used it frequently since the 1940's. As for the art historians, a number have become involved with the same distinction between the simultaneous and the successive that Lessing made, but with respect to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and this is the chief legacy of Lessing to recent art
criticism.

historical coexistence of time and space in art in order to show the manner in which painting has been able to transcend the limitations inherent in the spatial medium. That space and time coexist in art has been remarked often. One recalls that Ann Coffin Hanson said of Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere that the picture was both constantly in motion-out of focus-as well as static, thus fulfilling "Baudelaire's admonition that the modern artist must extract from the ephemeral and transitory the poetic and eternal qualities of his own age." And Lilian Brion-Guerry said of Cezanne's landscapes that the artist showed that painting could give the illusion of successive moments in time so that the observer thinks successively as well as simultaneously in his
imagination.

In the following examples, time in art ranges from a passive coexistence with space in the expression of timelessness, to active instantaneousness, prolonged duration, and a dramatic intraspatial tension. There we will see polar stylistic expressions of the visual unity of space and time, but not space and time at opposite poles in art and literature, and these expressions will be related to Kenneth Pike's linguistic theory of the particle, wave and field modes of perception. In this way art and literary criticism can join more comprehensively around the issue of time in the arts. I. The author who is most closely associated with bringing Lessing's name into the light of modern criticism in the arts is Joseph Frank, a historian of literature, whose well-known article entitled "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" was published in 1945.1 Frank cited a passage from the Laocoon (1766) which is well worth repeating
? 1985 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

The major point which this paper makes is that Lessing's polarization of space and time, of art and literature, does provide a useful approach to the subject of time in visual art. But it will be reactivated, through links with literary criticism, to explore the
JEORALDEAN MCCLAIN is assistantprofessorin the department of art and design at Iowa State University.

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

42 since it continues to be quoted to the present day.

I reason as follows: If it is true that Painting employs in its imitations entirely different means or symbols from those adopted by Poetry-i.e. the former using forms and colours in space, the latter, on the other hand, articulate sound in time-if it is admitted that these symbols must be in suitable relation to the thing symbolized, then symbols placed in juxtaposition can only express subjects of which the wholes or parts exist injuxtaposition; and consecutive symbols can only express subjects of which the wholes or parts are consecutive. Subjects, the wholes or parts of which exist in juxtaposition, are termed bodies. Consequently bodies, with their visible properties, are the special subjects of painting. Subjects, the wholes or parts of which are consecutive are generally termed actions. Consequently actions are the special subjects of poetry. Yet all bodies do not exist in space only, but also in time. They continue to exist, and may, at each moment of their duration, assume a different appearance or stand in a different combination. Each of these momentary appearances and combinations is the effect of a preceding one, and may be the cause of a subsequent one, thus forming, as it were, the central point of an action.... [A painter] can only make use of a single momentin the course of an action, and must therefore choose the one which is the most suggestive and which serves most clearly to explain what has preceded and what follows.2

Mc C LA IN [in works by writers such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust andJamesJoyce] is based on a spacelogic that demands a complete reorientation in the reader's attitude toward language. [Modern poetry is reflexive; meaning is apprehended] by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time. Time is no longer felt as an objective, causal progression with clearly marked-out differences between periods; it has become a continuum in which distinctions between past and present are wiped out. Past and present are apprehended spatially, locked in a timeless unity that ... eliminates any feeling for sequence by the very act of juxtaposition.3

With this publication Frank established simultaneity and succession as basic formal categories of aesthetics in the critical literature of the modern arts. The purpose of Frank's essay was to apply Lessing's method to modern literature, saying, "It is quite
possible to use Lessing's insights .
.

Frank called this new use of language "spatial form" and said that Wilhelm Worringer's Abstractionand Empathy,first published in 1908, holds the key to understanding it. "The heart of Worringer's book is his discussion of the spiritual condition which impels the will-to-art to move in the direction of either naturalism or an abstractgeometric style." A naturalistic style was used by peoples who had achieved a sense of harmony with nature; the Classical Greeks and Renaissance culture to the end of the nineteenth century were at home in the world. But when the relation between man and the cosmos was disharmonious, a nonorganic, geometric art resulted. This latter style is characterized by planarity because depth in three dimensions gives objects a time-value, placing them in the real world where change occurs.
In non-naturalistic art, the inherentspatialityof the visual arts is accentuated by the effort to remove all traces of time-value. And since modern art is nonnaturalistic, we can say that it is moving in the direction of increased spatiality. The significance of spatial form in modern literature now becomes clear; it is the exact complement in literature, on the level of aesthetic form, to the developments that have taken place in the visual arts.

. as in-

struments for analysis." However, Frank reactivates Lessing's attempt to define the limits of literature in order to show exactly how modern literature has transcended these boundaries.
Modern Anglo-American poetry received its initial impetus from the Imagist movement of the years directly preceding and following the First World War. "An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Such a complex does not proceed [in the form of a narrative sequence], in union with the laws of language, but strikes the reader's sensibility with an instantaneous impact. At the very outset, therefore, modern poetry advocates a [method] in direct contradiction to Lessing's analysis of language. [The inherent consecutiveness of language is undermined], frustrating the reader's normal expectation of a sequence and forcing him to perceive the elements of the poem as juxtaposedin space rather than unrolling in time. Aesthetic form in modern poetry

The synchronic relations within a text take precedence over the diachronic so that temporality becomes "a purely physical limit of apprehension, which conditions but does not determine the work and whose expectations are thwarted and superceded by the space-logic of synchronicity." As in Proust's A la recherchedu tempsperdu, this is the contrary of time that flows because space is an "extra-temporal eternity."4 The direction which Frank has given to literary criticism provides a solid basis for the consideration of the subject of time in

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Time in the Visual Arts

43

Figure

Figure

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

44

Mc C LA I N

Figure 3

Figure 4

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Time in the Visual Arts the visual arts. Even though Lessing and Frank considered painting to be a spatial, not a temporal, art, Frank's chief contribution to modern criticism may be that he has shown literature and art do not form two mutuallyexclusivepoles of time and space, as Lessing thought. Thus, because modern literature can transcend the sequential character of the linguistic medium, one may ask whether art cannot, and has not, overcome the inherent spatiality of the pictorial medium in order to express temporality? As Wolfgang Holdheim has put it, Frank is actually "describing a dynamic tension" between narrative progression and "spatial form" in works such asJoyce's Ulysses. "He knew that without emphasizing it, for what matters to him is the second (spatial) pole alone."5 The following study demonstrates that visually art is both spatial and temporal, and that a dynamic tension between space and time exists in modern art which is comparable to modern literature. The relation between space and time in painting stretches all the way from a passive coexistence to the tense partnership found in Analytic Cubism; indeed, simultaneity in the Cubist style, with its roots in the art of Cezanne, is the most dramatic example of the type of "spatialization of time" which was described above by Frank. Frank himself made this point when he compared the naturalistic art of Cezanne to the work of Proust and Joyce, and the later, more abstract, Cubist style of Braque to that of Djuna Barnes' novel also using the principle of "spatial form."6 II. The first concept to consider is that painting in general is not exclusively a spatial art. Time and space are unified visually in art and their qualities are complementary. To exemplify this point we have only to remark that Lessing's polarization of literature and painting in Laocoon resulted from a confusion of the sister arts in the doctrine of ut picturapoesis. Rensselaer Lee has shown that art criticism from c. 1500 to 1700 "was concerned with defining painting in fundamental terms" just as Aristotle's Poetics had done for literature. Basing their work on limited passages from the Poetics and Horace's Ars poetica in which painting and

45

poetry were compared, critics developed a theory of painting based upon the ancient theory of poetry. Art "submitted to a borrowed aesthetic," and the Aristotelian doctrine of unity of action came to be accepted.7 The doctrine of ut pictura poesis is found in an academic discourse recorded in 1667 by Felibien which was held between Charles LeBrun and another, unidentified, critic about Poussin's Fall of the Mana in the Wilderness (Figure 1). The discussants defended the Cartesian idea that expression must serve to dramatically illustrate the central idea of painting. More interestingly, they also defended Poussin's picture by saying that since the artist was not a historian who used a succession of words, he depicted an event as taking place in a single moment of time; however, it often was necessary to join together many incidents to tell the story to avoid giving only the conclusion of an action. Poussin had not destroyed the unity of action; he had "merely showed the peripateia, or passage from ill to good fortune in the manner of poetic art." Thus, Lee remarks, the painting unfolded temporally with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In this discourse "the Aristotelian doctrine of unity of action was pronounced as valid for painting as for dramatic poetry (and) painting was declared to be an art of time." It was something new in the doctrine of utpictura poesis for a painter's design to be governed by temporal considerations. Lessing objected to the adherence to Aristotle's unity of action in painting for several reasons. "First because he held bodily beauty to be a higher end in painting than the expression of the passions; and secondly because it was dangerous for a spatial art like painting to attempt the progressive effects of a temporal art like poetry. Thus, Lessing restricted expression to the fruitful moment, whereas the goal of painting was beautiful shapes in graceful attitudes." Yet, the fruitful moment was a concession to the temporal imagination for it was suggestive of past and future actions.8 Steven Levine has pointed out that during Lessing's lifetime "an alternative criterion to beauty and time" was developed by Diderot.9 Diderot opposed Lessing's pregnant moment with the "frozen instant of truth." Rather than seek the purpose of art in an

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

46

McC LAIN

abstract ideal of beauty, Diderot claimed rather their presence is accompanied by a that "at every instant one could say of the sense of temporal passivity or extended durauniverse that everything therein is as it is tion. Not only is the painting not unified in absolutely necessary that it should be." And the traditional sense, but Courbet abolished this axiom of instant truth was the principle the objective condition of the viewer by abof "a quasi-religious cult whose creed was sorbing him bodily into the space of the based on Newton's laws." picture.l2 Manet's painting Sur la Plage de Therefore, the concept of pictorial unity Boulogne of 1869 also shows a loss of pictoof the XVIIth century was significantly rial unity, but for different reasons; it remodified in the XVIIIth century. The sults from the spectator's temporal and spachange, explained by Michael Fried, ap- tial reading of the picture in fragments. pears with Diderot's art theory and was Manet refused to compromise the imexemplified by Jacques David's painting, mediate experience of seeing the beach in the Oath of the Horatii (1784-1785).10 The which his eyes moved about. As Hanson ideal history painting now should eliminate remarked, "The sense of spatial unity is all incident that does not bear directly on broken so that the entire scene cannot be the drama, and the central dramatic idea understood at once."'13 The eye jumps from must be set in motion by a dynamic cause group to group, and because of this partand be clearly intelligible: pictorial unity by-part reading the work can only be seen must be instantaneously apprehensible at a in time. In the later nineteenth century pictorial single glance (Figure 2). The actors in the drama were to be unconscious of the be- unity was re-established on a new basis. In holder's presence to deter a mannered dis- this enterprise the temporal factor became play for the audience's benefit. Indeed, the more explicit, as seen in Monet's Imtableau was sealed off entirely from the pressionist paintings of a series of poplars world, and the spectator's role was (1891) and Cezanne's landscape paintings. According to Levine, the novelist Gustave objective. With the Realist movement of the mid- Geffroy compared Monet's poplars with nineteenth century there was a loss of unity dramatic poetry saying, "Thus this changof action in progressive painting. The ing poem develops, so harmoniously, with single, infinite space of Renaissance art nuanced phases, so strictly consecutive and representing a single moment of time was unified that one has the feeling in these destroyed. The objective detachment of the fifteen canvases of a single work of insepaspectator also was lost: infinite space be- rable parts." Each painting in the series, in came the particular space of the viewer, and its specific configuration of light and color, the generalized temporal factor became captured "the life of an instant that comes historical time. However, if space and time after and foretells." In stressing the interwere no longer universal, they were still action of the instants, Geffroy echoed copresent and complementary, and these Monet who said that the separate pictures changes are seen in the work of Courbet "only acquire their full value through the comparison and succession of the entire and Manet. Courbet's Burial at Ornans (1849) re- series." Taken together, the series of injected traditional notions of death and the stants contributed a single whole. Another "sublime poetry of Christianity" with its notable critic, Ernest Chesneau, who was meeting of heavenly and earthly realities. the first to use the term "instantaneous," Nochlin has remarked that Courbet con- thought that instantaneousness, as in taking centrated upon the "purely secular import" a photograph, was a condition of truth and of the burial; it was the concreteness of the served as the principle to justify Imevent that concerned Courbet, and it did pressionism. Thus, Monet reactivated one of the central problems of traditional hisnot have a metaphysical meaning.1' tory painting: the representation of a moMoreover, Fried noted that Courbet created a new model for history painting ment in time and Diderot's "instant of based on a non-dramatic representation of truth." 14 On the other hand, Cezanne constructed figures. The striking instant of action seen in David's Oathof the Horatii was eliminated: landscapes such as Bibemus Quarry of c. the figures do not show intense effort, but 1895 to give the illusion of a synthesis of

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Time in the Visual Arts numerous moments in time (Figure 3). As Brion-Guerry remarks, Cezanne synthesizes the successive moments of a temporal different harmonies of continuity-the color in the sun's progress with the passage of the hours-and in doing so constitutes "the great divide in the history of spatial composition." Cezanne's space is no longer the empty cube of Renaissance perspective space. The spatial container does not exist prior to its contents and is not distinct from them. The object, such as the quarry, expands in three dimensions and "is indissolubly bound to the space it engenders and from which it will never be able to dissociate itself." Objects are not encased and isolated within limiting outlines; the Cezannian passage keeps them from being separate from each other by breaking the forms at some point, and allowing the planes to spill into adjacent planes. The viewer sees the objects from many angles successively and simultaneously in the imagination, whereas vibrations of the atmosphere also "give rise to movement, uncertainty and the possibility of structural variation." In brief, Cezanne did not want "to condemn his objects to immobility and have them . . . iso-

47
lows that to apprehend the multiple points of view the spectator must proceed slowly and continuously. He must recreate on a shorter scale the artist's experience by shifting his own position from side to side and moving back and forth in front of the painting until he comes to feel that his process of viewing is a repetition of the process of creation. If we re-enact in this fashion the artist's experience, continuous through time in space, then the painting will be seen as an image of time, since we shall have found that it cannot be comprehended as an image of a simple, single discrete experience of space.

Hamilton remarks that the experience of creating and viewing the work of art represents Bergson's "duration" which is continuous "becoming." Bergson persuades us, in CreativeEvolution of 1907, that the consciousness of even the most motionless observer is constantly undergoing change:
Let us take the most stable of internal states, the visual perception of a motionless external object [the painting]. The object may remain the same...; nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs from that which I have just had.... My memory is there which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration it accumulates; it goes on increasing [like a snowball]. . . . The truth is that we change without ceasing... .17

The search for pictorial unity on a new basis joins the work of Cezanne with Time."15 Braque's painting, and William Rubin has George Hamilton has discussed Cez- shown that Braque arrived at early Cubism from anne's working process and the observer's through a direct extrapolation experience of Cezanne's painting.16 First he Cezanne's passage of planes and faceted points out that Cezanne came of age artisti- brushstrokes.'8 Braque's landscape paintings made in 1908 after the trip to L'Escally during the Impressionist period, characterized by the work of Monet, and taque, such as Houses and Trees, are the first Impressionism was based on the concept of group of truly Cubist paintings. Here he "instantaneous time in a homogeneous pushed Cezannism beyond his earlier adapNewtonian space." Cezanne's new style tation of the high horizon from Cezanne, held out a Bergsonian view of conscious- where he set the scene more vertically than ness which was not the instantaneouspresent, in depth. The advance concerned Braque's because instantaneousness contained no grasp of Cezanne's passage of planes, with traces of memory. Cezanne worked slowly the emphatic outlines of the forms of trees and gave his memories of successive ex- and buildings being broken to allow the periences of the motif in space and time. planes to "bleed" into adjacent planes. In "Distortions" resulted from his sensations this way Braque was able to concentrate on of presenting three-dimensional space on a the "materialization of space," on painting two-dimensional surface, and from the the "visual space that separates objects multiple viewpoints from which he ob- from each other" and making space as conserved the motif in time. As a result, the crete as objects. At this time Braque's confrom the spectator cannot comprehend the various ceptual approach-detached foci in Cezanne's painting in a single glance. motif as he worked in the studio-was not totally different from Cezanne's method of The painting has to be considered as much an image of temporal as of spatial experience. It folworking. For although Cezanne placed lated from the living world." He did not want "the object to refuse to adapt itself to

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

48

Mc C LA I N

great emphasis on his sensations before the model, he also said: "In painting there are two things, the eye and the brain (and) one must work for their mutual development. The eye for the vision of nature, the brain for the logic of organized sensations which Cezanne's new way of composing a painting made such a drama of pictorial integration that the picture was a mosaic of decisions that determined its becoming a work of art. Picasso made this process the subject of his early Cubist paintings, and he was "the first consciously to emphasize the painting process" as an experience for the viewer (Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, 1909).20 Early Cubism extends to the limit the potential of Cezanne's ideas. Not only does the single moment in a single space disappear, but there is no sense of prolonged duration either. Cubist space and time are in a tense partnership: they are subjective, experiential, finite (incomplete), and heterogeneous with changing, discontinuous views that are shown simultaneously and unified on the flat plane of the canvas. Heterogeneous time and space have undergone planification. Robert Rosenblum provides a clear idea of early Cubist painting by Picasso and Braque.21 Picasso's Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweilerof 1910, like innovative contemporary architecture, is made with transparent planes implying a fusion of volume with the space around it, and the solidity of the object is destroyed. Space and time are relative in quality rather than absolute:
Unlike the fixed positions determined by Renaissance perspective, planes are in a state of constant flux, shifting their relative locations according to the changing contexts [of the views]. Fixed temporal relations are rejected, too. The spectator is obliged to assume that the figure is pieced together from fragments taken from multiple and discontinuous viewpoints. This produces the ambiguous quality of time in the Cubist painting, for one does not sense either duration or instantaneity, but rather a composite time of fragmentary moments without permanence or sequential continuity.

viewer realizes that there is a tension between art and reality:

In the new world of Cubism, no fact of vision remained absolute. A dense, opaque shape could suddenly become a weightless transparency; a sharp, firm outline could abruptly dissolve into a vibrant texture; a plane that defined the remoteness of the background could be perceived simultaneously in the immediate foreground. Even the identity of objects was not exempt from these visual contradictions. In a Cubist work, a book could be metamorphosed into a table, a hand into a musical instrument. For a century that questioned the very concept of absolute truth or value, Cubism created an artistic language of intentional ambiguity. In front of a Cubist work of art, the spectator was to realize that no single interpretation of the fluctuating shapes, textures, spaces and objects could be complete in itself. And, in expressing this awareness of the paradoxical nature of reality and the need for describing it in multiple and even contradictory ways, Cubism offered a visual equivalent of a fundamental aspect of twentieth-century experience.22

give the means of expression."19

Indeed,

Since the temporal factor of process played such an important role in Analytic Cubism, let us review certain methods that Picasso and Braque used to reveal it beginning with the Cezannian passage. Alfred Barr introduced the term into English in Cubismand Abstract Art of 1936, describing it as the "merging of planes with space by leaving one edge (of the form) unpainted or light in tone." As Steinberg comments, the plane is diffused into the field, and this prevents the materialization of full-bodied solids and maintains discontinuity.23 In 1912 Hourcade noticed the whole surface of Cubist paintings was organized in terms of interpenetrating or interacting planes, saying, "The fascination of the paintings
lies .
.

. in the dynamism

which emerges

from the composition, a strange, disturbing dynamism." And in Du Cubismepublished in 1912, Gleizes and Metzinger discussed this factor as coming from Cezanne:
a He [Cezanne] teaches us to understand dynamism that is universal. He shows us the modifications which objects thought to be inanimate impose on each other.. . . His work, a homogeneous mass, moves in front of our eyes, expands, seems motionless or flickers. . . 24

Braque and Picasso also continued to investigate the process by which nature beSecondly, the method of simultaneity incomes art and made it more explicit. corporated the idea of time as movement Braque placed a trompe-l'oeilnail and its around the object. Jean Metzinger said in shadow in Still Life with Violin and Pitcher 1911 in Cubismand Tradition: (1909-1910); and being no more or less The cubists have allowed themselves to move real, or false, than the still life itself, the around the object, in order to give ... a concrete

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Time in the Visual Arts

49

representationof it, made up of several successive sion in space and using four-dimensional aspects. Formerly a picture took possession of geometry: space, now it reigns in time also. In painting, any daring is legitimatethat tends to augment the picIt allows either the moving around the object or the ture's power as painting.25

The following year Gleizes and Metzinger remarked: "Then the fact of moving around an object to seize it from several successive appearances, which, fused into a single image, reconstitute it in time, will make reasoning no longer people indignant." 28 Representing multiple points of view simultaneously is related to the influence of four-dimensional geometry on the Cubists, according to Linda Henderson.27 Henderson compares Henri Poincare's Science et l'Hypotese of 1902 with Gleizes and Metzinger's statement given above in Du Cubisme. The notion that the artist moves around the object to seize successive appearances is exactly the procedure for repbodies four-dimensional resenting suggested by Poincare:
Just as the perspective of a three-dimensional figure can be made on a plane, we can make that of a four-dimensional figure on a picture of three [or We can even take of the same two] dimensions.... figure several perspectives from several points of view. In this sense we may say the fourth dimension is imaginable.

turning of the object itself which is necessary to form an idea of its total dimensionality. It is through the subject of four-dimensional geometry that Cubist simultaneity is best understood.

Gleizes and Metzinger also took from Poincare the concept that "pure visual space" is space, or Euclidean three-dimensional "geometric space," and it should be contrasted with subjective perceptual space which results from tactile and motor experiences. The latter has "as many dimensions as we have muscles." They wrote, "To establish pictorial space, we must have recourse to tactile and motor sensations, indeed to all our faculties."28 Another source for the geometry of four-dimensions, Henderson shows, was E. Jouffret's Traite elementaire de geometrie a quatre dimensions of 1903. Jouffret's work is like Analytic Cubism because it presents varied views which construct a four-dimensional body simultaneously in a kind of mental picture of the process of rotation. Time, says Henderson, is the means by which the artist viewed his subject. Time played a "supporting role" for a Cubist painter seeking the fourth dimen-

There is still another process in early Cubist painting, the dual process of analysis and synthesis derived from Kant's writing and described by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in The Rise of Cubismof 1915. He said that analysis is the reduction of the figure to basic geometric forms which lack closed contours, and the presentation of several views. Synthesis is the assembling of these forms and views into a new image united with the surface. Camwell has studied this dual process and notes that it originated in Kant's distinction between two kinds of judgment: a judgment is called analytic when a subject concept contains predicate concepts ("a tondo is circular"), whereas a judgment is synthetic when it synthesizes distinct concepts. "What the writers on Cubism inherited (from Kant) was the idea of two opposed processes: analysis as the study of objects in nature and breaking them up into basic components; synthesis as the assembling of distinct parts to make a unique whole."29 Certain directions in post-Cubist American abstract art have resumed the aesthetic of instantneousness, or "presentness," and also cultivate extended duration. Both of these traditional temporal qualities have been discussed by Michael Fried.30 Works by artists such as Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis and Frank Stella exemplify "presentness," and Kuspit has remarked of this aesthetic that it is completely isolated from the world of daily experience. "Presentness" entails a sensation of timelessness, or eternal nowness, because the picture is apprehended instantly in its entirety: being impersonal and anti-theatrical, the audience has no sense of time passing (duration).31 Minimal, or Literalist, art shows duration, says Fried, because the art object is a simple thing with a strong Gestalt (shape) which is experienced as having an endless duration. The thing is inexhaustible, it goes on and on, and Fried concludes that the Minimal artist "is preoccupied with

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

50

McC LAIN

time." Minimal art takes the form of a single body in space, such as a cube, or a clearly articulated succession of bodies in space having the same shape, such as Donald Judd's untitled steel sculpture of 1966 having six cubes in a row 25' 4"long. Minimalist art has been related to Phenomenology by Alien Leepa,32 and Rosalind Krauss has associated Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Minimalism.33 About the Gestalt he said, "Our spontaneous way of seeing is not a sum of sensations but a structure, grouping or configuration,"34 and his Phenomenology of Perception helps to explain the sense of endless duration in Minimalism:
There is a temporal style in the world.... Time abides, and does not flow or change.... If I consider the world itself, there is simply one indivisible and changeless being. . . . The past, therefore, is not past, nor the future future. [These exist] only when a [viewer] is there . . . to adumbrate a perspective. [Time] is not real process, not an actual succession. It [only] arises from my relation to things. Change presupposes a certain position which I take up and from which I see things in progression before me.... Within things themselves, the future and the past are in a kind of eternal state.... What is past or future for me is present for the world.35

dynamic tension between space and time in Picasso's Portraitof Daniel-HenryKahnweiler. The first is an isolated tableauset apart from the outside world, and the latter is experiential in character. The concept of the correspondence of space and time at the Euclidean pole is explained by Erwin Panofsky in "Perspective as Symbolic Form."37 Classical space, or "the world," was discontinuous. Democritus had built up the world with tiny particles which were bodies in motion in the non-being; and Plato opposed a world of geometrically shaped bodies to space, a shapeless or shape-hating receptacle. Even Aristotle thought there was "no continuous quality in which the essence of individual things
would be resolved .
.

. no actual infinite

Thus, in Minimal art the thing in itself, the Gestalt, is timeless, whereas the viewer's perspective of things, or lived time, is repspace resented as succession in space. Krauss transform . . . psychophysiological remarks that "looking along its length one into mathematical space." sees (the work) in perspective:" it "demands to be seen in perspective," and "is . . . the perspective space of the Renaissance series of presented as an indefinite tacitly makes two very important assumptions: first, that we see with a single motionless eye; second, that perspectival views." But the crucial factor, the plane section through the cone of sight is an is explains Fried, following Judd, shape reproduction of our visual image. The adequate and "the wholeness that can be achieved fact is, however, that these assumptions involve an through the repetition of identical units."36 extremely bold abstraction from reality [subjective III. It is important to realize that the Kantian and modern relativistic conceptions of the physical world have resulted in widely different modes of representing the unity of space and time visually, and that space and time have similar characteristics at both poles. For example, the space of which Lessing spoke was the single, infinite container of Renaissance art and it was visualized with an instant of time in David's Oath of the Horatii. This picture is at the opposite pole to early Cubist heterogeneity and the

which extends beyond the existence of individual things." Renaissance space reveals a perfectly unified and rational world: infinite, homogeneous, and continuous, it is an) unchanging quantity consisting of three physical dimensions experienced as "something that transcends and reconciles the opposition between bodies and non-bodies (what is left between bodies)." However, the reason for perspective construction was to realize in the representation of space a homogeneity and infinity of which immediate experience had no knowledge, "to

visual impressions]. For the structure of an infinite, short, purely unchanging, and homogeneous-in mathematical-space is directly opposed to that of psychophysiological space. Perception is unacquainted with the notion of infinity. It is . . . confined . . . to a definitely limited part of space. And we can no more speak of perceptual space as homogeneous than we can speak of it as infinite.... Homogeneous space is never given, it must be constructed. ... In the space of immediate perception . . . there is no strict uniformity of places and directions, but each place has its own individual quality.

The single, three-dimensional space of Renaissance art was an a priori intuition according to Kant. His argument for the a priori nature of the representation of space

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Time in the Visual Arts is contained in passages of the Transcendental Aesthetic:

Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. For in order that certain sensations be referred to something outside me ... the representation of space must be presupposed. The representation of space cannot, therefore, be empirically obtained from the relations of outer appearance. On the contrary, this outer experience is itself possible at all only through that representation.38

51

Henry Allison remarks that the crucial point is that by "outer experience" is meant a sense through which one can become perceptually aware of objects as distinct from the self and its states. Kant is saying that the representation of space functions within human experience as a necessary condition of the possibility of distinguishing objects as distinct from the self and from each other. Ernst Cassirer explains the objective nature of time in Kant. Time also is a priori and it is the presupposition for our determining objective temporal relations. Otherwise we would be simply abandoned to the chance sequence of impressions in ourselves according to the mere play of association.39 Also Milic Capek has shown that the space and time of Euclid, Newton, and Kant were similar. Like space, time had continuity, uniformity of flow (it was unchanging), eternity (infinity), homogeneity, and independence from physical contents.40 There was a spatial model for Classical space-time: an instantaneous cross-section of the world containing all simultaneous events, as it was believed that there was a world-wide instant stretching throughout the whole universe. All points contained in the cross-section were simultaneous in the absolute sense. The "timeless space" of Kant, and even of Bergson, was "a label for an infinite series of successive instantaneous spaces which, though qualitatively identical, still differed by their positions in the universal flow of time." With Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905), the objective existence of a worldwide instantaneous space, the universal now, was denied; and in 1908, when Minkowski first showed the impossibility of separating space and time, the relativistic space-time continuum was formulated. At this period the proposed fusion was thought of as the spatialization of time. Time was a fourth dimension

of space.41 In Relativity Theory there was no absolute space and no absolute simultaneity. Space was not a homogeneous, uniform, static container independent of its physical contents, and it was not causally inert and indifferent to physical action. Mass and space were fused in a dynamic reality which was not a rigid structure, but had curvature varying from place to place and moment to moment. Correspondingly, time lost its sense of uniformity and homogeneity. Whereas the heterogeneous space and time in Analytic Cubist painting are not Kantian, Cubism is definitely post-Kantian. But as Lynn Camwell remarks, Cubism had strong ties to the nineteenth century:
[It has been said] that the truth beyond nature depicted by the Cubists was not a nineteenth-century, timeless Absolute, but the unstable and fluxuating reality of the twentieth century. Although in hindsight Rosenblum's words ring true to us today, the contemporaries of the cubists consistently thought in categories inherited from nineteenthcentury idealism, symbolism and science. Those with a more tough-minded temperament, such as Metzinger . . . and Kahnweiler, looked to Kant, Poincare and science, whereas the more lyrical and mystical, such as Apollinaire . . . were open to Bergson's intuitionism and the tradition of symbolism.42

The role of contemporary philosophy in the development of the new representation of space and time in Analytic Cubist painting is exemplified in the relation of Henri Bergson to the Cubists. This relation was problematical and concerns a number of aspects of Bergson's writing, especially his thought about memory and the polarity of space and time. It is important to note that in 1911 the defenders of Cubism had begun to declare that Henri Bergson had given his approval to Cubism. Andre Salmon, in announcing the exhibition of the "Section d'Or," intimated that Bergson would write the preface to the catalogue, which in fact Bergson did not do as he had never seen a Cubist painting.43 Edward Fry has pointed out, following Hamilton's study of Cezanne, that the Cubists were influenced by Bergson's emphasis on the role of memory in experience:
... with the passage of time an observer accumulates in his memory a store of perceptual information

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

52
about a given object in the external visible world, and this accumulated experience becomes the basis for the observer's conceptual knowledge of that object. [The method ofl simultaneity was derived from the idea of the cummulative character of human memory as expounded in such works as L'Evolution Creatriceof 1907.44

Mc C LAIN

bly united. Our perceptions reach us only after having passed through [spatiality]. They have been impregnated in advance by our geometry, so that our faculty of thinking only finds again in matter the mathematical properties which our faculty of perceiving has already posed there. With Kant, space is given as a ready-made form of our perceptual faculty. [The mind perceives] under the form of extensive homogeneity [i.e. space] what is given it as qualitative heterogeneity.... [This conception is] a kind of reaction against that heterogeneity which is the very ground of our experience. What we must say is that we have to do with two different kinds of reality, the one heterogeneous, that of sensible qualities, the other homogeneous, namely space.47

Fry links the Bergsonian methods of Cezanne to the development of Cubism in 1908-1910. Kahnweiler also had said that the new Cubist method stimulated the memory of the viewer:
[Using the new method the painter] no longer has to limit himself to depicting the object as it would appear from one given viewpoint, but wherever necessary for fuller comprehension, can show it from several sides, and from above and below.... Starting from a background [space] the painter now works toward the front by a sort of "scheme of forms" in which each object's position is clearly indicated. ... If only this "scheme of forms" were to exist it would be impossible to see in the painting the representation of things from the outer world. One would only see an arrangement of planes, cylinders, quadrangles.... At this point Braque's introduction of undistorted real objects into the painting takes on its full significance. When "real details" are thus introduced the result is a stimulus which carries with it memory images. Combining the "real" stimulus and the scheme of forms, these images construct the finished object in the mind. Thus the desired physical representation comes into being in the spectator's mind.45

However, Bergson did not think that Kant's notion of time was a true "inner experience" of the self.
Kant's great mistake was to take time as a homogeneous medium. He did not notice that real duration [as experienced] is made up of movements inside one another, and that when [time] seems to assume the form of a homogeneous whole [instant], it is because it gets expressed in space. Thus [this] amounts at bottom to confusing time with space....48

In the following passage Bergson concludes that we spatialize time, or symbolize it, in intellectual and scientific thought:
Beset by the idea of space we introduce it unwittingly into our feeling of pure succession; we set our states of consciousness side by side in such a way as to perceive them simultaneously, no longer one in another ... the succession thus [taking] the form of a continuous line or chain, the parts of which touch without penetrating one another. We introduce order . . . by distinguishing [the parts] and then comparing the places which they occupy.... [In this way succession] is converted into simultaneity and is projected into space.... We here put our finger on the mistake of those who regard pure duration as something similar to space. But how can they fail to notice that, in order to perceive a line as a line, it is necessary to take up a position outside it, to take account of the void which surrounds it, and consequently to think a space of three dimensions? If our conscious point A does not yet possess the idea of space [then] the succession of states through which it passes cannot assume for it the form of a line; but its sensations will add themselves dynamically to one another and will organize themselves, like the successive notes of a tune. ... In a word, pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it would be pure heterogeneity.49

However, whereas the representation of memory traces posed no difficulty in Cubism, Christopher Gray called the Cubists' mobile relation to objects in space a Bergonian concept of dynamic reality which was limited, limited to showing only instants in the process of moving around the object, not the movement itself.46 The problem which Gray saw in representing motion resulted from the fact that Bergson polarized space and time, just as did that Bergson called Kant's Kant-except notion of time spatial, or "outer experience." Real duration for Bergson was said to be an intuitive inner experience that could not be spatialized. To understand this distinction, it is first necessary to realize that Bergson accepted Kant's concept of homogeneous space:
What the Transcendental Aesthetic of Kant appears to have established once for all is that extension [space] is not a material attribute of the same kind as others. Intelligence [for Kant] is bathed in an atmosphere of spatiality, to which it is insepara-

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Time in the Visual Arts

53

The impossibility of depicting motion intellect operated by making fixed divisions through multiple views was also discussed in space, or stoppages (immobile states). Boccioni called this "relative motion," an in Cubist literature by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler defended the intellectual approach associated with Cubist Kantian idea that time is represented as a art, which is a spatially divided time breakseries of instantaneous spaces. ing down into repetitive, separate parts perceived by an observer outside the object. The Futurists tried to represent movement [us- It, too, was given a place in his style; but a ing the Cubist language of forms] by depicting the third factor, "absolute motion," prevented moved part of the body several times in various the spatially divided time of Analytical positions, [or] by reproducing two or more phases Cubism from having a dominant effect. of movement of the entire figure. . . . Can the This motion is intuited within the object impression of a moving form be awakened in the itself, and lines of force are used to represpectator in this way? It cannot. All of these solutions suffer from the sent it as it follows its own innate energies. same mistake which render that impression imposThese energies synthesize the object, and at least two sible. In order to produce "movement," with its environment, in some the object visual images must exist as succeeding points in kind of unique dynamic unity. Boccioni time. In Futurism, however, the various phases exist simultaneously in the painting.50 sought to combine all these factors in The Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, having In fact to overcome Bergson's polariza- thought he had found a visual formula for tion of space and time, Futurist art related Bergson's idea that time precedes space, motion to Bergson's own concept of intui- that the fundamental reality of human existion, according to Brian Petrie's article of tence is the feeling of temporal process. However, the usefulness to the visual arts 1974 entitled "Boccioni and Bergson."5' Boccioni, who was a serious student of of Bergson's thought about time was called Bergson's philosophy, challenged Cubism into question by Marcel Duchamp, as demwith the idea that "if works of art necessarily onstrated in another article of the 1970's by exist in space, at least the attempt to make Lucia Beier describing Marcel Duchamp's that spatiality somehow expressive of dura- Large Glass of 1912-1923.53 Duchamp's tion (should) avoid an analytical methodol- Large Glass materialized Bergson's idea that ogy. . . ."52 Boccioni's own contribution was time, as the artistic ego itself, could not be spatially (Figure 4). As an intuitive approach to representing dura- represented tion, or flux, as visualized in The Unique Bergson said, considering whether time Forms of Continuityin Space of 1913. What could be represented by space, "Yes if you did an intuitive approach to motion consist are dealing with time flown. No, if you of? Bergson had said, "Intuition is the sym- speak of time flowing." After Beier's pathy by means of which one places oneself analysis, the manner in which Duchamp inside an object in order to coincide with represented this now seems clear. Duration what is unique in it," and Boccioni inter- was the subject of the Large Glass, the artist's preted that as meaning that an actual duration as the creator of the work. There object-the work of art-could bridge the were three important aspects of the artist's gap between the mind and the external self which entered into the creative process world, as though the object were a state of and were shown in a comical way. The mind that one could sympathize with. Boc- Bachelor Machine below functioned like cioni identified four crucial aspects in vis- the intellect, which breaks things up into ualizing the intuition of motion: inter- units and loses the dynamic flow of durapenetration, "absolute" and "relative" tion. The Bride above represented intuition. These two processes, the Geometric motion, and force-lines. Interpenetration was the means by which the artist made and the Vital, were fused momentarily by direct contact with the phenomenal world. the Vital Impetus, the creative force, which It was intuition, a sensation of the interac- Bergson compares to steam and which tion of his psychic states and matter taking Duchamp incorporates into the Large Glass the indivisible form of a continuum. Sec- as fog, droplets of water, splashes, and curondly, Bergson had said the time sensed by rents of electricity. With these elements of our intuition was indivisible, whereas the the creative process Duchamp demon-

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

54

A M C IN LL

strated that it is impossible to experience the artist's duration in the art object because the creative process, as an ongoing activity, is not visible to the viewer. Indeed, the only movement which the Large Glass has is the spectator's duration "which keeps it alive." By the time of the Large Glass of 1923, it appeared that the range of Bergson's thought about time, space, intuition and intellection had been fully illustrated in the visual arts.54 IV. The progress of literary criticism from Lessing's idea of the polarity of space and time has been summed up by William Holtz in an article of 1977 entitled "Spatial Form in Modern Literature: A Reconsideration."55 Remarking that twentieth century physics "recast physical reality in terms of a unified spatial-temporal field," Holtz has pointed to spatiality in Kenneth Pike's trimodal linguistic theory of perception which is based on modern physical theory. We perceive the world, said Pike, in three ways: as particle (a discrete unit such as a word), as wave (a flowing continuum as the sound of speech), and as field (figure and ground) within which a unit gets its meaning. Each mode is useful and should be retained. Indeed, the modes are supplementary because a single view is necessarily incomplete. "Within this tri-modal scheme," says Holtz, "we can say Frank . .. has focused on criticism focuses on the larger context of which the poem is a part." In both cases synchronicity is a condition of knowledge, and in both Frank's spatial "metaphor" is applicable. Let us adapt Pike's tri-modal theory to visual art in an effort to further clarify the question of "spatial form" relative to the qualities of time which have been discussed: unity of action, instantaneousness, duration, eternity, and heterogeneity.56 When the particle view is applied to art, it can be defined as thing-centered and objective. The particle is an isolable thing without a subjective, experiential context; static and timeless, it is apprehended intellectually. This concept about art synthesizes the thoughts of Pike with those of Worringer, Frank, Holdheim, and Bergson, and
. the field .-. while emerging structuralist

examples are found in abstract styles such as Byzantine mosaic decoration, as well as in the naturalistic style of David's Oath of the Horatii (Fig. 2). Pike's isolable unit clearly is comparable to the concept of abstractgeometric art discussed by Worringer because "one has abstracted (an object) from its environment and delimited it as a complete thing."57 The urge to abstract, we recall, results from a desire to get away from the restlessness of the changing world-the "ceaseless flux of the forces of nature" to a realm of stasis, harmony and wholeness.58 Moreover, in Bergsonian terms, Holdheim has noted the abstracting method reminds of the scientific method which isolates phenomena so that the object is removed from the familiar ground of experience. This distances reality, destroys subjectivity, and "replaces vital spontaneity and emotion with intellectual lucidity."59 From the partical view, art represents a timeless truth or a "frozen instant of truth" (instantaneousness), and these temporal qualities correspond with the "timeless unity" which Frank thought characterized the spatialization of time in modern literature. It is important to realize that the particle view of art does not so much denyspace as it denies the changing world of time which can be found in space because, as Worringer and Frank remarked, time destroys the objective character of reality.
The preference for abstract-geometric form in primitive man [resulted from a state of perplexity in the face of the mutiformity of the world picture]. Primitive man tore absract form out of the flux of happening, to free it from all caprice, to raise it up into the realm of the necessary, in a word, to eternalize it.60

The particle view of art is the same as Spanos' teleological "world of God" and the Aristotelian plot,61 and it is the world of Byzantine mosaic decoration as discussed by Otto Demus. The Byzantine church itself is the "particle," having its own intellectual, dogmatic context apart from the real world of experience. The Byzantine church was an image of the Cosmos with an ordered hierarchy of spaces descending from heaven, the sphere of the cupolas, to the earthly zone below. The rounded space in which each icon is set is not twodimensional; it opens outward and includes

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Time in the Visual Arts the beholder so as to give reality to the concept of divine world order. Correspondingly, time in the Byzantine church is symbolic. It is based on the Calendar of the Christian year, and the icons are arranged in accordance with the liturgical sequence of ecclesiastical festivals. Linked with the spatial symbolism of the building, the flow of time is converted "into an ever-recurring cycle moving around a static center."62 But the particle view of art is not only found in the timeless quality of Byzantine mosaics; it is also represented in naturalistic art with perspective depth by David's Oath of the Horatii. We recall that the painting exemplifies Diderot's art theory, and it has an instantaneously intelligible pictorial unity with a powerful dramatic idea set in motion by a cause. This tableau is an objective world which is set off from reality: it is a "frozen instant of truth," following Newton's idea that "at every instant one could say of the universe that everything therein is as it is absolutely necessary that it should be." The field view of art presents another form of the spatialization of time. It is subjective, experiential and temporally lifelike. This view emphasizes the process of making a picture, as discussed above in relation to Analytic Cubism: space and time are finite (incomplete), heterogeneous, and they have undergone planification. According to Pike, the field view places the object in a context, just as Cubism interwove the object with multiple spaces, and it is dependent upon the external world and the viewer. The separate parts, or "particles," disappear and melt together as the unit is viewed against a larger background. One is dealing with a total complex, a fused whole, the figure and the ground. The field view of art incorporates aspects of Worringer's empathetic (naturalistic) style because it is temporal and requires the active, subjective participation of the viewer. Even though Cubism has undergone "planification," Worringer could not have intended Cubist art as an example of the abstract-geometric style, because Cubism does not focus on the closed unity of an isolated thing:
The art of antiquity avoided rendering space and depth.... The aim of artistic volition was to render

55
the natural model as an individual material body-not by perception in walking around it-but to reproduce it as a whole for the imagination by amalgamating the fragmentary, temporal succession of perceptual moments. The artist intended to render a closed whole derived from the imagination. He did this in an attempt, foreover beyond his reach, to establish the absolute material individuality of a thing.63

The art of the field view is not spacedenying. Space is a primary factor and its many depthrelations require the viewer's attention just as does perspective space. Because of the active role of space in the field view of art, things are "confused and mingled," as Worringer said of perspective depth, and the viewer must subjectively make an effort at understanding how the varied perceptual elements might be
combined.64

As Holtz has remarked, the field view also has the simultaneous mode of which Frank said, "Temporality becomes a purely
physical limit of apprehension . . . super-

seded by a space-logic of synchronicity."65 That is, the image is viewed simultaneously and successively, as Brion-Guerry said of Cezanne's painting (Fig. 3) and Holdheim of Joyce's Ulysses, because of the factor of the moving observer.66 This is the world of process in which the temporal flow of the novel, or the unified picture space of the painting, is interrupted. What Frank actually describes, says Holdheim, is not the polarity of time and space but a "dynamic tension" between time and space. What the Analytic Cubist painting requires of the vieweris an effort to recompose the object in a unified pictorial space which is broken up by excessive temporalizing. In order to achieve a "unified spatial apprehension" of the work, the viewer is forced into "active empathy." This is the same process as Holdheim's organicizing, temporalizing role of the reader who attempts to restore the temporal line of narrative. In both art and literature abstraction, or discontinuity, functions "as a spur to exacerbated
empathizing."67

The wave view of art means a fusion of units like the field view-and an emphasis on process and change-but over an extended period of tiine. According to Pike, the wave view is useful in describing historical change and development, in a wavelike

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

56 fusion, as a continuous behavioral event. This view is exemplified by phenomena such as the historical development of Analytic Cubism or Monet's series paintings of poplars and haystacks. With these observations it should be apparent that literary criticism has done much to elucidate the subject of time in visual art, and that a passageway has been opened which is beneficial to art history. The two fields have common concerns and can share a common terminology.

McC L A IN Alan De Leiris, "Manet: 'Sur La Plage De Boulogne,'" Gazettedes Beaux-Arts 57 (1961): 55-59. 14 Levine, pp. 114-20. 15 Liliane Brion-Guerry, "The Elusive Goal," Cezanne,The Late Work,ed. William Rubin, (New York, 1977), pp. 73-82. 16 George Hamilton, "Cezanne, Bergson and the Image of Time," CollegeArtJournal 16 (1956): 2-12. 17 Ibid., p. 11. Where a Bergsonian approach to art is concerned, Hamilton's thought about Cezanne can be compared with that of Dewey in Art as Experience (New York, 1934), pp. 184, 220, who is cited by Paul Laporte; see n. 28. Dewey says that the distinction between the spatial and temporal arts is wrong. All objects of art are matters of perception and perception is not instantaneous.

Architectural structures provide, I should imagine, 1Joseph Frank, SewaneeReview 53 (1945): 221-40, the perfect reductioad absurdumof the separation of 433-56, 643-53; see also his The Widening Gyre (Rutspace and time in works of art. If anything exists in gers University Press, 1963), and "Spatial Form: an Anthe mode of "space-occupancy," it is a building. But swer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 (1977): pp. 231-52. even a small hut cannot be the matter of esthetic 2 The Laocoonand OtherProse WritingsofLessing, ed. perception save as temporal qualities enter in. A W. B. Ronnfeldt, (London), pp. 90f; see William cathedral, no matter how large, makes an instanSpanos, Martin Heidegger and the Questionof Literature, taneous impression. A total qualitative impression (University of Indiana Press, 1979), pp. 115-48. emanates from it as soon as it enteracts with [our 3 Frank, The Widening Gyre, pp. 9-10, 13, 59. vision]. But this is only the substratum and 4 Ibid., pp. 50,53-54,56-57, and "Spatial Form: an framework within which a continuous process of Answer to Critics," 233-35. interactions introduces enriching and defining 5 Wolfgang Holdheim, "Wilhelm Worringer and elements. The hasty sightseer no more has an the Polarity of Understanding," in The Questionof Texaesthetic vision of... the Cathedral of Rouen than tuality, ed. William Spanos, (University of Indiana the motorist traveling at sixty miles an hour sees the Press, 1982), p. 346, and Frank, "Spatial Form: an fleeting landscape. One must move about, within Answer to Critics," 233. See also a reprinting of Holdand without, and through repeated visits let the heim's article in The HermeneuticMode, (Cornell Unistructure gradually yield itself to him in various versity Press, 1984). 8 Frank, The Widening Gyre, pp. 27f. lights and in connection with changing moods. [To perceive, or have an esthetic experience, a be7 Rensselaer Lee Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic holder] must create his own experience and his Theoryof Painting, (New York, 1967), pp. 6-7, 27, 29f, creation must include relations comparable to those 62-64. Humphry House, in Aristotle's Poetics, which the original producer underwent. They are (Westport Conn., 1956), pp. 64-66, notes Aristotle not the same in any literal sense. But with the persaid little about the unities of time and place. Time as with the artist, there must be an ordering ceiver, was the 24-hour of a for and as simply period day; of the whole that is ... the same as the elements of place, the Greeks did not divide the stage and usually the process of organization the creator of the work had only one stage set. BLee, pp. 20f, 61, 66. Lessing's view was anticipated consciously experienced. Without the act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art.... by AbbeJean DuBois in 1719; see Michael Fried, "To18 ward a Supreme Fiction: Genre and Beholder in The William Rubin, "Cezannism and the Beginnings Art Criticism of Diderot and His Contemporaries," of Cubism," Cezanne,TheLate Work,ed. William Rubin, New LiteraryTheory 6 (1974-1975): 547f, and Steven (New York, 1977), pp. 151-69, 189. Levine, "The "Instant" of Criticism and Monet's Criti'9Judith Wechsler, The Interpretation of Cezanne, cal Instant," Arts Magazine 55 (1981): 114. (University of Michigan Press, 1981), p. 29. 20 Rubin, p. 189. 9 Levine, p. 117. 21 10 Fried, pp. 548-74. See also his "Thomas Couture Robert Rosenblum, Cubismand TwentiethCentury and the Theatricalization of Action in 19th Century Art, (New York, 1976), pp. 42-45, 65. French Painting," Artforum 8 (1970): 41f; "The Be22Ibid., pp. 13f. 23 Leo Steinberg, holder in Courbet: His Early Self-Portraits and Their "The Polemical Part," Art in Place in His Art," Glyph4 (1978): 113, 116f; Absorption America 67 (1979): 121f. and TheatricalityPainting and the Beholderin the Age of 24John Golding, Cubism, A History and an Analysis Diderot, (Berkeley, 1980). 1907-1914, (Boston, 1968), pp. 32ff. n Linda Nochlin, Realism, (Johns Hopkins Univer25 Edward Fry, Cubism, (London, 1966), pp. 66f. 26 Linda Henderson, "A New Facet of Cubism: the sity Press, 1971), pp. 30-32, 48, 78-81. 12 Fried, "Thomas Couture ...," 44; "The Beholder Fourth-Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Courbet...," 114, 116f; "Representing RepresentaReinterpreted," Art Quarterly 34 (1971): 428. See tion: On the Central Group in Courbet's 'Studio,"' Art Marianne Martin Futurist Art and Theory 1909-1915 in America 69 (1981): 168. (New York, 1968), p. 205; the term "simultaneity" was 13 Ann Coffin Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradia word "jealousy guarded" by the Futurists who had tion (Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 202,204; see also been the first to use it in the context of painting (Pref-

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Time in the Visual Arts

ace to the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery Exhibition, Feb. 1912). At first simultaneity stood for the pace of modern life with its speed and "simultaneity of states of mind." According to Lynn Camwell, Cubist Criticism (University of Michigan Press, 1980), p. 59, Apollinaire used the word to describe the contrasting color in Delaunay's Orphist paintings, then in 1913 to describe the Cubist use of multiple viewpoints for obtaining the most complete description of objects. 27 Henderson, pp. 411-33. 28 Paul Laporte also had realized that Cubist simultaneity integrated kinesthetic sensations with visual perceptions; see "the Space-Time Concept in the Work of Picasso," Magazine of Art 41 (1948): 26-32, and Art and "Cubism and Science," Journal of Aesthetics Criticism7 (1949): 243-56. Of special interest is his idea that great artists have integrated time and space either implicitly or explicitly. 9 Camwell, pp. 16f, 33f, 96ff. Kahnweiler's a priori geometric scaffolding also in Kantian:

57

to think of particular spaces as parts of a single space. Kant here is contrasting the relation between space and its parts (particular spaces) with the relation between a concept and its extension. In the case of the concept, the partial concepts out of which a general concept is composed are all logically prior to the whole. A general concept is thus a collection of partial concepts, but this is not the case with space and its parts. The parts of space are only given in and through this single space which they presuppose. Space is not only presented as single, but as a unity, consequently it cannot be conceived as a collection or aggregate. 39 Ernst Cassirer, Kant's Lfe and Thought (Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 182ff. 40 Milec Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics, (New York, 1961), pp. 1-50, 153-6, 158-77, 205-12. Capek thinks with Bergson that it is impossible to reconstruct any temporal process out of static geometric elements, so that "an abandonment of visual (for auditory) models in modern physics is imperative" (Ibid., pp. 234f). ... the described geometric forms give us the sturdy 41 calls this a static.view of space-time because scaffolding, upon which we place the products of the Capek spatial diagram suggested that successive moments our imagination consisting of retinal stimulae and coexist, whereas temporal reality is by nature incomimages from our memory. Our a priori knowledge and its "parts" are not simultaneous. of these forms is the prerequisite without which we plete 42 Camwell, p. 7. couldn't see and there wouldn't be a physical world. 43 Fry, p. 67; see also Camwell, p. 32f. 44 Fry, pp. 38, 13 f. 30 Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Artforum (1967): 12-23. 45 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism 31 Donald Kuspit, "Authoritarian Aesthetics and (New York, 1949), pp. lIf. However, we should rethe Elusive Alternative,"Journal of Aestheticsand Art member that Bergson's thought about the distant past Criticism4 (1983): 271-88. being carried into the present does not concern 32 Allen Leepa, "Minimal Art and Primary MeanCubism directly; see Henri Bergson, Creative Evoluings," Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory tion, trans. Irwin Edman (New York, 1944) p. 68: Battock, (New York, 1968), p. 205. Our duration is not merely one instant replacing 33 Rosalind Krauss, "Allusion and Illusion in another; if it were, there would never be anything Donald Judd," Artforum4 (1966): pp. 24-26. but the present-no prolonging of the past into the 34 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Nonsense actual, no evolution.... Duration is the continuous (Chicago, 1964), pp. 48f. 35 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologyof Percepprogress of the past.... And the past grows without tion (New York, 1962), pp. 41 If, 42 If; on the link beceasing.... In reality, the past is preserved.... In its tween Phenomenology and duration in Cezanne's entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earpaintings, see Forrest Williams, "Cezanne and French liest infancy is there, leaning over the present which Phenomenology," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, is about to join it, pressing against the portals of 12 (1954): 481-92. consciousness that would fain leave it outside.... 38 Fried, "Art and Objecthood," 12. 37 Erwin Panofsky, "Die Perspektive als symbolische Our personality, which is being built up each instant with its accumulated experience, changes without Form," Vortrage der BibliothekWarburg (1924-1925), ceasing.... pp. 258ff. 38 Henry Allison, Kant's TranscendentalIdealism. An has discussed the difference between imand Defense (Yale University Press, 1983), Capek Interpretation mediate memory and more distant mnemic links in pp. 82-98. The argument that space and time are pure Bergson; see Bergson and Modern Physics, (Dordrecht, intuitions continues: 1971), pp. 158-60: Space is not. . . [a] general concept of relations of From Descartes to [Alexius] Meinong the present things . . . but a pure intuition. For . . . we can was regarded as a mathematical point; Lovejoy exrepresent to ourselves only one space; and if we tended this point up to a definite temporal length; speak of diverse spaces, we mean thereby only parts insisted that this length has no constant and James of one and the same unique space. [These] parts sharp edges; but all these views agreed in considercannot precede the one all-embracing space, as ing the present moment as the only reality hovering being . . . constituents out of which it can be combetween two abysses of non-being. . . . Time thus posed; on the contrary, they can be thought only as conceived is a "perpetual perishing" in which the in it. Space is essentially one; the manifold in it... spark of the present moment is continually extindepends solely on [the introduction of] limitations. guished in order to be replaced by another spark, Allison notices that in support of his claim that "we can equally ephemeral. Such was the instantaneous represent to ourselves only one space," Kant only ofworld of [Heraclitus and] the Arabian atomists, of fers the observation that we are somehow constrained Descartes and of Leibnitz, the world of perpetual

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

58
perishing and perpetually recreated by God, its evanescent events lost forever in the abyss of nonbeing.

MC

L A IN

54 This has not proven to be true as Duchamp was a major influence on the development of Conceptual Art which focuses on process; see Robert Smith, "ConArt, ed. Nikos Stanceptual Art" in Conceptsof Modemrn The main difference between such a view of time gos (New York, 1974), pp. 256-70. and the Bergsonian view consists in a different view 55 William Holtz, "Spatial Form in Modern Literaof the status of the past. [For the atomists] succes- ture: A Reconsideration," Critical Inquiry 4 (1977): sive moments of the specious present were com- 276-80. pletely external each to the other; James admitted 56 Kenneth Pike, Linguistic Concepts.An Introduction 'feelings of transition" or "feelings of relation" be- to Tagmemics,(University of Nebraska Press, 1982), and tween them which are the links of immediate "Language as Particle, Wave and Field," The Texas memory. Bergson's duration has, besides the links Quarterly 2 (1959): 37-54; see also William Holtz, of immediate memory, a number of relations bind- "Field Theory and Literature," Centennial Review ing together temporal terms which are not [in suc- (1967); 532-48. cession]. These links are more and more tenuous as 57 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, the difference in date grows larger . . . [however] trans. Michael Bullock, (New York, 1967), pp. 5, 38. there is only a difference in degree and not that of 58Joseph Buttigieg, "Worringer Among the Modkind between immediate memory and more tenu- ernists," The Questionof Textuality,ed. William Spanos ous mnemic links joining temporally noncontigu(University of Indiana Press, 1982), p. 362. 59 Holdheim, p. 353. ous moments. In Bergson's duration the whole of 60 Worringer, pp. 35, 46. the past persists ...; forJames only the "immediate 61 past," perceived on the "rearward edge" of the Holdheim, pp. 348ff; see also William Spanos, specious present, is real. This is the main difference "Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of between the next-to-next continuity of [James'] Time: An Existential Critique,"Journal ofAesthetics and stream of thought and the total continuity of real Art Criticism29 (1971): 87-104, and "Modern Drama duration. While in James' view the distant phases of and the Aristotelian Tradition: The Formal Imperathe past are completely separated from the present tives of Absurd Time," ContemporaryLiterature 12 moment . . . the Bergsonian past is indivisibly im- (1971): 345-73. The "Bergsonian" self-space which manent in the present "occasion." Within the Spanos remarks in the work of writers such as Proust dynamic totality of the past there are no gaps, no not only recalls Frank's "spatial form," but also the full stops. unity of time and the self discussed by Hans Meyerhoff in Time in Literature (Berkeley, 1955). 46 Christopher Gray, CubistAestheticTheories(Balti62Otto Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, (Lonmore, 1967), pp. 65ff, 85ff. don, 1947), pp. 13-16. 47 Bergson, pp. 223-27. 63 Worringer, pp. 39f. 48 Henri Bergson, Timeand Free Will. An Essayon the 64 Ibid., pp. 22, 38. Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson 65 Frank, "Spatial Form: an Answer to Critics," (London, 1971), pp. 232f; originally published in pp. 235. 1886. 66 Rosenblum, p. 43, compares Joyce's Ulysses with 49Ibid., pp. 101-105. Cubist art. 50 Kahnweiler, pp. 21 f. 67 Holdheim, pp. 347, 353. 51 Brian Petrie, "Boccioni and Bergson," Burlington 1. Nicolas Poussin, Fall of the Mana in the Figure of the influence on Magazine (1974): 140-47; Bergson on Boccioni, see also John Golding, Boccioni's Unique Wilderness.Louvre, Paris. Courtesy of Service photographique de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux. Formsof Continuityin Space, (New York, 1972), pp. 6-8. 52 Petrie, p. 143. Petrie cites Boccioni's Pittura SculFigure 2. Jacques David, Oath oftheHoratii. Louvre, tura Futuriste of 1914. Boccioni said that Analytical Paris. Courtesy of Service photographique de la ReunCubism did not "present the nature of life. [With a ion des Musees Nationaux. multitude of planes] Picasso ... extracts dead elements tific analysis which seeks to study life by dissecting a Figure 3. Paul Cezanne, Bibemus Quarry. Museum Folvang, Essen. Courtesy of Zentrale Museumsvercorpse." waltung. 53 Lucia Beier, "The Time Machine: A Bergsonian Figure 4. Marcel Duchamp, Large Glass. PhiladelApproach to 'The Large Glass' Le Grand Verre," phia Museum of Art: Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier. Gazettedes Beaux-Arts 88 (1976): 194-200.

This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.227 on Mon, 3 Dec 2012 23:34:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions