Note to readers: This is an unfinished essay on the depiction of time in visual art.

It was originally posted on http://www.jameselkins.com/html/upcoming.html.

The essay is in two parts: the first is a survey of representations of time in art; it is
similar to the first part of the essay on space and form posted on the same website.
The second part of the essay surveys the current possibilities of narrative in visual
art; it is similar to the second part of the essay on space and form.

Note to students in Issues in Visual and Critical Studies: skip the first part of this
text; we will go over it with slides in class. Begin reading at the heading: “The
Place of Narrative in Contemporary Art.”

Send comments, criticism, etc., to jelkins@artic.edu.

Time and Narrative

James Elkins

In art schools and universities, there is often a distinction between art works that
involve time, such as performance, sound and music, film, animation, and video,
and those that do not, including drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpting.
The former are sometimes called 4–D to distinguish them from media that are
2–D and 3–D. For that reason, the study of time gets pushed out of the
Chapter 5 -2- Narrative

mainstream, and students virtually always begin with 2–D and work their way
toward 4–D.
But it is not possible to claim that the theme of time is absent from pictures
and sculptures. All visual art changes through time: it fades, yellows, chips,
decays, becomes scratched, cracked, or dusty, and eventually—over the passage of
centuries—it is mutilated, crushed, burned, or lost. But even if we choose to think
only of the present, there are the questions of how long it took to make the work,
how long it takes to see it, how long we will remember it. In addition many 2–D
and 3–D works have to do with time: they are about the passage of time, or they

show things in motion—seasons, clocks, people growing older.1 It may seem as if

visual art is different from novels or music because it is all seen at once, in an
instant: but we do not see things in an instant, and we do not stop seeing them
after an instant. It takes time to see a painting, and that time is part of what the
painting means.
For these reasons and others, all visual art has to do with time, and it can be
argued that it is not sensible to talk about objects without talking about time. An
object, Heidegger says, is a thing that exists at a certain place and a certain time.
If I take two apparently identical pine needles, I can tell them apart because they
cannot be in the same place at the same time. Each one has a place and a time,

1 P. Souriau, “Time and the Plastic Arts,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism vii (1949):

294-307, Souriau, The Aesthetics of Movement (Amherst, 1983), C. Gottlieb, “Movement in

Painting,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism xvii (1958): [ ], [ ] Lamblin, Peinture et

temps (Paris, 1983).

Chapter 5 -3- Narrative

even if it doesn’t have a form that is different from other pine needles.2 Time is

there at the basis of our way of thinking about objects.3

WAYS O F REP RES ENTING TIME

Time can become part of art works in many ways. The subject is too
complicated to be classified any one way; here is a list of examples what we will
explore in the course of this chapter.
(1) Art works can represent motion by showing walking and running
people, waterfalls, moving cars, and shooting stars. We might say that such
pictures try to represent gesture or movement. Abstract paintings often do just
that, by recording sweeping gestures complete with paint splatters and “mistakes.”
Representations of motion might be thought of as narratives that take place over
just a few moments, but I put them in a separate category since visual narratives
have traditionally been composed of separate, static scenes. (Comic books are an
exception, where superheroes might be shown in motion in a single cell, and also
in a narrative sequence composed of several cells.)

2 Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing? translated by W. B. Burton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch

(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), 15-16.

3 See further M. Capek, “Time,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by [ ] (New York,

1973), vol. 4, 389a ff.

Chapter 5 -4- Narrative

(2) These two strategies are often different from symbolizing time by
depicting signs of time such as clocks, hourglasses, the Sphinx, or gravestones. In
the twentieth century there have been various attempts to symbolize the fourth

dimension in pictures.4 Even a mountain landscape can symbolize time, if it

reminds us of the passage of millions of years. Symbols of time do not have to
show any motion, and they do not have to occur in sequences of scenes. A single
work can symbolize time without moving.
(3) Visual narratives are sequences of individual pictures. Films are
sequences of single frames, cartoons are sequences of cells, and fresco cycles are
sequences of scenes. In painting, more than one scene can take place within a
single frame, so that a single picture can represent several different times in
“continuous narrative.” It can seem as if narrative really belongs to the realm of
the verbal rather than the visual. A sequence pictures usually makes a story, and
stories are things that we tell in words. It can appear as if the visual realm of a
painting or a photograph is made to serve the verbal purpose of a story. But we
need to be careful about thinking this way. Every moment that we are awake, we
are looking around, and so we see sequences of pictures. They do not always add
up to stories—sometimes our eyes just move around to take in light and shade.
Yet it is essential to keep in mind that any picture can work in all three of
these ways. A picture of a normal–looking livingroom will symbolize time by

4 M. Baudson, editor, Zeit, Die vierte Dimension in der Kunst (Weinheim, 1984), Linda

Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art

(Princeton, 1983).
Chapter 5 -5- Narrative

reminding us of the years that a family might have spent there. It might also
represent motion by giving evidence of the way it is used, with glasses and plates
and newspaper changing places, curtains being opened and shut, rocking chairs
moving back and forth. And it might also be a narrative, if we can understand
how it has changed over time; perhaps there will be an old chair in one place, and
newer furniture or a crib in a corner. There is no secure difference between 2–D,
3–D, and 4–D, and the three manifestations of time I have listed intersect and
reinforce one another.
These are all ways that artworks can show time, but time is more involved
than that. There is also the time it takes to make an artwork, the time it takes to
see it, to learn about it, and even to memorize it or remember it. Those kinds of
time are all woven into the meaning of an artwork. I can tell about how long an
artist took to make a work; and no matter how I feel about that, it will influence
how long I look at it. Time is never only something that is captured by art: art
also changes time, and viewers change the time in art.

MO TIO N

Movement is a great temptation in painting. When we see objects that are

partly invisible, they can sometimes look as if they are moving. This is known as
the “Poggendorf illusion,” and it occurs early in the Renaissance: angels and
cherubs were shown dancing and singing behind rows of columns, giving the
Chapter 5 -6- Narrative

impression they were in motion.5 To us, it may not be very convincing, but it
shows the long history of the impossible hope that pictures might move. Like
most basic ideas about the inbuilt limits of media, it goes back to Antiquity;
Roman walls show figures peeking out from windows and behind walls, and
according to one author, a Greek artist painted a drawn curtain, fooling another
artist who tried to draw it aside. All these sculptures, reliefs, and pictures are a
little silly and artificial, because they strain against what pictures can do.
Artists have also tried to show motion by blurring their pictures to imitate
the confusion we experience when something flashes by, or else the confusion
cameras record when the film speed is too slow to freeze motion. When
photography was young there were debates about these questions. John Ruskin
defended the painter Turner, who had painted individual droplets in waterfalls;
Ruskin said that when photography progressed far enough, Turner would be
vindicated. On the other hand, high–speed photographs showed how galloping
horses were not the graceful creatures that painters had always imagined, but that
their legs took on all sorts of awkward and silly–looking postures as they ran. At
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston there is a permanent display
in which an arc of water is frozen into droplets by high–speed flashes of light.
The flashes are timed so that it looks like individual droplets are frozen in place in
the air. It’s a very odd experience to look at a droplet of water from about a foot
away, and see it hovering in space, trembling and bulging this way and that. This

5 See [Donatello’s Cantoria in the Museo del Duomo, Florence, and before it, the ciborium of the

lower church at Assisi.]

Chapter 5 -7- Narrative

is a problem that depictions of motion always face, whether they are based on
photography or not: it looks strange to freeze a horze in mid–stride, but it also
looks strange to paint the blur that we naturally see. Painting and sculpture always
have to make these decisions, and there is no satisfactory answer.
Some pictures also try for a “snapshot effect” by cutting the subject off, or
framing it so it isn’t in the center of the scene. Degas was the first to do this, and
his pictures sometimes seem as if he didn’t have time to frame the object

“properly.”6 Seurat tried this in the Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande

Jatte: two orange spikes at the extreme right are a woman’s dress and her
umbrella, disappearing from the scene. This is a strange painting, and nothing
really seems to move—even the little girl running and the dog leaping are frozen
in midair—but the idea for cutting the woman off that way came from
photography. Pictures that do this more convincigly can record the artist’s motion
as much as the object’s motion, because they imply the artist was in a hurry, or
was drawing very quickly. Seurat’s painting has the opposite effect: it is a
hothouse production, the result of almost two years of concentrated work, and
there is no real motion left in it.
The most famous examples of represented movement are pictures and
sculptures made by the Italian Futurist movement. They had particular theories of
motion that sometimes led them to draw blurs, and to sculpt and paint successive
moments like freeze-frame photographs. Occasionally they look scientific and

6 E. H. Gombrich, “Moment and Movement in Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld

Institute 27 (1964): 305.

Chapter 5 -8- Narrative

mechanical, which is what they wanted; other times they end up looking contrived
or just unconvincing. Whether or not this reminds us of dancing (it looks very
quiet and still to me, like shattered glass), it makes us think about the problems of
representing movement, and for that reason Futurist works are often about

motion, rather than simple depictions of motion.7 In art history a much more
famous painting, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, was done in
an unserious scientific spirit, and its jagged details are meant to be reminiscent of
scientific stop–action photography. But we don’t usually ask how fast Duchamp’s
nude is descending the staircase, or exactly how she moves her limbs or distributes
her weight (those are the questions that would be asked by the scientists who made
stop–action photographs), because what is interesting is the idea of time passing
rather than any scientific record. The painting is unscientific, even antiscientific,
and no conclusions can be drawn from it. In general, motion is a mistake in
painting, because the motionless canvas rebels against it, making motion look
ridiculous. A contemporary artist, Peter Saul, painted a Francis Bacon

Descending a Staircase, where Bacon’s melted flesh oozes down the steps, instead
of moving incrementally, like Duchamp’s machine.
Another way to represent motion is to show gestures. One historian has said
that abstract pictures refer to time by leaving gestures intact, like fossils or legal

records of motion.8 That strategy cannot express all sorts of motion, but mainly

7 See for example Sanford Kwinter, “Landscapes of change: Boccioni’s Stati d’animo as a

General Theory of Models,” Assemblage 19 (1992): 50–65.

8 [In Baudson, Zeit]

Chapter 5 -9- Narrative

varieties of gesture. We sense one painter’s carelessness, another’s frenzy or

anger, and another’s slow patience, by the quality of the gestures they use to build
up their images.
Paintings that have only gestures (and no objects) compel us to think about
motion and time, but I wonder if they can express anything that figurative
paintings cannot. Do we feel something about gesture from a Pollock painting that
we cannot feel in a Titian? And what is the difference between a graceful abstract
gesture and a portrait of a person making that same kind of gesture? Perhaps
gesture is so intimately connected with the body that we cannot quite imagine the
mark without thinking of the motion, and vice versa. In that case, depictions of
movement would be a way of thinking about motions in the world, and gestures
would be ways of thinking about motions of the body. I think in general every
mark that is made by an artist will also be a record of the time spent making it.
No matter what a work is about, it is always also about time: when I see a mark
made by a human hand, I cannot help but think, or feel, the time that went into
making it. My muscles replay the mark unconsciously, as my eye retraces the line:
all artworks are made by marks, and a mark is the trace of time. The first
questions are how often we are aware of that, and when it is helpful to bring it to
mind—and then there are more difficult questions, about how the thought of time
influences whatever else the work is trying to say.

TH E O BS ER V ER ’S S EN S E O F TIM E
Chapter 5 - 10 - Narrative

These questions have their complements in what the observer does. If a

painting makes us think about time, then it also make us pause: it changes our
relation to time. In philosophy, there is clock time and internal or subjective time.
Everyone has had the experience of looking at the clock and being startled by the
time, but usually our internal clocks run pretty much parallel to our mechanical
clocks. Every once in a while, the two will go badly out of synch: people who
have had serious operations, or have been on strong drugs, report days and weeks
elapsing in the space of hours, and vice versa. I had a milder form of that
experience once listening to a piece of music: I was intensely absorbed, and when
the piece ended, I had the distinct impression that it had lasted days or months. I
know of course that it was only twnety minutes long, but for a while it was hard
to get rid of that feeling. I had a persistent sense of a great period of time, as if I
knew that the piece “really” lasted that long. Unfortunately, that impression has
completely gone, and now all I have when I listen to that piece is a shell of that
memory. Philosophers of time such as Henri Bergson have written at length on
kinds of time, and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze has written three long volumes
on the way that novels dissolve our awareness of clock time and create a

subjective time that is “set” only by the narrative.9 This phenomenon is not as
often noticed in visual art, but it can be just as integral to the work.
Clocks are a particularly modern way of depicting time, and they lend
themselves to interesting variations. Salvador Dalí’s “soft watches” are the best

9 Henri Bergson, [!!!!], and Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, [ ]).

Chapter 5 - 11 - Narrative

known, but there are many others. Marcel Broodthaers’s Midnight lets us think

about the idea of a specific time—there is the name, Midnight, the signs, the
circles that depict the clock face, and the gears. Midnight is a special moment, a
kind of unstable balance like the inverted pendulum, but also static or eternal like
the work itself.
Baroque clocks and orreries (moving models of the solar system) are the
opposite of these modern meditations, since they move in continuous, measured
ways. Modern works divide and fragment time, or slur it into motions and
gestures. Older works tend to keep it continuous and let the pendulum move at a
steady rate. Modern works remove the labels and dates, and Baroque works label
and define everything. Perhaps we work against time in the same way as we work
against space: we take the received concept and fight against it, dividing and
fragmenting it, critiquing it, gradually removing its sense.
George Brecht’s Silence is not a conventional order, like we might see in a
hospital, because then it would have been stencilled or printed. It may have been
part of what Brecht called an “event score,” an object that implies a partly
indeterminate single action. The object itself, which is made of cork letters on
canvas, is more like a monument, almost a gravestone. We may pause in front of
it and remain silent a few moments, but Silence also makes my think how long
any works of art remains quiet and motionless. The people artworks rush about,
talking and moving, and the works stay still. The conceptual artist On Kawara has
been making Date Paintings since 1966. Each one is simply the name of the date
it was made—it may say “SEPTEMBER 12, 1976” in white letters on black. His
work has been criticized as a sad way of “marking time,” counting out the days he
Chapter 5 - 12 - Narrative

is alive instead of doing something with them that would halp make one day
different from the next. But that feeling of unchanging existence is interesting in
its own right. Samuel Beckett’s first published novel begins with the line, “The

sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”10 Kawara’s paintings

disrupt our own sense of time, flattening it and homogenizing it, taking away its
colors and its direction, making it senseless and insignificant. The more seriously
we take his work, the less happy we can be with the grand and hopeful stories we
tell ourselves about our own lives.
Both Silence and the date paintings change our experience of time, dilating
it, chilling it, or jelling it. Works of visual art can make us lose track of time, the
way we might when we read a novel, and they can also alter our experience of
time after we have left the work. I do not think that visual art can produce a time
effect different from writing, music, or poetry, but it might be interesting to try to
find such a difference.

TH E TIM E IT TA K ES TO S EE A R T W O R K S

Then there is the easier question of how long we spend looking at artworks.
No one, I think, looks at a picture for the same amount of time as they spend
reading a novel. Even if you have a favorite picture hanging in your house, the
minutes you have looked at it over the years probably do not add to the amount of

10 Beckett, Murphy ([ ]).

Chapter 5 - 13 - Narrative

time it takes to read a long novel. (That is not to say, of course, that you do not
think about it just as frequently.)
Some writers spend years making works, expecting them to be difficult to
understand (Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is the best example—a work so complex and
demanding that it can be argued no one has read it, and even Joyce forgot details

of it when he proofread his copy for publication).11 On the other hand, I do not
know any examples in which artists tried to make pictures or sculptures that would
take days or weeks to see. Usually it is the opposite. Maurice Vlaminck said the
idea picture could be held up as a train rushed by, and everyone on the train

would be able to see it perfectly in an instant.12 Robert Rosenblum thought the

stripes in Barnett Newman’s abstract paintings, which were called “zips,” had

great velocity—“as clean and breathless as a jet take-off.”13 These are

anti–academic ideas, since art academies have traditionally promoted slow,
intellectual deliberation or meditation. In fact, Newman wanted people to stand up
close to his paintings, and be absorbed into them.
We think of seeing as something that happens fast. William Keach has
argued that the poet Shelley saw the world as constant motion, so that he could
only glimpse it “quick as a flash” or else try to catch it as it “rippled into stasis”

11 [Article on Joyce’s errors] Wake Newslitter [ ].

12 [Vlaminck quotation]

13 [Rosenblum on Newman’s zips]

Chapter 5 - 14 - Narrative

for a moment before taking off again.14 Seeing is rapid: it can be so quick it
leaves words behind—at least that is our common notion. Usually I think we see
pictures in less than ten seconds. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought
Velazquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja it was the most expensive painting in the
world, and large crowds came to see it. When I visited I couldn’t spend much
time in front of the painting, and so I amused myself by sitting on a bench and
timing how long each person looked at it. On average, most people looked for two
seconds, read the plaque for twenty seconds, and then looked up once or twice
more for less than a second.
On the other hand, we might consider how long it is possible to look at a
work. Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling could occupy us for several days, if we
could stand to look up that long. The problem with long–term looking is that it
becomes excausting in a way that reading does not. I have taught classes in which
we look at single works of art for six hours at a stretch, without referring to any
literature or listening to presentations. After about an hour almost any art work is
hard to keep seeing, and in my experience an average–size class runs out of things
to say about four or five hours into a session. These are curious experiments,
because they bring out a quality of visual art that is often ignored: it needs to be
taken in quickly, and then thought over, and it resists long viewing.

REMEMBER IN G A R T W O R K S

14 William Keach, Shelley’s Style ([ ], 1984), [ ].

Chapter 5 - 15 - Narrative

Another aspect of the time spent observing is the limits of memory. After
several hours looking at a sculpture, it is sometimes happens that we still forget
what we’ve seen. If I ask students to sketch the object they have been looking at
so closely, they frequently omit whole sections and get others wrong. This
question of how much we remember is brought out well in 4–D works such as
performance art.
In plays, operas, and traditional dramas we know what we are expected to
remember and what we can safely forget. We need to remember the characters,
and what they think of eachother, but we can forget exactly what they say, or
where they stand. In performance art there is no way to know in advance what is
important, and so performances can risk becoming too complicated. Joseph
Beuys’s performance called Eurasia, 34th Section of the Siberian Symphony was

performed in Copenhagen.15 Beuys performed in a room with a blackboard. One

corner of the room was filled with fat, and another with felt. A journalist wrote
this description:
Beuys slowly pushed two small crosses [across]… the ground until they
were in front of a blackboard. On each cross was a wound-up stopwatch. He
drew a cross on the board, which he then wiped [half] off, and underneath
wrote “EURASIA.” (So he had an inverted T and the word “EURASIA”
underneath.)

15 For Beuys see also B. H. D. Buchloh, R. Krauss, and A. Michelson, “Joseph Beuys at the

Guggenheim,” October 12 (1980): [ ], C. Tisdall, “Beuys: Coyote,” Studio International

(July/August 1976): 36-40.

Chapter 5 - 16 - Narrative

The rest of the piece was… Beuys’s manoeuvrings of a dead hare along a
drawn line. The legs and ears of the hare were extended by long thin black
wooden sticks.… Beuys went from the wall to the board and layed the hare
down there…
On the way back three things happened. He scattered white powder between
the legs of the hare, put a thermometer in its mouth, and blew down a tube.
Then he turned to the board… and made the hare’s ears quiver, while his
own foot, on which an iron sole was tightly bound, hovered over another
iron sole on the floor. Now and again he trod heavily on this sole.
It was not easy to remember all the details, and the journalist gets some things
wrong. Without a conventional narrative, the sequence is difficult to follow, and
the symbols are open to widely varying interpretations. The journalist was sure he
know what it meant:
The symbols are perfectly clear and can be translated by everyone. The
division of the cross: the split between East and West, Rome and
Byzantium… The iron sole on the ground is a metaphor—walking is
difficult and the ground is frozen. The three interruptions in the return refer
to the elements: snow [white powder], coldness [thermometer], and wind
[blowing down a tube]… The legs of the hare—the thin blue
sticks—indicate the meaning of space… The ancient symbolic meaning of
the hare hits home too: the sign of transitoriness, fleetingness.
But Beuys himself was thinking along very different lines:
In moving the ears on the long sticks I created echoes of the angles that
appear in the fat and felt corners. The… blackboard records two such angles
Chapter 5 - 17 - Narrative

together with two special temperatures, one for felt, 32°, and one for fat,
21°. I cannot say why these are important temperatures for me, except that
by the end of the performance, during which almost every degree of the
circle was explored, they seemed to be the correct ones… But the third
temperature has a clear reason: 42° centigrade—it means a dangerous fever
level, and hence the presence of the thermometer.
The journalist thought the thermometer meant cold, not fever, and he thought the
tube was a “cardboard ‘gun’ with a felt bullet.” Beuys’s performances often took
eight hours or more, and some lasted for several days. With that amount of time
the work would quickly pass beyond anything that could be kept in memory, and
the audiences usually ended up making their own private stories to try to make the
performances cohere into comprehensible narratives. This problem of memory,
and the way that we make up stories to try to keep things straight in our minds, is
a special problem in those visual arts that intersect language: performance, some
video, and some film. In pictures, everything is different: time is suspended, and
we can refer to everything.

S EAS O NS , TH E AG ES O F MAN, F ATH ER TIME, BLIND

C UP ID, DEATH

With that I want to return to our informal survey of ways that time appears
in works, and especially to symbolized time. Very long periods of time are
usually shown in symbols instead of movements or gestures. Pictures that show
particular seasons can convey the idea of a year passing, and sometimes even the
Chapter 5 - 18 - Narrative

idea of thousands of years.16 Renaissance painters explored the idea of the three
(sometimes four) ages of man, typically by painting a young man, a mature man,

and an old man in the same scene.17 With women the representations are often a
little different, showing just beauty and old age, and implying that the wages of

sin are death.18 Father Time is another favorite symbol. Usually he is grizzled,
and sometimes he is also the figure of Death. A blind cupid sometimes walks with
Time or Death. (Cupid is blindfolded because love is blind, and he walks with
Death because love is what we do before we die.) In past centuries artists played
with these possibilities, and found ways to say interesting things about time, death,
fame, and love. Il Rosso’s Allegory of Fame shows a dead artist, his jaw

mouldered off, laid out on a slab. His Fame is a wild, almost psychotic image, of
a screaming nake artist (he also looks castrated), on a horsey swan, in some dank
woods where snakes grow from twigs. Artists like Il Rosso thought in terms of
symbols like these, and he worked out his thoughts by arranging these figures.

16 H. Langdon, Impressionist Seasons (Oxford, 1986).

17 Suse Barth, Lebensalter-Darstellungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts: Ikongraphische Studien

(Munich, 1971) Dissertation, Ludwig Maximilan Universität.

18 Joseph Leo Koerner, “The Mortification of the Image: Death as a Hermeneutic in Hans

Baldung Grien,” Representations 10 (1985): 52-101.

Chapter 5 - 19 - Narrative

A wall tomb is to a specific kind of tomb popular during the Renaissance.19

They were made of reliefs, inscriptions, and sculptures. The image of the deceased
was repeated in different ways: the sarcophagus was the primary representation,
since it contained the body itself. Sometimes the body would also be sculpted as a
gisant (an effigy) and it might lie or rest on top of the sacrophagus. Then the

deceased might be represented again as if he or she were alive and well.20

Renaissance tombs occasionally also included representations of the deceased
rotting away (en transis). Some had protruding intestines, and others were already

clean skeletons.21 Some were covered with frogs, others perforated by boring
worms; some were desiccated, others putrefied. An en transis figure in
Switzerland is nibbled by fat poisonous toads and perforated by long worms.

RU IN S , VAN IT AS P A IN TIN G S

Time was an appropriate theme for paitings about human life, fame, death,
and love, and it was explored especially on tombs and sarcophagi (carved

19 See, in addition to the sources listed below: F. Burger, Geschichte des florentinischen

Grabmals von den ältesten Seiten bis Michelangelo (Strasbourg, 1904), and P. Schubring, Die

italienische Grabmale der Frührenaissance (Berlin, 1904).

20 E. Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture, op. cit., 86 - 88, on Pollaiuolo’s tomb of Pope Innocent VIII.

21 K. Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Symbol, The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the

Renaissance (Berkeley, 1973), 195 - 96.

Chapter 5 - 20 - Narrative

coffins).22 But time could also be symbolized by buildings, since they collapse

into the earth.23 The archaeologist and illustrator Piranesi was obsessed with the

way buildings rotted and decayed, sometimes like organs or broken skulls.24 His
buildings sometimes look like human organs, skulls, and bones, as if to say that
cultures and buildings are like people, that they come out of the earth, die, and rot

back into it again.25 In other pictures it is the earth itself that seems to be growing
old and falling apart, and in fact there is a long history to the idea that the earth is

old and can no longer support life as well as it used to.26 In the seventeenth
century, some people thought mountains were ugly, broken things, left over from
a glorious golden age the way that the crumlbing pyramids survive from Egypt’s

wonderful past.27 Piranesi’s drawing style also looks like decaying matter, and
that was one of the most influential things about his work: for later generations, it
was no longer necessary to draw ruins to allude to decaying flesh, or dying
culture, or the aging earth: it was enough to scribble wildly the way Piranesi did,

22 P. Kranz, Jahreszeiten-Sarkophage… (Berlin, c. 1984)

23 A. Flett, Ruins… in Eighteenth Century British Landscape Painting, c.1760-1800 (UMI,

1981), Gunter Hartmann, Die Ruine im Landschaftsgarten… (Worms, c. 1981).

24

25 B. Reudenbach, G. B. Piranesi… (Munich, 1979), and Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), [ ].

26 Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore ( ).

27 Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Beauty [ ].

Chapter 5 - 21 - Narrative

upsetting the timid elegant academic rules of drawing. In that way every wild,
febrile gesture can express ruin.
The Wrangel–cabinet is another instance of this feeling, with its teeming
haunted graveyard of ruins. It is done in wood inlay: as in the intarsia scene we
looked at in chapter 1, each shape is a separate piece of wood. The apes, burning
towers, spheres, vines, hungry birds, and coats of armor are all symbols of passing
time and the ruin that waits for even the greatest empires. Here everything denotes
feverish ruin: a cuirass and an armillary sphere (an astronomical instrument) are
thrown together; a haggard crane pecks at an ape–like mask; bizarre rolling
ornaments called “Roll-bodies” (Rollkörper) loll about in the landscape like

discarded machines in a junkyard. This is a vanitas picture, showing the frailty

and vanity of human pride. Normally vanitas paintings set out all the things that
we enjoy in this life—music, food, sex, and luxuries—and show them falling

apart28 They can be obvious, with piles of rotting meats and vegetables (as if to
say, You too will decay into a foul–smelling heap), skeletons, and cadavers eaten
by worms; and they can also be extremely subtle, with clean tables daintily laid
with fresh candies and bread. Either way, we are meant to think about how
transient life is. Often there is a single fly on the peach, or a knife poised on a
table edge, or a tiny spot of mould on a peach. Looking at subtler vanitas

paintings has the unexpected effect of making every still life into a meditation on

28 A. Veca, Vanitas, il simbolismo del tempo, exhibition catalogue (Bergamo, 1981), and

Peter–Klaus Schuster, Melencolia I, Dürers Denkbild (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1991), 2 vols.,

especially vol. 1, p. 149 ff.

Chapter 5 - 22 - Narrative

death, and that may be what some artists intended. Even a simple picture of a fruit
can have that resonance, if you have seen enough vanitas pictures. Soon the fruit
will be over–ripe, and then it will begin to attract flies. The thought of its taste
will become a warning: things that are sweet today will not always be so. Like the
idea of the ruin, the vanitas is not really a restricted kind of painting. It can
happen anywhere—in any scene, whether it appears to symbolize time or not.

TH E LO S T A RS MEMO RAT IVA

Before I continue on this theme, it is worthwhile to pause over a lost art: a

technique for bringing memories to mind and restoring half–remembered ideas to
perfect clarity. The ars memorativa (art of memory) was a technique for

memorizing long poems.29 It has intimate connections with both architecture and
time, since it was a way of memorizing long texts by associating them with
theaters, houses, and museums. In one version, the speaker imagines a house or a
museum. He thinks of each room in turn, and of each piece of furniture and where
it is. Then he associates a phrase, a line, or a stanza of poetry with each object. A
dusty old painting might become “Once upon a midnight dreary,” and the desk
right next to it would become “as I pondered weak and weary.” Eventually every
object in the house would have a phrase associated with it. Then to recite the
poem, the speaker would walk through the house in his mind.

29 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory ([ ]),

Chapter 5 - 23 - Narrative

(Several texts say that single object—furniture or painting—should not be

larger than a human body. If it is, then it will be the wrong size to hold an idea.
This is a fascinating assertion, that a single idea needs to correspond to something
the size of the body, and even though it has many counterexamples, it feels right.
The place is called a “memory locus; could it be that there is a connection between
a lifesize art work an a site in memory?)
The ars memorativa has left many echoes on contemporary art. Bill Viola’s

Theater of Memory is also an eroded memory theater. Wind chimes sway and
kerosene lanterns flicker in the branches of a dead tree, while soft static and snow
alternate on a video screen with momentary “commonplace” images. It’s a
melancholy place, with an unfocussed sense of withdrawal from the world,

mingled with “an ominous realiztion of being severed from the source.”30
Installations like this are the remnants, the shards of the utopian project of the
memory theaters. They are single moments in memory or in amnesia, like a single
painting or sculpture taken from a memory theater, or a single shell or curio from
a dispersed museum.

N ARRATIVE

These ways of recapturing time lead me to what is arguably the principal

way to place time in artworks: by constructing narratives. According to some
philosophers, narrative is more than just the most common way of organizing

30 Art at the Armory: Occupied Territory, op. cit., 126.

Chapter 5 - 24 - Narrative

what we write. It is also a fundamental condition for understanding anything.31

An object, so they might argue, is in itself meaningless. The sentence fragment, “a
tree,” doesn’t have any use for us unless there is some context, for example if I
point to a tree while I say “a tree.” But as soon as I add a verb, the phrase takes on
meaning: “a tree falls.” The sentence is a rudimentary narrative, since it makes us
think of a sequence of events in time. That crucial addition lets us make sense of
the fragment, and it does so by placing it in time. It would not be the same, for
example, if I just added adjectives: “a big Cherry tree.”
This way of thinking about narrative is related to the idea that time is
essentially non–visual, that it has to do with words, and that “the visual” is
something that happens all in one place, in one image, and at one time. We have
already seen reasons to be skeptical of the idea that single pictures do not take
place in time, and there are also reasons to distinguish purely verbal narratives
from visual narratives.
Here is a generalization: artists of all cultures have based their narratives on
printed and spoken stories, until modern art in the West, when artists have begun
to make pictures that look like narratives but are not based on any story, private or
public. Religious art works have traditionally depended on stories that people
knew, and secular painting has normally depended on mythological or
biographical stories. In many cases the stories are obscure, but I do not know any
examples in which there is no original.

31 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [ ]), 3 vols.
Chapter 5 - 25 - Narrative

Modern narrative painters sometimes have no texts at all to base their work
on. I think that absence is fundamental. It subverts the ways we want to proceed in
understanding narrative. Some modern artists have private stories that they do not
share, so that viewers have to make up their own explanations. Others do not even
have private stories, but they make art works that look like narratives, or that

remind us of narratives. Either way, the audience is thrown back on its own
storehouse of associations and memories to understand what it sees.

TH E P R O BLEM O F S TR U C TU R E

Narrative is fundamental in the sense that we always look for it as a

preliminary way of understanding what we see. Good interpretations can be made
of abstract paintings based on the ways they decline to tell stories. Even medieval
icons depended on religious narratives, since they gained meaning by the stories
people brought to their experience of the static images.
The disruption and erasure of narrative, whatever its reasons and its
meaning, leaves artists with a major unsolved problem. Narratives have
traditionally kept viewers’ and readers’ attentions for long periods of time, and
the largest, most complex works in writing, painting, and film are narrative
works. The problem is how to make a large–scale work without a story and still
keep the viewer’s interest. Imagine Gone with the Wind with the scenes hopelessly
scrambled. It would be nearly impossible to stay awake long enough to read or see
long works if they were not propelled by plots. The same might be said about
Chapter 5 - 26 - Narrative

music: a classical symphony keeps its listeners alert by making use of a large–scale
structure of key changes. Modern composers who abandoned “tonal architecture”
faced trememndous problems constructing longer works that had direction,
anticipation, and resolution. These problems are far from solved, despite nearly a
century of experiment. In the visual arts, the problem of structure is the largest
unsolved question, something like the questions of the expanding universe in
physics. On the one hand, old–fashioned narratives with continuous stories and
beginnings, middles, and ends seem somehow wrong. On the other hand, every
alternate structure either loses energy and direction and becomes random and
unstructured, or else it reveals itself as a variation on conventional narratives.
Alain Robbe–Grillet’s novels, for example, sometimes present themselves as
familiar narratives. The Voyeur begins like a conventional murder mystery. It
appears that the protagonist, who is visiting an island, may have murdered a girl.
But as the novel proceeds, it becomes less clear that the protagonist committed the
murder, and finally it is no longer certain if there was a murder at all. The reader
who comes upon Robbe–Grillet for the first time may have several reactions: first
reading a mystery, collecting clues and information, then passing through a stage
of increasing exasperation, and emerging into a different way of reading. The
danger is that after the final realization the novel may lose some interest and
direction. Robbe–Grillet designs each novel differently in order to provide
structural interest, but he also always loses the particular impetus offered by the
murder mystery. The protagonist in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake may also have
committed an illegal act, but there is no moment when a reader naïvely expects to
find out what it was. There is no sudden or gradual revelation that the book is
Chapter 5 - 27 - Narrative

more or less problematic or conventional than it seemed. In that respect Joyce’s

book poses the problem of large–scale structure in a purer and more difficult
form. I mention these examples from literature because more work is being done
there and in music than in visual art, even though the problems are at root the
same. To begin discussing visual narrative, we need to develop several terms that
will help distinguish written from visual stories.

B OOK, S CROLL, AND TAP ES TRY METAP HORS

Giotto’s Arena Chapel is still among the more complex narrative cycles in
Western painting. It tells some familiar Bible stories, but the order of occurrence

is so obscure is almost nonexistent.32 To follow the events in order, one begins in

an inconspicuous place: at the top level, on the right wall, just short of the altar
wall (behind the last horizontal tie rod). From there the observer has to walk
round and round the chapel—three times around—following episodes in rows
from top to bottom, skipping down and over scenes that are in the way. (In
narrative theory, each of these pictures would be called an episode, and the entire
chapel, including all its pictures and decoration, would be called an image.
Episodes and images can be much less complex than this, and Piero’s picture is
also three episodes contained in an image.)

32 For a detailed description see Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, The Place of Narrative: Mural

Decoration in Italian Churches (Chicago, 1990), 43 ff.

Chapter 5 - 28 - Narrative

Letting the order of reading follow the order of occurrence involves

unlikely patience and self-discipline. Each level of each long wall is a complete
unit of the story, and so the chapel is like a single long story written on two pages
and interrupted at regular intervals. One can read each wall in turn as if it was a
page of a text, keeping the plot in mind without too much effort. The order of
occurrence is Biblical, but the order of telling conjures a book or scroll.
We have therefore an order of occurrence that requires concerted effort to
follow, and the strongly implied presence of a partly contrary order of telling. Yet
the chapel is more complex in this regard than any written text. Here are four

examples:33
(1) There are personified Virtues and Vices on a fictive dado (the bottom
level, nearest the floor). They are paired across the chapel: Prudence is opposite

Foolishness, Fortitude opposite Inconstancy, and so forth. Because they come in

pairs they raise the possibility that the Chapel should be seen in a zig-zag, not in a
spiral. A viewer who considers these Virtues and Vices will stand in one place and
move his head from side to side.
(2) The Virtue of Justice and the Vice of Injustice are paired in the middle
of each long wall, and because they are larger than the other figures, they mark
the middle of the chapel and hint that it is—however faintly—in the form of a

33 For further analysis see M. A. Lavin, The Place of Narrative, op. cit., and J. Elkins, “The

Impossibility of Stories: The Non–Narrative and Anti–Narrative Impulse in Modern Painting,”

Word and Image [ ].

Chapter 5 - 29 - Narrative

cross. A band that loops over the the ceiling just above them reinforces that
possibility.
(3) There are two panels at either side of the altar that have not figures in
them. They are trompe l’œil panels (made to fool the eye), and they make us
think of Giotto’s skill as a painter instead of the divine drama that he was
commissioned to paint. At least temporarily, they distract us from any attempt to
follow the orders of the story, and they set us looking for other evidence of his
skill.
(4) Decorative bands on the walls and ten isolated roundels (round
paintings, also called tondi) in the vault depict Old Testament prophets and other
figures. To see them a viewer needs to look up and down the vault, introducing an
new order of reading reminiscent of a legal scroll or an old proclamation.
The orders of occurrence and of telling in the Arena chapel are more
something we read about than anything we might plausibly follow. Eventually
they give way to a looser, inconsistent, nonchronological interplay of themes—to
an associative order of reading. The Arena chapel is like a tapestry: a woof for
back and forth readings, and a warp for up and down readings. There are other
metaphors as well: horizonal scroll, vertical proclamation, book, short story,
biography, parable, and sermon. All these were being used by Giotto’s
contemporaries, and it is likely that Giotto was thinking of them as he planned the
cycle.

B OUS TROP HEDON, CAT’S CRADLE,

ZIG –ZAG , LABYRINTH

Chapter 5 - 30 - Narrative

Boustrophedon is a particular kind of text in which one reads from left to

right, and then turns the page over and reads back, upside–down, from right to
left. Reading continues that way, snaking down the page. Easter Island script was
written on wooden tablets (some six feet long), so reading was especially
awkward.
In a recent study of visual narrative, Marilyn Lavin has catalogued several

dozen unexpected orders of telling among Renaissance fresco cycles.34 One is a

“cat’s cradle,” asking the viewer to look back and forth, up and down, in a
criss–crossing web of directions, and another is the boustrophedon. In some fresco
cycles, a viewer would have to read patiently in a bizarre zig–zag in order to

follow the order of occurrence.35

Order of telling is crucial in the visual arts precisely because it cannot be
settled once and for all. Painters can imply that there is no order of telling, or
(and this does not amount to the same thing) that we are not expected to find it;
but much more often, they imply order in various ways without being able to hold
us to it. Giulio Romano’s version of the classical story of Psyche is painted on the
ceiling and walls of a room. It is comprised of octagonal, rectangular, and
trapezoidal quadri riportati (painted scenes with painted frames, in which a ceiling
painting mimics itself by appearing “as if it was” a painted scene), arranged in a

34 Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, The Place of Narrative, op. cit., 6 ff.

35 For some complicated examples, see Louis Marin, “Narrative Theory and Piero as History

Painter,” October 65 (1993): 107–32.

Chapter 5 - 31 - Narrative

4- and 8-fold radially symmetric pattern, for a total of thirty-nine separated

episodes on the ceiling and eight more on the walls. Though the story—the order
of occurrence—was widely known, the order of telling is so scrambled that only
an exceptionally patient viewer would have bothered to unravel it. There is no
strong clue that tells a viewer where to begin, and it turns out that the first episode
is an unmarked quadro riportato in an unmarked row diagonally to the right as the

viewer enters the room.36 Beyond that the disarrangement becomes devilish, and
the successive episodes jump diagonally back and forth between and within rows
and down to the walls.
The symmetries of Giulio’s ceiling, however, speak strongly in favor of a
clearer order of telling. We initially expect to be able to read left to right around
the ceiling, or inward along radii, or in a spiral, and that has caused art historians
to see special meanings in Giulio’s twisted order of telling. Rodolfo Signorini
suggests that the torturous arrangements are not “errors” as a prevous historian had

thought,37 but that they follow the original story, so that the order of telling of

36 See Rodolfo Signorini, La ‘Fabella’ di Psiche e altra mitologia… , Mantua, 1987, 17, who

claims it is the first on the right when one enters; but it is not the closest to the right, only the

closest to the right that does not appear inverted—certainly a weak criterion for a jumping-off

place.

37 Signorini, La ‘Fabella’ di Psiche e altra mitologia… , op. cit., 16 n. 30, cites E. Verheyen,

“Die Malereyen in der Sala di Psiche des Palazzo del Tè,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Mussen 14

(1972): 47-48, nn. 30 and 32. See also Verheyen, The Palazzo del Tè in Mantua, Images of Love

and Politics, Baltimore and London, 1977. Signorini

Chapter 5 - 32 - Narrative

the pictures follows the order of telling of the text.38 But so far no hypothesis has
been convincing, including an attempt to see the entire room as a visual metaphor
for a labyrinth. Giulio may also have scrambled the episodes playfully and
without rhyme or reason, or made a narrative in which an order of telling exists
but is not meant to be discovered. The order of telling is effectively unknowable.
It promises, defers, and ultimately cancells the ordered narrative.
When the order of occurrence becomes so tangled, the question is also how
it is actually read—what the reasonable orders of reading might be, and what clues
we have about the order of reading. It seems only a patient historian would look
long enough to uncover the exact orders of occurrence or telling. How would an
observer be likely to proceed, faced with that kind of complexity?

D EDUCTIVE AND AS S O CIATIVE READING

One of the widest nets we can cast over our responses to painting is the
distinction between seeing pictures as puzzles and seeing them as opportunities for

meditation—or in in the terms I am exploring here, deductive and associative

reading (Diagram 1). In the former case, we conclude—for sometimes intricate

38 Signorini, La ‘Fabella’ di Psiche e altra mitologia… , op. cit., 17: “Tale disordine dev’essere

stato, per così dire, inevitable, a nostro parere, poiché l’immagine di Venere che mostra Psiche al

figlio viene sì a trovarsi, stando al testo di Apuleio, fra il primo e il terzo episodio, ma è

strettamente connesso al primo quasi in un rapporto di cause ed effetto, tanto che Verheyen… ha

aggiunto, fra parentesi…”

Chapter 5 - 33 - Narrative

reasons, not fully known to ourselves—that a work of art is hiding something, that
it contains or encodes some information, answer, moral, or message. Sometimes,
too, a picture lets us know that sleuthing is not correct, and we “fall” into a
meditative state: we look and think in an unordered or absentminded fashion,
letting associations flower of their own accord, until something bores or distracts
us. The border between pictures as puzzles and as opportunities for meditation is
universal, and it is a transition that marks a crucial change in our experience of a

visual work.39
Rarely do we return from the associative state, rethink our position, and
recommence analytic inspection—not only because we are lazy, but because we
enter the associative state after making a number of negative valuations. Perhaps
the artist is not in control (so why continue trying to understand every mark?), or
the symbolism is intuitive (so why persist in decoding it?), or the work is not
meant to be fully understood (so why put too fine an edge on what can and can’t
be understood?). Deductive slips into meditative, and rarely returns.

F RO ZEN NARRATIVES , TH E MO MENT AND TH E

INS TANT

39 For scientific support, see the distinction between “homogeneous associative memory” and

“genetically determined computational models” in S. Pinker, “Rules of Language,” Science 253 (2

August 1991): 530 ff.

Chapter 5 - 34 - Narrative

In the eighteenth century there were exchanges over the question of how
painters should choose the proper instant of a narrative. According to one author,
paintings could show moments that include what has just happened and imply
what is about to take place. Such pictures would not really be instants, but

something more like pivotal moments.40 Other writers stressed the single instant
or punctum temporis (point of time) because they thought it was painting’s special

strength to extract a single instant from the contninuous flow of time.41 Lessing
argued that the moment or instant chosen should never be the climax of the
narrative, but the the turning point, because during the climactic moment
everything before and after is less important and interesting. In Adam Elsheimer’s
painting of Hecate, the thirsty goddess is drinking something an old peasant
woman has given her. The woman’s son, Stellio, is laughing because the goddess
looks so funny gulping and slurping. A moment later, she will turn him into a
little lizard and he will crawl off under a rock. Elsheimer avoids the climactic
moment—there is no actual metamorphosis here—but he gives us a creepy look at
Stellio’s waxy, translucent limbs, as if Hecate is just now thinking of turning him
into a lizard.
According to Lessing one should avoid showing extreme emotions because
they don’t leave anything to the imagination—or as Lessing says, they “clip the

40 Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London,

1714), quoted in E. H. Gombrich, “Moment and Movement in Art,” op. cit., 293.

41 James Harris, Discourse on Music, Painting, and Poetry, in Three Treatises (London, 1744),

quoted in E. H. Gombrich, “Moment and Movement in Art,” op. cit., 294.

Chapter 5 - 35 - Narrative

wings of the imagination.”42 His position was not followed by the Romantics,
who preferred extreme emotions—actual metamorphosis, pain, or terror.
E. H. Gombrich has argued that this entire question of the punctum

temporis is false, because there is no instant in perception. Every moment is

informed by the ones before, and anticipates the ones to follow. Recent
neurbiological research has supported Gombrich’s claims, by showing that our
retinas are often “looking ahead,” anticipating what they will see next, so that we

are never only seeing one moment in time.43 Gombrich thinks there are several
qualities of our perception that vitiate the point of time: (1) an automatic blurring
of perception that lets us see TV as a picture, even though it is really only a single
spot moving rapidly over the screen; (2) an “echo box” of “immediate memory”
or “primary retention” by which we can “think back” and remember something
said a moment before; (3) longer term memory, which interferes with the pure
perception of an instant; and (4) the continuing anticipation that allows us to set
up probable meanings in advance of events, in the way that you can anticipate a
moment ahead of time how I will finish … this sentence.
All these do affect the perception of an instant, but it needs to be added that
the idea of the instant is still entrancing and indispensible for a great deal of visual

42 Lessing, Laocoon [1766], translated by W. A. Steel and A. Dent ([ ], 1930).

43 Jean–René Duhamel et al., “The Updating of the Representation of Visual Space in Parietal

Cortex by Intended Eye Movements,” Science 255 (3 January 1992): 90–92, and see also John W.

McClurkin et al., “Concurrent Processing and Complexity of Temporally Encoded Neuronal

Messages in Visual Perception,” Science 253 (9 August 1991): 675–77.

Chapter 5 - 36 - Narrative

art. When we began talking about narratives, I opposed them to “iconic” pictures.
In an icon, eternity takes the place of the instant, substituting one kind of frozen
time for another. In the eighteenth century critics were concerned with pivotal
points in narratives. Today we talk about “snapshots.” The ideas are all similar
since they are attempts to arrest or break the flow of narrative.

TH E EP ITO ME, TH E ANATO MY,

TH E INDEX, TH E ENCYCLO P EDIA

Thinking about instants is one way to avoid narrative. Another is to try to

avoid organizing scenes according to their chronological orders. Chronology is
our first recourse when presented with a work we identify as a narrative: we look
first at chronological orderings, and only when they fail do we suspect other
principles. Both chronological and non–chronological narratives contend with this
fact. But when we enter associative reading we often fall into other ways of
perceiving order, and we may devalue or question the primacy of chronological

narrative.44 Anatomy, epitome, and encyclopedia are names of narratives that do

44 The concept of associative reading is related to what Richard Brilliant, following J. M.

Blanchard, calls “paranarrative.” I have avoided this only because the term is used elsewhere in

modern criticism, for example by Ihab Hassan, with slightly different meaning. See R. Brilliant,

Visual Narratives (New York, 1984), 106 ff., J. M. Blanchard, “The Eye of the Beholder,”

Semiotica 22 (1978): 235-68, and I. Hassan, “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective,” Critical

Inquiry 12 (1986), 503 ff., with bibliography.

Chapter 5 - 37 - Narrative

not run in chronological order—they have no order of occurrence. The epitome is

a kind of non–cronological narrative since it is a summary or abridgement of
something longer. An anatomy is an outline or a dissection of some larger story; it
may be organized by leading ideas. An index also abridges, and it does so in
alphabetical order. An encyclopedia is a series of short narratives, all in
alphabetical order. These are examples of principles of ordering that could be
applied to visual art. In the Arena chapel, for instance, one scene might prefigure
something that would happen much later in the life of Christ, and the two scenes

might be arranged one above the other.45 The principal of ordering would then be
an anatomy—a kind of logical order that runs across chronological narrative.
Sequences of pictures, or scenes in a picture, could be organized by color, forms,
or ideas, in any number of ways. Modern anti–narratives often seem to have some
such principal hidden in them.

45 This is called antitype. In the Arena chapel and example is the vertical pair showing the

Massacre of the Innocents and Mocking of Christ. The first is an Old Testament prefiguration or

antitype of the second.

Chapter 5 - 38 - Narrative

The Place of Narrative in Contemporary Art

Note to students: begin here.

From an artist’s standpoint, the questions, Will my work have a narrative?

Will it tell a story of any sort? Will it have a message, a moral, a slogan?—are
both ubiquitous and radically undertheorized. From a scholar’s point of view,
narrative theory in literature is curiously disjunct from narrative theory in the
visual arts: and even within the visual arts, narrative theory in film is unhelpful
when it comes to narrative in painting, prints, and photographs (my subjects here).
all that leaves artists, historians, and critics in an odd position: narrative is one of
the crucial issues in visual studies, but one with the smallest literature.

1
The first thing that needs to be said about 20th or 21st century visual
narrative, as it is practiced by artists, is that it is moribund. It isn’t quite
dead—it’s always possible to name narrative artists like Eric Fischl—but it is as
close to dead as it can get. In experimental or avant-garde film and video, the
central question concerns the strategies that are available to hobble, deconstruct, or
otherwise ruin or problematize what is usually called “Hollywood
narrative”—which I understand as any narrative that provides the essential long-
range structure of a film, and has an acceptable number of flashbacks and flash-
forwards. Despite many points of contact, there is a separation between commerial
Chapter 5 - 39 - Narrative

or Hollywood-oriented film, on the one hand, and experimental film and video on
the other. The one works with narratives: the other works against narratives.
In painting, photography, computer graphics, and printmaking, the question
of narrative is pushed off the edge of the world altogether. it just isn’t raised in
the majority of studio art critiques and exhibition reviews. As far as art students
are concerned, it’s an asked-and-answered question: modernism depends, to some

degree, on the abandonment of visual narrative. It is acceptable to make truncated

narratives like Fischl’s; or emblems that seem to be taken from narratives, like

Koons’s pornographic pictures or Sherman’s movie stills; or hints of hidden

narratives, like Odd Nerdrum’s mystical scenes of vaguely Scandinavian
prehistory. But it is not normally advisable to use photography or painting or

printmaking to tell stories. (That phrase, using photography to do X, is telling: it

carries overtones of abuse. Such artists misunderstand what painting or
photography is, or can be.) People like Fischl, Sherman, Koons, and Nerdrum are
the exceptions that prove the rule. Narrative isn’t dead, but it’s a dead issue.
The avoidance of narrative is one of the great dogmas or working
assumptions of art production, criticism, and instruction. There is a huge amount
waiting to be written about how narrartive is avoided, and why it seems necessary
to avoid it. The question of how is a little easier, and it is the one I am concerned
with here. Truncations, emblems, and hints are part of the answer, but they hardly
amount to a classification of avoidance. Given that contemporary visual artists are
widely dependent on artistic strategies derived from surrealism, it might be
worthwhile to go back to some of the more systematic, less radical surrealist texts
to find terms that might augment the list. André Breton’s preface to Max Ernst’s
Chapter 5 - 40 - Narrative

The Hundred Headless Woman, for example, quickly runs through a number of
suggestive terms: juxtaposition, coincidence (as in Lautréamont’s famous phrase),
surprise, superposition, evasion, displacement, and trandformation.1 They might
well be added to truncation, emblem, and hint, to make the list more versatile.
Yet there might be deep reasons hy no such list can be satisfactory.
Somewhere Hayden White makes a list of non-narrative principles that might
organize a text: he names the epitome, and anatomy, and a few others, and then
turns to other questions. His laconic treatment might simply mean he is
uninterested in non-narrative forms, but it’s also possible that no extended
descriptions are possible because any such description would end up being framed
in terms of narrative theory. Perhaps there simply isn’t another theory about
large-scale structure in texts.
(In music the problem is just as vexed: when tonal structures are abandoned,
it is possible to give a work its sense of coherence by working with serialization,
with schemata of rhythm such as Elliott Carter’s “metric modulation,” or with
thematic patterns—but even after a century of experimentation, no single model
has emerged that has the large-scale organizing power of tonality.)

2
That’s from the point of view of working artists and critics. In art history
the situation is more complex and conservative, but essentially similar. William
Rubin put it best in an essay called “From Narrative to ‘Iconic’ in Picasso,” which
I have discussed elsewhere.2 Rubin says that the sea change from narrative
painting to “iconic” painting—and he uses the term advisedly, noting that its
Chapter 5 - 41 - Narrative

meaning is different when it is applied to religious paintings—the sea change can

be traced to a couple of paintings by Picasso. After those paintings, Rubin says,
temporal sequences had to be depicted through changes in style—and he points to

the Women of Avignon. I don’t think that conclusion is convincing, because

relatively few artists work with different styles within a single work. Still,
Rubin’s essay is an unusually clear attempt to get at a point that is often muddied
by generalizations. Something about pictorial modernism and postmodernism is
anti-narrative, and something else about is is more simply non-narrative.
As an example take a set of photographs by Terese Poulos, who is a student
at the School of the Art Institute. The first three show her mother’s hand,
superimposed on Teresa’s handwriting. Terese’s mother’s hands were once
considered beautiful, and she could have been a hand model. He had, Terese says,
a lovely calligraphic style. Now she has cerebral palsy and cannot write at all. In
one of the photos Terese holds her mother’s hand. The next three images are of
Poulos’s father. The first shows off his large ring, heavy keychain, and rosary.
The next shows his huge tie clip, which represents a Greek coin and identifies him
as a Greek-American. In the final photo, Poulos stands in front of him, her head
out of focus. Poulos says that at first her father disliked the pictures of him, and
ten realized they were her way of coming to terms with his presence in the family.
In the originals, the first three photos are black and white, done in a style
reminiscent of Man Ray or Edward Weston. The other three photos are in
color—deep purples and reds and blacks. The Greek coin is brilliant gold, and the
handkershief is maroon.
Chapter 5 - 42 - Narrative

This set of photographs—just six taken from a work in progress, one which
is not at all atypical of many other young photographers’ works—is anti-narrative
in the sense that Poulos does not tell viewers about her mother or father. She does
not say that the handwriting in the first photos is her own and not her mother’s,
and she does not reveal anything about her father’s Greek-American style. In that
sense the sequence is a truncated narrative: only people who know the artist know
the fuller story that informs the pictures. The photos are also non-narrative
because they avoid telling stories. The residual narrative elements—Poulos’s face
in the final picture, her presence in the background of the second picture, her hand
holding her mother’s hand—are only hints at narratives. It is impossible to tell
what is happening in the sixth photo, and impossible to link the pictures together
in sequences. And yet in spite of that, they go together as a set (even if the set has
no order), and they are done in two very different styles—one for each parent.
Thinking about this almost complete absence of narrative—an absence
pervaded by what is not present, by the lingering feeling of narrative—it helps to
recall Nelson Goodman’s distinction between orders of occurrence and telling
(table 1). The first is also called the fabula in narrative theory: it is the original

story, in the order of the occurrence of the events. A written fabula, or for that
matter a film, has an order of telling: it involves flashbacks and flashforwards. To
Goodman’s two categories I have added a third, the order of reading. A written
narrative or a film has an order of reading—from first page to last, except in
experimental novels, or from first scene to last in a film, or from beginning to end
in a video.
Chapter 5 - 43 - Narrative

Summary of kinds of visual narrative

I
ORDER OF OCCURRENCE
The order in which the events happened.

II
ORDER OF TELLING
The order in which the events are told.

(a) Genre order of telling—defined by the image’s

function, its genre, or its use of formats
such as predella panel or triptych
(b) Spatial orders of telling—defined by perspective,
composition, lighting, etc.
(c), (d), . . .

III
ORDER OF READING
The order in which the viewer experiences the narrative.

(a) Linear order of reading—following the scenes

left to right, top to bottom, etc.
(b) Deductive order of reading—attempting to
define the intended orders of occurrence or
telling
(c) Associative order of reading—meditative,
unordered looking
(d), (e), . . .

Things are much more complicated in visual art. In terms of the

abandonment of narrative, visual arts are significantly more radical than writing
and narrartive filmmaking, and this schema helps describe that radicality. The
problem in visual art is threefold:
1. The order of occurrence may not exist. In premodern painting, there was
virtually always a fabula or fabulae that could be consulted, or that were
Chapter 5 - 44 - Narrative

known—the Bible story, for example. Modern painters and photographs have
virtually given up on the idea of a founding textual narrative, so the image begins
with an irrecuperable deficit of clarity.
2. The order of telling is not clear, because images do not have the same
formats as writing or film. It is usually not possible to be sure what order the
story is told in, with a couple of exceptions that mostly pertain to premodern
painting—principally “genre orders of telling” where the kind of painting tells
how its stories are told, and “spatial orders of telling” where the picture’s spatial
organization leads the viewer to conclude a certain order of telling.
3. The order of reading is always impossible to parse, or usually even guess,
because viewers are invited to look in any order, repeatedly returning to particular
places, and entirely skipping others. In Table 1 I have given a few possible orders
of reading, out of the infinite number of eye movements and fixations performed
by all possible viewers. The point is not to extend Goodman’s analytic grip, but to
show how narrative is generated in and through the reading—and how reading, in
visual art, is forever unquantifiable.
Poulos’s work is an example of all three orders: it has no order of
occurrence, unless it is a private family history. It has no order of telling, because
the pictures can be rearranged and augmented by others. It has no order of
reading, for the same reasons. The history of 20th c. painting and photography is
full of better-known examples. Max Beckmann’s paintings are anti-narrative
because he mistrusts well-known stories, even ones he never told to anyone. (It is
not at all a safe wager that Beckmann had fully-developed scripts for his
paintings.) In that sense, his paintings are about the impossibility or inaccessibility
Chapter 5 - 45 - Narrative

of old-fashioned stories. Balthus is even more skeptical of storytelling: he makes

entirely non-narrative paintings using the full complement of narrative devices.
Paintings like The Street (New York, Museum of Modern Art) are dramas with no
story, or rather they are pictures that tell many stories, all at the same time and all
in a murmur, so that none can be heard. Their ultimate precedent is post-
impressionism, and in Balthus’s case especially the Seurat of the Grande jatte
(Chicago, Art Institute), a similar constellation of simultaneous narrative
fragments. Poulos, like many other contemporary artists, is the skeptical heir of
modernists and surrealists who were in turn skeptical of post-impressionism’s
skepticism about academic narrative. With each generation, visual narrative
recedes further into an irretrievable past.

3
Goodman’s schema and Rubin’s proposal are among the more precise
attempts to answer the question of how visual artists avoid narrative. The question

of why they avoid it is even more difficult. It would be possible to say that stories
have come to seem superficial, or that paintings with stories look old-fashioned,
or that painting is increasingly taken to be cognitively different from texts (and so
should be kept pure). Whatever answer eventually comes to seem optimal, it will
probably have to do with the philosophically fundamental problem of the non-
semiotic nature of visual artifacts.
In a book called On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them I argue that

pictures are difficult objects simply because they are made of nonsemiotic

marks—that is, they aren’t comprised of linguistic or otherwise systematic or

Chapter 5 - 46 - Narrative

oppositional signs.3 I am interested in the fact that so much of what happens in art
history is a way of ignoring that rudimentary fact. Art historians go on spinning
narratives about pictures, and it can often seem, reading art history texts, that the
illustrations are entirely optional: that is, the paintings or photographs or prints
just contribute their narrative meanings and whatever is left over is material for
inner, subjective, or otherwise nonverbal pleasure. In traditional art historical
iconography—generally confined to the history of premodern art—the narratives
that pictures are called on to exemplify are typically found in printed fabulae. In
the semiotically-invested art history that seemed promising in the 1990s, pictures
were allowed to generate their own narratives in a much freer fashion,
independently of the usual sources and protocols of interpretation, and in active
exchange with viewers and readers.4
The opening chapter of On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them is an
attempt to construct a theory of pictorial marks, blobs, smears, uninterpretable
mrushmarks, and other non-semiotic detritus—that is, the commonplace building
blocks of ordinary pictures—a theory that would not consign them to the realm of
permanently uninterpretable nonsemiotic and nonnarrative phenomena. Ordinary
pictorial marks are pictorial, I think, because they are an undecidable blend of
nonsemiotic and semiotic objects. There are historically specifiable examples of
such hybrids. (It is important to work against the tendency that semiotics has to
become a universalist doctrine, without historical purchase.) One is the contorno,
a Renaissance practice that consists of making many undulating lines that braid
together to make the outline of a figure. From far off, the contorno is a line, and
therefore a sign in the semiotic sense: it denotes the edge of a figure. From closer
Chapter 5 - 47 - Narrative

in, the contorno is a swirling, ill-defined area of markings that does not function
semantically. The two modes of denotation—semiotic and nonsemiotic, or
semantic and syntactic—coexist in the contorno and are analytically inseparable.
Pictures are difficult objects: they resist interpretation because they resist
words. That resistance is genuinely difficult because the paint smears,

photographic grain, and charcoal marks are between signs and marks. If pictures
were really just fundamentally nonsemiotic, then paradoxically they would be
easier to interpret. (They would simply be “inenarrable” in the sense that Derrida
and others use that word: not subject to narrative, but not comprised of elements
other than the elements that also comprise narratives.) The hybrid theory makes
pictures and art history significantly more difficult than they would be if pictures
were either semiotic (that is, ultimately, susceptible to narrative) or nonsemiotic
(susceptible only to mute appreciation).

4
The semiotic nature of the visual object is irreducibly important wen it
comes to deciding what place narrarive has in visual art. All of us in art history
and visual studies (and that includes fields like visual anthropology, archaeology,
and cultural studies more broadly) produce texts in response to pictures.
Sometimes it makes sense to stop our avalanche of interpretation, and ask what it
is about these stubbornly mute, nearly incomprehensible objects that provokes the
desire to write. Why try to turn non-narrative images—especially those made by
artists who have themselves turned against narrative—into continuous narratives? I
turned Poulos’s enigmatic photographs into a family drama, and then I turned
Chapter 5 - 48 - Narrative

them into an example of the avoidance of narrative. Both times I turned mute
pictures back into narratives. I have excuses, of course, but in the end what I have
done is no more or less excusable than what happens every day in classrooms and
texts. I like to put this as a question about living: Why spend your life writing
narratives about things that do not even contain a single word?
From an artist’s point of view, the narratives that other people spin can
have real-world effects: they can result I shows, reviews, and jobs. From an
historian’s standpoint they do all that, and also weave the fabric of art history for
the next generation. In all this—which I would not want to stop even if it would
make sense to try—there is the problem of understanding an artistic practice that
works entirely differently. Artists I know often search for a certain degree of
ambiguity, which can be achieved by erasing whatever seems most obviously
narrative about their work. If a painting has writing on it, the artist may smear a
few of the words. In Poulos’s photographs it is important that a few words can be
read, but not too many. The effect is a feeling of meaning: a sense that the picture

could be read by someone with enough energy, together with the security that it

will not be read, because it has enough signs that any reading would be difficult,
tedious, or unrewarding.5 Sometimes I think of this as if te picture were seen
through a heavy fog. An artist doesn’t want viewers to be too close, because then
they could just read the picture, and it would become a slogan, a story, a one-
liner, a narrative. On the other hand the artist doesn’t want viewers to be too far
away, because then the picture would melt into a single sign, and lose its allure. In
the endless game of avoiding narrative, the feeling of meaning is security against
Chapter 5 - 49 - Narrative

pure legibility or empty meaninglessness. Perhaps that feeling is the best analytic
criterion in a field crowded with evasions.
Chapter 5 - 50 - Narrative

Notes

1
See for example Breton, “Foreword to The Hundred Headless Woman by Max Ernst,”

translated by Dorothea Tanning, in A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections about the

Book and Writing, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay (New York, NY: Granary

Books, 2000), 213-16.

2
“On the Impossibility of Stories: The Anti-Narrative and Non-Narrative Impulse in Modern

Painting,” Word & Image 7 no. 4 (1991): 348–64.

3
Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
4
A crucial text in this tradition is Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art,

Preposterous History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

5
I am not sure where I got the phrase “feeling of meaning,” but it is not unrelated to Rousseau’s

“le sentiment de l’existence,” which George Steiner names as the antecedent of Heidegger’s

Stimmung. In practice, the “feeling of meaning” or “feeling of narrative” carry clear traces of their

Romantic origins in that they mix claims of radical subjectivity with protocols of reading. See

Steiner, Grammars of Creation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 233.