4

The Present in Pictures

I

What does the present look like? At first, this may seem a rather daft question. After all, what else do we see but the present, staring us in the face every day? We can’t see the past or the future, so what we see, by process of elimination, must be the present. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that what we see must be in the present. But if so, what visual quality marks it as such? Apparently, there are disorders in which the ability to discern the present is lost. In his essay on déjà vu, Henri Bergson recounts the case of a patient who “has not completely succeeded in apprehending the actual; he cannot say with certainty whether now is present, past or even future; he will decide for the past if that idea be suggested in the questions put to him.”1 The way Bergson phrases this is rather curious, since it implies that the patient is still seeing now but cannot recognize now as the present. What sort of sensory evidence is required to recognize the present? The easy impressionability of the patient in this case seems to suggest that the present is an idea added on to the sheer immediacy of the now. But, if so, how does the additional notion of the present change what he experiences already?

Generally speaking, philosophy and common sense tend to agree with Kant that time itself cannot be apprehended directly. As Kant puts it, time “cannot be a determination of outer appearances; it has to do neither with shape nor position, but with the relation of representations in our inner state.”² Time, in other words, is a condition of experience, a necessary context for it and, as such, is no more apprehensible than air. But does this necessarily mean that the present cannot be apprehended directly? One of the basic requirements for any kind of experience, as Kant sees it, is that the manifold presented by the outer world to the senses be unified in time and space. He calls this “the synthesis of apprehension,” and its chief duty in the whole process of experience is to weld impressions into the “absolute unity” of a “single moment.”3 Being organized into successive presents, then, is a necessary attribute of experience, but this organization, according to Kant, is not really a process but rather an a priori condition, without which there could not be representations of time or space at all.⁴

Temporal experience is more specifically organized by what Kant calls a schema, a kind of template laying down the conditions under which intuitions can be matched to concepts.⁵ A schema is something like the requirement that a triangle have three sides, a sort of experiential funnel by which the moiling stuff of intuitions is sifted into categories like triangle or square. The most basic schemata are temporal in nature, and they match concepts like substance and causality. What Kant calls the schema of actuality “is existence at some determinate time.”⁶ In other words, if something exists, it must exist at some time. In contrast, if it is possible, it exists at some time or other, and if it is necessary, it exists at all times. The schema of actuality, then, seems to govern our apprehension of the present, of things that exist now. But the schemata in general are not to be confused with images, and, in fact, Kant goes to some lengths to oppose them. Images, he says, are never adequate to concepts and must always be connected to them via the schemata. In other words, “existence at some determinate time” is not something we can see but rather is part of the format in which we see. There is no image of the present as such.

For Kant, of course, these are a priori conditions of experience and not empirical facts. But other, more recent philosophers have considered in a more immediate and practical context the question of whether or not we can see the present. Craig Callender, for one, wonders if there is some phenomenal property that corresponds to the concept being present. For a number of reasons, he decides this issue in the negative. He points out, for example, that the night sky includes light many eons old that does not look any different from that reflected off the planets, which is itself from a much more recent past. He also notes that most useful phenomenal properties allow us to make distinctions such as that between loud and not so loud or between red and blue. But if every perception is in the present, then it cannot be used in this way.⁷ The situation in this case is a little like that in the Land of Oz, where everyone wears green spectacles. But if everything is a just a shade of green, then green is the one color that cannot be distinguished, and so the Emerald City would only seem emerald to outsiders.

Callender does not consider other basic facts of human vision. The eye is not fixed but constantly moving and blinking, so that the field of vision is not received all at once but built up out of a number of brief, partial glimpses. Though it is sometimes said that the constant sight of things together in space is our visual warrant for their common temporality, the fact is that we actually assemble this spatial simultaneity from a collection of shorter, more restricted visual reports. The essentially discontinuous nature of saccadic vision means that what passes for the present is actually punctured throughout by infinitesimal fits of inattention and shifts in focus. The fact that we do not see these must cast a certain shadow over what we do see, which can hardly be the unitary, immediate entity we call the present if it is neither unitary nor immediate. Callender does end his argument by citing other evidence from cognitive neuroscience and physics to the effect that phenomenal properties come into the nervous system from a number of different directions and at different rates.8 The effect of this sort of evidence is to suggest that the present is not a raw aspect of perception but more a belief about it.

If we cannot actually see the present, then what is it that we do see? Kant’s argument, which has been definitive in this respect, is that we must represent time by means of spatial analogies. The problem with space as such, though, is that it is temporally invariant. Kant suggests that we tend to represent the passage of time as “a line progressing to infinity,” but lines don’t actually progress anywhere. They just sit there. Kant says so himself, insisting that a line is just like time “with this one exception, that while the parts of the line are simultaneous the parts of time are always successive,” as if that one exception didn’t make all the difference.⁹ In order to effectively represent time, then, we have to add to space the factor of movement. This is why so many ancient definitions of time were based on celestial motions and why opponents of these were able to argue that they were circular since the concept of motion already includes time within it.¹⁰ Be that as it may, in ordinary experience, we certainly do tend to represent time by means of spatial movement. Clocks are simplified, abstract versions of the ordinary movement that supports our sense of time. This basic fact has serious implications for our sensory experience of the present, though, since it would seem to mean that there is no readily available sensory version of it. Though we cannot see time itself, we do at least have a constant image of its existence, but even this cannot be said of the present.

Perhaps this is one reason why the present has always been so hard to grasp for definition. In phenomenal terms, the present can only be intuited by reference to the continuum from which it has been abstracted. Deriving the still from the moving, the discontinuous from the continuous, the unitary from the dispersed, has always been difficult. It has been so hard, in fact, that it makes sense to wonder if the whole project hasn’t started from the wrong end. The hardest part, even for those like James and Husserl, who have given the problem its most substantial solutions, is, having started from the standpoint of the present, how to explain the experience of motion. The answers to this question have been so tenuous they have made the fact that we do sense motion seem almost miraculous. Perhaps it would make more sense to start with the evident fact of the experience of motion and then wonder how the experience of the present might be derived from that. Looking at the world as it happens doesn’t seem to yield much obvious evidence for a concept that has been so easily taken as the fixed point from which all analysis of temporal experience must proceed.11

Given these evident facts of ordinary sensory experience, the best chance we have to see the present might lie in pictures. To say so, however, would seem to contradict the commonsensical idea that every picture is a picture of the past. Though this is true in relation to the viewer, in itself every picture is a picture of some present. Surely this is one source of the uncanny power of photographs, that they hold time still, as it never is otherwise, so that a present can be kept to be viewed again later. In a photograph, some part of the past is still present, though its subjects may be many years in the grave. Jacques Aumont, like many commentators, maintains that in a photograph “I see time,”¹² but this can hardly be true, since time, by definition, is not static. Rather, what is seen is a part of time that doesn’t change, which is what we tend to think of as the characteristic feature of the present.

At certain points in human history, holding the present in this way has been the purpose of pictures. In 1833, John Constable advertised his aims as a painter in this way: “To give ‘to one brief moment caught from fleeting time’ a lasting and sober existence, and to render permanent many of those splendid but evanescent Exhibitions, which are ever occurring in the changes of external Nature.”¹³ Here Constable quotes from Wordsworth, who praised a painting by George Beaumont for giving “To one brief moment caught from fleeting time / The appropriate calm of blest eternity.” In this familiar formula, time is always “fleeting,” which is to say in constant, incessant motion, and the job of painting is to snatch some portion of it as it passes. The implication of the formula is that the portion of time rendered in the picture is captured from a prior existence in the wild, as it were. Moments, in other words, exist as units of time. But this is at least paradoxical, since it implies that ever-flowing time is fundamentally made up of static parts. How much more sensible it would be to assume that the painter gives the moment its stillness, as he gives it the quality of perdurability. In fact, this is not so inconsistent with Constable’s claims or with the reality of painting, which makes time still so that it can endure. This would mean, though, that the painter does not capture the moment but makes it, by abstracting the still from the constantly moving. In other words, the painter produces the present, and the painting is not a retrospective record but a temporally creative act.

If we want to know what the present looks like, then, we should look at pictures, not because they are so many records of a present already in existence but because they are the means by which the look of the present is established in the first place. Where else is there any phenomenal evidence of that strange aspect of time that is moving and still at once? This might seem a fantastic notion if the present is considered to be a primordial fact of human existence. But the evidence of the preceding chapters has suggested that the present is not a given, that it is, in most of its versions, a metaphor covering a relatively formless temporal situation. There is certainly no need to believe that the present is older than the habit of making pictures, since this may be almost as old as speech. In any case, the known history of pictures is also a history of attempts to conceptualize the present, to find an image for something whose very nature makes it not just hard to see but also difficult to imagine.

II

The classic account of the nature of pictures also necessarily involves a theory of the present, if for no other reason than that the effect of pictures is supposed to be confined to the present. As E. H. Gombrich puts it, perspectival painting abides by the negative rule that “the artist must not include in his image anything the eye-witness could not have seen from a particular point at a particular moment.”14 In his well-known essay, “Moment and Movement in Art,” Gombrich quotes Lord Shaftesbury to the effect that the artist, having chosen his moment, is “afterward debar’d the taking advantage from any other Action than what is immediately present.”¹⁵ A proper painting is, therefore, as James Harris puts it, “of necessity a punctum temporis or instant.”¹⁶ As Harris noted, though, this restriction makes any very complicated subject matter difficult to represent without the application of information about preceding and succeeding moments. Painters had solved this problem for centuries in various ways, mostly by suspending their figures at what seemed to be crucial moments in a legible arc of action. Such moments are, in the canonical words of G. E. Lessing, “fruitful” enough to give the imagination free reign.17

Lessing’s Laocoön is usually cited as distinguishing painting from poetry on the grounds that the former cannot convincingly depict time, as the latter cannot logically encompass any space. Lessing does, in fact, lay down a law that sounds a good deal like Shaftesbury’s, to the effect that the single moment depicted in a painting “must express nothing transitory.”¹⁸ But even these momentary images can convincingly imitate an action, he argues, if the painter chooses an instant “which is most suggestive and from which the preceding and succeeding actions are most easily comprehensible.”¹⁹ A painting of a properly poised runner, for example, will exploit the viewers’ experience of running in order to suggest parts of the action that aren’t actually there. Elsewhere, Lessing cautions his reader that such techniques do not allow the painter to combine two different points separated in time, as the poet can routinely do, but he almost immediately begins to waffle and qualify this statement, until he finally decides that a very great painter, such as Raphael, may occasionally combine “two different moments into one.”²⁰ What he seems to mean by this is, as Robin Le Poidevin puts it, that paintings “can represent aspects of time that they are unable to depict.”²¹ Though a painting may only show a runner in midstep, it can also use the general fund of human knowledge about running to make that image into a sign for a full gallop.

Because Lessing was writing about paintings and not about human sensory physiology, he did not move on to the next logical question, whether paintings work the way they do because human perception always superimposes bits of the past and future on what counts for the immediately present. But this is certainly the assumption that took hold in the decades after Laocoön was published in 1766. The “specious present” that James developed toward the end of the 19^th century has an obvious ancestor in the “fruitful” moment that Lessing describes in the 18^th century and in the whole tradition of perspectival painting that had preceded him. This, then, is the canonical version of the present in pictures and sensory psychology, the threefold structure centered on a dimensionless instant. This model of the present governs ideas about visual experience well into the 20^th century, as evidenced by Sartre’s version of it in The Imaginary: “Retention and protention constitute, in every way, the sense of the present visual impression—without these synthetic acts, one could hardly speak of an impression at all.”22 But the extension of this version of the present from aesthetic standards to phenomenology does raise at least one question. Why is the task of the painter so tricky if ordinary experience always superimposes past and future onto every present impression? If every moment is a fruitful moment, then doesn’t that more or less define Lessing’s category out of existence? This is a question that could only be answered once photography established the principle that any moment at all could be the source of a picture.

The whole project of photography might be described as an investigation of the moment. The desire to capture the moment as it passes is one that preceded photography and that must, in some sense, have brought it into being. Even before Wordsworth, William Cowper expresses it in The Task: “To arrest the fleeting images that fill / The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast, / And force them sit, till he has pencilled off / A faithful likeness of the forms he views.”²³ Thus Cowper seems to describe, sixty years before the fact, the ambition that drove the British originator of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, who was frustrated by his inability to transcribe the images cast by the camera lucida, a portable version of the camera obscura that was usable outside. Looking back on his first ambitions, Fox Talbot remembers thinking “how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!”²⁴ A similar expression turns up in a story passed down from his French counterpart Joseph Niépce, who almost came to despair from his inability “to fix the images of the camera.”²⁵ When Daguerre announced his invention to the world public, Samuel Morse thought back to experiments of his own “to ascertain if it were possible to fix the image of the camera obscura.”²⁶ To be sure, other expressions are used, and it is not uncommon for early experimenters to confess a desire to capture or store the images made by the camera obscura.²⁷ But the idea of fixation is so pervasive in these early accounts of the drive to develop photography that it hardly seems a pun when a report to the French Academy describes Niépce as having an “idée fixe.”²⁸

As Lady Elizabeth Eastlake informed her readers in 1857, the expression fixing the image is “photographic language” for making it permanent, and the pervasiveness of the expression arises from the essential difficulty faced by would-be photographers, since it was easier to cause an image to appear than it was to make it stay.²⁹ But “fixing” must have become photographic language, with this specialized meaning gradually narrowed from the one Fox Talbot originally had in mind. For the first and most basic problem he faced was that of stilling the image cast by his camera lucida. Even set up before a distant and mostly static landscape, the camera lucida would convey a good deal of movement, including the gradual progress of the shadows as the day advanced. Thus his lament over the “fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away” that the camera cast before his hapless pencil.30 To fix is, first of all, to arrest the moving image and then to fasten it durably to a medium. As the London Literary Gazette put it in reporting on Daguerre’s announcement: a method “has been discovered to fix these wonderful images, which have hitherto passed away volatile—evanescent as a dream—to stop them at our will and . . . render them permanent before our eyes.”³¹

To capture the moment means, on one hand, to stop the seen before it disappears. Gombrich quotes Ruskin’s regret that he cannot catch a wave so as to give an exact description of it as the daguerreotype can.³² On the other hand, capturing the moment as the early photographs did also revealed something that had never been seen and which therefore could not have been regretted as it passed. When Eastlake marvels at the hypernormal detail of Fox Talbot’s photographs, she means to include the temporal as well as the spatial, “the fall, not of the avalanche, but of the apple, the most fleeting smile of the babe.”³³ A year after Eastlake’s article was published, Thomas J. Kaife presented a rapid-fire camera that, he claimed, could make visible “epochs of time inappreciable to our natural unaided organ of vision.”³⁴ Photography, in other words, does not merely record vision but also improves on it, and the speed with which claims like Kaife’s surfaced suggests that exploring unseen increments of time was one of the earliest ambitions attached to photography. In this sense, the camera is a popular version of the time microscopes that were filling the psychology laboratories at just this time.

The camera, in other words, does not just stop and record time but also investigates it. Geoffrey Batchen maintains that, for Talbot, “the primary subject of every photograph was . . . time itself.”³⁵ In a fairly basic way, this is seriously counterintuitive, though, because the photograph improves on the camera obscura precisely by subtracting time. Looking at a photograph may help us sense within ourselves the passage of time, but this is surely not inherent in the image itself, which is unnaturally still. In temporal terms, then, the real subject of every photograph is the present, isolated for examination from the tracts of time around it. The present is not directly available for examination because it doesn’t last but also because we cannot register the present and be in it at the same time.³⁶ To recognize the present is to make it into something else, something no longer present to us in the same way. In other words, photographs captured what had not been seen before, what could not have been seen, and the picture of the present they produced turned out to differ in important ways from the one they had been invented to record.

This new version of the present turned out to violate preconceived notions to such an extent that it demanded a specialized name: the instant. To some extent, the notion of the instant seems intrinsic to photography, appearing in Fox Talbot’s first description of it: “The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our ‘natural magic,’ and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy.”37 Fox Talbot also attempted to make good on this boast, which was hardly realizable with the technology of 1839, by experimenting with flash exposures, produced by electric discharge.³⁸ Ordinary photographs of moving subjects were commonly described as “instantaneous” by the 1850s, even though the exposure times were still fairly lengthy and great cleverness had to be employed to get everything in focus.³⁹ When roll film was finally introduced, toward the end of the century, “the golden age of the ordinary instant” could commence, though, as Tom Gunning points out, this “age” was hardly more than an instant itself.⁴⁰ Thus the research-oriented projects of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge were not in advance of the popular market but actually arrived as it reached its height. When Muybridge was hired by Leland Stanford in 1872 to take his celebrated pictures of a horse in motion, he was expected to produce an instantaneous photograph, an already well-known species, though one with which Muybridge himself had no experience.⁴¹

For most of the 19^th century, definitions of the instantaneous were remarkably elastic. Even Albert Londe, who was a professional and might have been expected to try harder, provisionally defined the instant as “a very brief period of time.”⁴² Elsewhere, bound to put a number on it, Londe chose a quarter of a second.⁴³ But the term implied, for many, a truly impossible standard, an exposure of infinite quickness capturing a single point in time. Thus an 1895 manual called Instantaneous Photography tried to restrict the art to exposures “beyond the limits of measurement.”⁴⁴ The manual did not specify how this was to be verified, but it is clear from this demand that popular photographers were conducting their own series of experiments, parallel to those in the psychology labs, on the human experience of time. For the instantaneous photograph to realize its potential, it had to be made entirely by mechanical means, without the intervention of the clumsy hands or the blurry eye of the photographer. This was necessary if the instantaneous photograph was to record sights that human beings cannot ordinarily see, to meet Londe’s most persuasive definition: “We propose to call instantaneous every photograph taken in a fraction of a second that our senses do not allow us to perceive.”⁴⁵ By this definition, then, the instantaneous photograph had to reveal the invisible, and thus it tested, by implication, the temporal acuity of human eyesight.

Using the camera to find an exposure time shorter than the instant of time discernible by eye turned out to be technically easy but conceptually paradoxical. The experiments proved to be rather difficult to validate for the rather ironic reason that the instantaneous photograph had to be seen to exceed the limits of sight. There was no such thing as an instantaneous still life, for reasons that must be fairly obvious, though they seem, on examination, to be a little odd.46 For an instantaneous photograph to achieve its purpose, it had, in a sense, to fail a little, to show some awkwardness of pose, some apparent violation of the laws of physics, some motion blur, that would prove that it had delved within the ordinary moment of vision. The results of the camera’s perfection as a surrogate, in other words, would show to the eye itself as imperfections in the photograph.

The fad for instantaneous photography turned on this paradox. There was a powerful novelty value in these pictures, which seemed to realize for the first time the truly revolutionary powers of the camera.⁴⁷ The off-balance, oddly suspended scenes they showed were taken as visible evidence of rapid temporal change, all the more persuasive for the violent distortion it took to make them still. The snapshot, in particular, seemed to make the present visible and thus to vouch for its existence and dramatize its brevity at the same time.⁴⁸ Thus it seems inevitable, in retrospect, that the snapshot fad and the first real discussions of the present should have coincided in the 1890s. These were not coincidental beginnings, though, but rather culminations, since the present had been under concerted study throughout the century and even the term “snapshot” dates to 1860 and Sir John Herschel.⁴⁹

The full complexity of these snapshots was probably revealed most effectively by the opposition they excited. From the beginning, rapid-fire photography was criticized as unrealistic, non-mimetic, since it represented sights that the unaided eye could not see. Even the painter Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, who had been inspired by Muybridge’s horse pictures, considered them little more than raw material, since a true artist “no more has the right to put on canvas what is visible with the aid of a sole lens than to paint what a microscope would show him.”⁵⁰ The rift created within the ancient partnership of vision and art was felt with almost visceral pain, and many artists and even some photographers reacted as if betrayed. Marey, for one, mounted a defense of his methods that relied on the example of Lessing, as if these new pictures were simply validations of classical standards of picture making. The most legible phase of any human movement, he instructed the painters, was to be found where the body has just changed its direction. These segments could be lifted from chronophotographs and used with full confidence.51 But he did not make it clear how the viewer is to deduce from a single frame, without the surrounding evidence, that the body in question is at any particular moment in its progress, that it might be turning left rather than right, rising rather than falling.

In fact, the craze for instantaneous photography had systematically refuted the assumptions on which the notion of the fruitful moment had been based. As Marta Braun shows, there is a necessary trade-off in these photographs between analysis and synthesis, between the clarity of the first and the smooth integration of the second. The more finely time is sliced into instants, the more difficult it is to see how these might be reintegrated into a legible arc of action.⁵² Gombrich points out that the production stills used to advertise commercial films are not usually actual frames but rather posed shots taken after the fact. Frame grabs are not always legible enough to portray the important action at a moment.⁵³ In short, the evidence of photography suggests that the fruitful moment is not a judicious selection from nature but an aesthetic convention.⁵⁴ The picture of the present that had been accepted as an aesthetic standard since at least the 18^th century was not relevant outside painting because it could not be generalized: every moment is not a fruitful moment. Is it any wonder that this period of European aesthetic history coincided with the psychological investigations of the present that culminated in the work of James and Husserl?

The passage from painting to photography had exposed the fact that the present, at least as Lessing had defined it, is not something to be captured by a clever and judicious eye but is only to be found in pictures themselves. It turns out that painting had been compensating for its essential stillness by all sorts of stratagems that simply aren’t necessary in ordinary sensory experience, which does not need reintegration because it does not come piecemeal in the first place. Photography exposed the artificiality of the present stripped of the adjustments and justifications with which painting had surrounded it. Thus it tended to call into question not just the fruitful moment but also the moment itself. But the passage from painting to photography, from Lessing’s formulation of the fruitful moment to the rage for instantaneous photography, is a relatively brief episode in the history of the visual arts. And the relationship that Lessing assumes must obtain between a picture and the present, the representational relationship, though it is the one most usually associated with art as such, is not the only one available. In the long run of the history of pictures, the present has often meant something quite different.

III

Lessing’s assumption that art necessarily occurs in the present may have been conditioned by much older ideas about the nature of art. According to the ancients, it is not just works of art that exist in the present but aesthetic experience itself. According to Plato, in the Philebus, any kind of pleasure is “unlimited, and belongs to the kind that does not and never will contain within itself and derive from itself either beginning, middle, or end.”55 For Aristotle as well, pleasure, like sensation in general, is “at any moment complete, for it does not lack anything which coming into being later will complete its form.”⁵⁶ What is true of pleasure in general is certainly true of aesthetic experience, which is commonly constituted by the co-presence of different perceptions—color and shape, for example—in a single sensation.⁵⁷ Such sensations are not just limited to the present, but their singularity is one of the defining features of the present as such.

It is not too far from this descriptive account to a normative ideal in which the perfect convergence of perceptions in the present is the feature that makes aesthetic experience the finest kind of experience in general. The Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Neo-Platonic schools, despite their various differences, all agreed that aesthetic pleasure was the highest kind, “corresponding to the richest possible grasp of a moment.”⁵⁸ The intrinsic identity of pleasure with that “grasp of the moment” then became a conscious ideal, as though it were not an inevitable fact of experience. Beauty was to be apprehended all at once, not just in a moment but even in an instant, and the brevity of the present ceased to be a problem as it became an index of a very particular kind of pleasurable certainty. The obvious fact that we must encounter any work of art, novel as much as photograph, in the present, thus becomes a measure of art’s particular excellence as experience.

This did mean, though, that the “binding problem,” that nagging question as to how the different sensations are to be combined, reappeared as a threat within aesthetic theory. Aristotle worried about this early on, and in worrying about it, he produced yet another set of ideas about the extent of the present. Very small things, he said, cannot be beautiful because our apprehension of them approaches zero in terms of time, while very large ones cannot be beautiful because we cannot see them in their entirety all at once.⁵⁹ Aristotle arrived at the same solution to this problem as Goldilocks, with the successful work of art installed firmly in the happy middle. The beautiful takes up just as much time as an ordinary person can apprehend at once, which is to say that it is coterminous with the present, as measured by some implicit norm. But this model of aesthetic experience, and the version of the present that corresponds to it, were always to be haunted by the extremes on either side. The instantaneous photograph is one example of an aesthetic object that seems to reduce our apprehension to the vanishing point. On the other side, where the time required for apprehension exceeds the beautiful mean, lies the sublime.

Burke, for example, produces a physiological explanation for the fact that “visual objects of great dimensions are Sublime.”60 If all the rays of light reflected by some huge object strike the eye at once, it must necessarily be overwhelmed by the effect. If, on the other hand, the eye processes rays of light one by one, then it is clear that it must soon be exhausted by the labor of composing all the rays reflected by some huge object. In either case, the eye’s inability to receive all the rays at once causes it pain and pushes the experience into the realm of the sublime. Though the evidence and reasoning differ considerably from that of Aristotle, the identification of the beautiful with the experience of a unitary present is the same. Kant’s explanation is similar to Burke’s, though less physiological. For him, “the effort to take up into a single intuition a measure for magnitude requiring a significant time for apprehension” results in a kind of violence insofar as it impresses us with the limits of our comprehension. Feeling this limit, painful though it might be, is also the condition for realizing that we can actually extend our comprehension beyond the limit, which is the source of the curious “pleasure that is possible only by means of displeasure” that Kant calls the sublime.⁶¹

The definition of the beautiful, then, depends on a certain version of the present, one in which experience is perfectly centered on a moment of just the right size. Louis Marin cites a certain landscape by Poussin, in which a “single time, that of simultaneous presence, governs the contemplation of the things that are co-present in the space.”⁶² There is a kind of blissful, utopian enjoyment inherent in such scenes, what Marin calls “the sovereign delight of the present,” that comes from feeling as if all the past and all the future were concentrated somehow in a moment so that they could be taken in all at once. Paintings like this are visualizations of the classical repose and calm that Goethe called “that splendid feeling of the present.”⁶³ A very different kind of present appears, however, in another painting by Poussin, in which a storm crackles in the background. This irruption of the sudden into the static calm of a classic landscape exemplifies what Marin calls “the meteoric instant of sublimity.”64 The flash of lightning is a perfect representation of the paradox of the pictorial sublime in that it is huge and scary but also infinitesimal in its temporal extent. In fact, Marin implies that the lightning flash becomes huge and scary by first being too quick for the eye to catch. The time it takes to happen is so much shorter than the time that is necessary to see anything, much less paint anything, that the calm symmetry of the beautiful is torn apart from within. Thus the phenomenological evidence that was to become notorious in the instantaneous photograph is visible within painting itself in a natural effect that is “incommensurable with the present of the gaze that contemplates it where it has been deposited on the canvas.”⁶⁵

When such effects had been formulated by Burke and Kant, the sublime could become a catchword for experiences that exceed the bounds that classical aesthetics had placed around the present. One of the most prominent examples in this respect is Barnett Newman’s mini-manifesto “The Sublime Is Now.” Newman’s dictum is based on an experience that seems designed to illustrate Kant’s theory of the sublime. Visiting some ancient Native American mounds in Ohio, Newman feels simultaneously his own small presence, “here I am, here,” and the immensity of the cosmos beyond, “chaos, rivers, landscapes.”⁶⁶ Being able to intuit that chaos, though, redounds upon the tiny individual, whose presence suddenly seems immense: “Man is present.”⁶⁷ This present is one transformed by its passage through the immensity of the cosmos. It is not, Jean-François Lyotard insists, the conscious now of Augustine and Husserl, but one that defies the ordinary limits of consciousness.⁶⁸ It contains, in other words, the vast space of time intuited before the ancient mounds.

Newman’s sublime now is meant to be exceptional and even subversive, though it relies on a set of ideas that had seemed second nature since the time of Aristotle. And it is also possible that the sublime now, the present that comprehends an experience of vast times, is more common in the history of art than fruitful moments. Aristotle worries about experiences that take too little or too much time, but he does not consider the very similar problem of experiences that touch on too many times. The canonical sublime experience, standing before the ancient Egyptian pyramids or Newman’s Ohio mounds, is an experience of temporal vastness but also of temporal difference. It must certainly be a feature of seeing the pyramids to be impressed with their elemental presence right now, the inaccessible present of their origins, and the many, many times through which they have persisted. It must make the present seem both large and small at the same time, which is more or less what Newman means by the sublime now. Despite the tradition that locates art in the middling temporal zones, this sublime present is the one more commonly found in pictures, even perhaps those that restrict themselves to a single moment.

IV

In most traditional accounts, the presence of a picture is inversely related to the absence of its subject. The canonical example in this respect is the story of the Corinthian maid who traces her lover’s shadow on the wall as a way of keeping him in mind even when he is gone.69 But a tracing of this kind is a fairly minimal representation whose extreme schematism seems almost designed to emphasize the absence of the subject. Would a photograph of the lover have the same effect of absence, as most commentators on the art of photography insist, or would it rather suggest two presences, two presents, one being contemplated now and another, also visible and identical to the first, located at the time of exposure? If one current definition is to be accepted, and a picture is an “image with a medium,”⁷⁰ then wouldn’t there always be these two presents to contend with, one relevant to the physical substrate and one implied by the image itself? Reducing this situation to a single moment is one of the simplifications that Lessing’s theory accomplished in concentrating attention solely on the represented subject of the picture.

Even as a purely material artifact, though, a work of art intersects with time in a number of different ways. Art exists most simply in immediate terms, as what Jacques Rancière calls the “senseless naked presence” of the material substrate.⁷¹ The stone, the paint, the print are there, first of all, in a pure present, static marks on a page, paint left splashed on a wall. For all but the very newest artworks, though, that presence has a curious quality, so solid in the now and yet redolent of some stretch of the past. George Kubler claims this is true of all artifacts, which have a specific kind of duration, “so durable that they antedate every living creature on earth, so indestructible that their survival may, for all we know, ultimately approach infinity.”⁷² Exaggerated though it may be, this idea does suggest the way in which artworks may occupy a kind of extended present tense, even as mere objects, quite regardless of any content. What else is Benjamin’s theory of the aura about but this awe that attaches to pictures from the past, whose physical presence now seems a kind of mystery?

Originally, the image was inseparable from its medium, and the whole purpose of picture making was to attach the two to one another so that the image might enjoy some of the durability of the medium. Imago referred at first to the wax death masks that were carried in Roman funeral processions and that were sometimes worn by actors hired to imitate the illustrious dead.73 For Hans Belting, the negative, empty space of the mask indicates the absence of its subject, but it must also be significant that the impression records the actual touch of the one who passed away.⁷⁴ Even when it is removed and carried aloft, the mask retains a connection with the body of the deceased. The cavity inside the mask, therefore, is the original impression, and this antecedent shows why impressions have always been understood with some literalness, as if they always resulted from the impress of a touch. The medium, then, retains the original present of the image, which is one reason why such masks remain powerful in later generations. In a larger sense, the continuing connection between image and medium allows for a temporal cooperation between them, a kind of relay between the immediacy of the medium and the timelessness of the image, and between the pathos of the image and the durability of the medium.

This sort of temporal exchange is most apparent in the pictures that were produced as ritual objects before art became art. Artifacts and architectural monuments, according to Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, were understood “as belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously. . . . They stitched through time, pulling two points on the chronological timeline together until they met.”⁷⁵ This was possible because the time in which the artifact had been created, the time in which it was appreciated, and the time it depicted were put in touch with one another, so that they could indicate one another without becoming the same. This is especially true of the icons produced for the Byzantine church. The icon, as a physical object, was thought to be identical to the sacred personage it represented, which is why it was able to perform the same kind of miracles. Thus, according to Georges Didi-Huberman, it would be wrong to say that the icon represents: its purpose is to make present.⁷⁶ It exists in order to create a connection between two different modes of the present, the eternal present of God and the immediate present of the mortal observer.

In his work on Fra Angelico, Didi-Huberman argues that this complex temporality is characteristic of at least some Renaissance art as well. In his long analysis of the theme of Annunciation in the Renaissance, Didi-Huberman maintains that “all times and all tenses are thus at work in the moment of the Annunciation.”⁷⁷ The event itself is virtually instantaneous, as Mary comes to realize the truth almost before it is announced, but it also embodies a present as old as Creation itself, in a garden that is often evoked in paintings on this theme, and also another present that will finally bring an end to time. Such paintings tell a very brief story, with the gesture of the angel toward the virgin, but superimpose on that moment others that are connected to it by leaps through time. Jean-Luc Nancy says something similar about a painting of the Visitation by Pontormo. Here there is also an instantaneous revelation, as the unborn John the Baptist leaps in the womb of his mother, Elizabeth, when she greets Mary. As a revelation, this moment reaches forward to the life that John can herald even before he is born and beyond that to the celebrations of this moment repeated in Christian ritual. The painting thus establishes what Nancy calls a “double presence . . . a present that comes from nowhere and from no time.” As the two women gaze at one another, two times also exchange gazes, the time of the observer and the time of the painting, “the view across which the immemorial considers us and, so to speak, sees us coming and even offers us its own visitation.”78

As these discussions imply, the model for the relation of the image to the medium, of the presence of the image to the present of the medium, is the Incarnation itself. Didi-Huberman quotes the dictum of Giovanni di Genova, whose definition of imago ends with the notion that every image allows the viewer to participate in the mystery of the Incarnation.⁷⁹ Along with all its other mysteries, the Incarnation binds the eternal to time, so that every moment of Christ’s life on Earth resonates with a past that goes back to Creation and a future that extends to Apocalypse. All of this is contained within what Didi-Huberman calls a “virtual present,” an instant that is produced “outside any historical law,” one that shows “how a ‘linear’ notion of the present moment is radically overturned and superseded.”⁸⁰ Though it incorporates past and future, then, this version of the present is almost the opposite of the one institutionalized later as the fruitful moment. In literal terms, the picture still occupies but a moment, the instant of recognition in Annunciation or Visitation, and it also contains a past and a future. But these are not the moments lying immediately before and after, not perhaps moments at all, but vast stretches of time that come to be superimposed on the unchanging plane of the painted surface.

The close association of this virtual present with the sacred might suggest that the situation changes when, as Hans Belting puts it, art ceases to serve a religious function and becomes art. Certainly, the separation of the picture from any ritualistic context, and, in the form of easel painting, from any context at all, must mean that it comes to be located more simply in a particular version of the present. But this is not necessarily the case. According to Rancière, at any rate, “the present of art is always in the past and in the future. Its presence is always in two places at once.”81 The picture plane, then, is inherently a kind of interface between two times equally present that confront one another in the moment. Surely this duality becomes even more apparent as the image comes to be more temporally representational. The location of the image in a distinct moment always makes it an instantaneous anachronism. The very details that once made a painting by Caillebotte so topical now make it seem all the more remote. Thus Didi-Huberman maintains that the attempt to contain a historical moment within a painting always fails: “We could say that a historical painting never captured any ‘real moment,’ that the most beautiful istorie in painting represent time as an equivocation about succession, as an aporia of the instantaneous.”⁸²

Even classical history painting, though, according to Marin, contains strategic equivocations about the present. The fruitful moment itself might be understood as an “interval, not represented except by the cut that sharply punctures the unity of the present.”⁸³ The instantaneous pause so central to such pictures might seem less like an intimation of the narrative moments around it and more like an “unrepresentable, invisible flash-instant, the punctum temporis of the mortal cut.”⁸⁴ On the other hand, even conventional history paintings might include gestures toward the vast present indicated by sacred art. Didi-Huberman’s contention that the purpose of sacred art is to present is matched by Marin’s notion that representational art “presents itself as representing something.”⁸⁵ In other words, a painting does not necessarily dissolve itself in service of the image represented, to assume the classic role of the window giving on reality, but also always presents itself as an act of depiction. Whenever a painting emphasizes the presence of the picture plane or brings the background out of its appropriate position behind the figures, or even when it acquires a frame, then it identifies itself as a depiction. Whenever the image openly relies on its medium, then the picture turns on and brings out its own temporal identity. When description prevails over narration, detail over design, facture over mimesis, then the painting becomes an act of making present and not a representation.⁸⁶

Even within the image, though, there are devices that Marin describes as presentational. Figures within the painting that gesture toward the focal point, sometimes by explicitly pointing, sometimes just by gazing intently, establish a deictic relationship within the image that reproduces the relationship established by the picture itself as it gestures toward its subject. This sort of pointing out, Marin says, establishes “an atemporal present,” an “unassignable present,” quite separate from the “categories of time and space.”⁸⁷ Not the fruitful moment, or the blissful present of Poussin’s calm landscape, this is the present in which the medium instantiates the image, lodging its time in another time that endures, though it does not last any longer than the instant of the image. If, on one hand, this atemporal present seems to harken back to the eternity of the icon, it also anticipates, in its self-reference and dependence on the medium, the development of modern art. Among Marin’s examples are the geometric abstractions of Frank Stella, in which successive bands of color frame themselves, instead of framing a representational image. In so doing, he says, the painting “presents itself representing something.”88 It is a picture of a picture pointing at itself and thus staging the flat, atemporal present in which it will exist, hanging on the wall.

The farther away we get from the era in which easel painting was the norm and into a period dominated by installations, performance art, and new media, the more the classical form of the fruitful moment comes to seem an episode in art history, delimited, on one side, by the eternal present of sacred art and, on the other, by the atemporal present identified by Marin. Alexander Nagel makes this argument in a book that assembles a number of parallels between medieval and modern art. He sees installation art as itself a norm, as the ancient practice of fitting an image to a particular site is only briefly interrupted by the development of galleries.⁸⁹ Echoing an argument also made by Didi-Huberman, Nagel argues that the original type of the image, the index, in which there is a physical, causal link between referent and result, has once again become the norm, as artists after Duchamp lose interest in iconic resemblance.⁹⁰ In this analysis, conceptual art appears as a continuation of the long engagement of art with the mystery of the Incarnation, of the containment of ideas somehow in bodies and objects.⁹¹ On all these counts, the present of the work of art assumes a much more complicated aspect than it has in its ostensibly canonical form as the fruitful moment.

This is the version of the present found in much contemporary art. The photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto, for example, involves a purposeful expansion of the time frame of the instantaneous snapshot. In one project, Sugimoto records the full duration of a film, as shown in a classic 1970s theater, combining every frame in one still image, so that the screen becomes a soft, luminous rectangle floating in the dark. A whole narrative, in other words, comes to be present in one instant of time. As Lutz Koepnick puts it, “Sugimoto pictures the presence of a past as one extended now in whose space we can enjoy the pleasures of losing our normal temporal bearing.”⁹² Among Koepnick’s other examples of this effect are the glacier photographs of Nina Subin and Olafur Eliasson. Since a glacier is, in a sense, flux frozen in time, photographs of these can be seen as affording “a timeless present existing in a state of suspension.”93 Of course, a great deal depends on whether we see such examples as representative or exceptional, and Koepnick tends to see them as part of a countercurrent to the otherwise dominant trend of the present. But it is also true, as he argues, that the most common forms of contemporary art, including installation and video art, tend by nature to probe “the temporality of producing and attending presentness,” to explore the nature of the present rather than taking it for granted.⁹⁴

From this point of view, even easel painting might be seen to occupy a more extensive present. According to the curator of one of the recent now-based exhibitions, MoMA’s The Forever Now, this situation obtains not just in performance art, installations, or video, but even in the ostensibly more traditional practice of painting. For Laura Hoptman, the painters in this exhibition place their works in an “eternal present” that she explicitly links to that of Saint Augustine.⁹⁵ According to this argument, contemporary painters have available to them all the resources of the entire history of painting, arranged not in some narrative order but rather in a vast simultaneity, from which they are free to choose without reverence or irony. In a sense, this reference to a larger present frees these artists from the local present and from the demands of critics and scholars that their work help to define it. Thus Hoptman is quite upbeat about a present that otherwise causes such distress in the art world, but only because this present is coextensive with another, much larger one.

The situation of art in general, then, might be said to resemble the one laid out in George Kubler’s The Shape of Time. Kubler defines the time of art by reference to a more general theory in which the present is informed by signals relayed from the past. “The nature of a signal,” he says, “is that its message is neither here nor now, but there and then. If it is a signal it is a past action, no longer embraced by the ‘now’ of present being. The perception of a signal happens ‘now,’ but its impulse and its transmission happened ‘then.’ In any event, the present instant is the plane upon which the signals of all being are projected.”⁹⁶ The present, in other words, is a one-dimensional medium on whose infinite thinness the whole of time depends for its existence. Since the past is flattened out against the membrane of the present, there is no question of narrative or even of sequence. All “thens” are potentially equidistant to one another in the context of the single “now.” This strikingly modern metaphor also applies quite well to the situation of medieval and Renaissance art as described by scholars such as Nagel and Didi-Huberman. Perhaps, then, it is the most satisfactory account we have right now of the present to be found in pictures.