Paintings are static. The uniqueness of the experience of looking at a painting repeatedly – over a period of days or years – is that, in the midst of flux, the image remains changeless. Of course the significance of the image may change, as a result of either historical or personal developments, but what is depicted is unchanging: the same milk flowing from the same jug, the waves on the sea with exactly the same formation unbroken, the smile and the face which have not altered.
One might be tempted to say that paintings preserve a moment. Yet on reflection this is obviously untrue. For the moment of a painting, unlike a moment photographed, never existed as such. And so a painting cannot be said to preserve it.
If a painting ‘stops’ time, it is not, like a photograph, preserving a moment of the past from the supersession of succeeding moments. I am thinking of the image within the frame, the scene which is depicted. Clearly if one considers an artist’s life-work or the history of art, one is treating paintings as being, partly, records of the past, evidence of what has been. Yet this historical view, whether used within a Marxist or idealist tradition, has prevented most art experts from considering – or even noticing – the problem of how time exists (or does not) within painting.
In early Renaissance art, in paintings from non-European cultures, in certain modern works, the image implies a passage of time. Looking at it, the spectator sees before, during and after. The Chinese sage takes a walk from one tree to another, the carriage runs over the child, the nude descends the staircase. And this of course has been analysed and commented upon. Yet the ensuing image is still static whilst referring to the dynamic world beyond its edges, and this poses the problem of what is the meaning of that strange contrast between static and dynamic. Strange because it is both so flagrant and so taken for granted.
Painters themselves practise a partial answer, even if it remains unformulated in words. When is a painting finished? Not when it finally corresponds to something already existing – like the second shoe of a pair – but when the foreseen ideal moment of it being looked at is filled as the painter feels or calculates it should be filled. The long or short process of painting a picture is the process of constructing the future moments when it will be looked at. In reality, despite the painter’s ideal, these moments cannot be entirely determined. They can never be entirely filled by the painting. Nevertheless the painting is entirely addressed to these moments.
Whether the painter is a hack or a master makes no difference to the ‘address’ of the painting. The difference is in what a painting delivers: in how closely the moment of its being looked at, as foreseen by the painter, corresponds to the interests of the actual moments of its being looked at later by other people, when the circumstances surrounding its production (patronage, fashion, ideology) have changed.
Some painters when working have a habit of studying their painting, when it has reached a certain stage, in a mirror. What they then see is the image reversed. If questioned about why this helps, they say that it allows them to see the painting anew, with a fresher eye. What they glimpse in the mirror is something like the content of the future moment to which the painting is being addressed. The mirror allows them to half-forget their own present vision as a painter, and to borrow something of the vision of a future spectator.
What I am saying can perhaps be made sharper by again making a comparison with photographs. Photographs are records of the past. (The importance of the role of the photographer and his subjectivity in this recording does not change the fact that photographs are records.) Paintings are prophecies received from the past, prophecies about what the spectator is seeing in front of the painting at that moment. Some prophecies are quickly exhausted – the painting loses its address; others continue.
Cannot the same be said about other art forms? Are not poems, stories, music addressed to the future in a similar way? Often in their written forms they are. Nevertheless painting and sculpture are distinct.
First because, even in their origin, they were not spontaneous performances. There is a sense in which a poem or story being spoken, or music being played, emphasizes the presence of the speaker or player. Whereas a visual image, so long as it is not being used as a mask or disguise, is always a comment on an absence. The depiction comments on the absence of what is being depicted. Visual images, based on appearances, always speak of disappearance.
Secondly because, whereas verbal and musical language have a symbolic relation to what they signify, painting and sculpture have a mimetic one, and this means that their static character is all the more flagrant.
Stories, poetry, music, belong to time and play within it. The static visual image denies time within itself. Hence its prophecies across and through time are the more startling.
We can now ask what would have seemed at first an arbitrary question. Why is it that the still imagery of painting interests us? What prevents painting being patently inadequate – just because it is static?
To say that paintings prophesy the experience of their being looked at, does not answer the question. Rather one has to say that such prophecy assumes a continuing interest in the static image. Why, at least until recently, was such an assumption justified? The conventional answer has been that, because painting is static, it has the power to establish a visually ‘palpable’ harmony. Only something which is still can be so instantaneously composed, and therefore so complete. A musical composition, since it uses time, is obliged to have a beginning and an end. A painting only has a beginning and an end in so far as it is a physical object: within its imagery there is neither beginning nor end. All this is what was meant by composition, pictorial harmony, significant form and so on.
The terms of this explanation are both too restrictive and too aesthetic. There has to be a virtue in that flagrant contrast: the contrast between the unchanging painted form and the dynamic living model.
What I have so far argued can now help us to locate this virtue. The stillness of the image was symbolic of timelessness. The fact that paintings were prophecies of themselves being looked at had nothing to do with the perspective of modern avant-gardism whereby the future vindicates the misunderstood prophet. What the present and the future had in common, and to which painting through its very stillness referred, was a substratum, a ground of timelessness.
Until the nineteenth century all world cosmologies – even including that of the European Enlightenment – conceived of time as being in one way or another surrounded or infiltrated by timelessness. This timelessness constituted a realm of refuge and appeal. It was prayed to. It was where the dead went. It was intimately but invisibly related to the living world of time through ritual, stories and ethics.
Only during the last hundred years – since the acceptance of the Darwinian theory of evolution – have people lived in a time that contains everything and sweeps everything away, and for which there is no realm of timelessness. In the galactic perspective proposed by such a cosmology, a hundred years are less than an instant. Even in the perspective of the history of man they cannot yet be considered more than an aberration.
When we consider this history of man we are faced by change and recurrence. History is change. What recurs are the subjects (and objects) of history: the lives of conscious women and men. What such consciousness works upon is subject to change and is part of the material of history. The character of such consciousness also changes. Yet some of its structures since the birth of language have probably not changed. Consciousness is pegged to certain constants of the human condition: birth, sexual attraction, social cooperation, death. The list is by no means exhaustive: one could add contingencies such as hunger, pleasure, fear.
The nineteenth-century discovery of history as the terrain of human freedom inevitably led to an underestimation of the ineluctable and the continuous. It deposited the continuous within the flow of history – i.e. the continuous was that which had a longer duration than the ephemeral. Previously, the continuous was thought of as the unchanging or timeless existing outside the flow of history.
The language of pictorial art, because it was static, became the language of such timelessness. Yet what it spoke about – unlike geometry – was the sensuous, the particular and the ephemeral. Its mediation between the realm of the timeless and the visible and tangible was more total and poignant than that of any other art. Hence its iconic function, and special power.
We can all still discover through introspection a vestige of this power. Consider a photograph. I have emphasized that photographs, unlike paintings, are records. This is why they only work iconically if the record is personal and there is a continuity within that personal life which reanimates the photograph. But, having said that, photographs are static images and they do refer to the ephemeral. Take an old family photograph. And you will find your imagination bifurcating: reconstructing the occasion, finding the date; and, at the same time, grappling with the question: where is that moment now? This bifurcation is a vestige of the response to the iconic power of painting when, cosmologically and philosophically, a realm of timelessness was acceptable.
Needless to say the iconic power of pictorial art was used for diverse social and historical purposes, and the ideological function of art in a class society is part of that class history. Needless to say, too, that during the secularization of art its iconic power was often forgotten. Yet whenever a painting provoked deep emotion, something of this power reasserted itself. Indeed had pictorial art not possessed this power – the power to speak with the language of timelessness about the ephemeral – neither priesthoods nor ruling classes would have had any use for it.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, as the Darwinian proposal about time became more and more dominant in all fields, the mediation of painting between the timeless and the ephemeral became more and more problematic, more and more difficult to sustain. On one hand, the represented moment of the ephemeral became briefer and briefer; the Impressionists set out to represent one hour, the Expressionists an instant of subjective feeling; on the other hand, the Pointillists and Futurists tried to abolish the static and timeless. Other artists like Mondrian insisted upon a geometry from which the ephemeral was banished altogether. Only the Cubists, as painters, sketched out a new cosmology in which relativity might have accorded the timeless a new place. But the Cubist sketch was destroyed by the First World War.
After the war, the Surrealists made the unresolved problematic of time the constant theme of all their work; all Surrealist paintings conjure up the time of dreams; dreams being by then the only realm of the timeless left intact.
During the last forty years transatlantic painting has demonstrated how there is no longer anything left to mediate and therefore anything left to paint. The timeless-as Rothko so intensely showed us – had been emptied. The ephemeral has become the sole category of time. Banalized by pragmatism and consumerism, the ephemeral was excluded from abstract art, or fetishized as short-lived fashion in pop art and its derivatives. The ephemeral, no longer appealing to the timeless, becomes as trivial and instant as the fashionable. Without an acknowledged coexistence of the ephemeral and the timeless, there is nothing of consequence for pictorial art to do. Conceptual art is merely a discussion of this fact.
An acknowledgment of the coexistence of the timeless and the ephemeral need not necessarily imply a return to earlier religious forms. It does, however, presume a radical questioning of something which most recent European thinking, including revolutionary theory, has ignored: the view of time developed by, and inherited from the culture of nineteenth-century European capitalism.
This questioning becomes more urgent if one realizes that the problem of time has not been, and can never be, solved scientifically. On the question of time, science is bound to be solipsist. The problem of time is a problem of choice.
1979