Start of paper:
In a darkened sky punctuated by illuminated tufts of clouds, the hazily obstructed light of the moon softly grazes a single sail. Extending from the mast of a lonely seafaring vessel, the resilient cloth is taught and wind-filled. It is curved dutifully in a course presumably set towards the other side of a rocky bluff. Two figures emerge from the shadows a few hundred feet up the beach, just left of where I stand. The same soft lunar light smoothes a yellowish landing strip stretching hazily from the frothy waterfront right up to the tips of my toes. However, were I to feel the sharp and grainy squish of sand between my toes at this particular moment, I’d be much disturbed. It is linoleum upon which my rubber-soled feet (squeakily) rest and pristine walls surround me, not a blanket of stars. This ghostly beachfront does not extend beyond its angular gilt captor.
How is the viewer to reconcile his/her temporal experience of that which occurs betwixt ridiculously ornate frames with the reality beyond fancy rectangles (white walls, hushed tones) all within a single moment: a single confused “present”? Such is a confusion oft produced by simultaneity.
RS: Rocky Seashore
ST: Spatialized Time
LT: Life-Time
Since this beachfront scene (Rocky Seashore) is naught but a succession of marks laid upon taught canvas in 1876 by a fellow named Ivan Konstantinovitsch, shouldn’t the guard telling my boyfriend to shut off his cellphone be more “present”, “real” and “now”? Can the two presents be equal when one is obviously past? This line of questioning is limited by its linearity, it employs what Soren Kierkegaard called a “spatialized”* understanding of time: a sort of temporal understanding and measurement he found much lacking. In its stead, Kierkegaard has provided a more self-centric understanding of time (“life-time”), a solution to this problematic Aristotlean construct. It is this theory of tensed time and measurement that has much to offer the average museum-attendee; the application of which is a definite act of expansion.
Before moving forward with an explanation and application of Kierkegaard’s theory, it is essential that I provide a couple of clarifications. Firstly, much of my own understanding of both “spatialized time” and “life-time” is firmly entrenched in Mark C. Taylor’s “Time’s Struggle with Space: Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Temporality.” This work has proved to be a crucial reference point. Though Taylor’s article is thick with direct passages from both Aristotle and Kierkegaard, the level of understanding I have achieved has undoubtedly been influenced by Taylor. Though I will continue to refer to Aristotle and Kierkegaard directly, the reader should be forewarned of Taylor’s indispensable role. As my intention is not to prove or disprove Kierkegaard’s theory, this divulgence should not prove utterly devastating. Secondly, if “Aristotle’s discussion of time [has] remained decisive” (Taylor, 312), why should Kierkegaard’s LT prove more pertinent to my analytic endeavors? Aristotle’s name is well marked in the annals of time (capped with an “A”, set atop a well-smoothed marble pedestal). I’d imagine his theories have survived for a reason. What could Kierkegaard possibly have found insufficient in Aristotle’s version of temporality?
ST is the measurement of an object’s movement through space. These movements can be viewed as a progression of points along a single line. The line of time (upon which the object moves) is composed of an “infinite number of points,” each point acts as a “successive present[s] differentiating past from future”(Taylor, 315). There is no overlap between the tenses of time, the “boundaries remain well defined” (Taylor, 315). According to Taylor, one of Kierkegaard’s primary difficulties with Aristotle’s theory is that it does not allow for human perception and consciousness. ST is applied “universally and irrespective of…character” (Taylor, 315). A human, a bar of soap, and a painting are all treated identically. However, a bar of soap has no awareness of time whereas a human most certainly does. Within human perception, the past and future can exist (in some form) in a simultaneous moment of “present”/”now”. Taylor has included a passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions, which seconds Kierkegaard’s emotion.
All this I do in the huge court of my memory…I can take out pictures [mental] of things which have either happened to me or are believed on the basis of experience; I can myself weave them into the context of the past, and from them I can infer future actions, events, hopes, and then I can contemplate all these things as though they were in the present.
(Augustine, 218-9/ Taylor, 312)
The boundaries of Aristotle’s point based system are created by the spatialization and visualization of time. One cannot exist at two points at once just as one cannot exist in two places at the same time. With consciousness, overlap does occur. Perhaps Aristotle’s line of time would work more swimmingly in a world unconscious to time, because it is in awareness of ‘present’ that the problems of linearity occur. “As far as the non-human world is concerned, time remains a perpetual flux in which there is no differentiation between past present and future”(Taylor, 329). Tensed time “emerges only in connection to man’s purposeful activity”(Taylor, 329). The concept being offered here is that, though Aristotle’s theory does function, time measurement is a human tool and it would do well to allow for the inner workings human consciousness. What need has a panther for Aristotle, however objective his stance?
Though a painting is a conscious-less object, it is the projection of consciousness. A painting is perception made manifest, put forth to be perceived. The object itself is a conflation of multiple points of time into an objectified whole. Multiple hours of “studio-time,” sittings and whatnot, are condensed and received as one. Post-completion, it moves from wall to wall, from cozy and private to stark, cold and public. The object then moves through minds. There is no allotting for this experience with ST. It is because the art object is so linked to human perception that Kierkegaard’s LT is far more applicable to the temporal experience of art.
Kierkegaard’s structure for tensed time is fully derived from the “lives of the selves” (Taylor, 318). It is born from the temporal interplay of man as object (matter) and man as subject (consciousness). One is finite and limited while the other feels limitless by way of imagination. Selfhood is not a simplistic entity; it is an intricate system (Taylor, 319); a vessel of duality. Within the self, the finite is put in relation to the infinite, as is possibility and actuality. Selfhood creates the relationship; the pairing is a synthesis.
Finitude of self is comprised of the concrete elements that compose one’s situation; it is the place “from which the self must proceed” (Taylor, 322). Meanwhile infinitude of self is, in part, the “capacity of the individual (historically situated) to imagine alternate courses of action” (Taylor, 322). It is his/her ability “to entertain different possibilities” (Taylor, 322). Actuality and possibility are essential to a human comprehension of the finite and the infinite. The actuality of one’s “historical position,” will affect the amount of seemingly infinite possibilities a creature of finitude is able to comprehend. The self is free, but only so free as one’s position allows.
This system of self and synthesis has close ties with the construction of (measured) time. Temporality is put in relation to its twin (eternity) within the “self system”, though it is not the self that synthesizes these factors. According to Kierkegaard these dual elements are mated and processed inside of “Oieblikket”. Unfortunately much is lost in translation (as Taylor is so good to acknowledge); this can have a grave effect upon writings of a philosophical nature. That being said, the Danish word “Oieblikket” loosely translates to “the moment” or “the instant”. A concept of the “present” is a mixture of these two syntheses: self and Oieblikket; it is the inter-play of the possible and the actual inside an instant. To put it simplistically, the present “is the moment of decision” (Taylor, 324). Here the past and the future touch, overlapping ever so slightly through thought on the verge of action. If the actuality of self is established through one’s past sufferings and actions while possibility exists as a future not yet realized, human consciousness can allow the tenses of time to exist in partial simultaneity through decision. There is no clear dividing line between past and future. Taylor proceeds to insert three more consciousness-based terms into the pre-existing tenses of time; past, present and future become remembrance, decision, and expectation. All three are actions that can be executed in the present tense.
So here I am back at The Rocky Seashore, to experience this pictographic present for a second time. In this two-dimensional Oieblikket, the moonlit strip reaches for my toes once more. How does Kierkegaard’s LT apply to my experience of RS? We know that within a theory of ST, the representational contents of RS could be distinguished as a past that had ceased-to-be. An experience of RS’s still waters must be somewhat unattainable in my present (due to its non-existence). ST defines the past as something that is no longer there to be referenced; it cannot exist in simultaneity with the present. In defiance of Aristotle I (my body) stand(s) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, while my mind is on the beach. It swirls murkily through a blended cloud of actuality and possibility, engrossed in the instantaneous cycle of decision. Isn’t this present, this Oieblikket, a bit more illusory than the average “moment of decision”(Taylor, 325). Though it feels as though the boat may continue on its course toward the rocky precipice, I know it cannot. Two shadowy figures hold me in their gaze. What questions might they have for me as we meet further down the beach? None, because such a meeting cannot and will never occur.
If the present moment is one of decision, what can I decide that will translate to actualization regarding the contents of this painting? There is nothing I can do to physically change this painting (on the right side of the law). Anything I can and would do on the wrong side would only shatter the illusion of a dual-present. I’d need the artist’s hand to further the boat along its course: a hand that is long since deceased. It is ultimately through imagination that my application of LT is made both fitting and appropriate.
We will now think of a youth. With his imagination he constructs one or another picture (ideal) of perfection, whether it be one handed down by history, that is, belonging to a time past, so that it has been actually, has possessed actuality of being, or whether it be formed by imagination alone, so that it has no relation to the time or place and receives no definition by them, but has the actuality of thought. (Kierkegaard, 185/Taylor, 323)
Though the picture to which Kierkegaard refers to an idyllic youthful creation of self, an imaginative essence far more changing and changeable than a painting on a museum wall (physically speaking), it is on the quality of imagination I’d like to focus. Though Kierkegaard describes imagination as “endless remoteness from actuality,” (Taylor, 323), it seems as though it can achieve “actuality of thought.” The latter picture (based on imagination) is termed as having this sort of thought-based actuality.
I would suppose thought-based actuality could be accompanied by similarly imagined possibilities. However, James Elkins, Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, may beg to differ. “Painting is an art based on inherently motionless figures, which are very different from frozen figures that are captured by the camera…I cannot imagine a painted figure moving or talking unless I am willing to settle for comic travesty…If I am more serious about painting, I have to acknowledge that motion is not just absent but inconceivable” (Elkins, 220-1). What Elkins has pointed out makes sense in literal manner; if I were to conjure the sight of the boat moving across the water the result would, in fact, be cartoon-ish. However, I have the ability to stave off a complete visualization of the boat’s possibilities. Though imagination is the means by which “an individual can envision different possibilities” (Taylor, 322), the execution need not be sight-based. The existence of the art object within the mind of the viewer is somewhat separate from its physical presence. Its imaginative presence (within the viewer) is an actualization of thought. It is mostly up to the viewer what possibilities are allowed to affect this picture. This is a part of the process of “deciding” (in viewership).
In many ways an art object has two cycles of “life-time.” These cycles exist through different selves: the artist-self and the viewer-self. The life-time within the artist’s self system is one of physical actualization. Each brush stroke is a moment of decision made physical/actual. Though an artist may work from a sketch or a plan, deviation and/or adaptation often occurs. Colors may react differently than originally anticipated, creating an effect outside of intention. In such a case, the artist must change the route of execution, or risk changing the entire result. Even when choices are seemingly made in advance, there is room for decision and change. The artist steps back and, in this moment of completion, the painting is released into its second life-time within the viewer.
Some paintings are better at engaging the viewer in a more active present (Kierkegaard’s present of decision) than others. Compositional tricks such as perspective and an outward looking gaze can do much to actively involve the viewer, to make the viewer feel as though s/he is an active participant. In the case of Konstantinovitsch’s Rocky Seashore, it is both perspective and atmosphere that give me a feeling of present/presence within the frame. The aforementioned strip of moonlight plays upon the beach; its brightest beach- front point echoes the enveloped moon and stretches right out to my bodily position. Despite its limitations (in actuality the “moonlight” is only able to reach the bottom of the canvas), my physicality has successfully been activated. The two figures seem to turn towards me. Shadowy as they may be, it is not a far leap to feel acknowledgement in their affectation. Here, though it is a figment of my imagination, it is as if the painting has engaged my actuality in its air of possibility. The possibilities held in the atmosphere of RS’s darkened sky resonate with those I’ve felt under similar skies. The particular deep purplish-blue of the night sky punctuated softly with the muted and cloud-gauzed moon is of the kind that can fill the chest with the magical potentiality of life. This is the sort of night charged with happening. In the busy-ness of day as well as the business of city life, it is easy to feel caught and constrained by routine, no longer cognizant of freedom and potential (decision). Under such a quiet sky, however, all is silent, clear and possible.
This dual Oieblikket between RS’s painted contents and my own bodily organism engages both of our actualities. The actuality of RS as representation is very-well set. Whatever could or would occur to change RS would only work to change it as an object, not an image-based narrative. Smashing, damage and discoloration all affect the object as a whole. The narrative would, in many ways, remain unscathed. The other actuality engaged is my own, by way of my past. That which is necessary is “given to the self” (Taylor, 322). It is the point from which the “self must proceed” (Taylor, 322). My actuality (past and necessity) and the physical actuality of RS as a completed artwork are dual precipices, towering over the possible in conjunction with one another. My actuality, my past contributes to the possibility held in such a sky (however unchanging); it is a possibility held within and actualized by my imagination.
DFTP: Departing for the Promenade (Will You Go Out with Me Fido?), Alfred-Émile-Léopold Stevens, 1859
The outward-looking gaze is another potent tool elicited in the engagement of the viewer. Would the Mona Lisa have ascended to such notoriety without eye contact? In Departing for the Promenade (Will You Go Out with me Fido?), the visual hook of two-dimensional eye contact is a flourish, an aside; though it would have been no more effective at capturing my attention had it been a central focal point. A young woman, fully clad in a mode of dress befitting none other than Vivian Leigh/Scarlet O’Hara (but perhaps a tad more modest), is the central (human) figure in DFTP. Groupings of long cylindrical curls fall out of her open bonnet. Her chest is fully turned toward the door, while her face angles over her right shoulder. Her right arm is extended; its right hand holds the door handle. The doorway is not quite parallel to the rightmost vertical edge of the canvas; the wall-line recedes diagonally inward from the bottom-right corner. Behind the young woman, the doorframe meets a sidewall edged with a well-upholstered couch. Over the couch, hangs a portrait holding a grey-wigged woman inside its borders. As the woman steps toward the door, the glance thrown over her shoulder tips down toward a small, poof-y white dog. The dog’s gaze is pointed upward in turn, towards the woman, and you can tell by its gate that it is quite excited. This canine-human rapport is buoyed by the playful parenthetical addition to the main title of DFTP (“Will You Go Out with Me Fido?”).
My first impulse, due to the painting’s fine execution, is to engage the piece as an artist in admiration of another’s craft. While breathtakingly executed, the dramatic atmosphere of RS couldn’t help but expedite sensorial experience well ahead of a colder craft-based appreciation of the work. DFTP, however, had me at “cufflink”. The doorknob bound hand is lovely, but the white cuff encircling it is lovelier. It is pinned by a single golden button that sings: a single point of delightful reflection that fills me with envy. I will never paint such a cufflink; it’s just not feasible. Each wooden “V” of the floorboards seems perfect, straight and efficient. Upon closer inspection, the sienna hue of the flooring thins out on the left side of the composition (revealing the surface of the panel as well as the artist’s hand). This chink in the painting’s seamless armor only works to further connect me to the craftsmanship of the work: the painting’s first cycle of life-time. It is the be-wigged vestige above the extravagant couch that pulls me into the moment, the narrative-Oieblikket.
Here in “the instant” my wandering eyes meet those of this woman, gazing out from her own golden frame (a rectangle within a rectangle), and I feel as though I’ve been caught. Until now, I’d been able to peruse as I wished, unencumbered and unnoticed. Such freedom could not continue under this doubly framed gaze. The spectacles of professionalism are knocked from my unsuspecting brow, all by an inanimate and be-wigged duchess-of-so-and-so. My eyes return to her over and over again, each time in reception of recognition. In this one quiet detail (an afterthought perhaps) I am brought into this two-dimensional world anew. However, it is not in totality I enter. I feel like a ghost, a spectral presence spotted by a sister specter. Perhaps she stares from her own portal, a portal where it is she who is flesh and I that is artistically rendered. Of course I do not believe this to be possible but imagination brings potential no matter how false.
Even with the power of imagination at my disposal, I remain on the periphery. The little white pup’s attention remains eternally clasped upon the exiting woman. She returns it in kind.
MF: My Friends, Viggo Johansen, 1887
Viggo Johansen’s My Friends takes my perceived marginality one step farther. My experience of MF is Scrooge-like in quality, only in this case I have visited the Christmas Past of another. Blushing faces, aglow in the light provided by a single gas-lamp, circle round a table in festive conversation. A smile plays on a handsome blond woman’s face; her blue eyes are edged and lightly creased with warmth. Two male figures stand to the right (our right) of the table, barely visible in the outskirts of the dim room. Though the room is dark and intimate, I do not feel inclusion. These are not my friends; with nowhere to place myself I am barred from the occasion. Such an impression may simply be the bi-product of my own propensity for social awkwardness (I’m shy!). As I am only able approach the painting from my “historical position” and my base of experience, this initial sensation of distance cannot be helped. I am left on the threshold to observe, not participate. As Scrooge, I move unseen, unheard, and unable to act upon this merry scene. Just as there is nothing he can say or do to affect Christmas’ Past, I feel similarly ineffectual.
Perhaps the viewer is powerless; the narrative is the past tense, having already been decided. S/he may see traces of a passed present by way of a brush-mark, evidence of the artist’s once-lively hand. As the mark represents a decision made, a potential actualized, the viewer is perpetually off by just one moment. Two-dimensional narratives will remain perpetually on the verge of progression, to no avail. To this argument I’d offer a similar experiential comparison, to that of the theatre. In theatre, the audience has no control over the narrative; the narrative cannot be changed. An audience can affect a performance, but to do so would only break the illusion between story and stage. The players are affected but the characters remain intact.
Theatre is an art that continually challenges the idea of the “present”. Actors, in their best moments, are able to experience and project scripted and predefined moments as if for the first time, in defiance of reality and tensed time. Because the play is written, read and practiced, the most gifted actors are able to make a moment of remembrance one of decision and possibility. The audience knows all has been decided and can know what has been decided in advance. They too have the power to defy time and hope where there is none. Macbeth will forever kill the king; Romeo and Juliet will never live happily ever after. That we enter into any play with any modicum of hope is a triumph of imagination.
Theatre as a time-based medium allows for a more seamless experience of “present tense” (the moment of decision) in narrative, while suspension of disbelief and imagination fills in any gaps. Such a suspension is slightly more difficult when approaching an object fully formed; there is a great difference between the act of reading a script and that of watching it performed. If theatre audiences as well movie audiences settle in all the same, for a story felt and projected in real time, why can’t the museum attendee? The power of decision, though limited to imagination, can bestow a great gift upon the viewer. Even its limitation can provide the viewer with a far richer relationship to art. Though there are gaps in its relevant application, Kierkegaard ‘s “life-time” (as imparted by Taylor) has most definitely expanded upon my concept viewing as a temporal act.
Why not spend an afternoon in transcendence of linear time…at the museum? It’s up to you.
Bibliography:
Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Taylor, Mark C. “Time’s Struggle with Space: Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Temporality.” The Harvard Theological Review 66.3 (July, 1993): 311-329. Jstor. Web. 14 April 2010.
Hardie, R.P. and Gay, R.K., trans. The Works of Aristotle Translated into English. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970.
Augustine and Warner, Rex, trans. Confessions. New York: Mentor-Omega Books, 1963.
Kierkegaard, Soren and Lowrie, Walter, trans. The Concept of Dread. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Links to images (experienced in person):
Konstantinovitsch, Ivan. Rocky Seashore. 1876. Painting. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Philamuseum.org. Web. 29 Apr. 2010.
http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/102719.html
Johansen, Viggo. My Friends. 1887. Painting. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Philamuseum.org. Web. 29 Apr. 2010.
http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/101698.html
Stevens, Alfred-Emile-Leopold. Departing for the Promenade (Will You Go Out with Me, Fido?). 1856. Painting. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Philamuseum.org. Web. 29 Apr. 2010.
http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/104330.html
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