André Malraux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_Malraux
photos
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http://home.netspeed.com.au/derek.allan/Time%20the%20Forgotten%20Dimension.htm
Time: The Forgotten Dimension of Art
One possible reaction to the title of my paper might perhaps
be this: ‘Why describe time as a forgotten dimension of art? After all, quite a
lot has been written on the subject. Some philosophers of art have examined ways
in which the passing of time is represented in films or the novel. Some have
distinguished what they call “temporal arts”, such as music, which they compare
with, say, painting, in which time seems to play a lesser role. And there have
been other discussions along similar lines. So why, someone might say, do you
describe time as a “forgotten dimension” of art?’
My answer is that my concern is of a more fundamental kind.
My concern is not the significance of time in this or that work of art, but the
general relationship between art and time: not the various functions of time
within individual works, but the temporal nature of art per se – that is, the
effect of the passing of time – of history if you like – on those objects,
whether created in our own times or in the distant past, that we today call
‘works of art’. Described in broad terms, my topic is the capacity of works of
art to endure over time – and, above all, the way they endure. This question
has been largely forgotten. Very little has been written about it in recent
decades, and what has been written, as I’ll argue shortly, has skirted the
crucial issues. In the time available, I want to explain carefully what I mean,
and why I think the issues at stake should not continue to be neglected.
Let me begin with some simple observations. It’s common
knowledge – a cliché, one might almost say – that those objects we regard as
great works of art seem to have a special capacity to survive across time. It’s
common knowledge, for instance, that of the thousands of novels published in
the eighteenth century, only a tiny fraction holds our interest today, and that
for every Tom Jones or Les Liaisons dangereuses, there are large numbers of
works by contemporaries of Richardson and Laclos that have sunk into oblivion,
probably permanently. And if we draw comparisons with objects outside the realm
of art, the point is equally true. We do not ask, for example, if a map of the
world drawn by a cartographer of the Elizabethan era is still a reliable
navigational tool, and we know that a ship’s captain today who relied on such a
map would be acting very foolishly. But we might quite sensibly ask if
Shakespeare’s plays, written at the same time the map was drawn, is still
pertinent to life today, and we might well want to answer yes. The map has
survived as an object of historical interest, but it is no longer applicable to
the world we live in. Shakespeare’s plays, on the other hand, are not just
historical documents. They have endured in a way the map has not.
There are endless examples of this point and I won’t try
your patience by providing any more. Stated in general terms, the proposition
is simply this: that those objects that we today call art – whether they be
(for example) Shakespeare’s plays, the music of Vivaldi, or great works of
ancient Egyptian or Buddhist sculpture – seem to possess a special power to
endure – a power to defy or ‘transcend’ time. This observation tells us
nothing, of course, about the nature of that power – about how art endures. I will
come to that crucial question issue shortly. For the moment, I simply want to
make the point – which many have made before me – that one of the
characteristics of art, or at least great art, seems to be a power to endure
over time. The observation is, as I say, almost a cliché; but it’s a cliché
beneath which, I will argue, lie some particularly important questions that
have not received the attention they warrant.
One more preliminary point before I move to the heart of the
matter.
In a book published in 2005, entitled What Good are the
Arts, which attracted considerable interest at the time, the author, John
Carey, writes that
No art is immortal and no sensible person could believe it
was. Neither the human race, nor the planet we inhabit, nor the solar system to
which it belongs will last forever. From the viewpoint of geological time, the
afterlife of an artwork is an eyeblink. [1]
Now, it may be superfluous to say so in this company, but
Carey’s comment is an obvious red herring. The belief that a true work of art
‘lasts’ or ‘endures’ – whether or not we use the term ‘immortal’ – has nothing
at all to do with a claim that it is somehow able to resist damage or
destruction. How many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of great works of the past,
one wonders, have been destroyed by wars, natural disasters, iconoclasm, re-use
for other purposes, or simple neglect? Indeed, the very fragility of many works
of art no doubt made them more vulnerable than other objects to the ravages of
time. The issue at stake when we speak of art’s capacity to endure has nothing
to do with physical durability. It has to do with the apparent capacity of
certain works — a Hamlet, a Magic Flute, a work by Titian, for example — not
only to impress their contemporaries but also to exert a fascination on
subsequent ages, while so many other works have faded into oblivion. It has to
do with the apparent power of certain works to ‘transcend time’ in the sense
that, unlike so much else in human culture — from the latest fad, to beliefs about
the nature of the gods and the universe — they continue to seem alive and
important, and escape consignment to what one writer colourfully, but very
aptly, terms ‘the charnel house of dead values’.[2]
Now, I’ve been using the terms ‘lasting’ and ‘enduring’ in a
loose and general way without asking what exactly they mean in the context of
art. So I’d now like to turn to this question. That is, I’d like to look at the
vital question I foreshadowed a moment ago of how art endures – how, exactly,
it ‘transcends time’.
It’s important to note, firstly, that despite its neglect in
recent times, this question has a lengthy history in European culture, and
without doubt the most influential answer has been that art is ‘eternal’,
‘timeless’, or ‘immortal’. This idea pre-dates the birth of aesthetics, of
course. It was highly influential in the Renaissance world, and we need look no
further than Shakespeare’s sonnets to see the evidence.[3] Art defies time,
Shakespeare asserts, because it is eternal – timeless. The idea is much more
than a so-called ‘poet’s conceit’. It was a widely-held belief at the time not
only about poetry but about art in general, and it continued to be highly
influential over the centuries that followed.
We today, in our matter-of-fact world, are, of course,
inclined to smile a little at words like ‘immortal’, ‘eternal’ and ‘timeless’,
but before dismissing them too hastily we should perhaps reflect on certain
points.
First, the proposition that art is timeless at least
provided a complete answer to the question we face. We’ve acknowledged that art
has a special capacity to endure, but in principle something might endure in a
variety of ways. It might, for example, endure for a certain period but then
disappear definitively into oblivion. It might endure for a time, disappear,
and then return – in a cyclical way. It might endure timelessly – the
alternative I’ve just mentioned. And, as we’ll see shortly, there’s at least
one other possible option. So, by itself, the notion of enduring, important
though it is, leaves us with an unanswered question, an explanatory gap. How,
we need to know, does art endure? What is the particular nature of its
relationship with time? Now, the claim that art is timeless provided an answer
to this question. Art, it said, endures not simply because it persists in time
in some unknown, unspecified way, but because it is impervious to time,
‘time-less’, unaffected by the passing parade of history, its meaning and value
always remaining the same. Whatever one may think about this solution (and I’ll
shortly consider some objections) it was at least a complete solution. It
didn’t simply claim that art endures. It explained the manner of the enduring,
and the explanatory gap was closed.
Second, it’s worth remembering that the notion that art is
timeless had a major impact on European culture, including on our own
discipline of aesthetics itself. One obvious manifestation of this is the
belief, well established by the time of the Enlightenment, that there existed a
timeless standard of beauty established once and for all by the art of
Antiquity – exemplified by works such as the Apollo Belvedere or the Laocoön.
For the influential Winckelmann, for instance, the best way – in fact the only
way – an artist could excel was by ‘imitating the ancients’.[4] Comments such
as this – and they are legion in Enlightenment aesthetics and art criticism –
take it for granted that great art somehow conforms to an unchanging ideal
beyond the reach of time; and, as we know, Kant himself in the Critique of
Aesthetic Judgement is happy to suggest that there is such a thing as an ‘Ideal
of Beauty’.[5] Just as Classical art had endured by virtue of its ‘immortal
beauty’ so, also, it was thought at the time, any contemporary work that acceded
to the ideal realm of beauty – such as a Raphael, a Michelangelo or a Titian –
could partake of the same immortality.
Thirdly, how confident are we that, at least at some
subliminal level, we ourselves are not still dependent on the notion that art
is timeless? Critics and reviewers often still speak of a writer
‘immortalising’ someone or something in ‘timeless’ prose and those are clear
echoes of the ideas I’ve been discussing. It’s also arguable, I think, that the
idea often hovers in the background in modern aesthetics, especially analytic
aesthetics, as an unacknowledged assumption. The very fact that the
relationship between art and time is so seldom mentioned seems, after all, to
imply that art and time have nothing to do with each other, that art is somehow
untouched by time – which is, in effect, to say that it is timeless. And, not
surprisingly, I notice one prominent aesthetician of the analytic school [Peter
Lamarque] arguing recently that the value we place on a work of art is due not
only to its historical significance but, in his words, to its capacity ‘to
engage the mind, the imagination, and the senses with some more timeless
interest’.[6]
I’ve spent some of my time so far in the realm of cultural
history and while I don’t want to dwell there any longer than necessary,
there’s one further issue I cannot omit. For at least three centuries after the
Renaissance, the belief that art was timeless held the field virtually
unopposed; but, as we know, this view encountered a serious challenge in the
nineteenth century, especially from Hegel’s aesthetics, which placed art within
the historical unfolding of the Idea, and also from Marx’s historical materialism.
For many thinkers in the post-Marxist tradition today, art is caught up
inevitably in the processes of historical change. Like all other human
activities, they would argue, art bears the marks of its historical context and
plays its part in strengthening or subverting prevailing ideologies and social
arrangements. The implications of this thinking are clear. Viewed from this
perspective, the claim that art’s essential qualities inhabit a changeless,
‘eternal’ realm removed from the flow of history would be an idealist illusion,
false to art and history alike.
An obvious problem, of course, is that if one accepts the
Hegelian-Marxist view, one is left without a satisfactory explanation of art’s
capacity to endure, a stumbling block that, interestingly enough, Marx himself
recognised when he wrote in the Grundrisse:
...the difficulty is
not so much in grasping the idea that Greek art and epos are bound up with
certain forms of social development. It lies rather in understanding why they
should still constitute for us a source of aesthetic enjoyment and in certain
respects prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment. [7]
Marx’s statement reflects a degree of deference to Antiquity
that we today would perhaps not share, but this aside, the basic point remains:
we are still left with the problem of explaining how art endures. So while
Hegelian-Marxist thinking undoubtedly inflicted a body blow to the notion that
art is eternal, it also left an explanatory vacuum. As Marx implies, where do we
look now for an explanation of art’s capacity to endure? Deprived of the idea
that art is eternal, what alternative solution might we offer?
The principal aim of my paper is to highlight the importance
of this question rather than offer a solution. As I’ve indicated, I think the
question of the relationship between art and time has been neglected, and it’s
that situation, above all, that I want to call attention to. But I do think
there is a solution, and although my time is limited, and my explanation will
be very sketchy, I’d like to give at least a broad indication of where I think
the solution lies.
Once we reflect a little on the history of art, we quickly
see that our world of art today is very different from that of the Renaissance
and very different, even, from that of the late nineteenth century. Art no
longer means, as it did for several centuries, the works of the
post-Renaissance West plus selected works of Greece
and Rome – the
tradition denoted by, for example, the Apollo Belvedere, Raphael, Titian,
Poussin, Watteau and Delacroix. Art today encompasses the works of a wide range
of non-Western cultures, such as the ancient civilizations of Pre-Columbian
Mexico, Mesopotamia, and even of Palaeolithic
times; and in addition, it includes works from earlier periods of Western art,
such as Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic, which were long regarded with
indifference if not contempt.
Exactly why the world of art expanded so suddenly around
1900 is a fascinating question – and again, I think, a neglected one – but it’s
not a question I have time to consider today. The important point for present
purposes is that once we factor in this radical change in the nature of the
world of art, the claims that art is timeless or that it is simply a creature
of history – the two basic claims I’ve discussed – both start to look very
implausible. Why do I say this? Selected objects from non-Western cultures
began to enter art museums (as distinct from historical or anthropological
collections) in the early years of the twentieth century.[8] Yet as we know –
even if we tend to forget – Europe encountered many of these cultures well
before that, but had always regarded their artefacts simply as the botched
products of unskilled workmanship, or as heathen idols or fetishes.[9]
Moreover, if we accept the abundant archaeological and anthropological
evidence, even in their original cultural settings these objects were never
regarded as ‘art’– not, at least, in any sense of the word art that resembles
its meaning in Western culture today. Their function – their raison d’être –
was religious or ritualistic: they were (for example) ‘ancestor figures’
housing the spirits of the dead, or sacred images of the gods.[10] The
transformation that has taken place over the centuries in cases such as these –
from sacred object initially, then to heathen idol or ‘fetish’, and now to
treasured work of art – is obviously very difficult to square with any notion
of ‘timelessness’ – that is, a condition in which the meaning and value of the
object is immune from change. Time and change seem, on the contrary, to have
played a very powerful role, not only in terms of whether or not the objects
were considered important but also in terms of the kind of importance placed on
them. Clearly, these objects have endured in a certain way: they are not simply
creatures of history that have lost their original significance and are now of
merely ‘historical interest’ – like the Elizabethan map I referred to. But the
manner of their enduring seems far less suggestive of timelessness than, as the
French theorist André Malraux has argued, of a capacity for resurrection and
metamorphosis – that is, a process in which time has played an integral part
which involves the revival of an object long regarded as without interest,
accompanied by a transformation in its significance.
The point is not an easy one on first encounter and a
further example may help clarify it. The so-called ‘pier statues’ of biblical
figures on the portals of Chartres cathedral are now widely considered to be
among the treasures of world art, on a par with, for example, the best of
Egyptian or Khmer sculpture, or the works of Donatello or Michelangelo. Yet
from Raphael onwards all medieval art was regarded as inept and misconceived
(hence, as we know, the term ‘Gothic’ with its original, pejorative overtones)
and consigned to an oblivion of indifference. The revival of medieval sculpture
as art[11] only began in earnest in the late nineteenth century – that is,
after some three centuries of neglect and disdain. This is not, of course, to
condemn the intervening centuries, or to suggest they somehow lacked an
‘appreciation’ of art (an unpromising argument, given that the period in
question produced many of the major figures of Western art – and aesthetics).
It does, however, suggest an alternative explanation of the relationship
between art and time. It suggests that art does not endure timelessly –
unchangingly – but through a capacity to ‘live again’, to resuscitate, despite
periods of oblivion, its rebirths being inseparable from a metamorphosis – a
transformation in significance. The statues at Chartres were not ‘art’ for the men and women
of the thirteenth century for whom they were created. They were sacred images –
manifestations of the Christian Revelation – and to place them on equal footing
with religious images from other cultures such as ancient Egypt or the Khmer
civilization, as I have just done, would, for their original beholders, have
been unthinkable and, in all probability, sacrilege. These works have become
‘art’ for us (and thus comparable with images from other religious cultures)
but they have done so through a metamorphosis – a process very different from a
capacity to remain impervious to change implied by the notion of timelessness.
These few remarks certainly don’t do justice to Malraux’s
concept of metamorphosis. But my time is running short and in any case the
central aim of my paper is, as I’ve said, less to advocate a particular
solution to the question of the relationship between art and time than to
highlight the importance of that question. I happen to find Malraux’s position
very persuasive because it’s coherent and explains the facts as we know them,
but I will leave his ideas now so I can comment briefly on what has been said
by recent writers in aesthetics about the question of art and time.
As I’ve indicated, very little has been said. And even when
discussion has moved in this direction it has not, in my view, addressed the
key issues. Let me give just two examples.
Pursuing a well-known theme going back at least to Hume,
some philosophers of art have focused on the so-called ‘test of time’. One
writer, for example, [Anthony Savile] notes that the longevity of a work of art
– its power to ‘survive over time’, in his phrase – is often seen as an
indication of its value, and he then asks whether this view is justifiable,
eventually returning an affirmative answer. [12] But, as we can now see, this thinking does
not go far enough. The issue is much less to know that art – at least great art
– has a power to endure; that much, surely, is reasonably obvious. The crucial
question is how art endures – the nature of its capacity to ‘survive’. I have
listed four possible answers: Art might survive for a certain period and then
disappear definitively into oblivion. It might endure for a time, disappear,
and then return with its original meaning – in a cyclical way. It might endure
‘eternally’ – outside time – which, as I mentioned, is the explanation that has
figured most prominently throughout European history. Or it might, as Malraux
argues, survive through a process of metamorphosis. So, conceivably, art might
‘survive’ in a number of ways, and to focus simply on the question ‘Does art
survive?’ is to stop short of this crucial issue.
Another debate sometimes thought to have a bearing on the
relationship between art and time is the question of whether a work of art is
legitimately susceptible to just one interpretation, or more than one. The
thinking here, I take it, is that if the answer is ‘more than one’, then a work
of art is changed by the passing of time; and if the answer is ‘only one’ then
it is not changed.[13] But this line of inquiry is of no help to us at all. For
whatever the number of so-called ‘legitimate interpretations’, that number
could conceivably be fixed – the fixed number of meanings that the artist,
consciously or unconsciously, gave the work at its moment of creation. And if
this is so, the work is fundamentally immune from change irrespective of the
number of interpretations – just as a diamond is, for example, despite having
multiple facets. Moreover, even if we ignored this difficulty, we are left
simply with the conceptual framework: change/no change, which is equivalent to:
change or timelessness; and for all the reasons I’ve given these alternatives
do not give us a satisfactory purchase on the problem of the relationship
between art and time. In short, as I say, this line of inquiry is not fruitful.
Whether a work of art is susceptible to one, or a more than one, interpretation
is, by itself, of no assistance at all in understanding art’s temporal nature:
it tells us nothing about the way art endures.
A few concluding remarks:
Perhaps someone might say to me: ‘Yes, yes, but even if we
agree, how important is this, after all? Does it really matter? Does aesthetics
need to bother about the relationship between art and time?'
My answer has two aspects, one theoretical in nature, one
more practical.
The theoretical aspect is this. We know that art –or at
least great art – endures in some way. We know that for every painter,
composer, or writer of the past whose works are still admired today, thousands
have faded into oblivion. And going outside the realm of art, we know there’s a
major difference between an object such as a map preserved purely for
historical interest, and a work of art, such as a play by Shakespeare, or the
music of Mozart, which still seems vital and alive today.
So we know the simple fact that art endures. But if we, as
philosophers of art, are asked how it endures, what do we answer? Do we say it
is timeless – eternal? Few would argue this today, I suspect, and for good
reason, as I’ve tried to show. So what do we reply? That art is a creature of
history? But that would tell us why art is affected by time, not why it
transcends it. Do we then try to argue that art is somehow both timeless and
embedded in historical change? But that clearly won’t do. The notion of
timelessness means what it says – outside time, immune from change. To be
simultaneously changing and changeless is not a condition one can readily
imagine.
So that’s the theoretical aspect of my answer: We know that
art endures. Are we content, as philosophers of art, to leave the question of
how it endures neglected and unanswered?
The practical issue is this:
Our modern world of art is obviously much more than the world of modern
art. The exhibitions that greet the hundreds of thousands of visitors to
today’s art museums encompass a vast stretch of the human past from prehistoric
times onwards. And just like modern works, many works from the distant past
seem vital and alive to us despite the long periods of time since their
creation, despite the fact that so many of them did not begin their lives as
‘works of art’, and despite the long periods during which they were regarded
with indifference or even derision. Seen in this light, the capacity of works
of art to transcend time, and the nature of that transcendence, become very
real and pressing questions – questions posed on a daily basis to countless
visitors to today’s art museums, even if they are only vaguely aware of them.
So in simple, practical terms, we, as philosophers of art, surely cannot afford
to ignore the question of how art endures – unless we are content to place
severe limits on our discipline’s capacity to speak to the art-loving public in
useful and relevant ways.
André Malraux once wrote that, ‘as well as being an object,
a work of art is an encounter with time’, and this, in a nutshell, is the point
I’ve been making in this paper. Aesthetics today, as I see it, has had a lot to
say about art as an object. We’ve asked, for example, about the difference
between a work of art and a ‘mere real thing’, we’ve asked whether works of art
function as a means of ‘representation’ or not, whether art provides a kind of
knowledge and if so what kind, and a range of other questions concerning the
work of art’s condition as an object. But we have not asked about art’s
temporal nature – the nature of its capacity to endure over time. This was once
a major theme in Western thinking about art, and I’ve briefly canvassed some
aspects of that lengthy and fascinating history. Today, however, it seems to be
a forgotten issue and contemporary aesthetics, it seems to me, is seriously
impoverished as a result.