Vanity and Witness – Temporality in the Plastic Arts, Part II

While I am sure that many a Part I’s have been written without a mate ever being supplied (pastors and ministers are notorious for this in my experience), I would really like to transfer my Part II from haunting the back of mind onto (proverbial) paper.

The reason for my writing this post in two parts in the first place is due to two different ways in which temporality is manifested in the plastic arts, although I suspect that they are in fact difficult to disentangle. The first is a temporal experience on the part of the viewer arising out of his or her engagement with a piece. Arvo Part, for example, experienced the blurring of time and eternity through the sculpture Marsyas. The second is a more intentional temporality inscribed in the piece by its maker. I will discuss this in two examples.

Vanitas

The first is a genre of still-life paintings known as the Vanitas paintings. The name originates from Ecclesiastes, in which the phrase “vanity, vanity, everything is vanity” is repeated a number of times. These paintings consist of a number of objects, one of which is always a skull, representing death. Other common objects representing transience might include a wilting flower or a soap bubble. Among these representations of death the artist also paints objects representing earthly treasure, success, knowledge, beauty etc. There is a Vanitas painting in the Ashmolean museum that is particularly interesting because it depicts a mask and a skull facing and almost touching one another. The implication of these paintings, from Ecclesiastes, is clear. The inevitability of death makes all the treasures, success and knowledge of the world but vanity.

Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still Life with the Spinario, Rijksmuseum

Particularly interesting about this genre is the juxtaposition between the medium and the message. One could say that the paintings seek to represent the passing of time, yet time is here represented in the most motionless way possible: through a still-life, and what’s more, a still-life that does not have anything living in it (other than the occasional wilting flower). Inanimate objects might undergo decay, but they cannot experience time. A further irony is the hidden implication that while the beauty, knowledge, life and success of the owner of the painting will all come to an end, the painting itself will far out-live the owner. I also wonder about the common use of musical instruments in the vanitas paintings. They may represent gaiety and dancing, but they might also be thought to represent the passing of time in music and the rhythm of life (also in Ecclesiastes – a time to laugh, a time to cry, a time to dance, a time to mourn etc.). This is all speculation, but the painting does seem to represent a certain intersection of time and timelessness, as does Ecclesiastes itself. There is both the linear passing of time in which all things come to an end, but there is also the recurring rhythms of time in which events, fame, knowledge etc. continually ebb and flow, such that ‘there is nothing new under the sun.’

Medieval Composition and Participation

Second, Mary Carruthers has fairly convincingly demonstrated that medieval reading and exegesis was a very different practice from what it is today. In The Craft of Thought¹ she discusses how the practice of memorizing texts was really an act of composition. The purpose was to make something out of one’s store of knowledge. In this process, mental images were used as gathering places for texts and ideas. However, these images were not static, but interactive. The reader would compose mental images that contained spaces between rooms or buildings in order to avoid the crowding of concepts. Recollection involved mental walking or moving from one location to another. Thus it involved a temporal interaction with one’s mental composition. Furthermore, the gathering of these texts and concepts into an image was not the result of a survey of texts from a point outside of time and place. The purpose, rather, was to bring the text, through composition, to bear on one’s situation. It was a making present of the past (one of the metaphors used to describe the composer was that of ‘conjurer,’ someone who could juggle past, present and future). The purpose of these mental compositions was most often rhetorical. They were used to construct persuasive speeches in order to present evidence. The aim here was to make one’s speech as vivid as possible, to make an event present in time so as to transform listeners into witnesses. Imagination, implicated in all dimensions of rationality was therefore the most valuable skill in reading, composing and speaking. Mental composition in reading was therefore inherently temporal. It was the making present of the past in order to witness an event in real time.

We might ask whether this temporality was ever concretized in images external to the mind. There are several examples of paintings or pictures in books in which the patron of the pictures is him or herself depicted. While it was previously always thought that this was an attempt on the part of the painter to secure the good-will of his benefactor, Carruthers understands these pictures differently in light of her research. Consider, for example Hours of Mary of Burgundy:

Hours of Mary Burgundy, 1480. http://www.heorot.co.nz/Hall/Wardrobe/15CBurgundian/Women/

Mary of Burgundy is here reading scripture, the words of which lead her to witness the Virgin and child through her mind’s eye, depicted by the window. Even more involved is the painting Christ as the Gardener (of which I could not find a picture), in which Charles VIII of France is actually participating in the story! These sorts of paintings lead Carruthers to believe that belief was understood to come not from mere hearing and comprehension but from temporal participation in the story of scripture through the making of mental images.

Even more helpful, for my purposes, is the fact that Carruthers suggests that all of the art-forms which we now distinguish into genres actually overlapped far more in medieval thought. All composition involved the artisan practice of composing off of an image. In particular, she suggests that the distinction between rhetoric and poetry was not made prior to the 17th century. The sound of words was therefore very important in these making-present speeches. Words were meant to be heard, not read. Therefore, meaning was not something independent of the rhythm of words, but inherent to that rhythm itself, as in poetry.

Carruthers is therefore able to demonstrate the relationship in rhetoric between image, rhythm, and temporality. The painting of a vivid image through the rhythm and poetry of one’s words initiates the hearer into participation in a past event as witness. This temporal relationship has then been manifested in several paintings. This brings us to an observation that I made in passing at the beginning of this post; the temporality inherent to an image and the incidental temporal experiences that one might participate in through an image are in fact difficult to separate.

 

1Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400-1200, (Cambrdige, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). While most of this information can be found in her book, I am basing my synopsis of her research on a the Speaker’s Lectures in Biblical Studies given at Oxford University, on January 23^rd, January 25^th, and February 6^th entitledAesthetics, Rhetoric, and Reading the Medieval Bible.

A Time to Mourn –Temporality in the Plastic Arts, Part I

One of the challenges of my thesis (for which I have not posted an abstract), is that I bear the burden of proof in attempting to demonstrate that not only music, but all art, involves temporality; rhythm even. The philosophical justification for this assertion comes from Giorgio Agamben’s The Man without Content, where he quotes and expands on Holderlin in saying that

“Everything is rhythm, the entire destiny of man is one heavenly rhythm, just
as every work of art is one rhythm, and everything swings from the poetizing
lips of the god.”

My suspicion is that this assertion is also theologically significant. However, before I can unpack why and how this is the case, my challenge is to demonstrate in what sense Agamben’s assertion is in fact true of art in general. Thankfully, I am able to draw upon others who are more familiar with art history than I am. I owe the following analysis of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture, Marsyas to Judy Raines.

Behold, Marsyas

Tate Photography. Marsyas, 2002: Installation at Tate Modern. See www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/kapoor

Inspired by the massive Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern museum in London, Kapoor engineered a sculpture of colossal proportions to fill both the height and the length of the hall in 2003. As an artist, Kapoor believes form to have metaphysical memory, and so seeks to make art that moves the viewer past the material object itself through her interaction with it. Marsyas accomplishes this primarily through its size, leading the viewer to confront her limit. Made of a PVC membrane stretched taught over three steel rings, this sculpture is so enormous that it is impossible for the viewer to see its entirety from a single vantage point. It cannot be mastered. Rather, it can only be known through a series of encounters that require bodily strain and participation. Marsyas is so gigantic, that it feels as though it imposes itself into one’s own space. It cannot be ignored. It is absorbing, demanding and unnerving. It is an extremely tactile experience of how one can be absolutely confronted by the other. It is an unsafe object in the sense that it refuses to undergird the enormity of the viewer’s imagined self, but confronts her with her hubris. At the same time, however, it contains an element of safety. One of the three steel rings is positioned over a bridge such that the viewer can walk under the sculpture. This takes some trust in the engineering of the extremely heavy sculpture, especially given that it is engineered to give the illusion of floating in mid-air. However, what is remarkable is that one feels a certain enveloping safety under this ring. The same object that is unnerving and dangerous is also gentle and safe.

So far, so spatial. How does this help me? Well, there has been at least one viewer who has been confronted by Marsyas, not in terms of space, but time: the composer Arvo Part. Coming out of the Orthodox tradition in which the trumpets of judgement play a prominent theological role, Part was confronted, not by Marsyas’ size as such, but by the enormous red trumpets of eternity, signalling his judgement. He became immanently aware of passing time; that his time was ending. For Part, Marsyas was eternity breaking through time. The line between time and timelessness became blurred. Through this encounter, Part came to believe that the context in which it is appropriate for us to confront our time and our death is that of eternal time, or timelessness. We can only bring ourselves to look plainly at our limits in the context of that which is both overpowering and gentle; the unsafe God in whom we might find safety.

So this is perhaps one example of the way in which plastic art might exhibit a sort of rhythm. It is the manifestation of the eternal in the forms and materials of the temporal, such that temporal reality is in turn caught up into the eternal.  We speak, for example, about the rhythms of the liturgical year, and week, in a similar way. It’s the movement back and forth between human limit and human participation in divine time. It is a part of what we mean when we call something ‘incarnational.’

Where Can I Find a Temenos in All This Experience?

The best lectures are always those that put into words some sort of gnawing feeling that you yourself have been attempting to capture, and that one can then witness unfolding beyond the lecture room. In short, they are those that are true. Whether because intellectual pomposity and pressure for originality have made truth scarce, or simply because I spend too much time in the safety of the library, and not enough out watching and testing what I read and hear, my experience of the truthfulness of lectures is rare. Nevertheless, I recently had the privilege of being at a lecture given by Graham Ward in Edinburgh at the SST postgraduate conference, and it was true. Unfortunately.

He pointed to the ways in which we have come to collapse time and space into an immediate present, with the result being that everything is accessible to all, regardless of their time, place, skill, purpose or virtue. Everyone has a right to everything (with a fee of course). The name that we have given this is ‘experience.’ However, what it really denotes is that we are nomadic; we wander from experience to experience with nothing but our will to tie them together. In my own words, we are coming less and less to inhabit the spatial and temporal measures of life and liturgy. We are living without rhythm.

Soon after hearing this lecture, I went home for Christmas and quickly found myself mired in two such ‘experiences.’ My husband and I were visiting some relatives and our originals plans were cancelled due to weather, so his relatives took us to something called an Omnimax. It is a theatre like an Imax, except that the screen curves over one’s head and around the sides so that the edges are barely visible. Looking at images of beautiful places, I thought to myself “Why are the most beautiful, majestic places so difficult to get to?” “What would it be like to be that poor fisherman living in such a beautiful place? Does he still think it’s beautiful if he has never seen anything else?” Then I realized, that perhaps that is precisely the point. These places are not supposed to be easily accessible. Beauty is not supposed to be easily accessible. If one wants to see beauty, one must do the necessary work to ready oneself to see it. To turn an image into an experience by making it seem as immediately present as possible is to remove the work so that it no longer matters. The beautiful place is hurled into a vacuum. It no longer determines anything. Space and time are collapsed, allowing one to add a beautiful view as an experience alongside waking, sleeping, eating, arguing, working, laughing. But it does not change or form the way one wakes, sleeps, eats, argues, works or laughs, like it does for the fisherman.

The second ‘experience’ was a visit to an exhibition on Judaism; it’s culture, history, art etc. Now, the whole idea of museums and exhibitions is strange to begin with. We seem to think that it’s normal to remove things from their intended contexts and function, collect them together in one place and display them to satisfy the curiosity of the masses (or in the case of art to actually create things without purpose for the masses). We do it to give the people an experience of having seen things that are rare, beautiful and old, and of course it’s all very nice and we walk away and say “well, wasn’t that interesting…?” But what does it mean? It doesn’t change us at all. It’s all just so easy. All of these beautiful and rare things are simply hurled into a vacuum. They no longer have any liturgical function, so they function instead as something which provides an experience. What is more disconcerting though, is that the chosen place for this exhibition was a Church. Now, when I first thought about it, it seemed very appropriate. The Church is embracing its Jewish history as well as acknowledging the history of its injustice against Jews etc., and that’s no doubt what the curators were thinking. But on the other hand, regardless of content, there is something conceptually peculiar about putting an exhibition; an idol to human experience that collapses space and time, in a sacred space.

Sir John Tavener, an Orthodox composer that I have become particularly fond of, has said that spaces such as galleries and concert halls are spaces that remind us of how fragmented and dislocated we have become, such that artists, understood Christianly, must work within and work to open an alternative sacred space; a temenos.¹ What does it mean if the church; that place, which has historically been our temenos, is now becoming the concert hall and the gallery; the place of dislocation in which God’s time and space are no longer honoured, but collapsed?

1John Tavener, “Towards a Sacred Art” in The Sense of the Sacramental: Movement and Measure in Art and Music, Place and Time, David Brown and Ann Loades, eds., (London, UK:SPCK, 1995), p 176.