I
have been thinking over the past few days, for my conference work, about the
stark opposition between space and time in a painting, in an artistic image. It
has seemed that space is the painter’s mode, her material, the clay of which
she has an infinite abundance, and that the limits of her spatial creation only
exist in her limits of a human being. She does not, of course, have a paint
color of every wavelength, and perhaps her fingers do not have the precision to
create a perfect circle. But if she had every material and the power to master
it all, she would be unlimited in her three-dimensional spatial creation—as of
now, she is unlimited spatially,
within the realm of her ability.
Time,
however, I have come to see as not the mode, but rather the constraint upon visual imagery. Each
frame is limited temporally, to one moment, by necessity of the oneness of the
painting. We have there only one viewpoint, which is not progressed or affected
by time (except of course by erosion or vandalism, features “outside the art”),
and the frozenness prevents the existence of two moments, and at least two
moments are necessary for the progression of time. Even a film can only convey
one set of visual features in each momentary frame. The challenge of art, then,
would be to explode and dazzle infinitely within the boundaries of a single
moment in time.
But
Arnheim’s Dynamics chapter is shifting my view. He says on 424, “[T]he immobile
image is not momentary, but outside the dimension of time,” and that to succeed
at conveying a sense of movement, one must convey not one moment of a “temporal
sequence,” but must wrap up the entire sequence into one “timeless pose.” Thus
an image has actually complete control over time, in that it can distort to its
liking the linearity of actual time; it can sculpt the laws of time so that
many moments are present in the image’s one moment, or perhaps, “non-moment.”
Time is what the image is not constrained
by—it can do anything, at any time. There is no time, as it applies to the real
world, at all. It can alter “real-time,” or perhaps disregard it completely, by
conveying movement by the horses’ limbs in a complete leap, fusing multiple
frames of real-life movement into one image. When looking onto a scene, only
the center of our stare has that
particularly vivid acuity, and the surrounding and peripheral fall out
of focus gradually. Many hyper-realist disrupt the reality of real-time seeing
by giving the entire painting a stunning acuity. It merges several moments of
real perception into the image’s one container of time. Contrastingly, some
paintings (see Flowers in a Pitcher,
by Matisse) intentionally mimic the eyes’ temporal restriction (they cannot
function the same way in two moments) by giving thick, crisp globs of
brushstroke to the important areas, and painting the unimportant, the
intentionally peripheral, with less detail and exertion. Perhaps it is not true
that the immobile image is “outside the dimension of time” as Arnheim says, but
rather, free to alter the rules of time as we know it in reality. A painting
has its own dimension of time.
This,
of course, does not mean that each work of art by necessity manipulates time
successfully—though the image might be intended
to convey motion, as Arnheim explains, a snapshot of a football player may have
“the human figure awkwardly arrested in mid-air as though struck by sudden
paralysis,” (414). It means only that time is the malleable material, available to be manipulated to convey
whatever certain visual expression, whatever facet desired in the painting
world, unattainable in the real world. Perhaps “successful” manipulation is
irrelevant, because it refers to the artist’s intention; the image on the
canvas inherently either obeys temporal reality or doesn’t, has tension or has
none. Arnheim mentions “Muybridge’s serial photographs…[in which] the full
impact of the blow appears only in those pictures in which the hammer is lifted
high. In-between phases are not seen as transitional stages of the smashing
blow, but as a more or less quiet lifting of the hammer,” (424). If an artist
intended the immense weight of inertia that charges the high-hammer images, but
produced a work more resembling of the in-between, we wouldn’t necessarily see
the image as unsuccessful in its
mastery of time, but rather simply a resemblance of the in-between stage of
real life’s swinging.
It
is interesting that to convey one realistic dynamic, one of the mobile,
four-dimensional, non-painting world, we have to destroy another. Indeed, it
seems Arnheim, in his approval of the non-realistic outstretching of galloping
horses, which forgoes realistic position for realistic speed, holds one kind of
dynamic above another; expression is more important than content. What must be
conveyed is the sense of tension,
weight, movement; it matters not whether these artistic legs are truthful to
the limbs on real horses. A step further, it does not even matter what the
shapes of the legs are on the painting,
but how we perceive them, what they strike the viewer with. We see not the ontogram, as Arnheim says, but the
phenogram. It is a function of gestalt psychology, that no beautiful part gives
us a stable and complete sense of beauty. It is taking a cue from the
subjective principle of perception, that the value of the image of shapes and
interplay are not in their truthful being, the noumenon world, but how we see
them. Their value relates to us selfishly. It’s not just that the successful
horse’s limbs aren’t realistic—it’s that their success relies not on inherent
qualities in the painting, but on us as perceptive visual creatures,. There is
no visual gestalt without us. The images without us are not images, worlds of
their own, separate from and perhaps representative of the real world. They are
just objects—when I try to describe what a painting is without humans, I’m at a
loss for words that don’t contain a principle of human organization or
perception (shape, color, material, piece, instance). I’m reminded of the
principle of currency; what we are holding is strips of green paper, and if the
human race perished then there would be no monetary property in the bills, no
value, nothing except the paper itself.
In
fact, it is space that is the painting’s handicap—not in size, for enormous
canvases exist, but in that no space can by occupied by two things at once. A
square centimeter that is occupied by red, and cannot, also be occupied by blue. It is the law of substance, of
matter, that confines our real world as well. If the vase is completely full of
flowers, it isn’t full of water. An image can contain many temporal phases in
one horse, but it cannot contain two horses in one horse. In photograph
overlays, perhaps, a fusion of two spaces into one is obtained, but what
results is more accurately its own space, and each image is unseeable in its
original form, bound to the other. It is perceived as two spaces, physically
containing a determined array of pixels, but understood and impossible to
understand any other way than occurring within one space. Rubin’s vase, or duo
of profiles, contains two organizational patterns in one image—but as far as which
space is occupied by black and which by white, the makeup of the image, the ontogram,
the image is limited to being one image. It is photographic overlays and optical
illusions that challenge the spatial handicap of painting, and succeeding
throughout the course of one viewing—but no viewer, at one moment, can perceive
two images, can “see both.”
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