As an artist I am increasingly aware of standing outside of time. This isn’t a philosophical state so much as one where a lifetime has become compressed into a largely undifferentiated past.  Partly I can put this down to having seen and read so much about art, history, philosophy and the whole gamut of learning available to me. The shelves are crammed with books.

For decades though I was conscious not so much of standing outside of time as of being out of synch with the world. If that makes no sense, a common occurrence in my life was in beginning an art project based upon a personal revelatory moment only to find that someone else had explored the exact same concept eight to ten years previously. This became more obvious once search engines were available, but I never seemed able to close the gap.  Perhaps I simply knew too much. What I didn’t understand was the nature of atemporality.

Today, atemporality is a defining force for contemporary artists. With the accumulated knowledge of humankind available at our fingertips, past and present no longer exist. There is only an endless now. This is particularly relevant to artists in that adherence to a movement, a singular idea, a single medium, a way of defining where we are in time, no longer exists in the form it did in the early 20^th century. The question is though how do we deal with that concept?

History, life and the story of art are often considered as linear. History happened in this order; your life is a series of events from birth to death; art began with cave painting and continues on its merry way in bizarre directions that defy understanding. However, once artists became as important as their work at the beginning of the modern era, and the philosophy of why something was made, what it meant, and why that was significant, became salient things to consider when critiquing a work of art, art moved from temporal to atemporal. It is no longer enough to critique a painting/sculpture/installation based on its aesthetic qualities alone. The audience can no longer simply enter a gallery and review an artwork using critical faculties alone [assuming that the audience has such faculties], but rather what is now needed is a contextual framework, including the artist’s intent, biography, and philosophy, before understanding the work at all.

Atemporality in one sense means that artists need not feel confined to any particular style, movement, or genre but are free to take their inspiration from anywhere. We are able to digest and distil information from countless disassociated and even contradictory sources, with the aim of creating something new. In another sense it suggests that life and art are no longer linear at all. The accumulated knowledge of humankind is presented as a continually expanding universe, formless, shapeless, defying the constrictions and conventions of the written page. All of those manifestoed art movements, preceding and following each other in quick succession attempted to deny this process. Ideas had boundaries. Movements had boundaries. Artists had boundaries no matter what they said. Life, though, has no such boundaries. Then and now are the same place. This, essentially, is what makes contemporary art practice so difficult to comes to terms with.

In his seminal 1996 work of aesthetic philosophy After the End of Art, Arthur C Danto discussed the idea that art was over. What Danto was actually suggesting is that we have now moved into a period of art that is free of previous conceptual constraints and has morphed into something new, as yet uncategorised, and ever more open. Hans Belting in his book The Image Before the Era of Art argues that before the Renaissance, art – with its current meaning, didn’t exist. Paintings, created by craftsmen, were appreciated for the moral and ethical ideas they represented and not for their aesthetic beauty or skill. These icons were often religious in subject matter and did not need the presence of the artist to validate their significance. It was only with the dawn of Modernism, and the Impressionists in particular, that a real philosophy of art was necessitated, or even possible. When artists became as important as their work and assumed identities, the philosophy of why something was made, what it meant, and why it was significant, became salient things to consider. What it meant for artists is that they became the subject of their work. Rather than responding to an external idea as any more than a starting point, the artist ventured down the path of the endlessly autobiographical. The idea of the heroic artist was born out of this.

The aesthetic philosophies that dealt with such abstract questions as ‘What is beauty?’ and what is art?’ were no longer relevant by the end of the 20^th century.  Anything could be art. No longer having to ascribe to a particular movement/idea/philosopy, took the debate to whether a work of art was good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, original or derivative on its own terms. When those ‘own terms’ meant understanding the artist before understanding the work, we had moved into a quite different frame of reference.

One direction for some practitioners has been the ‘Frankenstein Mashup.’ Interesting and useful work can be accomplished through appropriation but when it starts to look like advertising billboards it loses all impact. The same is true of the current crop of so-called abstract landscape painters. Apart from the obvious contradiction in terms and failure to distinguish between a noun and a verb, Abstract or abstracted, these works all look the same and are immediately forgettable. Personalised abstraction is already very much of the past. It tends to lead to the kind of levelling blandness much like elevator music. All work is temporal in that it was executed as a specific time and place and manifests as an object [I painted this yesterday standing on the cliff above the beach; this abstract work is me feeling miserable during lockdown] but it also misses the point. High art, a philosophical high end, not the lowest end of visceral artistic expression, could fill the void being created from an atemporal perspective in the 21^st century instead of trotting out the tired cliches of a modernist thinking. Perhaps the weight of the 20^th century is so great and so well documented that dealing with the enormity of ever-increasing knowledge is beyond art.

One of the more interesting directions in contemporary art though can be seen in two examples which perhaps approach exemplifying a different form of thinking.  For the first time ever the Turner prize shortlist is comprised entirely of socially engaged art collectives. There are no paintings or photographs so the autobiographical individual as a subject is eliminated in favour of a multi-dimensional response that responds to the current state of the world. In that the problems addressed are both timeless and ongoing, the idea of atemporality comes to the fore. Seen in retrospect by future generations, this may not be the case at all, but as with performance art, the idea defies linearity even when the length of the performance is predetermined. Marina Abramovic sitting at MOMA with The Artist is Present in some sense defied time while encapsulating the whole of human artistic experience.  Secondly a recent collaboration in Adelaide between Ruby Chew – a painter, and Ida Sophia a performance artist, saw them challenge each other over a month with instructions to create work using written provocations and limited materials. While each was responding using the elements of their individual approaches, as they said, each provocation created a third ground that was unfamiliar. Instead of beginning with a stated subject, or responding to the landscape, or a face to be painted, they were drawing upon the diverse universe of possibility. While they allowed themselves four weeks to accomplish the tasks suggested by the provocations, time was not the determining factor other than to force each artist to come up with something within the allocated week.

While the cult of the heroic individual artist will seemingly continue forever, collaboration around shared philosophies, shared knowledge and that a work of art is not necessarily anchored to a specific individual, time or place may well be the most effective response to the time in which we find ourselves – past, present and future as one.

Unfortunately, the collective approach to my endless quest to make sense of the world though art may be forever dogged by the primary school assessment ‘doesn’t play well with others’. Oh well.

 

 

 

 

Hans Belting, The Image Before the Era of Art 1988

Arthur C. Danto   After the End of Art 1996

Laura Hoptman    Catalogue essay ‘Forever Now’ MOMA 2014

The Painter and the Performance Artist, The Mill, Adelaide, May 2021.