Skip to main content

Plastic Time: Time and the Visual Arts

  • Chapter
The Many Faces of Time

Part of the book series: Contributions to Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 41))

  • 202 Accesses

Abstract

In his Elements of Criticism, published in 1761, Henry Home, Lord Kaimes, advanced the view that “a picture is confined to a moment of time, and cannot take in a succession of incidents.”1 A few years later, Lessing, an admirer of Kaimes, drew a sharp distinction between the arts of time—poetry, above all—and the arts of space—painting and sculpture. “. . . Succession of time,” Lessing wrote in Laocoon, “is the province of the poet just as space is that of the painter.”2 A few innocent incursions of one of these two sorts of art into the territory of the other might be tolerated, but the integrity of each finally depends on its keeping within its own bounds. Thus painting, if it seeks to include time at all, must present only a single moment of a body or bodies in action; and poetry, if it intends to paint a word-picture of an object whose features exist simultaneously in space, must do so by describing the temporally extended action by which the object came into being, as Homer did in the case of Achilles’ shield.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Bermard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), 205.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 91 (Chapt. 18).

    Google Scholar 

  3. Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung (1895–1925), ed. Eduard Marbach, Husserliana XXIII (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 21.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Ibid.,476.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Ibid., 19.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Ibid., 22.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Ibid., 57, 60.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 4.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Etienne Souriau, “Time in the Plastic Arts,” in Reflections on Art, ed. Suzanne Langer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 123.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, Bollingen Series XXXV (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 8.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Souriau, 123.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” in the Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2526.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Souriau, 126.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Micheline Sauvage, “Notes on the Superposition of Temporal Modes in Works of Art,” in Reflections on Art, ed. Suzanne Langer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 164.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Sauvage, 164.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Gadamer, 42.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Alexander Sesonske, “Aesthetics of Film or A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Movies,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33, no. 1 (Fall, 1974): 5157. Reprinted in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dickie, Sclafani, Roblin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 585.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Ibid., 587.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Ibid., 588.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Steiner, 2.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Nelson Goodman,“Twisted Tales; Or Story, Study, and Symphony,” Critical Inquiry 7, 1 (Autumn, 1980), 105. Cited in Steiner, 18.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Steiner, 18.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Charles Seymour, Jr., Art Treasures for America (London: Phaidon, 1961), 18,23. Cited in Steiner, 37.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Steiner, 38.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Souriau, 132.

    Google Scholar 

  26. George Dickie, The Art Circle (New York: Haven Publications, 1984), 73.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Irwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture,” Critique, I, No. 3,1947. Reprinted in Problems in Aesthetics, ed. Morris Weitz (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970), 666.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Steiner, 23.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Steiner,42.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Steiner uses these terms, 13–14.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Souriau, 132.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 22.

    Google Scholar 

  33. John Ash, “Arshile Gorky: How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life, 1944,” Artforum, XXXIV, No. 1 (September, 1995), 79.

    Google Scholar 

  34. Ibid., 79, 121.

    Google Scholar 

  35. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), ed. Rudolf Boehm, Husserliana X (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 48. English translation: On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough, Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, vol. 4 (Dordrecht & Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 50.

    Google Scholar 

  36. Ash, 79.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women (New York: Harmony Books, 1987), 141142.

    Google Scholar 

  38. Ibid.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Souriau,note 8, 130.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in Abstract Expressionism, ed. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

    Google Scholar 

  41. Ibid., 78.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Sauvage, 167.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Antoine Schnapper, David (New York: Alpine Fine Art, 1980), 263. David himself gave this account of the painting.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Stephen Wildman, Visions of Love and Life: Pre-Raphaelite Art from the Birmingham Collection, England (Alexandria, Virginia: Art Services International, 1995), 175.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Husserliana XXIH, 476.

    Google Scholar 

  46. Sauvage, 166.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Ibid., 171.

    Google Scholar 

  48. HusserlianaXXm,476.

    Google Scholar 

  49. “I Am Still Learning”: Late works by Masters (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1992), 3.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Brough, J.B. (2000). Plastic Time: Time and the Visual Arts. In: Brough, J.B., Embree, L. (eds) The Many Faces of Time. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9411-0_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9411-0_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5581-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9411-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics