On Time: MARCEL DUCHAMP

Marcel Duchamp,

Nude descending a staircase, 1912

oil on canvas

147 x 89.2cm

Duchamp's Nude descending a staircase is a painting from his early career. It could be argued that this painting represents a misunderstanding of cubism - a use of the planar language of cubism but retaining the wholeness of the body in the void of space, and choosing a subject that is a moving entity, rather than moving around a still subject. Nevertheless, it conveys an effective sense of the passage of time.

read more

A little timely reading

Barbican Art Gallery: Art & time Brussels, London: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1986

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, New York : Zone Books, 1988.

David Cockburn, Other Times, 1997, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge New York Melbourne

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, London : SCM Press, 1962.

George Kubler, The shape of time New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008

Genevieve Lloyd, Being in Time, London ; New York : Routledge, 1993.

Nikos Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics, London ; Chicago : Rivers Oram, c2006.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, London : Chatto & Windus, 1957.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, New York : Penguin Books, 2001.

Suzanne Treister, No other symptoms : time travelling with Rosalind Brodsky London : Black Dog, 1999

We are to view our temporal relation to an event as in some ways akin to our spatial relation to an object with which we are confronted. Of course the analogy is not complete. We cannot move at will through time in order to examine the event from different temporal perspectives, as we can walk around the house to inspect the different faces which it presents from different angles. Nor can we physically rise above the temporal plane in which we normally live, and so at a single time see all past and future events laid out before us. The imagery does however, capture the idea that we are, as far as we are able, to move in thought through time. We are to be struck directly by the fact that the event which, from where we now stand, lies in the distant future will one day be a present event; and to be struck directly by this fact is to grant to the event just the significance which we normally ascribe to a present event. Cockburn p 20

On Time

MARCEL DUCHAMP

No comments:

Post a Comment