|
|
“It is as
though space, cognizant […] of its inferiority to time, answers it with the
only property time doesn’t possess: with beauty.”
Joseph Brodsky[1]
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets[2]
Time in Science and Fiction
Time is the most mysterious dimension of the physical reality and human
consciousness. It appears self-evident in the context of everyday life, but
beyond comprehension in deeper scientific and philosophical analyses. Saint
Augustine made an appropriate remark on this fundamental mystery of time:
“What is time? If people do not ask me what time is, I know. If they ask me
what it is, then I do not know.”[3]
Time is the object of fascination both for the writer and the scientist,
and, indeed, today the dreams of the fiction writer and the scientist can
hardly be distinguished from one another; both suggest multiple realities of
time. In his delightful little book about the multiple faces of time,
entitled Einstein’s Dreams[4],
the physics teacher and writer Alan Lightman fancies two dozen different
realities of time: circular time, time that flows irregularly in rivulets
and eddies like a stream, reversed time, time as a quality instead of
quantity, and time that takes the form of a nightingale, to mention a few of
the author’s variations on this physical and mental dimension. On the other
hand, today’s astrophysicists theorize the feasibility of time travel
through “traversable wormholes” and “warp drives”. They speak seriously of
“chronology protection” and “time-machines”. Looked at closely enough,
quantum gravity theorists say, even ordinary space and time dissolve into a
boiling mess that they call “space-time foam”.[5]
Some quantum gravity theorists even argue that space and time are most
likely a sort of illusion, or an approximation to be replaced by some more
fundamental idea in the future. Regardless of the dizzying leaps of fantasy
in today’s physics, Stephen Hawking confesses modestly in his recent book
The Universe in a Nutshell: “Even if it turns out that time travel is
impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.”[6]
Our common understanding of time seems to have evaporated under the
scrutinity of science, and there are, indeed, several very different
theories about time in physics today. And there are also vastly different
scales of time, such as cosmic time, geological time, evolutionary time,
cultural time, and human experiential time. And we all know how flexible and
varied experiential time may be depending on the human situation, or
horizon, that happens to provide the measure for the passing of time.
Modern Space-Time
Space and time, as well as the space-time continuum, have been central
issues in theories of art and architecture since the early years of last
century. The new space-time concept is the focus in, for instance, Sigfried
Giedion’s seminal book Space, Time and Architecture originally
published in 1941. “Space in modern physics is conceived as relative to a
moving point of reference not as the absolute and static entity of the
baroque system of Newton. And in modern art, for the first time since the
Renaissance, a new conception of space leads to a self-conscious enlargement
of the ways of perceiving space. It was in Cubism that this was most fully
achieved”, Giedion argues.[7]
The masterpieces of Cubism exemplify the novel integration of space and time
through movement and the fragmentation and re-composition of images. In
Giedion’s view, this new conception was first formulated by the
mathematician Hermann Minkowski who claimed in 1908: “Henceforth, space
alone or time alone is doomed to fade into a mere shadow: only a kind of
union of both will preserve their existence”.[8]
Cubism did, indeed, historically emerge soon after this mathematician’s
proclamation, and it laid the foundation for the modern artistic perception
and consciousness.
In the early years of the 20th century, progressive writers, poets,
painters, sculptors and architects alike abandoned the idea of an
objectified and static external world as exemplified by perspectival
representation and linear narrative, and entered the dynamic experiential
reality of human perception and consciousness that fuses reality and dream,
actuality and memory.
My intention, however, is not to speculate on the physical or philosophical
dimensions of the essence of time, or the understanding of time experienced
by the mobile observer synthecizing his/her dynamic and temporal mosaic of
observations. I am rather going to make some remarks on the significance of
time as a mental dimension in artistic phenomena and architecture. I could
characterize my subject matter as the “psyche and poetics of time”. Marcel
Proust claims: “As there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in
time”.[9]
The Collapse of Time
Philosophers of postmodernity, such as David Harvey, have identified
distinct changes that have taken place in our perception and understanding
of space and time. They have, for instance, pointed out a curious reversal,
or exchange of the two physical dimensions: the spatialization of time. In
my view, the other reversal has also taken place: the temporalization of
space. These reversals are exemplified by the fact that nowadays we commonly
measure space through units of time and vice versa. Daniel Bell also points
out that space has taken over time as the central concern of aesthetics:
“Space has become the primary aesthetic problem of mid-twentieth century
culture as the problem of time (in Bergson, Proust and Joyce) was the
primary aesthetic problem of the first decades of this century.”[10]
The postmodern era has also brought about a curious new phenomenon; the
collapse or implosion of the time horizon altogether onto the flat screen of
the present. We can today appropriately speak of the simultaneity of the
world. David Harvey writes about this “time-space compression” and argues:
“I want to suggest that we have been experiencing, these last two decades,
an intense phase of time-space compression that has had a disorienting and
disruptive impact upon political-economic practice, the balance of class
power, as well as upon cultural and social life.”[11]
It is inevitable that such an experiential compression has a significant
impact on how space is conceived in the art of architecture.
In this process of time-space compression, time has lost its experiential
depth, its plasticity, as it were. This collapse is brought about by an
incredible acceleration of time in the contemporary world. Speed is the most
seminal product of the current phase of industrial culture. This development
has given rise to a “philosophy of speed”, as exemplified by the writings of
Paul Virilio[12];
Virilio calls his novel science of speed “dromology”. In his view,
contemporary architecture does not express spacelessness and timelessness
but rather a concept of temporal space dominates our lives. The aesthetics
of speed, however, was introduced already in the first decades of last
century. “The world´s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the
beauty of speed”, Marinetti declared in his Manifesto giving rise to a new
aesthetic sensibility.[13]
Today, Coop Himmelblau declares an “architecture of desolation”, an
architectural aesthetics of speed, compression, fragmentation and violence:
“The aesthetics of the architecture of death in white sheets. Death in tiled
hospital rooms. The architecture of sudden death on the pavement. Death from
a rib-cage pierced by a steering shaft. The path of the bullet through a
dealer’s head on 42nd street. The aesthetics of the architecture of the
surgeons´s razor-sharp scalpel. The aesthetics of the peep-show sex in
washable plastic boxes. Of the broken tongues and the dried-up eyes.”[14]
The aesthetics of speed has also brought about an aesthetics of violence
that can be discerned today equally in the art of the comic strip, rock
music, cinema and architecture. Avantgarde buildings today often appear as
machines of violence and torture rather than habitation. A building that
excludes habitable time turns into a trap.
The dizzying acceleration of experiential time during the past few decades
is rather easy to recognize in comparison with the slow and patient time
projected by the great Russian, German and French classical novels of the
nineteenth century. It suffices here to mention the painfully slow
description of Hans Castorp’s seven year stay in the Berghof Sanatorium in
Thomas Mann´s novel The Magic Mountain, or the three thousand and
five hundred pages of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Italo Calvino comments interestingly on this acceleration of time during the
past century: “Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the
dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot live or think except in
fragments of time each of which goes off along its trajectory and
immediately disappears. We can re-discover the continuity of time only in
the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet
seem to have exploded”.[15]
Have slow buildings that materialize time become similarly an impossibility?
It is quite astonishing to find the lament of Abbé Lamennais about the
disappearance of time written already in 1819: “Man does not read any
longer. There is no time for it. The spirit is called upon from all
directions simultaneously; it has to be addressed quickly or else it
disappears. But there are things, which cannot be said or comprehended
quickly, and exactly these are most important for man. This rushing of
movement, which does not allow man to concentrate on anything, finally
shatters the entire human reason.”[16]
This piece of literary evidence, dating back two centuries, assures us that
the problem of the acceleration of time has its roots deep in the history of
modern culture. Our loss of time is the consequence of a historical process.
Proust makes an interesting comment on the alteration of our consciousness
of time since the Roman era: “Since railways came into existence, the
necessity of not missing trains has taught us to take account of minutes,
whereas among the ancient Romans, who not only had a more cursory
acquaintance with astronomy but led less hurried lives, the notion of not
only of minutes but even of fixed hours barely existed.”[17]
I wish to point out a fundamental change that has recently occurred in a
minute and commonplace detail; the difference in the reading of time by
means of a traditional and a digital watch (my quote derives from a book
entitled Conversations About the End of Time published at the turn of
the Millennium): “When you look at a watch dial for the time, that is
situated within the circle of time, you immediately recall what you have
done in the course of the day, where you were this morning, what time it was
when you bumped into your friend, you remember when dusk is going to fall,
and you see the time that´s left before bedtime, when you’ll go to bed sure
in the knowledge of another day well spent, and with the certainty also that
on the following day time will resume its daily course around your watch. If
all you’ve got is a little rectangle, you have to live life as a series of
moments, and you lose all true measure of time.”[18]
This is the fundamental experiential difference between analogical and
digital measuring. What is essentially lost with the digital watch is the
cyclical nature of natural time.
Significantly, we have even changed our bodily position in relation to the
flow of time. The Greeks understood that the future came from behind their
backs and the past receded away in front of their eyes. We have turned our
faces towards the future and past is disappearing behind our backs.[19]
Most dramatically, however, we even seem to loose our memories. Milan
Kundera makes a remark to that effect: “The degree of slowness is directly
proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly
proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”[20]
My paper is essentially about the virtues and benefits of slowness, or the
“chemistry of time”[21],
to use a notion of Proust.
We have all the reason to be frightened by the disappearance and abstraction
of time and the curiously related phenomenon: the expansion of boredom. I
am not going to enter this subject matter, however, beyond simply referring
to a recent book on the philosophy of boredom by the Norwegian philosopher
Lars Svendsen.[22]
I would like to suggest that we have lost our capacity to dwell in time, or
inhabit time. We have been pushed outside of time, the experiential space
of time. Time has turned into a vacuum in opposition to the “tactile sense
of [time]”[23]
in Proust’s writings, for instance. We live increasingly outside of the
continuum of time; we dwell solely in space. It is tragic, indeed, that as
we have entered the age of four-dimensional, or multi-dimensional, space in
our scientific thinking, we are experientially thrown back to Eucledian
space restricted to its three spatial dimensions. In fact, Bachelard
suggests that even the third spatial dimension has disappeared; we have lost
the verticality of space in our modern homes, and we live in mere
horizontality.[24]
The substance of time seems to exist nowadays only as archaeological remains
in the literary, artistic and architectural works of past eras. Similarly,
the originary silence of the world exists only in fragments, but as Max
Picard, the philosopher of silence, suggests, we are frightened by all
fragments.[25]
We are equally frightened by fragments of silence and time.
Museums of Time
In the same way that we can encounter an amazing presence of time, almost as
a still and heavy liquid, when reading Anton Chechov´s short story The
Steppe, we experience a slow and thick time when entering a Romanesque
cloister or a medieval cathedral, or walking on the streets of an old town.
In his legendary novel Proust describes the gradually released time
dimension by the Combray Church: “[A]ll this made of the church for me
something entirely different from the rest of the town - an edifice
occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space – the name of the fourth
being Time – extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay
after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not
merely a few yards of soil – but each successive epoch from which it emerged
…[26]
In the modernist masterpieces we can experience a gradual quickening of
time, and a further acceleration of velocity in today’s deconstructionist
buildings. The celebrated buildings of our time often appear to be rushed
and neurotic as if time were just about to disappear altogether. Every age
and every building has its characteristic speed, sense of time and silence.
There are slow and patient spaces as well as fast and hurried buildings.
There are mute, silent and garrulous spaces and buildings. “Tell me (since
you are sensible to the effects of architecture), have you not noticed, in
walking about this city, that among the buildings with which it is peopled,
certain are mute; others speak; and others, finally – and they are the most
rare – sing?...” Valéry makes Eupalinos ask Phaedrus during their dialogue.[27]
Every truly moving experience of art – ancient, modern or contemporary -
seems to suspend time and open the curtains of experience onto a calm,
tranquil duration. I wish to suggest that a distinct slowness and silencing
of experience belong to profound artistic greatness in general. When
visiting the Great Peristyle of the Karnak temple in Luxor, I felt that my
entire personality, my sense of separate self, evaporated as I became fused
with the space, time and matter of the age of the Pharaos. As Paul Valéry
makes Socrates remark in one of his dialogues: “Did it not seem to you that
[…] time itself surrounded you on all sides?”[28]
I experienced a similar vanishing of the temporal reality – the separate
categories of past, present and future - when standing in front of Mark
Rothko’s magnificent dark monochrome paintings in the Rothko Chapel in
Houston, Texas. These painted spaces invite the viewer into a deep timeless
space at the threshold of being and non-being. They bring the viewer to the
ultimate shore of time.
The American artist and professor Sanda Iliescu writes perceptively of this
peculiar perceptual and mental essence of poeticized time: “In aesthetic
experiences, time seems to slow down, allowing our memories and perceptions
to mingle. Unlike chronological time, which is concerned with actions and
consequences, aesthetic time is a layered surface in which present (what is
seen, touched, smelled, tasted, heard) and past (what is remembered or
re-considered) are embedded. The past and present overlap in fluid ways,
neither one serving or being summoned for the sake of the other. Time
becomes less a singular journey we travel on than a richly marked and
textured surface we touch.”[29]
Time-Free Perception
Regardless of its ephemeral and mystical nature, time is the crucial fluid
of our mental lives. We do not live in a fixed, objective reality; we live
in a mental reality that perpetually keeps flowing back and forth between
reality, dream and imagination. Our mental reality has no fixed boundaries,
no fixed temporal order or given categories. In his seminal, but sadly
forgotten book, The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing: An
Introduction to a Theory of Unconscious Perception, first published in
1953, Anton Ehrenzweig speaks of a “time-free” consciousness, or mode of
perception, as a necessary condition for creative thought.[30]
Time-free association, remembrance and dreaming, in fact, also seem to be
the condition of our normal daydreaming as well as concentrated thought; in
these mental states we detach ourselves from the progression of time.
Ehrenzweig quotes a letter of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as an impressive
example of time-free hearing. The composer describes the gradual
disintegration of linear time in his creative process: “I spread it [the
composition] out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in
my head, even when it is a long piece, so that I can see the whole of it at
a single glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting or a handsome
human being; in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as a
succession – that way it must come later – but all at once, as it were. It
is a rare feast! All the inventing and making goes on in me as in a
beautiful dream. But the best of all is the hearing of it all at once
… .”[31]
Just try to imagine hearing the entire Magic Flute or Requiem all at
once, an entire musical composition compressed into a singular volume of
sound! This description of Mozart makes one think of the unimaginable
compression of the entire Universe at the very moment of the Big Bang.
Perfection and Imperfection
Time has a seminal mental importance also because of our unconscious fear of
death. We do not only live in space and place, we also inhabit time. Karsten
Harries points out the essential mental reality of time in the art of
architecture: “Architecture is not only about domesticating space, it is
also a deep defence against the terror of time. The language of beauty is
essentially the language of the timeless reality.”[32]
Our longing and quest for beauty is an unconscious attempt to temporarily
eliminate the reality of erosion, entropy and death. Beauty is a promise; an
experience of beauty gives a promise of the existence of permanent qualities
and values. Jorge Luis Borges makes a strong remark to this effect: “There
is an eternity in beauty”[33].
But Paul Válery gives a warning through the words of Phaedrus in his
dialogue “Eupalinos, or the Architect”: “What is most beautiful is of
necessity tyrannical ….”[34]
Besides, Valéry disagrees with Borges regarding the permanence of beauty, as
he writes: “What is most beautiful finds no place in the eternal.”[35]
This fundamental disagreement about the essence of beauty between two master
poets is thought provoking, indeed.
At the same time that we dream of eternal life through images of timeless
beauty and perfection, we need experiences that mark and measure the course
of time; we need to be convinced of the depth and availability of time.
Traces of erosion and wear remind us of the ultimate fate of the physical
and biological world, “horizontal death”[36]
– to use a notion of Gaston Bachelard – but they also situate us concretely
in the flow of time. Time turns into a haptic sensation; it becomes a
perception of the skin. Matter expresses time, whereas shape, particularly
geometric form, expresses space. A pebble held on the palm conways the
experience of materialized time. We cannot mentally live in a placeless
space, but we cannot exist in a timeless duration, either. Our contemporary,
highly technological environments, built of man-made materials, do not
usually mediate traces of time and history. Instead of promoting rootedness
and a sense of belonging, they evoke an air of alienation, detachment and
lack of empathy. When comparing contemporary cityscape with historical towns
we can distinguish a flat time from a thick time or the absence of time from
time as a comforting presence.
The human consciousness is balanced between Eros and Thanatos, and it is one
of the mental tasks of architecture to mediate between the two polarities.
Paul Válery argues: “Two things do not cease to threaten Humankind: order
and disorder.”[37]
The quest for perfection has to be balanced by traces of imperfection. John
Ruskin advises us: “Imperfection is in some way essential to all that we
know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a
state of process and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly
perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent […] And in all things that
live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies, which are not only
signs of life but sources of beauty.”[38]
Architecture needs deliberate devices to express duration and time. The 18th
century’s fascination with artificial ruins is an example of the attempt to
expand the scale of architectural time. An element that somewhat
unexpectedly evokes time in juxtaposition with architecture is water.
Water and Time
Joseph Brodsky gives a surprising meaning to time: “I always adhered to the
idea that God is time, or at least that his spirit is”.[39]
He makes other intriguing associations: “I simply think that water is the
image of time”[40],
and: “Water equals time and provides beauty with its double.”[41]
In the poet´s imagination, God, time, water and beauty are connected to
create a mysterious cycle, or Mandala of sorts. These associations are not,
however, Brodsky´s alone; Gaston Bachelard, and Adrian Stokes, for instance,
make similar suggestions.
Water is also a frequent image in various art forms. Think of the fusion of
images of water and the extraordinary sense of time, spirituality and
melancholy in the films of Andrey Tarkovsky, or the gentle and hypnotic
slowness of the paintings of water by Claude Monet, or the architecture of
water by Sigurd Lewerentz, Carlo Scarpa and Luis Barragan. Water dripping
from a giant seashell into the dark wound in the brick floor at the Klippan
Church of Lewerentz, the underwater architecture of the Brion-Vega Chapel of
Scarpa, and the reflecting veils of water, as well as the images of rushing
water in Luis Barragans buildings, all evoke a hightened and sensitized
experience of duration. The reflective surface of water hides its depth, as
the present conceals the past and future. The life-supporting image of water
also contains the mortal images of deluge and draught. We are suspended
between the opposites of birth and death, utopia and oblivion.
Images of water turn into instruments of concretizing the passing and
persistence of time. The dialogue of architecture and water is truly erotic.
There is a special fascination in all towns that are in dialogue with water.
As Stokes remarks: “The hesitancy of water reveals almost like a textile of
visual and audible ingredients architectural immobility.”[42]
The sound of the waterfall at Frank Lloyd Wright´s Fallingwater House
creates a dense sensuous weave with architecture and the enveloping forest,
almost like a textile of visual and audible ingredients; one dwells
comfortingly in a natural duration next to the beating heart of reality
itself.
Symbol and Reality
The two ideas that have given rise to fundamental misconceptions about the
essence of artistic phenomena are: art understood as a symbol, and art seen
as novelty.
Artistic and architectural works do not just symbolize something outside
themselves; they create a reality and they are this other reality. “… [A]
poem […] is not a paraphrase or a metaphor for reality, but a reality
itself”, as Brodsky argues.[43]
A work of art or architecture is not a symbol that represents, or indirectly
portrays something outside itself. It is an image reality, or
ideated reality that places itself directly in our existential sphere
and consciousness. It becomes part of us and we become part of it.
Architecture, also, creates its own altered reality, in which perceptions
and experiences of space, duration and gravity are transformed. Architecture
projects specific horizons of perception and understanding. Buildings also
condition our reading of time; like the cinematic or literary arts, they can
speed up, slow down, halt and reverse time. Great buildings are not mere
temporal symbols or metaphors, they are museums and stores of time. As we
enter a great building, its particular silence and mode of time guide our
experiences and emotions. In fact, the depth of cultural time is measured
and expressed primarily by architectural constructions. Just imagine how
shallow and scaleless our sense of history would be without the image of the
Egyptian pyramids in our minds. This is true regardless of whether we have
ever seen a pyramid in reality or not. Architectural structures have seminal
functions as externalized mental structures, and as extensions of our
individual and collective memories and consciousnesses. They constitute
instruments for grasping and sustaining history and time as well as
understanding social and cultural reality and the essence of human
institutions.
Art and Novelty
In his intriguing book The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New
Scientific Mind[44],
Gaston Bachelard explains the development of scientific thought as a
transition from animism through realism, positivism, rationalism and complex
rationalism to dialectical rationalism[45].
This is the closed orbit of scientific thought, in his view. “The
philosophical evolution of a special piece of scientific knowledge is a
movement through all these doctrines in the order indicated”[46],
the philosopher argues.
Significantly, artistic thinking aspires to develop in the opposite
direction. An artistic image works its way from the realist, rational and
analytic understanding back towards a mythical and animistic grasp of the
world. Science and art, therefore, seem to move past each other in opposite
directions along the same continuum. Whereas scientific thought progresses
and differentiates, artistic thought seeks to return back to a
de-differentiated and experientially singular, oceanic understanding of the
world. Artistic imagination seeks expressions that are capable of mediating
the entire complexity of human existential experience through singular
images. In that sense, art is a perpetual tautology. It keeps repeating one
and the same message: the experience of being a human being in this world.
The paradoxical task of uniting singularity and universality is achieved
through poeticised images that are experienced and lived rather than
analyzed and understood. Alvar Aalto points out this paradoxical task and
capacity of art: “In every case one must achieve a simultaneous solution of
opposites[…] Nearly every design task involves te…, often hundreds,
sometimes thousands of different contradictory elements, which are forced
into functional harmony only by man’s will. This harmony cannot be achieved
by any other means than those of art.”[47]
Our time is obsessed by ideas of uniqueness and novelty, and art –
particularly of our own time - is usually appreciated and judged primarily
through its unforeseen novelty. I cannot think of a single profound artist,
however, who would have written about this kind of a futuristic interest,
excluding the futurists for whom the interest in the future was a
semi-religious motive. “No real writer ever tried to be contemporary”,
Borges appropriately argues.[48]
No real artist or architect is interested in such shallow and meaningless
notions as contemporaneity and freedom. Whenever someone begins to speak
enthusiastically about freedom in an artistic endeavour, the questions
arise; freedom from what, and freedom for what? “Strength is derived from
limits and it dies in freedom”, Leonardo da Vinci already taught us.[49]
Reversed Time
“[W]hen one writes verse, one´s most immediate audience is not one´s own
contemporaries, let alone posterity, but one´s predecessors”, Brodsky
confesses.[50]
No authentic creative work takes place in a cultural or mental vacuum:
creative work takes place in the continuum and traditions of culture, in a
constant dialogue with one´s great predecessors. The profound artist seeks
advice and approval among the dead, not the contemporaries, not to speak of
seeking to please the future reader, viewer or inhabitant. Consequently, the
past, the very depth of time is the real mental dimension of artistic work.
“In its desire to acquire great perfection, each work of art must from the
moment of its finalization descend into the darkness of millennia with great
patience and extreme caution, and return, if possible, into the immemorial
night in which the dead will recognize themselves in this work”, writes Jean
Genet when writing about the work of Giacometti.[51]
Instead of aspiring for futuristic fantasies, the artist seeks to recapture
the undifferentiated consciousness of the child and the singularity of human
existence. The artist defends the historicity of the human being and desires
to fuse again with the world.
The magical quality of art is exactly in its disregard for the element of
progressive, causal or linear time. Great works of art overcome the abyss of
time and speak to us in present tense. “An artist is worth a thousand
centuries”, as Valéry writes.[52]
A stone-age cave painting confronts our eyes and mind with the same force of
life and actuality as any work of our own day. This is exactly because time
as a chronology or causality is meaningless in art. Art is fundamentally an
existential expression that makes the observer confront his/her own
existence with sensitized senses and heightened braveness.
Instead of being interested in contemporaneity, art is driven by an
aspiration for an ideal, an ideal mode of consciousness and being. This
desire for the ideal is not a sentimental yearning; it is a search for an
experientially singular world where the opposition of object and subject
disappears, and this is the realm of beauty. This quest of the artist is the
source of profound humility and uncertainty. As Brodsky wisely writes:
“Uncertainty, you see, is the mother of beauty, one of whose definitions is
that it´s something which isn´t yours.”[53]
Beauty cannot be possessed; it can only be encountered. Similarly, artistic
meaning cannot be invented; it can only be re-discovered, re-identified and
re-articulated.
Biological Time in Architecture
We are primarily biological and historical beings whose genetic programming
extends millions of years back into the past of the human race. Our
instinctive reactions to spatial situations and qualities are grounded in
the living conditions of countless past generations of our predecessors. The
human sensations of directions, above and below, darkness and light , safety
and threat, pleasure and discomfort, horizontality and verticality, nearness
and distance, etc., are all grounded in our collectively shared unconscious.
We may live in a city and be deeply engaged in the technological and digital
realities of today, but our embodied reactions continue to be grounded in
our timeless past; there is still a hunter gatherer, fisherman and farmer
concealed in the genes of each one of us, and architecture needs to
acknowledge this deep historicity of humankind. This bio-cultural
historicity poses a critical perspective to today’s preference for novelty
and uncritical enthusiasm for digital and virtual realities. Scientific
research in the biological and evolutionary essence of aesthetics and beauty
has hardly begun[54],
but the poet and artist already know the depth of these phenomena. “Believe
it or not, but the purpose of evolution is beauty”, Joseph Brodsky declares
with the assurance of a great poet.[55]
The historical grounding of architecture, also, is likely to be found
decisively deeper than our current understanding of the few thousand years
of architectural history suggests. It is evident that the origins of
architecture are beyond history and verbal accounts in the deep
anthropological past of Humankind. In my view, the ethical task of
architecture is to defend our biological essence and historicity in order to
root us in the essential mental realities of life. This, I believe, is the
most important time perspective for the art of architecture.
*******
“As the
consequence of the annihilation of time, the public space is replaced by the
public image”.
Paul Virilio[56]
“Language is a diluted aspect of matter … By manipulating it into a harmony
or, for that matter, disharmony, a poet […] negotiates himself into the
domain of pure matter – or, if you will, of pure time – faster than can be
done in any other line of work.”
Joseph Brodsky[57]
“To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rosegarden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall.
Be remembered; involved with past and future,
Only through time time is conquered.”
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets[58]
Notes:
[1]
Joseph Brodsky, Watermark (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 44.
[2]
T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”, Four Quartets (San Diego, New
York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1988), 13.
[3]
As quoted in Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse
(Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University
Press, 2000), 19.
[4]
Alan Lightman, Einstein´s Dreams (New York: Pantheon Books,
1993).
[5]
Dennis Overbye, “Remembrance of Things Future: The Mystery of Time”,
New York Times, June 28, 2005.
[7]
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: the growth of a
new tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1952), 368.
[9]
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The
Captive, The Fugitive (London: Random House, 1996), 637.
[10]
Daniel Bell, The Cultural Condition of Capitalism, as quoted
in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge
Massachusetts, Oxford UK, 1992), 201.
[11]
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 284.
[12]
For instance, Paul Virilio, Katoamisen estetiikka [The
Aesthetics of Disappearance] (Tampere: Gaudeamus, 1994).
[13]
As quoted in Thom Mayne, “Statement”, Peter Pran, ed. Ligang
Qiu, (DUT Press, China, 2006), 4.
[14]
Coop Himmelblau, ”Die Fascination der Stadt”, as quoted in Anthony
Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, Massachusetts,
London, England: The MIT Press, 1999), 76.
[15]
Italo Calvino, If on a winter´s night a traveller (San Diego,
New York, London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981), 8.
[16]
As quoted in René Huyghe, Dialogue avec le visible: Connaissance
de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1955), page number
unidentified.
[17]
Marcel Proust, op. cit., Volume 4: Sodom and Gomorrah, 258.
[18]
Catherine David, Frédéric Lenoir and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac,
editors, Conversations about the End of Time (London: Penguin
Books, 2000), 139.
[19]
Robert M. Pirzig, “An Author and Father looks Ahead at the Past”,
The New York Times Book Review, date unidentified.
[20]
Milan Kundera, Slowness (New York: Halper Collins Publishers,
1966), 39.
[21]
Proust. Op. cit., Volume 6: Time Regained, 331.
[22]
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, Ikävystymisen filosofia [The Philosophy
of Boredom] (Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Tammi, 2005)
[23]
Jean-Claude Carriére, “Answering the Sphinx”, Conversations,
op.cit., 95.
[24]
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press;
1969), 25
[25]
Max Picard, The World of Silence (Washington, D.C., Gateway
Editions, 1988), 212.
[26]
Proust, op. cit., Volume 1: Swann´s Way, 71.
[27]
Paul Valéry, “Eupalinos or the Architect“, in Paul Valéry
Dialogues (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 83
[28]
Paul Valéry, Dialogues op.cit., 94.
[29]
Sanda Iliescu, “Eight Aesthetic Propositions”, unpublished
manuscript, 2006, 23. Constantin Brancusi’s Sculpture for the
Blind, 1920 was first exhibited inside an opaque cloth sack with
sleeves through which visitors could touch the primordial egg shape
of the sculpture. Iliescu, ibid., 11.
[30]
Anton Ehrenzweig, The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and
Hearing: An Introduction to a Theory of Unconscious Perception
(London: Sheldon Press, 1975).
[32]
Karsten Harries, “Building and the Terror of Time”, Perspecta,
Yale Architectural Journal, issue 19 (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1982).
[33]
Borges, op. cit., 115.
[34]
Valéry, op. cit., 86.
[35]
Valéry, op. cit., 76.
[36]
Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams, An Essay On the Imagination
of Matter (Dallas, Texas: the Pegasus Foundation, 1982), 6
[37]
Paul Valéry, source unidentified.
[38]
Josh Ruskin, The Lamp of Beauty: Writings on Art by John Ruskin,
Joan Evans, editor (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980),
238.
[39]
Brodsky, Watermark, op. cit., 42.
[42]
Adrian Stokes, “Prologue: at Venice”, The Critical Writings of
Adrian Stokes, vol II (Plymouth: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 88.
[43]
Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason (New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1997), 386.
[44]
Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New
Scientific Mind (New York: The Orion Press, 1968).
[47]
Alvar Aalto, “Art and Technology”, lecture in the Academy of
Finland, 1955, published in Alvar Aalto in His Own Words,
edited and innotated by Göran Schildt (Helsinki: Otava Publishing
Company, 1997), 174.
[48]
Jorge Luis Borges: On Writing, ed. by Norman Thomas
diGiovanni, Daniel Halpern and Frank MacShane (Hopewell, New Jersey:
The Ecco Press, 10994), 53.
[49]
Leonardo da Vinci, source unidentified.
[50]
Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, op. cit., 439.
[51]
Jean Genet, Giacomettin ateljeessa [In Giacometti´s Atelier]
(Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Taide, 1987), 15. Translation Juhani
Pallasmaa.
[52]
Valéry, Dialogue, op. cit., XIII.
[53]
Brodsky, Less than One, 339.
[54]
See, for instance, Ingo Rentschler, Barbara Herzberger, David
Epstein, Beauty and the Brain: Biological Aspects of Aesthetics
(Basel▪Boston▪Berlin: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1988).
[55]
Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, op.cit., 207.
[56]
Paul Virilio, as quoted by Mika Määttänen in Paul Virilio,
Katoamisen estetiikka, op. cit., 127.
[57]
Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, op. cit., 311.
[58]
T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”, Four Quartets, op. Cit., 16.
|