Time and Art

Like other human experiences, time can be the subject of artistic expression in a variety of themes. Conceptualization of the notion of time has been the subject of many visual artworks in different mediums. Michael Wesely, Marina Abramovic, Salvador Dalí, and Tehching Hsie are a number of artists who have paved different paths to express their thoughts on time based on the differences in style and the mediums they have used.

Michael Wesely portrays time by showing the illusion of motion and the implication of change in space in photography. Hsie uses the same medium but a different approach to capture self-portraits over and over for the period of a year. He lives the time as he creates his artwork. In performance art, Abramovic deals with time as we perceive it in reality to create an interactive visual/emotional dialog with the spectator, and Dali's metaphorical depiction of melting clocks deals with the subjectivity of time on a subconscious level. The co-existence of these distinct artistic approaches in depicting multiple aspects of time adds more room to explore the complexity of time as a topic through art.

Time and art are entangled tightly, where chronology is the crucial element for the narrative to unfold. Performance and literary narratives are good examples in this sense. As the story happens over time, actions take place as sequences in time regardless of the content of the narrative. In essence, time empowers the creator of the narrative to illustrate the fundamental changes in space within the framework of the medium. Time is also an essential parameter for static visual narratives; however, in two-dimensional presentations like painting and photography, visual artworks lack the ability to have time as an embedded structural element.

In the following chapter, I illustrate the ties between literature and photography to justify the adequacy of textual narratives as the benchmark to examine the notion of time as a design element in the photographic medium and the narrativity potential of single images.