Telling Time

Having just commented upon the planned obsolescence of modern art, it's important to remind readers about the ways that time is thematic in art. In former, more innocent times, artists certainly didn't suppose that their work was so trivial that it would be passed over by their descendents. But then, following ambitions very unlike the current art ethos, artists formerly used to use art as a vehicle of exploration. Art has been connected to life in the past. In truth, it still is. Every era has its genuine and its fake, its best and also rans. The ideas that really matter stick around. Hence the motto: ars longa vita brevis.

A lot of artists of the past were quite aware of creating objects that would live longer that they would. Perhaps the short life expectancy of earlier eras was formative. Whatever the case, time itself has continually turned up as a topos in art, as here with Cezanne's clock.

There's something really liberating about studying the past. For one thing, all the bombast drifts away and in its place one finds the ideas that have sustained the intense scrutiny of generations. I love a painting that is so filled with visual incident that it can hold your attention for a long time, an image that is really almost more interesting than real life. Of course, I am not talking merely about detail. Detail and business of a pictorial sort -- nothing could be easier to make. But a visual representation of things, that is so carefully felt and thought through, that your eyes linger over every element and find not only visual beauty, but visual complexity and evocative and conceptual meaning. Pictures that mean things, but whose meaning is silently imparted, put into the forms -- these are the things I love!

That kind of searching art just isn't possible when trends rule.

Consider: what are the odds that a particular artist's most ardent concerns will be compatible with the fad of the moment? Do the math. What if your idea of a searching art is all concise lines and the prevailing fad is for gobs of paint? What if you make small, intimate images and the "serious" artists are cranking out acres of canvas? What if you have a natural understanding of paint as a material, and the common wisdom is that "painting is dead." (More likely: some peoples' imaginations are in a coma.)

In the moment, contemporary art is so about "time," is so about being Now, that it's difficult to see how an artist will ever be granted "permission" to make something that takes years to think through. What possible guarantee could he have that the trend some years down the road would support whatever he was making slowly and thoughtfully, searchingly and uncertainly now and through intervening years?

Ingres spent eight years working out the totality of the London painting of Mme Moitessier.
An artist of today who cared about his painting, her painting, as much as Ingres cared about Mme Moitessier would not hesitate to spend however much time it takes to understand and realize the image he wanted.

Nothing in the art culture tells you to do this. It comes from inside.