Having enough time seems to escape all of us. And no wonder! Time is not a substance that we can grasp in our hands. Yet we talk about it as a physical presence in our lives. It's simply how we measure the period in which an event (an action, a condition or a process) occurs. It's also the continuum in which one event succeeds another from the past through the present and into the future. It's real and virtual, historical and recorded. Some cultures conceive of time as cyclical; others map it linearly. While we can't control it, too often it controls us, appearing to move faster or slower according to our perceptions.

Time plays several roles in art. Because it is not tangible matter, artists offer symbolic images of time, such as in The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali (1904-1989). Melting pocket watches seem to convey a “soft” or malleable sense of time, especially in dreams.

*The Persistence of Memory* (1931), by Salvador Dali. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

In two vanitas paintings by Spanish artist Antonio de Pereda (1611–1678—The Knight’s Dream and Allegory of Vanity— the subject is the ephemeral nature of all that surrounds us, including our own life. The collections of objects in both works symbolize the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures.

*The Knight's Dream* (ca. 1650), by Antonio de Pereda. **Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. Source: commons.wikimedia.org/**

*Allegory of Vanity* (1632-36) by Antonio de Pereda. **Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Source: commons.wikimedia.org/**

Another aspect of time in art is how long it takes to create something, be it a painting, weaving, sculpture, or musical composition. When the process is running smoothly, it's as though time disappears. When the process is laborious, tedious or fraught with problems, it might feel as though it’s taking forever. In Baskets as Textile Art, American fiber artist Ed Rossbach (1914-2002), looks at the time involved in a creative activity through a particular lens. Although he specifically addresses basketry, his perspective could just as easily apply to working with cloth and thread or canvas and paint. He suggests understanding basketmaking as more like music than a visual art:

...more of a time experience than a space experience...an experience in dividing and organizing time, breaking time into modular units...more complex than minutes and seconds, to be arranged in sequences and patterns. Basketmaking might be a sort of clock, not a measuring device, but something devised by [wo]man to enforce an awareness, a savoring, of time through its arbitrary division into rhythmic units.

**Yokut basket maker, Tule River Reservation near Porterville, California, ca.1900. Source:** **commons.wikimedia.org/**

**Weaving a textile in Cusco, Peru. Source:** **commons.wikimedia.org/**

In our nano-second culture, how often do we savor time? We feel the urgency of its passing as we rush to complete this or that task, to keep up with emails, texts, or tweets, to respond to the demands of work and family. Writing more than fifty years ago, Rossbach decried this aspect of modern life and suggested a different experience of perceiving time in an art object:

[W]hen a person says, upon looking at a basket or any other textile, "Think of the time it took to make it," [s]he may be doing more than merely illuminating...the distorted values which are part of the detestable illness of the century, that anything which takes time is not worth bothering with. It has become essential to feel a pressure of time, to reject anything which requires an abundance of time. And with such a rejection...we reject any full appreciation of what others are doing or have done. Yet by feeling "time" when [s]he confronts a piece of quilting or embroidery or lacemaking or basketry, the viewer may be close to the essence of the art.

**Tlingit basket, probably mid 1800s. Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.** **Source:** **commons.wikimedia.org/**

**Valenciennes bobbin lace (1720-1760).** **MoMu** **(Mode Museum), Antwerp, Belgium. Source:** **commons.wikimedia.org/**

Rossbach made me consider yet another aspect of time in art--timelessness. While some art appears meaningful only in its era, other art seems to transcend the period in which it was created. We can view work from centuries ago, or even longer, and recognize something that time doesn't erase. Its beauty or message or spirit--a je-ne-sais-quoi quality--is indifferent to time. British writer, broadcaster, and activist Jeanette Winterson (1959- ) notes this in Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery:

If truth is that which lasts, then art has proved truer than any other human endeavour. What is certain is that pictures and poetry and music are not only marks in time but marks through time, of their own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they ever did, exuberantly, untired.

*The Kiss* (1907-08), by Gustav Klimt. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. Source: **commons.wikimedia.org/**

*The Great Wave at Kanagawa* (from a Series of Thirty–Six Views of Mount Fuji) (ca. 1831–33), by Katsushika Hokusai. Source: **commons.wikimedia.org/**

**Prehistoric Rock Paintings at Manda Guéli Cave in the Ennedi Mountains, northeastern Chad. Source:** **commons.wikimedia.org/**

In 2013, there was an exhibit on the concept of time and its artistic manifestations at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Two particular conceptual artworks stimulated the curator to organize 0 to 60. One of them, in particular, strikes me as conveying a sense of time that is monotonous to the extreme, even grueling. In Punching the Time Clock, Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Heieh (1950- ) punched a time clock every hour on the hour for a solid year (April 1980-April 1981), never sleeping more than an hour at a time during the entire twelve months. Each time he punched the clock, he also took a single photo of himself, which became a 6-minute video. Part of the performance was shaving his head before the piece began, so that his growing hair would reflect the passage of time. Documentation was originally exhibited at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2009, using film, punch cards, and photographs.

**Tehching Hsieh with One-Year Performance 1980-1981 at Carriageworks, Sydney. Photograph: Anna Kucera/Guardian. Source: theguardian.com/artanddesign/australia-culture-blog/2014/apr/30/**

And, finally, I can’t help mentioning British sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy (1956- ), who has created many ephemeral installations, often near water. In Thomas Riedelsheimer's 2001 documentary Rivers and Tides, it is clear that time is actually the medium in Goldsworthy’s natural creations. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that, when I looked up the etymology of "time," I learned that it originates from the Old English tid, for tide. I can still visualize one of Goldsworthy’s sculptures gradually succumbing to the tide rolling in. Right there on the beach was the intersection of art and time.

Comments & Questions:
How does time play a role in your creativity?
What are the ways in which an artist can represent time?
Which artworks convey a sense of time to you?
What artwork has a timeless quality for you?

TIME and ART

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