Facing the Real: Timeless Art and Performative Time

Abstract

[EN]This contribution analyzes the uses of time linked to materials in contemporary art practices. In the first part of the argument I consider the significance of the contemporary turning away from the normative idea that time should be external or non-intrinsic to fine or visual artworks. The change in mentality concerning the value of time in these works of art has been especially transforming among artists and opened up new opportunities for their creative work. I am particularly interested in the possibilities of an aesthetic translation of the human experience of time into the so-called spatial artworks through the intervention of changeable, non-permanent or non-lasting materials. When time ceases to be seen as a destructive element whose intervention should be avoided, or as a simple subject that the picture tries to depict, it can then be regarded as any other artistic material or as working inside the artistic materials as an active element that can attain a high impact on the final solution of the artistic process. Consequently, artists, viewers, art conservation institutions and so on ought to acknowledge that the temporal nodes should always count as a significant aesthetic component and that the performative temporal dimension is intimately linked to the amplification of the material possibilities in the creative process. In connection with this, I discuss the blurring of the difference between the real and the representational in art practices and how that affects the very presence of temporal dimensions. The paper concludes with the proposal of a new temporal level in works of art that modifies (our temporal understanding of) the identity of the work.