Time (3): Without context, we lose history

But not necessarily history as we're used to thinking of it

Continuing my enjoyment of being an outsider to the contemporary art world, for the last couple of weeks I’ve been reflecting on my recent visit to the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, where I was surprised to find rooms of paintings organised on the basis of themes rather than chronology. Last week I examined the experience of two of these themes, finding one to be engaging, and the other alienating. It’s got me thinking about the uses and problems of both linear chronologies and decontextualised themes in relation to how we think about time and history.

In the first article in this series, I introduced the idea of time as a weave. The straight line of chronology, moving forwards and into the future, I saw as a single thread. This single thread, whilst effectively showing how things change and influence each other over time, usually only reflect the interests and stories of those who have power, and as a consequence, leaves out the hundreds of parallel strands which are always running alongside its official story (voices that have no power or are not invited into the conversation) . I suggested that we could go a step further…

… and say that these hundreds of weft threads are in fact held in place by a thousand unseen lines of warp, running vertically through the horizontal plane, invisibly holding the fabric of time together in ways that the straight-line approach is never able to see. So the single-thread, arrow-of-time approach has a problem, not only because of all the parallel threads that it ignores, but also because it doesn’t acknowledge the myriad vertical strands which are actually holding everything in place.

A theme, I argued, approaches things from a different perspective:

A theme interrupts the horizontal narrative by picking across the cloth according to one idea, collecting the end results of many disparate processes. It removes all contexts and forces the viewer to examine only what it’s chosen to frame; ignoring linear movement through time and the specifics of location, says, look, there’s an underlying shape here, a form that things keep falling into. In art it says, look at these different pieces of art from this perspective, and see what happens for you.

The theme is able to operate across two dimensions of the weave, but in the process it completely loses track of the single thread of traditional chronology.

Last week, looking at the two themes in the gallery, I asked whether or not it felt important to have a sense of that linear chronological movement through time. I found that for the first theme, ‘Making a Mark’, it didn’t, because in the context of that theme (drawing) somehow the presence of the drawings was enough. In the case of the second theme, ‘French Connections’, it felt crucial. For this one, having no sense of where the paintings sat on a timeline seemed to strip them of much of their meaning, reducing them to little more than a collection of coloured marks, which, without context, might now be experienced as not much more than a fleeting instagram moment.

Kazimir Malevich, White on White, 1918

I’m not sure that Malevich’s painting, above, would promote much of a response now if someone came into a room and saw it hanging on a wall, without any sense of why it was important in terms of the way that painting was changing through the line of 20th century time. Does this painting have an effect if you know nothing about it, and how does that effect differ if you do?

I started to think about all of this while I was watching ‘Scorned by Muses’. Taylor, an art critic, had been invited for a discussion by some soon-to-be-graduating students from the MFA Studio Arts programme at Hunter College, New York, in response to his criticisms of aspects of the current art scene. It took me some time to feel into the discussion, having no knowledge context in which to place this channel, Hunter College, or the contemporary art scene in New York. I found my context-free position both interesting and a little worrying. It meant that I could engage with what was there without too much guiding knowledge (other than all of my own prejudices and experiences), but it also meant that I was likely to be drawing inferences and forming opinions that were potentially uninformed and likely to be misrepresenting the participants.

Taylor was clearly unimpressed by these students, feeling that they had no sense of themselves in relation to larger discussions and the history of art. Initially I felt the same, and was surprised to see that they seemed to have nothing to say about their own work. One student, who clearly did understand the history of European/American art, stood in front of her own paintings in her studio but said nothing about them. The other students were the same. Everything seemed curiously undefined, as if there was nothing really to say. Another student, when asked about where their work stood in relation to much older ideas about craft and apprenticeship, said that their work was often ‘seen to be crafty’. The camera panned to some of their work, and we saw bits of cloth or other material pasted onto the canvas; craft being understood in the most simple and literal way as ‘making something with your hands’? The students mentioned that the MFA as a way to ‘find other people to talk to’, ‘a community’, and necessary for getting a teaching job.

My intial impressions of artistic vagueness were altered to some degree by the discussion beneath the video. People pointed out that Taylor clearly had an agenda, and that the film was biased towards this. The articulate student who hadn’t talked about her work in her own studio wrote her own response to the way the film had turned out:

The “young woman who emerged from the shadows,” here. I've been wondering how I'd feel about this when it came out. I found our conversation fun and stimulating, but I ultimately feel a bit betrayed by the concluding statements, primarily because my aversion to viewing art through narratives is oversimplified into an avoidance of history…

It is not that I believe that history is irrelevant or that it ought to be ignored. On the contrary, painters can't ignore history. To ignore the history of painting is to have a false consciousness, which results in art that never overcomes adolescent cliches (just look around at what passes for painting today). I’m against narratives in painting—not against facing history. The “history of art” isn’t given (unless you resort to general narratives, which doesn’t require ever having really seen a painting).

A painter learns their relevant history by looking at particular paintings, and both builds their relevant history and responds to it by making particular paintings, whether inside or outside an academic institution..

When I watched the film for the third time, I began to realise that there was quite a lot of information for me in this discussion. The student seemed to be saying she was ‘anti-narrative’, both in terms of subject matter, and in terms of rationalising painting practice. Let’s look at this again:

A painter learns their relevant history by looking at particular paintings, and both builds their relevant history and responds to it by making particular paintings, whether inside or outside an academic institution.

I take this to mean that she feels that each painting carries its own history, in its present, material form, and that you can learn everything you need to know as a contemporary painter by studying the painting itself. The only history of interest is what you build within your own frame of reference, in your own practice, by making paintings¹.

I understand her claim that her position is a response to art history, rather than its denial. But I find the condensing of everything down into a single instance of the material present quite troubling. It’s that instagram five seconds again; all we have is the unmoored moment, which denies anything other than itself, including the movement of time.

This disturbs me because dynamic systems theories/complexity have taught me that history not only has an effect in the present, but that it is in fact the causal driver of those effects. I’m not talking about the ‘grand narrative’ of a hegemonic single strand. Whether it’s cultural history, national history, or personal history, we can’t pretend to be without origins, or without influences. We can’t pretend that the circumstances we’re born into don’t affect the nature of what comes next, even when we believe we’re exercising free will. We can’t deny the importance of certain events in our lives, and the effect that these events have on the thoughts and dispositions that follow, just as we can’t ignore the fact that government policies will cause certain things to become possible, at the same time that they close down other possibilities, or that some people will benefit from those policies while they will make other people suffer.

Histories are important, not as linear, single-stranded stories (which reflect the perspective of those in power and leave out the rest), but in their multi-stranded forms; dynamically woven into multiple other living stories, which constantly weave and flow through whatever happens to be the focus of attention at any given moment.

Complexity theories provide a language and a different way of thinking about the complicated, embedded reality of the living world. More than a network, complexity describes a three-dimensional space made of up of open, continually interacting systems where everything is woven into everything else, with information and matter continually being exchanged across what used to be assumed to be borders and divisions.

The beauty of complexity thinking is that it’s not just throwing your hands up in the air and saying ‘it’s all very complex’; it’s a particular way of understanding how the fabric of life is continually creating and adapting itself in relation to the energies of movement and change. Complexity outlines a way of thinking and talking about the most fundamental processes of existence; starting at the level of ontology, it offers a description of the way that the concrete realities of the world come into being.

Brilliantly, however, despite its descriptive power, complexity doesn’t try to claim to be able to tell us ‘the truth’ about how the world works. It’s not a ‘theory of everything’, in the sense that it claims to have found the underlying rules responsible for all of life’s processes, which can then be used to accurately predict results in the physical world. One of its most interesting features is the fact that it recognises that much of what it describes can’t be measured, seen or predicted. Complexity recognises causality - things are not random - but it doesn’t try to describe the details of that causality.

For example, it can tell us that small variations in initial conditions can build over time to create widely divergent effects; you can measure starting points, and you can measure what eventually happens, and see that what seemed to be an insignificant difference at the beginning, after thirty years becomes huge. But it won’t try to tell you exactly how or why this happens, because it recognises that there are far too many factors/systems all interacting with each other through time, and that the interactions taking place are happening so fast that it would be impossible to be able to track or name or measure what’s actually going on.

One of complexity’s most compelling features is that, despite stressing interrelationship and the fact that everything is always in motion, a complexity view of the world also accommodates the reality of distinct systems or ‘things’.

Many living organisms – and by organism I don’t just mean biological, but also cultural, social and linguistic – can usefully be thought of as open, dynamic systems. A neighbourhood, a class, a city, a school, a profession, a discipline, a language, and even an individual human being, can all be thought of as a dynamic system. One of the mysteries of this type of system is that, although it’s open to all kinds of cross-currents and constantly producing new things² it nonetheless somehow also maintains some kind of a sense of itself; an identity, if you like. This is the restaurant area of this city; this is the way that people in this culture greet strangers; this human is maintaining enough of a sense of themselves to function in consensual reality, even though everything is always changing within and around them.

An important aspect of a complexity view of the world is what the original work in this area called ‘sensitive dependence of initial conditions’. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions draws attention to the effects, and also to the uniqueness, of origins; the particular conditions that were present when a system first emerged. For example, if you think of a human as a dynamic system, two or three or ten humans may appear at first to come from very similar sets of conditions (for example, the things that a category like gender or class might focus on in sociology). But what complexity theorists noticed in biological systems was that the smallest variation in an initial conditions, over time, slowly magnified into what could become a large difference later in the system’s trajectory. Although the systems may have appeared at first to be the same, not only were there many small differences present at the time that were invisible or overlooked, but as each system moved through time, variations in the other systems which each system encountered or embraced, and differences in how each system reacted, and a thousand other things, meant that the originally similar-seeming systems became more and more different the longer they continued to be alive.

One of the things that this means is that, in its details, each system is particular to itself. It’s specific, subtly unique, even if it might also be possible to take a bird’s eye view and say, but look, they’re all humans! Yes, they are. Cross-sectional groupings/themes are obvious when you stand back and take a wider view, but to do this, you have to take things out of their contexts. And this is really the point; that when you don’t try to abstract or generalise out of specific examples, you can’t escape the fact that everything is continually being produced by its own set of contexts.

What saves this from being an individualistic way of thinking is the fact that all the systems involved are open, rather than closed. Despite each system maintaining an ever-evolving sense of its own integrity, they’re all open, interconnected, and constantly interacting. For each system, whether the smaller systems contained within larger systems, or the larger systems that smaller units make up, it’s the movement of the various system histories through time which patterns what happens next, what emerges into the present. History creates everything, even though you can never see or measure all of its elements. We can’t separate ourselves from our personal or cultural histories, because they’re making and remaking us every minute of our lives.

Every artist is part of this multi-stranded living web through time, whether they like it or not. They can choose to ignore its reality, but they’re still continually being produced by the specifics of their surroundings and by the dynamics of their local conditions; by the particular connections of the circumstances and flows in which every concrete, living thing finds its being. To take just one example, the language that the student is using in the video is continually emerging into present time from the many historic strands of her interactions with her tutors, her peers, the art world, and the ideas of post-structuralist theory.

This student talked about learning history by looking at a particular painting, suggesting that the painting itself was all the history that was required. It’s an argument for a kind of perpetual present, where at the start of every painting she and the canvas are a blank slate :

Painting shouldn’t be viewed through an art-historical lens, or a conceptual lens. You arrive, start seeing what’s there, then you can bring in things that it asks you to bring in…

From a practitioner point of view, I find this interesting and can relate to what she’s saying. But I find it a little disingenuous, because I don’t think she can just decide to cast off her dynamic histories; histories that are literally creating emergent effects in her biology, her psyche and her language as she stands there in space talking to Taylor through time.

How might we see differently if we thought about time as a dynamic, interconnected, three-dimensional weave of interconnected, open systems continually influencing and responding to each other?

From a complexity point of view, particular means uniquely presenting and evolving as a result of a system’s embedded but specific journey through multi-stranded time; a journey that has been, and continues to be, webbed into many dynamic contextual factors. In contrast to the idea that looking at single painting is all that’s required in terms of understanding or learning, might new perspectives be generated from looking more closely at the four-dimensional weave from which the painting has emerged?

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

I thought about this recently when The Week reported that someone had challenged the long-held idea that Picasso was inspired by African masks for his ground-breaking approach to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. They argued instead that the painting was more likely to have been inspired by the ‘severe geometries and colour palettes of now-lost medieval frescoes that adorned the walls of two churches in Catalonia and the French Pyrenees’. The new perspective was based on chronological information and seems to me be a very single-thread approach to understanding both history, and Picasso. Can anyone know for sure exactly when Picasso first saw an African mask?Who can say, now, how or why the dynamic system that was Picasso gave rise to this particular painting in the form that it did? People, and creativity, don’t function in such a straightforward, linear way.

1. She also says that millenials have inherited ‘a rejection of modernism’. In my hazy understanding of what this might mean, her position feels like a post-structuralist refinement of the ‘project of modernism’ itself, where meaning relates only to the painting surface and the paint - with the emphasis on ‘particulars’ added in as an attempt to eradicate any lingering remnants of attachment to history . She acknowledges that making ‘meaningful particulars’ is a problem, but is clear that the painting itself is the only place where meaning can be found.

2. Through another mystery, emergence, where changes that facilitate adaptive capabilities just suddenly take place without it being possible to track them back to any single cause or reason.