Art, Time and Metamorphosis: A Revolutionary Aspect of André Malraux’s Theory of Art.

The topic I wish like to address today is one which, it seems to me, should occupy a position of major importance on the agenda of modern aesthetics but which, oddly enough, is almost completely neglected.  The topic is the relationship between art and time – or to use an equivalent phrase, the temporal nature of art.

What do I mean by the relationship between art and time?  Well, what I do not mean is the portrayal of time within this or that particular work – for example in Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu as compared with, say, the picaresque novel.  That is a perfectly legitimate topic of interest of course, but my focus today lies elsewhere.  I want to talk about the general relationship between art and time – the temporal nature of art in general.*  Given that such a thing as art exists – and that much I’m going to take for granted – do we think that its temporal nature differs in some important way from that of other products of human activity?  And if so how? And why might this be important?

The question is by no means strange or esoteric.  There is one view of the relationship between art and time that is so familiar to us that it has almost become a cliché, an idea that we employ very often but to which we rarely give a second thought.  This is the idea that art – or at least great art – has a special capacity to, as we say, ‘endure’ or ‘last’.  We don’t mean by this, of course, that works of art have a special power of physical endurance: we know that they are as vulnerable to floods, fires, earthquakes or simple neglect as anything else.  We mean, rather, that certain works — Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Mona Lisa, Mozart’s Magic Flute, for example — seem to have a capacity not only to impress their contemporaries but also to exert a fascination on subsequent ages, while so many other works have lost whatever appeal they may once have had and have sunk into oblivion.  We mean, more broadly, that unlike so many other things that the passage of time renders obsolete and void of interest – ranging from the latest fashion to beliefs about the nature of the universe – certain works of art seem to have a power to preserve their vitality, and to escape consignment to what André Malraux aptly terms ‘the charnel house of dead values’.[1]  In effect they seem to have a power to transcend time.

In a sense, all this is a statement of the obvious: as I say, the idea that a great work of art ‘endures’ is so familiar to us that we rarely give it a second thought. Yet once we begin to reflect on the proposition, it is surely a perplexing one – a proposition that puzzles the understanding.  How, after all, could certain works ‘transcend time’? What precisely does that mean? What property could such works possess that might bring that about? How does it operate? And what significance might we place on this apparent power to defy the vicissitudes of time?

We are not, of course, the first to have wondered about the temporal nature of art and it is useful, I think, to remind ourselves of the leading ideas on the subject that our Western cultural inheritance has bequeathed to us. 

Perhaps the most influential idea owes its power, if not its origins as well, to the Renaissance.  How was it possible, Renaissance minds asked themselves, that the rediscovered works of Greece and Rome – forgotten for a thousand years and more – seemed suddenly radiant with life, as if, somehow, they had defied the passage of time? What power did these works possess that could make such a thing possible?  The answer the Renaissance gave has echoed down the centuries and is still very much part of our intellectual heritage. The works of Antiquity, like those that the Renaissance artists were themselves bringing into being, were, it was said, possessed of a demiurgic power called “beauty”, and beauty, like the goddess Venus so often chosen as its supreme representative, is “immortal”. The works of Antiquity, like the paintings of a Botticelli or a Raphael, were all works of “art” — a term on which the Renaissance was conferring a new significance — and each of them bore triumphant witness to the power of beauty to accede to an eternal realm, impervious to the corrosive powers of time. This thinking was not just the preserve of a handful of intellectuals.  It had all the force of a reigning ideology — as powerful and as widely accepted as, say, Marxist and post-Marxist explanations of history have been for large numbers of people over much of the past century.  We find the idea again and again in Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, and it was still very much alive in the mid-nineteenth century when Théophile Gautier could write in his poem called ‘Art’:

All things pass.  Sturdy art

Alone is eternal;

The sculpted bust

Outlives the State.[2]

The question that confronts us today is whether this explanation of the temporal nature of art remains satisfactory and, if not, what account might we put in its place. Given that, as we have said, art appears to possess some special capacity to endure – to transcend time – and given also that we are looking for an explanation and that we’re not, like much contemporary aesthetics, simply turning our backs on the problem, do we think that the traditional explanation I have outlined – the notion that art is beauty, and beauty is timeless – remains plausible for us today?  And if we don’t think that, what explanation might we now offer for the apparent power of art to transcend time?  How in short might we explain the temporal nature of art?

I believe the traditional explanation I have described is no longer viable and that there are at least three reasons why this is so.  I shall outline them briefly in increasing order of importance. 

First, the last hundred or so years has witnessed the progressive disintegration of the idea that art is the manifestation of ideal beauty – an idea which, as I have said, has been a mainstay of the traditional explanation.  The notion of a beau idéal began to lose plausibility in the early decades of the twentieth century when the category ‘art’ started to encompass works which no longer seemed to have any connection with such an ideal — that is, when the boundaries of art began to extend beyond Raphael, Titian and their post-Renaissance successors to take in the worlds of (for example) Pre-Columbian gods and African masks, modern artists such as Picasso, and pre-Renaissance Western art such as Romanesque sculpture or medieval paintings such as the Isenheim Altarpiece.  I am aware that some contemporary advocates of the theory of beauty attempt expand the theory to accommodate works such as these, but the result is a concept of beauty that seems to me so vague and anaemic that it ceases to be of any explanatory value.

The second assault on the traditional explanation of the temporal nature of art has come from the modern fascination with the idea of history – a major focus of nineteenth century thought and one that, in many respects, we continue to share.  Though seldom stated plainly and simply, the threat this idea poses to the traditional explanation is perfectly straightforward.  If something is understood as timeless, then essentially it is exempt from change: it is unaffected by the vicissitudes of time and circumstance.  If art is timeless, it must therefore lie essentially outside history and beyond the reach of history’s explanatory categories.  Naturally enough, this implication is not at all congenial to theorists who place history at the centre of their thinking  and it was, for example, quite unacceptable to Hegel, who placed art firmly within the ambit of history and made it the subject of a teleology — ending, indeed, with art’s demise; and of course the assaults on the notion of timelessness continued with Taine and Marx and a series of post-Marxist thinkers up to the present day, all of whom have declined to exempt art from the historical process (however conceived).  Art, on the historical view of things, is fundamentally a creature of its times.  No less — and perhaps even more — than other human activities, it bears the marks of its times, and plays its part in strengthening or subverting dominant ideologies and social arrangements.  To locate its essential qualities in a changeless, ‘eternal’ realm removed from the flow of history would from this point of view, be an ‘idealist’ illusion, false to art and history alike.

The third attack on the traditional explanation seems to me the most damaging of all.

The nature of the problem quickly becomes clear if we take account of the full extent of the realm of art as we know it today.  “Art” today no longer simply means, as it did for several centuries, the works of the post-Renaissance West plus selected works of Greece and Rome.  Art today encompasses the works of a wide range of non-Western cultures, many ancient civilizations, and even Palaeolithic times stretching back to the caves of Lascaux, Chauvet and beyond.  In addition, it includes periods of Western art itself which were previously regarded with indifference, such as Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic.  How plausible does the notion of timelessness seem to be in this new and vastly enlarged world of art?  As we know, selected objects from non-Western cultures, such as Africa and Pre-Columbian Mexico, began to enter art museums (as distinct from historical or anthropological collections) in the early years of the twentieth century.  Yet as we also know — even if we tend to forget — the West encountered these cultures well before that, and for centuries regarded their artefacts as merely the botched products of unskilled workmanship, or as heathen idols or fetishes.  Moreover, even in their original cultural settings, these objects were not regarded as “art” in any sense of the word that resembles its meaning in Western culture today.  Their original function — their raison d’être — was religious or ritualistic: they were “ancestor figures” housing the spirits of the dead, or sacred images of the gods.  Thus, the transformation that has taken place over the centuries in cases such as these — from sacred object initially, then to heathen idol or “fetish”, and now to treasured work of art, is very difficult to square with any notion of “timelessness” — that is, immunity from change.  Time and change seem, on the contrary, to have played a very powerful role, not only in terms of whether or not the objects in question were considered important but also in terms of the kind of importance placed on them.  Art as we know it today seems, in other words, far less beholden to a quality of timelessness than, as André Malraux has argued, to a capacity for metamorphosis and resurrection – processes in which time has played an integral part.

A further example may perhaps help clarify the point.  The so-called “pier statues” of biblical figures on the exterior of the cathedral of Chartres are today considered to be among the treasures of world art, on a par with works such as the frescos at Ajanta, the best of Egyptian or Khmer sculpture, and the works of Donatello or Michelangelo.  Yet from Raphael onwards all medieval art, including Chartres, was regarded as inept and misconceived (hence, indeed, the term “Gothic”) and was consigned to an oblivion of indifference where it remained until the end of the nineteenth century.[3] The revival of medieval sculpture as art (as distinct from archeology or a picturesque adjunct to medieval history) only began in earnest in the early years of the twentieth century — that is, after some three centuries of indifference, not to say contempt.  This is not, of course, to condemn those centuries, or to claim that they somehow lacked an “appreciation” of art.  It is, however, to suggest, firstly, that art does not endure timelessly, but rather through a capacity to “live again” despite periods of oblivion; and, secondly, that these “renaissances” (of which the Renaissance was but one example) are inseparable from a metamorphosis – a change in significance.  The statues at Chartres were not “art” for the men and women of the thirteenth century for whom they were created, any more than Greek statues of Pallas Athene were “art” for the Athenians who brought offerings to her.  They were sacred figures — manifestations of a fundamental Truth — and to place them on equal footing as art with images from other civilizations (as I have just done) would, for their original beholders, have been unthinkable and doubtless a sacrilege.  These works have become “art” for us (and thus comparable with other works) through a metamorphosis in their signification, just as the fourteenth century renaissance of Graeco-Roman works, which were also originally embedded in religious belief, was accompanied by a similar metamorphosis.

***

Now, as I mentioned at the outset, the question of the temporal nature of art has been almost entirely neglected in contemporary aesthetics so it is very difficult to locate books or articles which address the issues I have been discussing.  To my knowledge, the only exception to this is the French writer and art theorist, André Malraux, for whom the relationship between art and time is a matter of central concern.  Much of what I have already said today is informed by Malraux’s theory of art but in the brief time remaining I would like to say a little more about his thinking on this matter.

Malraux’s firmly rejects the proposition that the temporal nature of art can be explained by the notion of timelessness, and one of the central themes of his theory of art is that art transcends time not because it is unaffected by the vicissitudes of time and circumstance, but through a process of metamorphosis in which time and change play an intrinsic and inevitable part.  If time had permitted I would have liked to provide a full explanation of this aspect of Malraux’s thinking showing how it emerges as a necessary consequence of the basic propositions on which his theory of art rests.  This is especially worth doing because some of Malraux’s commentators – E H Gombrich is a prime example – have claimed that he is not a systematic thinker but merely a purveyor of random insights, an opinion which, I believe, is demonstrably false.  Unfortunately, however, time will not permit the kind of in-depth explanation a refutation of that kind would require, so I thought I would confine myself to certain key propositions about the temporal nature of art that emerge from Malraux’s thinking and simply trust that you will accept my assertion that, like all other aspects of his thinking about art, they form part of one coherent, systematic theory.

As I have said, Malraux argues that art transcends time through a process of change – of metamorphosis.  To quote one of his formulations, he writes in the third volume of The Metamorphosis of the Gods, entitled L’Intemporel, that ‘Metamorphosis is the very life of the work of art in time, one of its specific characteristics.’[4]  What exactly does this mean?  One way of clarifying his position is to distinguish it from a very familiar claim about the interpretation of works of art with which it might perhaps be confused.  We have all no doubt encountered the idea that a particular work of art may be given different interpretations at different periods of time – that a play by Shakespeare, for example, can be interpreted in a variety of ways and that successive periods of history are likely to see it in different lights and discover different meanings in it.  Well, one might say, is this all Malraux is saying when he writes that metamorphosis ‘is the very life of the work of art in time’?  Is he simply rehashing this familiar truism?  The answer is an unequivocal no, because the similarity between this and Malraux’s position is purely superficial.  Malraux certainly accepts that different historical periods may discover different meanings in a work of art and perhaps regard it with varying degrees of importance – including, quite possibly, none at all.  But by itself, if we reflect on it, that familiar proposition tells us nothing specific about the temporal nature of art.  It is perfectly compatible, for example, with the claim, which is quite at variance with Malraux’s position, that the work of art is something whose nature is fixed ‘once and for all’; for one need only assume that different interpretations to which a work lends itself is a specific, fixed range of meanings that the artist, consciously or unconsciously, gave it at its moment of birth.  Malraux does not leave the matter unresolved in this way.  He is arguing that the work of art is something which, by its very nature – and not simply as a result of accidental circumstance – has a changing significance.  It is a domain of meaning that is inherently in a state of continual change.  ‘Metamorphosis’, he writes in The Voices of Silence, ‘is not an accident, it is the very law of life of the work of art.’[5] 

It follows then that a work’s significance at its moment of birth is only that – its original significance – and one that will, whether the artist knows it or not, inevitably disappear over time, to be replaced by another.  The work’s moment of creation, whatever effect it may then produce, and whatever function it may then perform (which in many cultures may not even be as ‘work of art’ as we have noted) is only a point of departure from which it sets out on a journey of metamorphosis.  Its nature is precisely that of an adventure launched onto the unknown seas of the human future : like an adventure, it is not proof against time and changing circumstance (as the concept of timelessness would require) and there may well be times when it fades into obscurity, possibly for centuries, even millennia.  But like an adventure, it is pregnant with possibility: unlike the mere historical object which fades into oblivion, it is capable of ‘living again’, albeit with a significance quite different from that which it originally possessed. 

Thus, a work may, for example, begin its life as a sacred object within a particular religious context – a Pharaoh’s ‘double’, for instance, placed in his mortuary chapel to receive the offerings of his subjects.  Subsequently, when the beliefs on which that significance depended have perished, the object may recede into obscurity, as did the works of Ancient Egypt for nearly two millennia, or as Byzantine art did after Giotto, or as Giotto himself faded from view for nearly three centuries after Leonardo and Raphael.  In such cases, it is as if the work inhabits, for a time, a kind of limbo in which it evokes at best indifference, at worst, contempt.  But unlike the mere historical object, it is capable of resurrection, and it returns to life if and when, with the passing of time and its own capacity for metamorphosis, it can re-emerge, but with a significance quite different from that which it originally possessed.  Thus the works of Ancient Egypt, Byzantium, and Giotto ceased in time to be sacred images, created for tomb, basilica, and chapel, and became, after periods of obscurity, ‘works of art’ in the sense that phrase has for us today.  Seen in this light, the destiny of any great work, Malraux argues, is inseparable from a dialogue – though at times a dialogue of the deaf – between the changing human present, and the work’s own, continually changing significance.  We recognise, he writes,

That if Time cannot permanently silence a work of genius it is not because the work prevails against Time by perpetuating its original language but because it constrains us to listen to a language constantly modified, sometimes forgotten – as it were an echo answering each century’s changing voice – and what the great work of art sustains is not a monologue, however authoritative, but an invincible dialogue.[6] 

One such dialogue which is very familiar to us is that which led to the revival of Greek and Roman art during the Renaissance, and Malraux’s explanation of the temporal nature of art allows us to see this event in a very different light from that in which it is conventionally portrayed.  Renaissance art, we are often told, was stimulated by the discovery of the works of Antiquity.  But what exactly does ‘discovery’ mean in this context?  Malraux asks.[7]  Traditional accounts sometimes give the impression that the works of Greece and Rome all vanished without trace after the decline of the Roman Empire until they unexpectedly came to light in Renaissance excavations.  But Greece and Rome had not disappeared – at least not physically.  For Byzantine and Romanesque Europe, however, the images on their ruined temples and monuments spoke of a profane world which Christian faith resolutely rejected.  Those images became important again – they were ‘discovered’ in the sense that counted – once they became part of a dialogue – that is, once their capacity for metamorphosis, and the response elicited from them by the emerging forms of the Renaissance, themselves progressively losing touch with the world of faith, gave them a voice again, although now speaking a language quite different from that which they had originally spoken.  In effect, therefore, Malraux’s notion of metamorphosis and dialogue stands traditional thinking about the Renaissance on its head.  ‘It is at the call of living forms’, he argues, ‘that dead forms are recalled to life.’[8]  ‘In art,’ he writes, ‘the Renaissance produced Antiquity quite as much as Antiquity produced the Renaissance.’[9]

The most dramatic example of such a dialogue has, of course, taken place in our own time which has seen the resuscitation, as works of art, of objects from the four corners of the earth and from the depths of ancient history and prehistory, large numbers from cultures in which the notion of art was quite unknown.  The significance of this unprecedented event, and the reasons why it occurred when it did, are explored at length in Malraux’s books on art and I could not hope to do justice to those matters today.  The key point once again, however, is that he sees this development in terms of dialogue and metamorphosis, resulting this time in what he does not hesitate to call ‘another Renaissance’,[10] recognising of course that the scope of our modern resuscitations dwarfs those of the Renaissance.

***

Malraux’s theory of art poses a series of major challenges to modern aesthetics, and there is much more to be said on that topic than I have covered today.  Among the many challenges, however, his explanation of the temporal nature of art stands out as one of the most striking and important.  As we have seen, the traditional explanations we have inherited simply do not account for the facts as we know them.  Art clearly does not live ‘eternally’, and nor is it swallowed up irrevocably, as a mere historical phenomenon, into ‘the charnel house of dead values’.  And neither of those explanations even begins to explain why, when resurrected, so many of the objects we today regard as art have assumed a significance quite different from that which they originally held – that a god or an ancestor figure, for example, has become ‘art’.  Malraux’s theory of art provides a solution to this problem.  He allows to see why art ‘conquers time’ – why we find (for example) Sumerian religious figures thousands of years old in our art museums (and not just as archaeological artefacts in history museums); yet at the same time he frees us from having to believe what now seems a manifest absurdity – that art is eternal. 

As I mentioned earlier, the question of the temporal nature of art has been pushed very much to the margins of modern aesthetics.  Indeed, the last major contribution to the topic was arguably that of Hegel who placed art firmly in the domain of history.  Broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have had to make do either with variations on Hegel – Arthur Danto is one example[11] – or with Marxist and post-Marxist accounts which, again, situate art essentially within the domain of history.  The other alternative has been the almost complete indifference to the question shown by contemporary analytic aesthetics.  Meanwhile, however, over the course of the past hundred years, and almost as if to mock the inadequacy of these explanations, art museums around the world have been filling up with objects from distant times and other cultures which seem to have escaped history (because, though long-forgotten, they have ‘come alive’ for us today) but which are self-evidently not timeless (because they have been resurrected after long periods of oblivion with significances quite different from those which they originally held).  In other words, art museums around the world have been filling up with objects whose very presence there poses the problem of the relationship between art and time in an acute and very conspicuous way. 

The outstanding value of Malraux’s contribution is not only that he recognises the pressing need to address this matter, but that he provides a solution that fits the facts as we know them.  He has given us a fundamentally new way of understanding the relationship between art and time, which, unlike the explanations bequeathed to us by our Western cultural heritage, makes sense of the world of art as we now know it.  His account of the temporal nature of art thus stands out as a landmark achievement in the theory of art.  It is no exaggeration, in my view, to describe his contribution in this area as revolutionary.

* In other words the external relation between art and time - the relation between art and the passing of time - with history in the broadest sense.

This paper was delivered at the annual conference of The Nordic Society of Aesthetics in Uppsala University, Sweden,  29 May to 1 June 2008. 

It outlines, in an abbreviated form, some of the arguments I advance in my book Art and Time.

Christ in Majesty, Moissac – Romanesque art

Thus, a work may, for example, begin its life as a sacred object within a particular religious context – a Pharaoh’s ‘double’, for instance, placed in his mortuary chapel to receive the offerings of his subjects.  Subsequently, when the beliefs on which that significance depended have perished, the object may recede into obscurity, as did the works of Ancient Egypt for nearly two millennia ...  But unlike the mere historical object, it is capable of resurrection, and it returns to life if and when, with the passing of time and its own capacity for metamorphosis, it can re-emerge, but with a significance quite different from that which it originally possessed.

Pharaoh Djoser – Third Dynasty

He allows to see why art ‘conquers time’ – why we find (for example) Sumerian religious figures thousands of years old in our art museums (and not just as archaeological artefacts in in history museums); yet at the same time he frees us from having to believe what now seems a manifest absurdity – that art is eternal.

Gudea, Prince of Lagash - Louvre