How do contemporary artists suggest different understandings of time?

Use 4 artworks. Discuss at the end how art brings together aspects of brain, body
and world.

Intro
Because time can be understood and interpreted in an infinite array of ways, it
may be one of the most if not the most important aspect in arts. With that in
mind, contemporary artists are continuously suggesting different ways to
understand time, some embrace the ideas of deep time (1), in which time is
understood through arts as something that has been there from a time before
humans, before life itself, as fluid and infinite. In order to represent this fluidity
of time, artists often engage with materials that are taken from nature, such as
earth, trees, rocks. Other artists have suggested that time can be understood
from a phenomenological perspective (2). In other words, from how bodies
experience time around them rather than letting the brains do the hard work.
Other contemporary artists prefer to suggest that time can be understood as
been gendered (3 and 4) and as such they engage with political discourses
surrounding time. Their artworks may be heavily embedded with ideas of
feminism, sexism, social constructs or homosexuality, for example, all of which
suggest that the understanding of time may dependent on who we are as
individuals in a determined context.

Artwork 1.
With Spiral jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson, the artist made use of nature to
represent deep time, geologically, in a large scale. Located at the edge of the
Great lake in Utah, in Salt Lake City, this granite spiral sculpture can either be
seen from above or it can also be experienced as a walk-on process, a journey, in
which the viewer, fully immersed in it, is able to phenomenologically perceive
the passing of time as he or she takes a new step, looking either forward in time
or backwards, where he or she has just been. The work, fully embedded in
nature, is now part of the local ecology and it makes use of nature’s own
dynamics to “show itself off” through time. Through the spiral jetty, the viewer is
also able to experience and understand time from a cyclical perspective, not just
from a here-and-now experience: the spiral changes its appearance with each
new season and through the years: it has been observed to have been fully
immersed in water for many years and having emerged again fully covered in
white salt years later. This long period of change in the artwork epitomizes the
very own idea of multi-temporality, which relates the artwork to the concepts of
deep time, earth’s own unique fluid clock.
Artwork 2.
Gonzales Torres (untitled) 1991.
Said to represent the artist and his partner, who died of AIDS years earlier,
Untitled is an installation that involves two identical clocks that are placed side
by side, in perfect synchrony on a blank wall. The work, although simple in a
physical sense, brings us to very complex ideas about the understanding of
materiality and the materiality of time, the very essence of how time is measured
and processed. The artist challenges us to think about how our own bodies
perceive and experience the passing of time when starring at these two identical
clocks. Some have reported that instead of seeing two clocks, after starring at the
artwork for a few minutes, were convinced to have seen only one, unified clock
and not two. With Torre’s artwork, the viewer has been challenged to maybe
look at time for what it actually is: a mental construct that our bodies do not
quite understand and process, but only feels.

Artwork 3.
Ana Mendieta , silueta works, 1973-8. While also dealing with ideas of deep, fluid
time, the artist engages with concepts of gender to help the viewer understand
time. Time in Mendieta’s Silueta Works references the role of women in the deep
history of the humans; it references and corrects history, as a male construct by
placing a distinctive female figure in nature. For the artist, earth, mud, rocks and
other natural resources function as the very canvas for her works. Here we have
an artist who engages with ideas of feminism to tackle issues regarding the
dominant discourses on man, mankind, human race as being gendered, male.

Artwork 4.
Eleanor Antin, Carving (1973)
Carving is a series of photographic works by artist Eleanor Antin. During 32 days,
the artist dieted and took one black and white photo of her nude body per day, as
a critique on current social pressures on the female figure, the ideas of beauty
and of idealistic body shapes. Directly dependent on time, carving is a heavily
feminist conceptual artwork that echoes Greek sculpturing methods, in which
the artist would carve out the excess material in order to reveal idealist shapes
for their female figures. Here we are able to perceive the passing of time by
looking at the body changes that were registered in the photographs. In a sense
then, the artist is not only ‘carving her body’ for a specific agenda but she is also
demonstrating the passage of time through her body. in other words, she uses
her own body as a clock to demonstrate the passing of 32 days. By carving away
fat, the artist was the sculptor and the sculpture of her work and it could only
have been made possible by the passing of time. One cannot represent time
without an ego (a point of reference) at the same time that the intention of her
work (to physically represent the social pressures on women’ s physique) would
not have been made possible without the passing of time. It takes days for a
person to actually lose weight. By observing the weight loss throughout the
photographs, the viewer is able to perceive that time is actually passing.

Conclusion