Temporal cubism

As I understand modern art history, cubism showed up in the early 20th century along with a whole flurry of revolutionary art movements, and rejected a static figurative stance: pictures didn’t have to look like their signified motifs — especially not the same view from everywhere on the canvas… the art movement deconstructs their motifs, breaking a scene or a composition up into parts, bits and pieces, different perspectives, and then glues them all together into a completely new view of the depicted scene.

Thus, for instance, Braque’s Candlestick and Violin that Wikipedia uses as the first illustration of cubism, has several bits and pieces that recognizably look like the holding cup of a candlestick, or like the shape of a violin, but the entirety of the painting outright refuses to stick to one perspective, to one view of the imagined scene.

I find myself thinking more and more about this aspect of cubism in these past few days. In particular, it strikes me that there is a temporal variant of this that almost all pictoral artists run into, and that might have interesting seeds of pictures to provide: as you draw or paint a scene, time goes by. As you go back to figure out details in parts of your canvas, time has passed since you started the picture, or that part.

Panta rei.
Unless you freeze time, time goes by as you work on capturing it.

Their drawings strive to capture a view of the dynamic and everchanging ocean surface in a frozen moment of time; but depending on their artistic methodology the captured image may very well utterly fail at capturing a single moment in time.

There is a number of ways to get around this:

1. Work from a photograph: if time is already frozen, time is frozen and you can capture it in your own hand. But then you leave the seeing to the camera, not the artist.
2. Work with subjects that do not change much: still life works fine — especially under controlled lighting. Models that hold the pose you ask for as long as you need it are close enough.
3. Avoid capturing reality: patch up a scene from your own fantasy instead. Possibly very very similar to the scene you are trying to capture; but with bits and pieces worked out separately and fused together by your composition… but then, that’s basically returning to the temporally cubist approach again.

Or we can embrace it and see where it leads us.

I am by far not the first to have thought this. Let me show you some examples. First off, Marcel Duchamp painted — inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s very early photography series Woman Walking Downstairs, the painting to our left here.

This painting takes on the cubist ideal of showing different views along the canvas — but there is a strong temporal component to Duchamp’s take on the cubist vision here.

Another example comes from photography.

Todd Webb photographed the above panorama in New York City in 1948. I saw this picture just a few weeks ago at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where it is part of an exhibition going on right now. Webb photographed a whole block of 6th avenue, capturing the block in 8 panels of silver oxides in gelatin. The text accompanying the display included a remark from the photographer that the picture had been difficult to make because of all the movement: cars driving past and people walking all had to either be entirely inside each frame, or outside, to avoid them being suddenly chopped off along the way.

Thus, Webb has embraced the cubist vision of deconstructing the subject, and produced his work with a purely temporal deconstruction. Each panel is taken at a different time, but they fuse together to show an entire scene that never actually existed all at once as depicted.

The more I explore this idea, the more I realize that bits and pieces of it are ubiquitous.

One might argue that time lapses perform a temporal cubism by the high-speed juxtaposition of different timestamps.

Scott McCloud, in Understanding Comics, discusses different ways to combine scenes into sequences to create comic art narratives. One of his observations is that one large and quantifiable difference between Western European and Japanese comic art traditions lies in the narrative techniques used — and the Japanese is by a very far margin more fond of a temporally cubist approach to building scenes: several disconnected but simultaneous scenes are depicted together to build a mood or set a stage in a way that is almost completely absent in European comic traditions. Even sticking with European art traditions, McCloud points out that sequences of events, pasted into the same frame, are commonly used in comic book art.

These temporally cubist approaches are also common when there are drastic changes to be depicted. When visiting Poland a while back, I saw pictures showing the same cityscape: before the world wars, after the WW2 bombings, and after their reconstruction, fitted on the same canvas.

I have not finished exploring these ideas, but they form inspiration for possible exploration directions. I wonder whether compressing a timelapse: not into compressing time to a shorter time, but by the temporally cubist approach of letting different parts of the canvas pick up different times would make for a good photographic art composition method?
Layer aligned images together and pick out one to dominate in any part of the canvas.

The more I think of it, the more examples I remember where similar things have already been done.
I should experiment myself, see what I can do.