An Ephemeral, but Eternal Moment
Elisa Anzellotti
Introduction
This essay deals with the topic of the particular “revolution” of time (and space) create by a dancing body. The question of time is central when talking about the work of art and especially when dealing with problems related to memory / conservation. It is interesting try to apply at the dance the esthetical reflection, that born when speak about of intangible cultural heritage conservation’s (Anzellotti 2016).
On argument conservation/restoration it is normal to refer to Cesare Brandi, the father of restoration. He wrote the Theory of Restoration in 1963, a masterpiece translated in many languages. Here he delineates the esthetic and philosophical foundations of restoration defined firstly as the action of knowing the work of art and secondly as an action of conservation of the material to the work of art to allow its survival across time. The restoration must:
aim at the re-establishment of the potential unit of the artwork, if this is possible without committing a false art or a false history, and without deleting all traces its passage across time (Brandi 2000: 8).
The time is one of the first arguments discussed by Cesare Brandi. He references many philosophers, such as Henry Bergson, Hans George Gadamer, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Henri Focillon. We must not forget how the beginning of the twentieth century assisted to changes, and a new attention to the concept of time, especially after Einstein's theory of relativity, as according to which the constant, progressive and linear time becomes relative, a measure depending on relative speeds of reference systems. To see the world is to observe a world built from one’s own experiences, which organize it and order it (Heinz von Foester 1982).
The arts, indisputable time machines, allow to amplify this discourse, because with them other times and spaces come into play and bring new and different meanings. The image offered by Focillon (1972) to describe the temporal stratification in the work of art appears then extremely evocative. He speaks of the work of art as a polyphonic stratification of time. In this case time is to be considered as a changing series of durations, a multi-faceted and stratified polyphony of the unequal present (1). A work of art is in the present, but it is also a polyphony of the past transmitting to us. Different sounds that together create something new; the work of art is not the result of an instantaneous process, but rather of a series of experiments, the idea of succession, providing different conceptions of time, is necessary.
Then it is not strange to do a deep reflection on time dealing whit restoration. Cesare Brandi (1977: 21) speaks about of three interdependent levels of temporality in the work of art: duration, interval, instant. The duration is connected to the creation of the work by the artist; the interval, is the period of time interposed between its formulation and reception, which takes place in the consciousness of the observer; the instant is linked to the “fulgurazione”/ “flash of intuition” through which the work leads to consciousness (Carboni 2004: 151).
The question on the intuition of the instant is central in order to analyze the time of perception of dance.
The time of perception of dance
In order to understand the concept of intuition of the instant, in relation to the time of perception of dance, I need to quote St. Augustine and his reflections on historical time and memory. He said:
In our minds lives the present of the past, which is memory, the present of the present, which is intuition, and the present of the future, that is expectation (1999: libro XII, cap. XX.26). So intuition as present of the present is deeply connected to the Latin etymology of the term in tueor, i.e. “enter inside through gaze”.
This definition is perfect to describe the time of perception of dance. In fact the instant when I perceive the dance, is a present moment that I live, a unique ephemeral moment, condensed in a present, that arrives in the consciousness in no time, connected to the suspended time of dance, an instant out of time, where many other times create something different, where the subject creating this action is central.
The perception of a performance involves two "subjects": a spectator and a work of art. The viewer, has his own eyes tied to the time and place where he belongs. In the moment of perception, then the time should be considered both as duration and as a historical period, thus including its cultural context and heritage associated with it. A reflection on viewing is fundamental because this changes with the time, place and cultural context (Michael Baxandall (1994) talk about to the “period’s eyes” (2).
With dance we have a particularity: the work of art coincides with the performer / dancer. He is carrier of his own time and space, his own experience as a person. Furthermore, in the time of dance, the dancer is a body in action creating another space, which is a body in action in a defined/given space, which, in turn, is reshaped by the "dancing space".
When you dance you create a "double relativity", because the body that appears is also the body of a defined present, of a hic et nunc / here and now that counts for its ability to interpret the present, to make it concrete and obvious (Volli 2001: 29) (3). The dancer is the master of illusion and manages to rid the body of the laws of physics, in particular of the concept of time. «Dance is an art of space and time, the purpose of the dancer is to make you forget that» (Cunningham 2011: 161) (4). He is the prince of conjunctions of fortuitous events leading to the happening of the dance, «such as the formation of a rainbow» (Dupuy 1993: 45). A series of moments adding up to a magical "suspended time and dilated space" dance, which focuses on the intuition of the instant.
We must never forget that no dancer will ever dance the same dance twice in the same way, we must think of the panta rei of Heraclitus. Unlike other arts, that still live a unique moment, dance also includes the variants of space and instrument / Body Dancer. There is therefore a superposition of different times, i.e. those of the viewing and of the life experiences of those who take part in it, the viewer, dancer and their conjunction, witnessing a multiplication and an interweaving of these relationships that bring different times and spaces into play.
This multiplication of times and spaces that are created with the subjects, required for the realization of an art performance, are to be kept in mind when analyzing the time of the dance.
The suspended time of dance: the ephemeral but eternal moment
Dance is one of those arts that lives in the moment in which it reveals, in an unrepeatable moment, Hic et nunc / here and now. To this hic et nunc are connected three concepts – fantasmata, astanza, aura - that will be discussed further on. Now I will analyze the key point of the time of dance: the suspended time, the single moment, the particular interaction with space creating another dimension.
The time of dance is a suspended time, i.e. the time of the future manifested in the expectation. There is a conjunction of factors, of which the dancer is the main creator. However, it is necessary to consider also space, a necessary element in this discourse on time. The space of dance is:
a poetic space of absolute formal harmony where the body - that is the place where life is manifested by incessant metamorphosis – creates the experiences of himself and models forms gradually vanishing from its visual metaphors: it transforms, indeed builds space-time where it moves defying gravity and bringing to the meeting between symmetry and strength, rhythmic pattern and lightness (Carboni 2007: 61).
Dance is, therefore, an art that, unlike others, moves simultaneously across space and time and thanks to its peculiar ‘game of the instant’, it creates a new time and another space. The work in this case is not the subject, but the action. In this way a game of overlapping is created, which can be perceived in the moment of dance’s perception, identifiable with the intuition of the instant. Special overlaps are created from different spaces and times occurring during that dance, which we could summarize in the hic et nunc, this ephemeral moment representing a fragment of eternity, where the present, past and future overlap.
In order to describe this particular form of time in dance, which somehow gives a particular aura to the entire work, as previously stated, one considers the intuition of the single moment, since time does not pass during the exaiphnes (instant): time not flows, but pouring out. Kierkegaard defines the instant as the encounter between time, as an everlasting sequence, and eternity (the continuous present), being a removed sequence (Kierkegaard 1965: 101-115). So the exaiphnes appears as an atom of eternity, a fragment of something not whole (Carboni 2007: 66).
The time of dance is a fleeting time running towards its death, living in the moment in which it manifests. But this death should be almost read in “religious” terms, as a transition towards eternal life. Despite the term “death” might suggest a negative connotation, I focus more on its highlighting the uniqueness of the artistic act. All arts are unique, but while paintings, sculptures etc. leave a physical/material print, music and singing may be recorded and annotated in a specific or universal form and also be performed in playback, this cannot happen for dance. The space and body variants cause the most differences in relation to the other arts. My aim is not the one of favoring one art in disadvantage of the others, but rather of underlining how dance has presented significant conservation issues, today partially solved with the help of videos.
It is fundamental to contextualize this discourse within the dichotomies of present times. This allows a better understanding of the reactions of art and its anomalies. The same apparently contradictory concept of the eternal ephemeral assumes a different meaning in this context.
In a world that has lost certainties, where the values considered untouchable, indeed eternal, have vanished, the only irrefutable certainty (for now) is the obvious fact that the ephemeral passes rapidly, changes. So arts become ephemeral because this is the only chance of their eternity. One should intend the eternity of the ephemeral in this sense (a philosophical sense as stressed by Kierkegaard, or maybe - more provocatively- religious?). The change allowing survival and adaptation to the current time, a suspended moment concentrating all times and for this reason eternal, time assumes a different dimension, leaves time itself and therefore becomes eternal.
The ephemeral is also defined pure aura or pure immobilized fragment of time. The ephemeral is an art of time and should be differentiated from the instant as “breaking of times” in the Aristotelian meaning; it consists in welcoming and accepting the unpredictable as it is. The ephemeral is not time, but its vibration becoming sensible (Buci-Glucksmann 2003: 15, 26).
The ephemeral is a passage, a modulation of a becoming to pick up, in its arise and in its "right time", the kairos (5) of the Greeks. The Kairòs of the Greeks - in contrast with the kronos, the linear flowing of time - is the time of the moment-event, the opportunity to catch, of unheard concentration and compression, enclosing in itself the past, present and future, breaking and confusing the linear chronological order of time. This concept will be adopted by Benjamin in the Theses on the philosophy of history through the concept of Jetztzeit, the “now time” conceived as a messianic arrest of the happening (Carboni 2004: 152).
The eternal ephemeral, is only a surface contradiction in light of what has been stressed, an oxymoron that can translate into a striking image, the one used by Georges Didi Huberman (2005/2006: 37) opening an article on the dance space: L'espace danse. He begins with the discourse on the dance space describing the feelings that one has looking at a star in the night sky. Flickering light, fixed, eternal, but perhaps already dead, since we know that the stars that are illuminating our present could have exploded for years earlier than can be remembered. So what are the eternal stars, which, however, may be just the architects of this illusion?
Illusion of something that looks to its death and, at the same time, thanks to this unique moment fascinates us.
Dance, queen of ephemeral art, lives on this ephemeral eternal game, the game of the single moment / instant, created by its suspended time and expanded space, the hic et nunc.
Fantasmata - Astanza - Aura
We can condense this hic et nunc into a suspended image that is created in our minds (6). This particular moment draws three concepts that are well suited to this instant of suspension: fantasmata, astanza and aura (Anzellotti 2016: 26-39).
We can find the concept of fantasmata in a dance code written in the fifteenth century in Italy for the Este court, the De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi of Domenico da Piacenza and it has been significantly discussed (7). We could define it as a particular moment of perception of dance, that special "pause" that virtually contains the memory of past, present and future of the whole choreographic scene. A suspension from one step to another, as if our mind, thanks to these moments, managed to break into images that follow the action perceived. Suspended time and space where we could reconnect the discourse of "power and action" of Aristotle, because at that suspended time one is in power of completing an action. In my opinion there is a relationship between the concept of fantasmata and astanza: both are two temporal suspensions binding to the memory formation of an action that is perceived through the gaze (Anzellotti: 2016).
Astanza is a word created by Brandi and corresponds to a phase of perception of the work of art (8), a moment of flash of intuition, discussed earlier in this paper. The astanza represents a specific aspect of art: that epiphanic presence, the image of a sui generis reality; it is an intrinsic quality of art transcending existence and time and conforming to an unchanging eternity. The temporality of astanza condenses into a hic et nunc, an eternity which is current participation consciousness-opera (Diodato 2006: 51-52). Astanza is the instant where an artistic expression – «the pure reality of art» (Brandi 1970: 55) (9) - comes to consciousness, condensing into an image, which can also be, as in the case of poetry, music or dance, takes the form of something indefinable. The presence of an absence, to manifest side in shadow of the world, assuming a figure of something not figurable (De Luca Pina 2006: 212).
There are therefore obvious commonalities between astanza - fantasmata, i.e. an instant appearing in an ephemeral moment, a suspended image that is manifested in a particular time and place - hic et nunc. To the latter Benjamin relates the concept of aura. For Benjamin (1977: 70) the aura is « a unique interweaving of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance to the it neighbor may be » (10); therefore a notion that condenses a number of properties relevant to the work of art: uniqueness, authenticity, authority, constraint to its here and now, belonging to a tradition. The lack of these qualities, through the work of technical reproduction processes, means the loss of its aura. In contemporary art we increasingly see the shift of the aura towards the author - as in the case of ‘ready made’ of Duchamp, even if just an act of protest – rather than a denial of this aura. This corresponds to a response of the arts to the changes of the present era. In fact today we see a series of upheavals caused by several factors including globalization. Marc Augè well explains this in a text, with a very eloquent title, What happened to the future? From non-places to no time, we live in a kind of eternal present because the speedups are likely to overwhelm the future and make it the past before one can achieve it. We are in an era where there is no longer the here, everything is now (Augè 2009; Virilio 2000).
These speedups and instability lead us to relate past, present and future, which are conventionally used to mark time, as follows: the past is the time of memory / archive, this is a fluid time, because it still has not established a form, until this has not materialized in a past act, and the future is seen as a suspended moment that runs towards its definition, which becomes the past even before transiting to the present. So today, the concept of space and time has changed. As observed by Nelly Delay (2004: 39), some physicists are working on atomicity of duration, which implies a discontinuous time and a space time in 5 dimensions (4 of space and one of time) and one should approach in a different way the concepts of contingency, uncertainty, instability.
Regarding those spatial-temporal distortions a strong reaction of the art is normal, that is more and more expressed with performance and often looks to its disappearance without allowing its preservation. Often there is a voluntary choice of the artist to not preserve the work (11). In some cases we can find the possibility of reenactment, that seems a good response to the statement of Benjamin «lately and more widespread, the life of original is unfolding in ever renewed form» (2007: 10) (12). In this case the eternal is not to be considered as what remains the same, but what changes (Badiou 2011: 206). The only certainty, facing the collapse of the immutable - those alleged eternal values such as God etc. (Severino 1972) - is change. This trend was already identified by Charles Baudelaire in the “Painter of modern life” (1863), where he wrote that the modernity of art consisted in its being something ephemeral, so irreducibly contingent, along with something eternal, and therefore immutable.
For this reason, it is so important to live the moment, something that new technologies challenge… New technologies tend to overturn the relationship between spectator and artwork - especially if performative - and to remove the importance to the event in a dual way. The first is through technical reproducibility, for which, besides the exhaustive discourse by Benjamin on arts, stands also the fact that we are free to rewatch whenever we want and wherever we are anything, making us almost feel like owners of time. We have lost the value of living the present. By living it we are participants of the moment itself. The other way of emptying the relevance of the event is the current trend of living a virtual present, because we are more appealed towards taking pictures and filming and therefore living the present only with the purpose of documenting, in order of having evidence to share, being in this way passive spectators of a lived moment. One becomes a passive identity of a memory that has not even been lived, rather than actor of the same memory. It is therefore relevant to locate this discourse within the social-cultural context, because it implies several variants.
Conclusion
I can summarize in these few lines the key points of the reflection on the time of dance.
The moment of perception of dance is identifiable with the intuition of the instant. So with the art of dance I have the intuition of the instant because the present moment that I live, which is a unique ephemeral moment, is intertwined with the time of dance, which is a suspended time (the time of the future that manifests itself in waiting). The moment I perceive the dance, which takes the form of a "floating image", marked by a constituent rhythm, it produces the memory, then the present moment becomes a past time.
The subjects creating and living the moment are fundamental and it is important to consider the social and cultural context.
It is therefore clear when speaking of art, and even more of dance, that it is necessary to approach the concept of time in a new way, different from the historical time. It is becoming a Hegelian or unitary and global vision of history; there are conflicts, topicality, earliness and delays. It is a mix between the fluid and indistinct nature of Bergson's durée (1970: 1395-1396; 1996), the spiral of time of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1996) (13), the concepts of space and time relativity of Albert Einstein (2005). Henry Bergson speaks of time as length, as an incessant flowing, not a sequence of moments but rather a simultaneity in which the borders between present, past and future are lost. So no single moments exist in time, but their continuous and inarticulate flowing, lived in their actual length and in every person’s consciousness, where psychic conditions happen without coexisting.
Gadamer underlines how the present existence is influenced by a series of stratified knowledges, so every interpretation is conditioned by our historical prejudices.
With Einstein time becomes relative, from 1905 with the article Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper (On the Electro-dynamics of Bodies in Movement), the restricted relativity, followed in 1915 by the Theory on general relativity. Until Einstein’s theory on relativity, restricted and general relativity, the spectator conceived the time as absolute and independent.
In this context, we see dance as a dynamic system, trans-historical, inter-incorporations and excorporations. It is necessary to understand dance not only as something that passes in between (through time and space), but also as something that passes around (in the middle and through the bodies of the dancers, spectators, choreographers) and also as something that, again, re-turns around (Lepecki 2016).
This is crucial when one reflects on dance conservation issues, as well as the restoration of works of art, basic acts so that art can survive the centuries and always re-actualize. In this view the same re-enactment (literally re-putting into action the performance) may be seen as a peculiar time machine, bringing us to a different universe. Not by chance I will recall that this reflection on the time of dance started from the question on the memory of dance and its conservation.
In conclusion, considering the many new times and spaces that are created with dance and the subjects that allow its existence - the dancer and the audience - we could imagine the art of dance as a special time machine, which, however, does not move forward and back in time, namely linear time, but allows us to travel across a myriad of parallel universes (14).
Luglio 2019
1) Reflecting on this, I came across the concept of “policronia”, term created by an anthropologist, Edwars T. Hall (1976), to distinguish two types of culture. I consider interesting like these theories do not take into consideration the times of art that, between other, are one of the greatest expressions of a culture. However, I think that, with another meaning, it could well adapt to this multitude of created times.
Luglio 2019
1) Reflecting on this, I came across the concept of “policronia”, term created by an anthropologist, Edwars T. Hall (1976), to distinguish two types of culture. I consider interesting like these theories do not take into consideration the times of art that, between other, are one of the greatest expressions of a culture. However, I think that, with another meaning, it could well adapt to this multitude of created times.
2) On relationship between time and image see also: Didi-Huberman Georges, 2007. Here he said: «sempre davanti ad un’immagine ci troviamo di fronte al tempo» (2007: 11); here there is a complex dissertation on temporality, image and visual experience.
3) Let us remember that human is identical to time. «La temporalizzazione dell’uomo, quale si attua attraverso una mediazione di una società, è uguale ad una umanizzazione del tempo. Il movimento incosciente del tempo si manifesta e diventa vero nella coscienza storica» (Debord, 2008: p. 125).
4) «La danse est un art de l’espace et du temps. Le but du danseur est de le faire oublier ».
5) http://www.dombis.com/info/CBG_Les_spirales_du_temps.pdf (traduzione dell’autore). On this concept Christine Buci Glucksmann develops its ephemeral philosophy, see Buci-Glucksmann 2003.
6) Everybody thinks through images. When I perceive the dance in my mind an image is created that produces memory (on this argument see Aristotle, Plato, but also Candel 2012: 35-42). This image is a "floating image", marked by a constituent rhythm. Dance is feasible in an endless succession of images (which has many things in common with cinema or photography, not by chance attracted to the concept of movement from their origin), which are "its plastic over time", of which the externalization lies in the definition of rhythm (Brandi 1992: 35). Rhythm, as claimed by Laurence Cornu, is perceived as an instant "out of time"(Brandi 1977: 21), a time "waiting", a carefree time of all games, a time within another time (Carboni 2004: 151).
7) For a study of the code – today at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, f. it. 972 – see: Procopio 2014, and Pontremoli 2011.
8) Brandi 1998: 70 e ss. In Teoria generale della critica (1974) we can find the most completely and articulated discussion of the concept of astanza.
9)See also Carboni 2004 : 39.
10) On the concept of ‘aura’ in Benjamin (Benjamin 2012); in general on the topic ‘aura’ see the special number: Di Giacomo - Marchetti 2013.
11) Many studies are on the Problem of Contemporary Art Conservation and aesthetic reflections on this topic, See eg.: Martore 2014; Rinaldi 2008; Breuil– Dazord 2013.
12) Baudelaire 1991: 9-21.
13)Here there is the reflection on the choice, very important when speaks about conservation.
14)This idea of art as a time machine derive from a convention where I spoke of the dance’s time: «L’Art machine à voyager dans le temps», UHA – Mulhouse, Institut de recherche en Langues et Littératures Européennes – ILLE (EA 4363), Campus Illberg, Maison de l’Université, Salle du Conseil, 22-25 Marzo 2017.
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