6 / the three times of art 39

Transcription

1 6 / the three times of art In which art s chief means of ordering itself as an experience, though highly spatialized, turns out to be temporal. But, time for art is not a matter of normal clock or calendar time. Art draws upon the human race s extensive experience as hunter-gatherers, when for nearly 500,000 years (a con ser va tive estimate) time was divided into venatic periods devoted to the actual hunt, festal periods of communal celebration of the spoils of the hunt, and forensic periods of refl ection, story telling, tracking, and dreaming. Venatic, festal, and forensic time got hard wired into the psyche, so that even our modern experiences require these as a framework for their operation. Learn how these forms of time originated, how they guided the use of signs, and how they still operate as genres of meaning and events. TIME, ST. AUGUSTINE SAID, was like air. It was all around us, and therefore it was impossible to step back from it to form a definition. Time is asso ci at ed most commonly with the instruments we have to measure it. We think of clocks as time, but perhaps before the age when these were the accurate in stru ments we know them to be today, this would have been a laughable metaphor. Today, we know they are ac cu rate only in a limited sense. The 20th century is the age of Einstein, that is, an age that began with the disconcerting knowledge that all weights and mea sures were relative, and that any clock is only as good as the universe that surrounds it. Sounds OK to most of us, not plan ning to make any trips that far abroad, but there are other lim i ta tions to technical definitions of time. The most obvious is that actual clock length of time is a poor gauge of what time is like to us in actual experience. Time flies when we re having fun, and creeps by during all unpleasant ex pe ri enc es. Then, there is the matter of quality, which clocks don t measure at all. There are good times and bad times. There are Miller times. There are the times of our lives. The time of art is quite special. When we go into a movie theater or concert hall, we give up our normal sense of time and enter into an experience where timing has special poetic functions. The most common expression, having to do with watch ing films, is that the director purposefully paces the audience by making something unexpectedly slow or fast. Taking control of the time sense is the first and perhaps most important order of the day, artistically. It s something like riding a horse, where it is important to give firm and clear orders so the horse doesn t take the upper hand, if that is the right expression. We know of cases where timing is controlled, but not for artistic purposes. Commercial television broad- casting is carefully timed to optimize the pre sen ta tion of advertising, and the result is that we come to expect this sort of pace in other works of art. It is difficult these days to get audiences to sit through plays, carefully study paintings, or come to sym pho ny concerts, because they have been used to short in jec tions of entertainment with frequent shifts back to the reality of commercial exchange. Television has been in the family home since the late fifties. Only three or so generations have been sub ject to its tutelage, yet there are evident signs of warp ing in our sense of time. What of other, more prolonged influences? Have they gotten erased, or do they still linger within the deeper interior of our cells? Looking at our species as a whole, there is an interesting logarithmic phenomenon. While we re gard the past few decades as the most important ones, and certainly ones filled with rapid change, we tend to for get that, comparatively speaking, the past decades the past centuries even are nothing but a final coat of paint on a thick wall of time. How long has West ern humankind been modern? Depending on the defi ni tion of that term, we might say 50, 100, or 500 years. If we take the ex tend ed use of electronic com mu ni ca tions as a measure, 50. If we use urbanized economic patterns and the stratification of society as the mark, then 100. If being modern is an attitude towards knowl edge, nature, and society, then we might look to the Enlightenment (17c. to 18c.) as a beginning of the modern. So, taking the largest figure available, 500 years, to what is that to be compared? How, long, for ex am ple, have we been human? The marker is con tin u al ly pushed back by an thro pol o gists. Most re cent ly, re search ers working in Ethiopia have discov ered a num ber of fos sil ized re mains of in di vid u als 6 / the three times of art 39

2 that suggests that hu mans could have been around for some 4.5 million years. That s enough time, one would think, to acquire a few in del i ble habits. Even if one present day industrial revolution Athenian democracy uses the ice ages as a mark er and looks at a pe ri od where culture was rel a tive ly sta ble, we have a period of 500,000 years to compare to our paltry 500. first appearance of humanoids last ice age Putting it comparatively, the kind of life we take to be normal has been normal, in hu man species terms, for less time spent as hunter-gatherers mixed than one hundredth of one per cent! That means that, on the ruler of time, our life-style counts for less than.0012 of an inch. This means that, to get a per spec tive on our sense of time, we must not only pay at ten tion to the influence of television, but to the mil lion-times more pro longed influence of everything else. Everything else in this case is, quite simply, hunting and gath er ing: a way of staying alive that de pends on direct exploitation and consumption of the environment, limited and temporary eco nom ic spe cial iza tion, and few fixed settlements. This text is not the place to come for a detailed description of prehistory. We are, however, in ter - est ed in the kind of time that is associated with hunting and gathering. We will be limited to de scrib ing only the largest categories, the ones with the biggest differences and the most striking signatures. venatic, forensic, and festal time hunter displacement (the hunt as chase) venatic time is goal oriented hunted The word venatic comes from the goddess Venus. Like Diana in later mythic times, she presided over the hunt. Venatic is the adjective that means of the hunt. It s a good word to apply to the most obvious influence that hunt ing-gathering exerted over our human sense of time, the time of the hunt. What kind of time is venatic time? That depends in large part over what kind of animals are being hunted, and in this case, we use the evidence of cave paint ings, archaeological digs, and other stuff to infer that our ancestors were interested in big game such as antelopes, deer, and other ruminants. The logic was that these an i mals traveled in large herds, could be marginally do mes ti cat ed, and, when domesticated, produced milk as well as meat. The hunt of ru mi nants involved a big pay off, so it was essential that hunt ers did some plan ning. Here s where the time thing came in. Draw a straight line. On the left end, put a dot la beled human ; slight ly to the right of it a dot la beled ru mi nant. The dots are go ing to move to the right (in your imag i na tion), but the ru mi nant dot is go ing to move fast er. By the time the human dot is in the mid dle, the ru mi nant dot is prob a bly off the right end of the line, en joy ing a cool 40 the art 3 idea

3 graze before sun set. So, the logic of be ing a hunt er is en tire ly mixed up with tim ing. The straight-line kind of time, the one we used, will al ways leave the hunt er behind. The hunters used a tracks clues signs SURPLUS Forensic time looks to the past and calculates a future kind of track ing that allowed them to in ter sect the mo tion of herds rather than to fol low it, al ways be ing left be hind. By taking an an gu lar approach, they had a hope of get ting to a herd, even of cre at ing some traps in wait for them. The an gu lar ap proach in clud ed such things as stand ing down wind, to avoid being detected, noting the behavior of other animals in the area, and being fa mil iar with the grazing patterns of the prey. The resulting line of travel of the human hunters and their prey would thus be V-shaped rather than I-shaped. V for venatic, that s easy. The hunt ers start out on one wing of the V, the ruminant herds on the other. Near the apex, when the hunt ers have been noticed, things get fran tic, and the hunters have to be prepared with Festal time rules when multiple levels are created weap ons, ploys, fences, and what ev er it takes to get meat on the table. The wings are drawn out and sometimes purposefully de layed; the in ter sec tion is accelerated. I n t e r e s t i n g thing is that the hunt can be taken as the origin of the two other principal forms of time. These two are obvious derivatives of the hunt, so it is not surprising. The first has to do with the forensic or tracking part of the hunt, the time spent looking for clues, following leads, tracking animals on the basis of their past evidence. Today, we use the word fo ren sic to describe courtroom activity. That s because perhaps we spend more time with lawyers than ru mi nants, an unfortunate trade-off of modernity. The word still has the same logic. We look to the past to find evidence of what hap pened, and we use this evidence as a guide to present action. We require proof and use rules of evidence, just as the ancient hunters did. The other form of time, the last in our triad, is derived from the frenzy of the intersection between man and beast, festal time. In terms of human behav ior, this extends to the time after the kill, when the food is shared with the whole group, and when the sharing process reinforces the sol i dar i ty of the group. During feasts, the stories of the hunt are retold, along with stories of other hunts. Genealogies of fam i lies are re vis it ed through memories of great hunters, and some great gatherers, too. The festal category also covers the op po site phe nom e non, the fast. When food is rare, so ci et ies have ritualized ways of in sti tu tion al iz ing hunger so that panic doesn t set in. They al ter nate pe ri ods of fast and feast to provide a min ia ture of the sequence of the hunt s paucity and privations ver sus the glut fol low ing the kill. Just as the hunt requires the hunters to adopt differ ent rules and social structures based on dif fer enc es in expertise of the group members, the feast/fast cycle institutionalizes role-shifts and crazy behavior. At Mardi Gras, for example, normally straight guys can wear dresses with panache. Church ladies can boogie. Fools can be kings. One of the many duties of art is to pro vide the means for humans to ex pe ri ence the world upside-down, without the risks usu al ly attendant on such an inversion. Festal time is time turned inside out, expanded and contracted to the ex tent that long and short no longer make any dif fer ence as ad jec tives. The feast/fast bring humankind to its most basic acts of self-definition, but the pro cess is ac com plished through play, mimicry, idiocy, and dancing. The whole human scene is visible through this festal lens, and that is why perhaps feasts survive even in modern so ci ety, long after the ruminants have been tagged and bagged. So, the basic category of time, laid down in antiq ui ty as a foun da tion to all other human per cep tions of time, is venatic, or hunt-related. From this, we extrapolate two other major temporal forms, the foren sic and the festal. Venatic, forensic, and fes tal time are all a part of the venatic, but it is easier to divide our concerns into issues dealing directly with the hunt, the trial, and the feast. modern times The real question is not so much what these an cient forms of temporality were but how, and in what form, they survive in our time consciousness today. To this, we can look to art, which specializes 6 / the three times of art 41

4 a footnote for your interest: For a detailed and fascinating discussion of the festal, read Mikhail Bakhtin s Rabelais and His World (translated from Russian in 1965). Rabelais was on the borderline between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His sen si bil i ties were with the Latin tradition and its intensive study of the classics, rhetoric, and philosophy. Into this he sowed French folklore, elements of the fool tra di tion, and dirty jokes known only to medical stu dents in Paris. The result was, as Bakhtin char ac ter iz es it, an exposition on the functions of the low er bodily stratum as an essential hygienic force, counterbalancing the ill-effects of over-in tel lec tu al iza tion. To maintain one s sense of bal ance, laughter is the key ingredient, and the Car ni val is the occasion for role-reversals as well as a general inversion of the world. For insight into the role of pro fes sion al clowns and fools in this public health program, see William Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptre, or Enid Welsford s classic study, The Fool. in pre serv ing old forms to contain new material. If we look at the practical domains of hunting, dining, and lit i ga tion, we note a consistent domination of the esthetic. Modern hunters with city jobs describe hunting in near-mythic terms. Cooking and dining are without a doubt the last domain of popular esthetic behavior that has not been identified as such but left to raw con sid er ations of sen su al i ty, health, or magic. As to our pre oc cu pa tion with forensics, one might say that the court room, de tec tives, and the logic of knowing the present by fer ret ing out the past is our most dominant way of think ing; that, inside or outside the actual courtroom, we think in terms of clues, tracks, and traces of what ev er caused the present. Westerners are cause-dom i nat ed in our rational thought, and when asked to ex plain some thing, we in ev i ta bly rely on a causal model of a continuous chain of events. Official art has already set up in these three modes of time, and the popular arts of hunting, cooking, and explaining things have many esthetic models to follow. There is the adventure movie chase scene for venatics, Carnival and other parties for festal time, the detective novel for forensic time. We extrapolate these forms to looking for a job, Saturday night, and lawsuits, but the esthetic is still there, in the form of the venatic, festal, and forensic times in volved. The a footnote for your interest: Jean-Paul Sartre defined a generation of philosophy with his revised reading of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and other European phi los o phers. Born in Paris in 1905, he became famous first because of his philosophical novel, Nausea (La Nausée), written in During World War II, he was a prisoner of war. Re turn ing to Paris after armistice, he taught phi los o phy and completed his most famous work, Being and Nothingness (L Être et le néant) in Along with Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Sartre initiated a philosophical movement directed towards the decidedly un-hope ful human condition. Along with ex is ten tial ism came phenomenology, derived in part from the writings of Martin Heidegger but fueled by scientists such as Edmund Husserl and hu man ists such as Hans-Georg Gaddamer, Herbert Spiegelberg and Merleau-Ponty. The Frankfort School arose around sociologists and phi los o phers who examined ethics from a philo soph i cal and historical perspective (e.g. Hannah Arendt s The Human Condition). The new European interest in the everyday life was not mirrored in the Unit ed States. Departments of philosophy in American uni ver - si ties concentrated even more on an a lyt i cal phi los o phy, the study of logic and language, de rived in part from British language phi los o phy (A. J. Ayers, for example). With the rise of log i cal pos i tiv ism in Vienna at the turn of the cen tu ry, Anglo-American philosophers were drawn to the defi ni tion of science, not the humanities; and the pre em i nence of scientific models over humanistic ones has continued to influence academia this side of the Atlantic, not that the French haven t done their best to change this. point of this lesson is to un der stand these forms of time as signatures that can be detected in any of the great variety of forms of art and non-art in which we find them. signs of the venatic Venatic time is such a commonplace of ev ery day life that we would hardly think of having any dif fi cul ty spotting it. Pursuits of all kinds, looking for something, running from some thing what could be more familiar? In the wealth of our ex pe ri ence of the venatic, we 42 the art 3 idea

5 could easily overlook the simple basis of the venatic: that it is a mode of be hav ior based on a lack that may or may not be satisfied at some future moment. A hunter lacks his/her prey. Some lonely per son lacks a girlfriend or boyfriend. The venatic world is missing something, and the world is re struc tured to facilitate a search for that thing, a quest. We usually think that what we see or experience is a sum of what is there. In the case of the venatic, what we perceive is conditioned, first and foremost, by what is missing. The existentialist phi los o pher, Jean-Paul Sartre, has featured this negativity in his most famous work, Being and Nothingness. You go to the café, Sartre says, looking for Pierre; but Pierre has not wound his watch (in those days you had to wind them) and he s late. Pierre is not in the café. You look here, you look there. You don t see a simple table or a simple chair. Instead, you see a chair where Pierre is not damn him! sitting and table where Pierre is not piling up a big bill drinking Courvoisier doubles. This con di tion, Sartre says, is near the essence of the human con di tion. Something that is not present condi tions and shapes our ideas of what is present. This absence can be retailed in terms either of desire, when what is missing is something we want; or of fear, when the opposite is the case. Either way, it is easy to see how the simple biological con di tions of hunger or fright can feed these semiotic (sign-cre at ed) situations of absence. The char ac ters of a life boat movie (al ways starring, it seems, Ernest Borgnine) start seeing their fellow passengers as ham burg ers. Or, con ser va tives in the 1950s saw com mu nists behind every bush. Desire and fear change our per cep tion of what is there, and this is venatic time doing its job. A hunt or chase makes what is there there be cause of something not there. This Sartrean absence and the venatic time it generates lay the basis. We can understand how foren sic time works because it is a special close-up view of the clues connecting the past with the present and, by ex ten sion, the future. Time flows backwards to the origins of the traces that occupy our present attention. When we finally find what we re looking for, we shift into a festal mode. When we are deprived of our ob jects of desire, the fest becomes fast. Or, when fear dominates every aspect of life, we have a feast in re verse: prison, mourning, madness. In our final in ter sec tion of fear/desire, time stops, or seems to. The modern sense of time needs to overwrite these fundamental temporal forms to give life sta bil i ty. We can t really get to meetings on time if we are caught up in a festal experience or a forensic in ves ti ga tion. We can t conduct a court-case unless we are turned backwards to some generative causal events. Modern time borrows what it can from venatics: the interval. In the form of decades, years, months, weeks, hours, minutes, and sec onds, modern mind divides time as if it were a line, stretching to infinity, with little marks on it. What this modern version omits to mention is that the line is really string, and that the string s real nature is to be found in a ball of string, not a line stretched taut. In the modern, realistic sense of time, events do not repeat themselves. There are patterns of his to ry and repetitive kinds of events, but no real re cur renc es are admitted. Once something happens, that s it. Like wise, events that are causally unconnected that momentarily intersect perfectly are called co in ci denc es, but their importance never goes beyond that. On the line of time, we can travel only in one di rec tion, and what is past is past. The future is always un known. The exceptions to these rules are treated with an air of the supernatural. If our memory exceeds its normal reach of a lifetime, we are possessed. The 19th century found this to be very interesting, and called it metempsychosis, or change of soul. One soul could take up residence in many dif fer ent bodies; or, it could use the mouth, ears, or eyes of a borrowed body. Travel to the future was prognostication, and was similarly aligned with superstitious belief. See ing into the future was what primitive peoples did, think ing that signs in the present could be gauges of the future. Of course, the practical ver sion of this su per sti tious belief is called planning and is un der tak en by every modern organization. Venatic time has its ordinary and mystical sides, and they both work about the same. Because our modern sense of time insists on a linear progress from past to future, it is the perfect fall guy for artistic use. If we insist that the present is a uniquely isolated point moving forward into the dark future, then we can be easily surprised when we see bits of that future (déjà vu) or get visited by the dead of the past simple and cheap sources of sur prise for all art to use. As if things weren t easy enough, the venatic nature of the modern sense of time is easily translated into its ancient form, where forensic and festal time are directly related. A brief view of the original logic of venatic time is in order. In mythic thought, the past and the future were also not present, but this un-presence was the basis for their magic value. The past was a collective into which things, events, and souls mixed and, in the process, were ordered. The future also came from the same place. It seems as if once something escaped 6 / the three times of art 43

6 outside of time, it could be either past or future tense. Your ancestors would know more about the future than you would, be cause they inhabited a place where time was just an invention to fool mortals. To tap into this eternity required magic, ritual, prayer, in can - ta tions, sacrifice. One had to visit the underworld, in a dream, trance, or story. Once there, the whole pat tern was vis i ble. Time was not fleet ing or elu sive; it was a sol id block. You could move around as if you were in a large house. The fact that time was spatialized was a very im por tant feature. One could visit the past or future just as one would make arrangements to visit the Seychelles or Paris. This was a double-edged blade, however. What was space was also time, just as in the case of metonymy we found that the horizon was re al ly a bit of time turned solid. Now, we find out just how space gets to be time: through one of the three basic modes : venatic, forensic, and festal. This is a big break for us, as student-critics of art s use of space and time. We learn one, we get the other free: the most famous two-for deal in history. We can use expressions such as a forensic and get a space-time phenomenon. Venatic time is also a kind of place, a structure of space. Festal places tell us about festal times. The first connection we should examine is the space created by metonymy as a space of clues : the labyrinth. We can now see how this can serve as an emblem of time, for it is in fact a frozen sample of fo ren sic space. Now we know where this leads: to an orig i nal and singular event located in the center of re al i ty. We know, from the em bel lish ments onto sto ries about the labyrinth, that this central point is mon strous. There is a half-man, half-animal in the center which is to say it is our own origin, our own bor der line con di tion between nature and culture. The near-cousin of the labyrinth, the mons delec tus, or moun tain of choice, is usually shown as a series of mazed path ways leading up to a temple hid den behind clouds. It is clear that the syn ec doch ic tem ple (the part that reveals the whole) is in fact where the party is. Festal time is to forensic and venatic time what the temple is to the labyrinth, a part that was there all the time but couldn t be realized until a sequence of events, a trial, had been undertaken. The closest analog to forensic time apart from the labyrinth is a hole in the ground. When we dig, we dig by definition into the past. Archaeological sites are excavations to find history, and we favor met a phors that imply that the past is buried and beneath us. There fore, the most common literary form of searching for the past is a journey to the underworld, the earth being where the past is. Also, if we follow the rule of conflation that says that all unknowns get grouped together, we find the future there, too. Now, you know the basic plot themes of about 75% of all the novels ever written. Hero leaves home, goes some place that is like the un der world (jungles do fine), gets something valuable, and returns. And this is a real bonus with the idea of descent into the past as a journey into earth, you get, at no extra charge, locked into the system of humors with its informative and engaging options of psychology, phys i ol o gy, ge ol o gy, me te o - rol o gy, astronomy, astrology, etc. Back to the future, as it were. The displacement of the system of humors led us to the distinction be tween artifact and representation, the all-purpose di men sion al system of works of art. This primary dis tinc tion enabled art to use old structures while mar ket ing new goods, and to build in layers of meaning, some of which were hidden from audiences who wouldn t know what to do with them anyway. The juice behind the artifact-rep re sen ta tion distinction was me ton y my, the parts metaphor which, in its spatial guise, gave us a ge og ra phy of bound aries. In par tic i - pat ing in art, metonymy builds us into the artifact. We journey inside and not just across a boundary. Now, we find out that crossing into liminal territory (re mem ber the para-site?) is a matter of time, especially forensic time. The goal of this journey is a quest (venatics) for an all-inclusive disclosure about, well, everything. The particular subspecies of me ton y my known as synecdoche is the party room of the arts. Its concentric and focal structure con cen trates all space and time into a space-less and timeless point that, para dox i cal ly, incorporates all space and time. The Argentine short-story writer, Jorge Luis Borges, once wrote a story about such a point, but he fic tion al ized it so that we could get a close-up view. In The Aleph, the narrator has a cousin who tells him excitedly about discovering a small point of light beneath the cellar stairs. If you lie on your back and stare upward, he advises, you can see into the point and beyond space and time itself. The narrator de cides to try, and suc ceeds after a number of cynical hours in the basement darkness. Once focused on the small point, his vision goes through the present space and time as through a hole through a curtain. The spacetime beyond this veil is either no time or all time. Ei ther ex pres sion would be accurate. Its space can be tra versed by the mind s impulse. It would be proper to say that this point, compared by Borges to the monad of Leibnitz, was a gateway to the fourth dimension. 44 the art 3 idea

7 a footnote for your interest: Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires. He studied in Geneva and spent three years in Spain as a poet of the ultraísta group. When he returned to Ar gen ti na in 1921, Borges was politically disadvantaged because of his family's opposition to the Peròns. Instead of teaching, he served many years as a librarian, where he acquired an encyclopedic knowl edge based on his readings in many languages, in clud ing Celtic. With Bioy Cesares, he began to ex per i ment with the literary genre of the fantastic, of which he proved that there are only four devices: the double, the story in the story, the contamination of re al i ty by the dream, and travel through time. His spoofs proved suc cess ful, and he began writing short fictions and poems exploiting these four themes in qua si-philosophical ways. a footnote for your interest: Nearly every English person of im por tance in the late 19c. was attracted to spiritualism. The most famous figure in London was Madam Blavatsky, me mo ri al ized in T. S. Eliot s poem, The Waste land. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, was a prominent promoter of spiritualism and traveled widely to speak, not about Sherlock Holmes, but life after death. An interesting book that appeared in the 1920s had to do with the phenomenon of déjà vu, written by John Dunne (The Se ri al Universe; and An Experiment with Time). It seemed that artists (Picasso, Braque, Di Chirico, Duchamp, etc.) as well as amateurs were interested in the mutability of time. When the physicists Eddington and Einstein put forward math e mat i cal versions of relativity theory, it was already old hat. The idea of escape from space and time is an old one. Ancient peoples used ritual of sacrifice to dis cov er the future, and told stories of heroes who de scend ed into the underworld to visit the dead (katabasis). The idea of time-space transcendence was embodied in re li gion. Pascal repeated an already-old formula for God: a sphere whose center is ev ery where and whose circumference is no where. Everywhere and nowhere, everything and noth ing. All religions of the world have found this par a dox to be informative. Our footnote is less serious, but no less pro found. Art, too, found that space-less time and timeless space were useful. They were, like Borges Aleph in the cel lar, points that allowed the imagination to escape into the past and the future. Along the dimension of this curious artifact, the mind was no longer a point on a line, but a vector of travel. a final note There are many ways to expand the idea that there are three forms of time. The one wrong way is to see the times as categories for classification. Almost any human event is a composite of the three forms, and even when one form clearly dominates, as does fes tal temporality at feasts, the other forms are present. There is a general continuity between stages of human cultural development and the forms of time that gives a rough measure of the correspondences of these to mental styles. Modern thought is strik ing ly forensic in its preference for facts, logical structures, and conceptual clarity. Logic is pointed backwards in its an a lyt i cal abilities. With the future, it has prob lems; it is limited to in fer ence (shaky) and deduction (in practicality, usually wrong). In the 18c., the French designed a ship, they said, ac cord ing to the strictest logical principles. When it slid off the skids, it imme di ate ly sank to the bottom of the harbor. Venatic time is associated with the trial and quest and is, by ex ten sion, a matter of the heroes of the remote past. Human action was in the foreground, and humans who ex celled were attributed a status midway between gods and men. The venatic structure of heroic feats was a key to their as so ci a tion with the hunt, and their pe cu liar vulnerability to Diana and her simulacra. 6 / the three times of art 45

8 Mythic thought was festal, if only in contrast to the other forms. Its sense of time was time less ness. Its main forms (ritual, sac ri fice, augury telling the fu ture) were designed to bring about what the fa mous phi los o pher of re li gion Mircea Eliade called the eternal return. Fes ti vals are eter nal re turns, and in this they are mythic in their sen si bil i ties. This is why, per haps, the fool-play of fes ti vals has tra di tion al ly been attributed a sacred sta tus. Another illustration of the diverse ways of thinking about the three forms of time is in the pro cess of artistic discovery. When en coun ter ing a work of art, we are given a frame work that creates a set of ex pec - ta tions. Of course, the point of a work of art is to get some thing you didn t expect. When you first en coun ter some thing out of place, you do not im me di ate ly judge it to be im por tant. Only when an oth er instance of the same kind is added to the first does the co in ci dence seem mean ing ful. The ap pear ance of a third clue puts the al ter na tive reality on a solid foot ing. At this point, you become cu ri ous. You look for a con fir ma tion of the new pattern. When you find it, meaning is refocused around the new center. This might be called the hey, ooo, aah, ahah the o ry, because the first en coun ter with the un ex pect ed is a mere hey! The second elicits an ooo of won der at the co in ci dence. The third, a sense that some thing s really up ( aah ). And, when we actually go looking for the con firm ing in stance, we are look ing for that ahah! ex pe ri ence. Clearly, the search is in it self a form of venatics. But, the clues come up from a structure hidden, met a phor i cal ly, beneath the main sur face of events, and our discovery of them is forensic. The final confir ma tion involves a quick and dramatic shift in our judg ment of the reality of the work, and is festal in its im me di a cy. The semiologist Jan Mukarovsky modeled this process in somewhat more elegant fash ion. He suggest ed that a triangle would best ex press the manner in which moving forward in a work (= venatic) is com ple ment ed by the mem o ry of previous parts of the work in al ter na tive or ders (= fo ren sic). At some point, the ac cu mu la tion of ev i dence for al ter na tive ideas of the struc ture of the work brings about a whole-sale trans for ma tion. It is not hard to see the pres ence of a rep re sen ta tion al vec tor (= venatic) and an ar ti fac tu al vector (= fo ren sic) to bring about a syn ec doch ic re al - iza tion (= festal). venatic direction of experience forensic memory A B C D A B C A B A D C B A threshold of discovery think of the mons delectus Mukarovsky s triangle of the semiotics of a work of art 46 the art 3 idea