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Back to A Rhetoric of Time Title Page
Extracts
from: Peter Nesteruk, A
Rhetoric of Time in the Arts: Eternity, Entropy and Utopia in Visual Culture (2011).
(Cover Introduction, Contents Page, Preface)
Cover Introduction: The role played by
temporality in the impact and interpretation of art has been an area long and
unjustly neglected. This book will attempt to redress this balance by insisting
that our sense of temporality together with, what we might call, the rhetoric
of eternity can not only can be used to decode the world of the visual image,
of art and architecture, but also to explain our position relative to the art
work, as to what we see before us. As such this book consists of a sequence of
readings of images and buildings, of framed art and frame of our lived
experience, the built environment.
Beginning with
representative works from the epoch of medieval and renaissance art, a key
period in the history of Western art in terms of temporal rhetoric in narrative
and priority, the analysis will progress to the seventeenth century onward,
when such potentials were to become hidden, but still effective, as will a
chapter on photography. The last two chapters will focus upon architecture and
our experience of the city, from an analysis of the Pantheon in
This work is for those
interested in art, architecture and the analysis of visual culture.
(Contents Page)
: Preface.
p.
3
Chapter One: A Short
History of the Rhetoric of Eternity:
Priority and Narrative in Medieval and Renaissance
Art. p. 5
Chapter
Two: Painting: Time and Affect in Two Dimensions p.
44
Chapter Three: Photography
and Identity:
The Image of Captured Time. p.
104
Chapter Four: Architecture
in Pieces: the Rhetoric of Cohesion. p. 154
Chapter Five: Utopia and
Dystopia:
Eternity and Entropy in Twentieth Century
Architecture. p. 208
Afterword.
p. 287
*For detailed chapter content, please see each chapter file.
Preface.
This book consists of a
sequence of readings of images and buildings. The images chosen traverse the
history of (mainly Western) art and include painting and photography, the
inclusion of the latter indicating its importance in recent art history, and
will include a section of comparative historical trends in Chinese art history
(showing similarities and differences regarding the findings of the period
covered in chapter one). Many of the findings of the earlier chapters on the
evolution of the uses of time in the two dimensional image translate into the
world of three dimensions and its dominant art form, architecture, or, more
precisely, our built environment. Many of the factors that influence our
experience of the image also influence our experience of the environment in
which we live, our cities, their streets and squares and the buildings we find
there. Both are, in effect, images as far as our nervous system is concerned;
it is not only rural landscapes that are read as images, but also urban
landscapes. Or perhaps, given the priority of evolution, it is images that are
read, that have evolved to be read, as landscape, ‘natural’ and urban. So one
thesis of this book is to suggest that the symbolism and codes that we use to
read one kind of visual culture obtain in other kinds of visual experience.
Another is that these codes are part of our visual sense, one of the most
developed (with hearing) senses we humans have; in part genetic-evolutionary
(part of our received human characteristics), in part a product of our cultural
evolution. An evolution in which we play a increasingly formative role,
beginning with the changes of landscape due to the Neolithic revolution and
climaxing in this century’s, almost completed, urbanization - the dominance of
the city as source of human experience. So our physical apparatus (genetic) and
cultural evolution have armed us with a language, a set of codes, a symbolism,
let us call it a rhetoric, that we use to understand, or better, to feel, our environment, our
perception, our object in focus, that on which we furnish our intentionality,
that which dominates our perception, our mind, the interior space which we
imagine as coeval with the self – that which lifts, as well as depresses, our
spirit…
The first chapter will
describe and apply the ‘rhetoric of time’ as it was deployed in the art of the
Medieval and Renaissance period – it will include a brief ‘pre-history’ to
situate this period as part of a process of evolution, as well as comparative
material from other geo-cultural traditions (a survey of similar traits in
Chinese art history). The second chapter will continue this survey into the
period covering the Baroque through to the early twentieth century and include
extended readings of some well-known paintings (Poussin, David, Turner, Monet,
Braque, Hopper). The third chapter, which begins with a brief account of the
theory of the temporal implications of black and white photography as a genre,
continues the analysis of the role of the rhetoric of time in art into the
later twentieth century – with a particular focus on questions that have become
centre-stage in recent art (as well as in drama and literary history) questions
of identity and community (not least feminist and post-colonial concerns) and
includes discussions of Rauschenberg, Mendieta and Boltanski. The fourth
chapter will use the rhetorical tools developed in the first three chapters to
‘read’ architecture and will include an original reading of the Pantheon,
Copyright, Peter Nesteruk, 2011.