Time
(The Great Collaborator)
The evidence of time’s passage — in the landscape, an abandoned school, ancient ruin, forgotten object — is a visual clue that points toward the paradox of absence and presence so important in Nihil. In Nihil, time is a friend making all processes possible.
The only violation of this tenet is to regard time as enemy. It is to be worked with, never against. In this way, the process can’t go wrong. For example, a layer in a painting might prove uninspiring. This is not a problem. There is no wasted time in Nihil; the uninspired layer will simply take part in the overall consciousness of the work. It will contribute to the whole, however discreetly, whether it provides useful coloration peeking from underneath in later stages, or whether it simply adds to its overall sense of weariness, the necessary weight of experience grounding the work in contrast to other moments of deftness.
Time is the ubiquitous collaborator. Listening to Arvo Pärt’s music is a good way to understand this. Music, in general, depends upon and must exist in time, and yet, within a fixed time signature, it can either seem to expand or compress an experience of time. Pärt allows time to do a lot of the work, benefitting from the relative silence between notes, for example. This silence, in Tintinnabuli, is also the expression of a gap between two voices, T-Voice and M-Voice. This is, to the Nihil way of understanding, suggestive of the paradox of presence of absence, where being becomes possible in the distance between myself and other. It is also the gap in the brokenness between two things, and only in brokenness, can beauty be extricated. I want to know, how can my collaboration with time benefit in finding a visual approximation of this aural space that time makes possible in Pärt?
Both the opportunity and limitation in painting is that it isn’t confined to a linear experience of time. All considerations must fit in space, and in painting, that space is relatively flat. It’s the secret of Nihil that a broad scale of time is present in the work as if harnessed and made expansive even if confined to what, in the scheme of things, is a small space. In Nihil, I must trust the process no matter what. I don’t understand its alchemy; I am required only to trust it. I understand the passage of time in the object itself, with its evidence apparent, as having a deep past or a deep memory. In the addition and subtraction of layer after layer, this memory seems to regard the eternal, as opposed to the momentary.
When the scale of time grows broader in the imagination, I don’t fear the eventual catastrophe but accept its role in the drama. Just as there is a painting before painting, in Nihil, there is one after. Its eventual transformation will not have been an accident; I’ve accounted for another horizon.
In exile, I hear Emanuel Levinas:
To renounce being the contemporary of the triumph of one’s work is to have this triumph in a time without me, to aim at this world without me, to aim at a time beyond the horizon of my time. It works in an eschatology without hope for oneself, an eschatology of liberation from my own time.
To be liberated from one’s own time is what the very collaboration with time makes possible. This is true in life, in the work, and in a single work. Whatever object I might collect tells me something about the limits of my involvement with it. The touch anticipates the consciousness of time; there is what I show to you and what I don’t. I am saying: the eternal is evidenced in the ephemeral, which is what every painting eventually is. The Tenet of Time is for a method I employ now to create a work, but, more importantly, it’s for a method of liberating the work from my own time.
Whether memory is external to the mind or entirely dependent on it, I can’t know. Neither can I know how to differentiate between internal and external phenomena. What I do know is that my individual experience of time has little to do with its reality, whatever it is: fundamental, emergent, chimerical. I must fall in love with not knowing. Someone not yet born will find what preceded me in the painting, that piece of time I sought. The one who comes later is the one for whom it had waited.