Evanescence: Time in Modern Plastic Art

Abstract

The Article follows the trail of Max Weber’s comprehensive sociology and uses the hermeneutic and iconological analysis methods applied to significant contemporary plastic art works (painting and sculpture) which are representative of modern and late modern art. Starting from these theoretical and methodological bases, it pursues three specific objectives: (a) to analyze the construction of Time in plastic art, (b) to verify how this theme has evolved in artistic practices from the first modernity to the second and (c) to verify the way in which the complementary visual language the conceptual of contemporary sociological theory. In this regard, our paper provides evidence that the selected works prioritize a kind of temporality determined by the logic of capitalist industrial modernity. It likewise becomes obvious that time—focused on an accelerated and instantaneous omnipresent—lacks both an origin and a telos; it has neither a past nor a future and, in parallel, a gap has opened between the time of natural life and the artificial one, as well as between space and time, which is only transiently bridged at the imaginary level of art. Finally, the experience of time has been emptied, in such a way that the latter has lost some of its solidity and its sense of permanence, while the contingent, the fleeting and the ephemeral now occupy in its place.