That tells us something about time and history that Hoptman's notion
of atemporality leaves out: that men can still find institutional and market acceptance far more quickly than their female peers.
Fifty paintings by fifty American artists offers a critical balance to the conditions
of atemporality, affected responses, and the material turn shaping much of contemporary painting discourse.
By asking the spaces that write our history to include narratives that have traditionally been left out of actual and historical records, namely the voices and works of female artists and artists who are unseen or under - represented because of race and class; these pioneering activists in guerrilla suits may have been practicing an early form
of atemporality.
Not exact matches
Perhaps the word «
atemporality» isn't quite right, but the range and quantity
of information that we have access to every minute — and perhaps even take for granted — needs to be addressed.
Atemporality in his vision
of web culture is a thing that allows us to reimagine history as we surf the Internet, simultaneously experiencing the past, present and future from unprecedented angles
of diversity.
The fact that its unsung heroines are successfully rewriting historical knowledge and the evolution
of historical identity — evokes Bruce Sterling's
atemporality assertion that, «history is not a science, it's an effort in the humanities.»
When science fiction writer Bruce Sterling introduced the notion
of «
atemporality for creative artists» he crystallised a powerful new notion, not just in art but in life.
Atemporality, or timelessness, manifests itself in painting as an ahistorical free - for - all, where contemporaneity as an indicator
of new form is nowhere to be found, and all eras co-exist.
Featuring a mix
of collaged drawings, carved cork sculptures, and mixed - media creations
of clay, bones, and wire, the exhibition promises to be an update the much - ballyhooed trend towards
atemporality by an artist who has the age (and critical chops) to actually pull it off.
Using William Gibson's writings on
atemporality as a point
of departure, Hoptman culled canvases registering traces
of earlier styles and times — from Kazimir Malevich's utopian abstraction to Barnett Newman's heroic zips to the title
of a Lucio Fontana painting — in sometimes overt, sometimes clandestine ways.
And decades later, the postmodernism
of the 1980s — above all in architecture but also in the quotationism
of neo-Expressionist and «transavantgarde» painting — sought
atemporality with a vengeance.
To gain purchase on the
atemporality of the current moment, this exhibition
of nearly fifty photographs, videos, installations, and sculptures from the past six years highlights eleven artists who reevaluate historical events and notions
of progress.
Hoptman, in her catalog essay, attributes the word «
atemporality» to the science - fiction novelist William Gibson, for whom it means «a new and strange state
of the world in which, courtesy
of the Internet, all eras seem to exist at once.»
More than once while viewing Rough Cut, I thought
of the late Studio paintings
of George Braque and the idea
of a still life or landscape as a collection
of multiple lived experiences — seeing what is in front
of you as it's remembered or as a symbol
of a collective humanity, a simultaneity akin to
atemporality that is now regarded as intrinsic to our virtual / digital existences.
Curated by Laura Hoptman around an idea
of «
atemporality» in order to address a supposedly free condition in which painters could pull styles and motifs from traditions potentially across the span
of civilization, the references felt stiltedly 20th century.
Such may be the project
of «The Forever Now», an exhibition
of recent painting curated by Laura Hoptman at The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, which brackets these and other approaches under the broad banner
of «
atemporality».