Introduction: Time and the Work
Reni Celeste The starting point of this issue is the conviction that the artwork has been one of the most important sites for speculation on the concept of time, from systematic German aesthetics to contemporary visual and cultural studies. The multiple critiques within the theoretical fields of the past century can be said to center around a re-evaluation of the concept of temporality, from Nietzsche’s exaltation of Dionysian thought, to Bergson’s analysis of duration, Heidegger’s challenge to metaphysics, and Derrida’s notion of différance. The contemporary theory that has been the legacy of these critiques has continued to assert the fundamental importance of the interlacing of time and the artwork to the re-evaluation of thought. On one hand the work of art has been conceived as the arrest of time, of time frozen and possessed, and on the other as the vehicle itself of becoming, expressing a form of knowledge that exceeds the limits of systematic, linear thought. This issue does not seek to take a unified position on the question of the artwork’s relation to temporality, …