Images and materiality between vibrant times

GABRIELA SIRACUSANO

Austin

Conferencia; The 2018 Lozano Long Conference Create, Consume, Collect: The Lives of Colonial Latin American ARTifacts; 2018

Lillas Benson Latin American Studies. University of Texas at Austin

When we look at an artifact of the past, that complex triad that Belting has defined between work, medium, and subject pops up. On this basis, we tend to consider that what the work offers is the last moment of its long life. A final moment of a representation and its materiality, linked by the continuity of its duration in time. But... is it not an illusion to think in a linear and continuous duration of objects? Objects, and the artistic in particular, last what the moments stored by our memory last. [6] The poetics of Gaston Bachelard introduces us to this thought when it designates duration, in opposition to the bergsoniana duration, as a construction and when he stated that the true reality of the time is the instant. [7] "Time can only observed by its instants;" the duration (...) can only be felt by the instants. It is dust of instants"[8], says the French philosopher.Following this argument, we might think that a painting is in itself a multiplicity of instants, of spatio-temporal discontinuities, and its matter is precisely the one which, in its details, in its fragments reveals these discontinuities through which are filtered the instants of what it was. [9] Instants which, under our gaze, make these material details vibrate but also give them their own semantic thickness.