In this dissertation, I examine art’s profound connections with temporality, understood as a defining feature of human existence. More specifically, I argue that art can be understood as a technology that experiments with and modifies human temporality through a process that oscillates and mediates between the self immersed in the artwork and the self that reflects upon that immersion. The first step in this argument consists in establishing art’s technological character via a phenomenology of art-experiences, suggested by the “postphenomenology” of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek, and by Alva Noë’s notion of artworks as “strange tools.”
Artists and audiences play with possibilities of human action and perception, embodiment and cognition, precisely insofar as they are predicated on temporality. I clarify the operative sense of ‘temporality’ in this regard by critically appropriating Merleau-Ponty’s account of time and temporal style. In that account, time is a kind of rupture at the base of experience and temporal “style” expresses the fact that we are our time and that our existence consists, with a certain continuity, in both sedimented experiences and a transition between temporal perspectives that is itself perspectival. While acknowledging this account’s merits and its fruitfulness for understanding the experience of art, I argue that it needs emending since it entails an aim for completion that does not do justice to the full experience of time.
My next step is to expand and offer some corroboration for my account by examining three works of art: Terrance Malick’s film The Tree of Life (2011), Katsushika Hokusai’s woodprint The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831), and Delmore Schwartz’s poem “Calmly we walk through this April’s day” (1937). In this connection I develop several novel concepts, useful to evaluating art-oriented temporality, including the concept of “temporal layering,” a more sophisticated understanding of the protentional/retentional structure of time, and the concept of “temporal framing,” which articulates how art experiences shape “regional” temporalities.
Finally, I investigate how creating art reconfigures temporality. Borrow from Alfred Schütz, László Tengelyi’s, and Toni Morrison, I argue that we can understand creative moments as epiphanic events at the edges of regions of time. / 2026-06-26T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/49049 |
| Date | 26 June 2024 |
| Creators | Kokot, Jordan D. |
| Contributors | Dahlstrom, Daniel O. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0014 seconds