by Jon Lackman | 16 February 2007 | Conferences, News
“What then is time? If no one asks me I know; if I wish to explain to one who asks me, I know not,” Saint Augustine wrote. A new interest in time developed in the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th centuries. Hence this well-attended panel on “The Presence of History, the Persistence of Time” in Netherlandish art. It considers several kinds of time: “God’s time” (the evolution of earth and the universe), “man’s time (seasons, stages of life),” and “viewer’s time” (second by second, minute by minute passage of time, time as it is lived).
Margaret Carroll reconsiders Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Early Delights,” which is often interpreted as a meditation on man and his history, but can perhaps be seen instead as (or additionally as) an exploration of the earth and natural history. In Bosch’s time, there was intense interest in time, in determining for example when the apocalypse would occur, when the world began, and in how its creation unfolded. The foundational Christian texts were succinct and ambiguous on such matters, opening the door for the curious to spin wild speculations. Hard answers were hard to formulate, for writers but especially for artists. What does it mean when Genesis states that in the moment before Earth’s creation that the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters? Bosch was ambitious and took up the improvisational challenge of illustrating or imagining such moments. He jumps off from the suggestions of texts at times, seems to be entirely on his own at others. In one text, it is written that in the earth’s early life, it was a wildly fertile and productive place – wherever a suitable place was found, uteri were formed, and we see suggestions of this in Bosch’s painting too. In later times, according to texts, the earth will become desiccated, cold, and ungenerative. This may be the subject of Bosch’s right panel. Carroll also shows a detail of a fantastic fountain in the central panel appearing to grow out of the ground. What is the fountain made of? Vegetable, mineral or animal? It’s impossible to say. What is the distinction between nature and artifice? Bosch seems full of questions if not answers. He perhaps is partaking of a slowly emerging empirical culture that is wondering and speculating on the workings of earthly phenomena and their origins, that is not content to just defer to texts and create allegories.
Pieter Bruegel’s peasants are sometimes taken to be timeless exemplars of rural Netherlandish life, but they also contain intriguing suggestions of particularized contemporary life – including lovingly rendered pieces of garbage. His paintings could be said to partake of present and past, Stephanie Porras argues. She begins her paper by showing slides of contemporary trash heaps. “Garbage is the ghost that haunts human presence.” For the archaeologist, garbage is information. Trash often appears in Bruegel, standing out from the earth as a reminder of the past. Bruegel gives peasants an unchanging identity but also marks his life with temporal details. To the educated urban dweller that was Bruegel’s typical viewer, peasants were closer to animals, bound to nature, strange remnants of a previous age, not yet “up to date.” But are they to Bruegel? In Peasant Wedding, barrels are reused as furniture. In Bird Trap, the bird trap is just a recycled door. Bruegel’s pictures act as if the viewer knew nothing about the function of everyday things. He undercuts the ahistorical time of the peasant by showing the particular history of objects. In 16th century, peasants were moving to cities, urbanites were visiting peasant towns. Peasants increasingly performing their peasantness for others, evoking for them a nostalgic imagined past. Garbage stands out all the more in this context, a haunting reminder of peasant time, caught between now and then, us and other.
