Plural temporalities of vision: temporalities and fragmentations in art and beyond

Abstract

This thesis aims to look at various possible ways in which temporality is concerned in visual arts. I consider that time exceeds being an object of perception and leads to an emergence of a fragmented notion of 'otherness', which interrupts constitution of a projective difference between the subject and the object. I chose my examples from the contemporary art practices - since the early sixties - which have been critical of the ways in which art was understood as an object of a single thought or belief. My examples may look as if they were analysed according to a specific history. However, they are critical of conceptualisation of things according to a single order that introduces an illusionary belief of space and time as if they were concrete things. Rather, I consider an emergence of multiple temporalities communicating with its viewer significant since such an understanding introduces a sense of becoming replaced by being not only in art but also in everything. Fragmentation is considered not as a distorted version of unity but as that which introduces the divisibility of a conception of unity.