OUR DESTINY WAS THE PRESENT

our destiny was the present
single-channel video
4 minutes y 11 seconds

THE TIME-NOW

Blanca de la Torre’s reflections on Eugenio Ampudia’s new video:

New York City throughout a day from different points of view. This is how Eugenio Ampudia’s new video could be seen: a continuous collage of images where each building is on the same plane at a certain time of day. Morning, afternoon, and night; present and future take shape in an eternal present.

The artist plays with the ambiguity of an unsettling scenario that seems to depict a city where the human figure has disappeared in the dizzying pace of late capitalism. Ampudia thus suggests the idea of an involuntary time, the confusion of a post-Anthropocene temporality, the possibility of a world without humans, or the plausibility of spaces with their own agency, inhabiting the city after a moment of collapse.

Time as a conceptual tool has been used consistently by Eugenio Ampudia throughout his career, in a similar way to how reflections on time have been present throughout the history of thought. Addressing it could be, like time itself, an infinite endeavor. One could reflect on anachronisms and heterochronies, image-time, historical time… From Mieke Bal’s “presentism” and Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial time, to Andrei Tarkovsky’s sculpting of time or Paul Virilio’s dromology and Pamela Lee’s chronophobia. From Stephen Hawking’s imaginary time. From suspended time and expanded time. From space, time, and perception.

A possible history of the philosophy of time could begin with Plato, who in Timaeus already defined it as the moving imitation of eternity. One could also start from the Aristotelian view that identifies time with change and action, with beings in motion. It is not that time is movement, but it cannot exist without it. Aristotle asked a key question: does time exist independently of the mind? Or, in other words, is it a creation of man or, on the contrary, does it belong to the world of things?
Later, St. Augustine also linked time and movement, but he did so as a measure of the latter carried out by the human soul. For Descartes, too, time is the measure of itself, a way of thinking, of thinking about duration.

Immanuel Kant does not relate it to movement or the soul, but rather links it to the organization of experiences and the existence of each person, going so far as to question whether space and time are real beings. Time and space are often linked in the history of philosophy, and it would be Bergson, much later, who would separate them by stating that “time is creation or it is nothing at all.” According to the philosopher, “we do not think in real time, but we live it because life overflows intelligence.”

Later, Rosalind Krauss, in Passages in Modern Sculpture, would once again unite space and time in the arts: “(…) even in a spatial art, space and time cannot be separated for the purposes of analysis. In any spatial organization there will be an implicit assertion about the nature of temporal experience.”

We could also delve into Hegelian ideas of time and history, of art history understood as a present that has already been fulfilled, and arrive at Walter Benjamin’s conception of “the time now.” A time that has stopped. For him, the very essence of time reveals the false paradise of modernity obsessed with technical progress.

And one cannot talk about time without mentioning Heidegger, who proposes it as the ultimate meaning of the question that interrogates being. Being is time, or time is the meaning of being. To think about time is to think about being. Trying to understand our own existence is, inevitably, trying to understand time. Starting from the paths of the philosopher of the hut and his teacher Husserl, we will then encounter the hermeneutics of Hans-George Gadamer, who considered himself a “living anachronism.” The author goes so far as to propose a distinction between different cultures and historical periods based on how they have considered time. The author also confronts us with art through his ontological explanation: “art is never only past, but somehow manages to overcome the distance of time by virtue of the presence of its own meaning.”

George Kubler, in a sort of harassment and demolition of a classical conception of time, denies its diachronic character. In The Configuration of Time, he conceives of it through leaps, discontinuities, repetitions, or returns. Applied to art, the work always inhabits a plurality of times and, in a certain way, is always contemporary because it never ceases to be here with us, even though it is traversed by different times.

This plurality of time also leads us to Giorgio Agamben’s critique of the instant and the continuum in Time and History, where the Italian philosopher states that “the original task of an authentic revolution is no longer simply to change the world but also, and above all, to change time.”

Along the same lines of thought, Keith Moxey leads us to believe that the only possible times in art are those of heterochrony, those of multiplicity. Furthermore, for Moxey, “the non-synchronous nature of the passage of time does not fit with the permanent need for a common historical narrative.”

“When faced with an image, we are always faced with time.” This is how Georges Didi-Huberman begins his book Before Time, in which he dissects a critical archaeology of models of time and the values of their use in art history, the discipline that sought to make images through time its object of study. This could lead us to talk about Deleuze’s image-time, and even to take up the Deleuzian immanence that Daniel Birnbaum studies in Chronology.

As a literary aside between these references, we recall how James Thurber, already almost blind, states in his fantasy story The Thirteen Clocks that “time lies there, frozen. It is always Then. It is never Now”; or the gray men who smoked people’s time in Michael Ende’s novel Momo. Bataille, for his part, wrote that “in a certain sense, every problem is one of the use of time,” while Cioran touched down on earth when he determined that time was made to be lived.

Modernity and postmodernity also clash over the idea of time. If the former is characterized by hyperacceleration, as Paul Virilio pointed out, the latter eliminates it, according to Fredric Jameson. For the philosopher, postmodernism would be—as in the subtitle of what is possibly his seminal work—the cultural logic of advanced capitalism, characterized, among other things, by the erasure of time and history. Moreover, “when we are unable to unify the past, present, and future in a single sentence, we cannot unify them in our own experience either.” Later, in the article The End of Temporality, he settled the issue by stating: “At the very least, time has become non-existent and people have stopped writing about it.”

The time proposed by Ampudia could be the culmination of that confrontation. On the one hand, there is the idea of time inherited and carried over from modernity: enslaved time, dominant time, accelerated time, the time that governs work. The time in which the subject becomes a machine. That of Charles Chaplin in Modern Times who, as a consequence of his Fordist alienation, screws the button on the chest of the bourgeois woman who interrupts his path. On the other hand, there is the Jamesonian end of temporality, the erasure of everything that came before, which appeals to the need to decrease, resize, and think about time on another scale, at another pace, and, why not, to the idea of a time without humanity.