Late modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 138

those of non-Euclidean mathematicians (Jay 1993). With levels of spare time
rising and railroads allowing urban workers to engage in day trips to the
countryside, leisure was celebrated through a series of quick impressions,
such as Georges Seurat's pointillist paintings of the French bourgeoisie stroll-
ing through the parks. Van Gogh fi filled his painting with whirling eddies and

colorful energy fields.

Cubism went even further than the sense-dependence of Impressionism
and attempted to portray multiple perspectives simultaneously, abandoning
linear perspective in the attempt to demonstrate temporal duration on the
canvas by fragmenting the orderly spaces of the canvas. Cubism drew upon
numerous intellectual currents of the time, including non-Euclidean geom-
etry, X-rays, multiple exposure photography, and the nascent theory of rela-
tivity to attack traditional modes of representation through art that presented
numerous views of the subject simultaneously in one painting (Miller 2002).
These notions were most famously to be found in Picasso's portraits, such
as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). By 1910, Kandinsky produced the

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fi rst

completely non fi gurative, nonrepresentational painting, which could not, by

de nition, be put into language; after all, if it could be said in words, there

would be no need for art. Likewise, Surrealism, personi

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ed by Dali's famous
melting watches in The Persistence of Memory (1931) became an iconic
emblem of deformed time. Painting could never adequately capture the new
temporal sensibility, however: Kern (1983:22) notes that “No matter how
many successive views of an object are combined, the canvas is experienced in
a single instant.... Their inventions presented time in art in a new way.”
These schools and works accentuated the emerging antipositivist notion
that space was as plural and malleable as the perspectives of the viewer. As
Miller (2002:131) observes, “Geometrical space is an abstract entity that is
in

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nite in content, its properties are the same everywhere, and it has three
dimensions.... Representative space, on the other hand, has none of the above
properties.” Jay (1993) theorizes that the late nineteenth century witnessed a
concerted challenge to the “ ancien régime ” of Cartesian perspectivalism that
questioned the traditional sensuous hierarchy in which sight reigned supreme.
This challenge to ocularcentrism was evident in the dissolution of the perpec-
tival grid in painting, the movement away from authorial point of views in
literature, and the birth of perspectivism or relativism in philosophy, includ-
ing authors such as Nietzsche, who argued that if god were dead, so was the
idea that there was only one way to know the world.
Innovations in art representing time as a

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flux were paralleled by a new body
of work in psychology, philosophy and literature that represented conscious-
ness as a continuous stream (Kern 1983:24). Bergson adopted the Heraclitian
emphasis on process over stasis, on becoming rather than being, stressing the
continual process of change that he called la durée and in so doing launched
the

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first frontal attack on the hidden epistemology of ocularcentrism (Jay
1993). Bergson saw time as the central question of philosophical inquiry, and
regarded the past as meaningless, a subjective product of memory, which only

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