Notions of time are inevitably imbedded in the video process as a video is always of the past – a piece to time captured that immediately becomes the past. The minimalist artists Robert Morris saw that core of the debate on the perception of art is time, duration and experience in time. Morris showed us that the experience of an art object is in real space, in real time and has duration.
In this short essay I will discuss how Buddhist notions of time are embedded in this work. Time is central to Zen Buddhist philosophy; things, and us, arise and dissipate according to causes and conditions and are dependent on these to exist in time, as a consequence all things are interconnected. This is called dependent arising.
The clouds reflect this view of existence, in each video it takes time to see the quality of the sky, clouds, light, time of day, and we sense the alignment of a heavenly body, the sun with the earth and perhaps also the position of the camera. In Buddhist terms, therefore, each video could be said to be dependently arising; that is, they each demonstrate the interconnectedness to each other and of all things. The fact that the conditions for each video cloud are unique and exist only momentarily, shows that phenomena arise and decline as a consequence of causes and conditions. Clouds are never the same from one instant to the next and can be seen to be exemplars of the nature of being, of life as impermanent.
Each video is an imprint of the light of the past, a slice of time in a continuous flow of time. When we see the videos, we are aware of past, present and future as three distinct tenses. Three clouds are together as one video work and as three separate videos they seem to be related in form, to be part of a whole, the clouds seem to be repeated, similar forms. Each video is a slice of the past in the continuous flow of time which we watch in our flow of time, in our present.
As Zen Buddhist philosopher Masao Abe points out, the past is realized “as the past in the “present”, and from where we stand now in time, the present is realized as the present in the “present”, and the future is realized as the future in the “present”. This “present” is a “transtemporal present”, wherever we are positioned in space and time it is always in the present.”[1]There are thus two levels of time: the transtemporal and the temporal. Within the temporal are the three tenses of past present and future. In the transtemporal we are in our ever present now.
Abe has a spatial image for seeing how the temporal and the transtemporal work together. He refers to the transtemporal as “the vertical dimension”, the depth of time, and what he calls the horizontal dimension of time is “the dimension of temporal past, present and future moving directionally”.[2] Horizontal time is perceived as duration, unidirectional, irreversible time. The vertical transtemporal is now.
We are always at the junction of the horizontal and the vertical dimensions of time, that is, we are always at the position in space and time where the temporal and the transtemporal meet. We are always in the ever present now.
On the basis of what Abe says, a video is a piece of time rescued from the horizontal temporal line of time seen in my ever present now in the flow of temporal time. When my present intersects with the “this once was” of the video, my experience of it is in the present, now.
When viewing the videos, I am a body occupying space and being time, not that time passes through me or that I am carried along by the ceaseless flow of time. I am inseparable from time. I am a body in space and I am what time is, as I change and grow older. Time expresses itself through me and all things.
Each of these videos is a piece of the continuous flow of time of one cloud, here sliced into three, embodied in this work are three times in the life of one cloud that was; past, further past and even further past in time. All seen in my present, the past in the present.
[1] Abe, Masao, A Study of Dogen, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992, p 99.
[2] ibid