The Shape of Time. Reconsidered

Abstract

GEORGE KUBLER THE SHAPE OF TIME WAS FINISHED IN 1961, which makes this year, in Maya terms, its Katun anniversary of twenty years. During these twenty years, the occasion has never arisen for me to speak in public about the book. Being. a man not prone to autobiography, and who will go out of his way to avoid looking in a mirror, I have paid little attention to the reception of the book. Here, however, on this anniversary, I hope to look back over the reviews, to note the changes in the book's public and its author. I was surprised, while I was preparing this lecture, to notice how, among my friends who had read the book, a division into two groups appeared. Both groups are equally discerning and educated and, as far as I can tell, equal in numbers. One group is eager to say that they don't understand a word of it, and there are artists and historians among them. Those of the other group declare that they understand it all on first reading, without difficulty. Of course I believe them both, without knowing the combination that separates them so sharply. Perhaps distinctive and contrasting features in their comprehension of works of art are responsible. What I say speaks to some, but not to others. Some are ready and others are not. But when both someday find that they agree in understanding it, that day may be its last as a book alive in the dissension over its intelligibility. In what follows, it seems best to limit my remarks to printed reviews and essays that are more in disagreement than in accord with the book. In this way the more searching objections to my argument are chosen. The most exact and critical review that has appeared in this country is by Priscilla Colt, then at the Dayton Art Museum.' She notes five principal positions of the book which are at variance with entrenched practice in art history. These are:

Drilling Down: Can Historians Operationalize Koselleck’s Stratigraphical Times?

“…63 Kubler offers the notion of a mosaic, a network of disparate elements. 64 All of these, I think, gesture to the complexity of presence in a historical moment. What we need to recognize, however, is that the urge to coherence is nonetheless a compelling regulative ideal as much for the individual practices of a historical time (as in Rheinberger's experimental systems or Kubler's form-classes of artistic practice) as for the historian seeking to comprehend the epoch.…”

Memory and the Timeless Time of Eros

“…Eroticism is a continual attempt to refine answers to the question of what makes us human. The answers can be applied to Eros, the great artist, whose memory stays with us even after the candle has gone out (Kubler, 1962). Here the past and the present fuse, and life, with its trivial devices and desires, seems only a moment in eternity.…”

Bak-Sneppen Models for the Evolution of Structured Knowledge

“…5 where he studied the loss and compensation. Mathematical philology, like all artistic and constructive activities, enters in the conceptual scheme of (Kubler, 1972), especially in chap. 3 dedicated to disposal and retention.…”