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Indepth Arts News:
"Telling Time: The relationship between time and the still image."
2000-10-18 until 2001-01-14
National Gallery
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
Paintings could be described as timeless - you can't talk meaningfully about
a picture's beginning and end. But when painting stories which develop over
time, or which depict movement, artists have often tried to put time into
their still, unchanging images. 'Telling Time' explores the fascinating
relationship between time and the still image through paintings, prints,
drawings and photographs dating from the 12th to the 20th centuries by
artists as varied as Rembrandt, Munch, Turner and Hockney.
One area explored in the exhibition in the Sunley Room is how artists have
depicted or described movement, from freezing instants of imbalance to the
use of the blur. Another technique was employed by one of the most sustained
of all the investigators of motion, the American photographer Eadweard
Muybridge. In 1887 he published his 11-volume 'Animal Locomotion', an
extraordinary compendium of men, women and animals engaged in a wide range
of actions, each one depicted by a sequence of still photographs.
Muybridge's experiments proved an important forerunner of the cinema, but
they also had their artistic antecedents, as suggested by Rubens's
fascinating sheet of studies of dancing peasants which uncannily foreshadows
Muybridge's plates.
If still images are timeless they cannot be seen instantly. Looking takes
time and an innovative display in Room 1 explores the process of looking. It
will include the largest-ever eye-tracking experiment, devised and designed
in collaboration with the Applied Vision Research Unit from the University
of Derby, which will allow members of the public to observe their own
eye-movements as they look at pictures. The experiment will provide an
unprecedented amount of data on how we look at paintings and an update of
its findings will be posted on a special website during the running of the
show.
Time Trail, an audio tour around the Gallery, available from the Soundtrack
desks in the Sainsbury Wing and Main Building, will also lead visitors to
other paintings in the Collection which have time as their subject or
preoccupation.
IMAGE:
Detail of Eadweard Muybridge,
'Dancing Couple' (from 'Animal
Locomotion'),
London, Victoria and Albert Museum.
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