Aporetic experiences of time in anti-narrative art

Abstract

I present art as a potential source of aporetic temporal experiences. The experiences in question are aporetic by virtue of both their anti-narrative quality and their potential to disrupt or short-circuit dominant models of experiencing temporality. I argue that contemporary art shares with earlier artistic trends a critical attitude towards dominant narratives but has its own particular way of dealing with time. In the first section, I frame narratives and temporality within a critical approach in which our current culture is seen as imposing ways of living and thinking through narratives. The focus in this article is on artistic expressions that take a critical stance in this context. In the second section, I sketch a genealogy of anti-narrative artistic phenomena. I explain that while the Avant-gardes played a more experimental role, the art of the sixties was oriented, according to influential art critics and academics, to decoding dominant discourses. In the next section, I discuss current studies in narratives, which open the door to new kinds of narratives other than the classic ones. In Sections 4-6, I show the temporal and anthropological relevance of these new narratives through a rereading of Ricoeur's theory of the complementarity of time and narrative. Through a personal and original interpretation of the Ricoeurian aporetic of time, I argue that we can experience temporality and other aspects of our life-self-identity, moral values, and historical events-outside of consistent narratives, although the experience may be critical or disappointing. Finally, I illustrate this thesis by reference to two contemporary works of art, both shown at Documenta (13).