Anachronistic Time

Stood before an image, our present is arrested to allow the past to come through; but it also arises, emerges, “born in the experience of the gaze.” Sometimes, something like an awareness of these shifting and fragmentary temporalities can bring about an instance of an anachronistic reading, such as the experience described by the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman of looking at a Fra Angelico fresco, in which he anachronistically sees, in the mottled flecks of red pigment on ground, a Jackson Pollock painting. Now this is a specific case, subjective and personal to the thoughts and experiences of Didi-Huberman. It could be put down to ‘pseudomorphism’, literally meaning ‘false form’, the inaccurate conflation of two works of art based on their similar appearances. But the idea of the viewer’s experience of looking at a 14th-century fresco being broken by the image of a 20th-century artist’s work, in this way jolted out of the historical framework of Renaissance Italy, brings up a curious question of the phenomenon, and function, of visual or temporal disjunctions in looking at an artwork of any period.

The most prevalent conception of anachronism within art history and more broadly within art and literature is of chronological inaccuracy: the appropriation or misplacement of an object, expression, or idea, to a period other than that which it depicts. Its etymology derives from the Greek ana, meaning backwards or against, and khronos, one of the two Greek words for time, denoting a quantitative, chronological, or sequential time (the other being kairos, meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment for action, as well as a kind of sacred time). We can also use the etymology to think about anachronistic occurrences as being against chronological time, throwing order out of joint and destabilising a viewer’s experience of looking at and understanding a work.

Anachronism is not merely a way of thinking that is blindly old-fashioned or ignorantly out-of-step; nor just a ‘helpful’ method to aid the understanding of a historical event from a contemporary standpoint. Anachronism here has more to do with a quality within a work of art that might reveal something to the viewer, by its being not out-dated but out of time. This anachronistic method of making connections between disparate entities can also broaden ways of understanding histories of objects (in this line of visual art thinking, the image is also an object). These, as in Didi-Huberman’s example, can be arbitrary, occurring in relation to a viewer’s subjective knowledge and whatever might have been stirred up during the viewing experience – an experience which will later be recalled as memory, thus extending its lifespan and future possibilities.

Ida Applebroog and Rose Wylie are two figurative painters whose works, while not using the mural medium as it might be historically recognised, engage with or evoke the mural in various ways. Murals elude medium specificity, instead encompassing myriad forms and styles.

Ida Applebroog is an American multi-media artist, most prolific in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, with her large-scale painting structures that deal with narratives of gender, illness, and psychology. British artist Rose Wylie studied Fine Art in the 1950s and had been a relatively unknown artist for over half a century before recently gaining recognition; she won the John Moores Painting Prize in 2015 aged 80. While drawing from disparate traditions and dealing with different subject matter, these works share common ground: they lift the viewer out of time.

Chronological time: the past as influence

Why is it that the mural form today evokes this sense of anachronism? It might be that despite there being a considerable audience for contemporary art, there is a scarcity of public art, thus limiting the scope of exchange and dialogue. Historically, murals have been used as political tools, either as state-sponsored propaganda, or on more revolutionary grounds, or both, as with the murals of Mexican artists in the early 20th century, such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. Today, artists are not quite at the vanguard of social and political change, and murals are less common in this context. The subsequent shift away from the public space of the mural into the compressed space of the gallery changes the scope of viewership and thus alters the production of the artwork’s meaning. What I have been investigating is how contemporary artists might recall the forms or sequential narratives of mural painting, and its effect on the viewer. Wylie and Applebroog’s works exist within gallery walls but use formal techniques to enliven the viewer’s experience.

Using an anachronistic approach to looking at works of art through history might also disencumber us from the taxonomical frontiers between periods and styles, and instead encourage a mode of art historical thinking that spans epochs and cultures, from past to present and back again. Rather than rigidly positioned, artworks could start to occupy more shifting and mutable temporal positions. It might, therefore, prove a useful method to current scholarly and art-world discussion, especially considering the widespread preoccupation with time and ‘the contemporary’. Applebroog and Wylie trouble this category of the contemporary as an artistic period by referring to historical techniques and styles, creating partially anachronistic works that dislocate the viewer’s experience. Giorgio Agamben expresses this idea in his essay, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, emphasising a need for distance from one’s own time through “a disjunction and an anachronism”, the necessary disconnection that allows for a clearer understanding of one’s own present condition and, in doing so, reconciles tensions between tradition and the contemporary. Anachronistic is not, however, synonymous with ahistorical; this approach does not intend to eradicate the critical understanding that comes with historical specificity. These artists play with different modes and traditions, privileging the montage, the multiple, and the serial, against linear, teleological approaches to history and narrative.

The sculptural assemblages of Ida Applebroog

Applebroog’s early works in the 1970s included a series of self-published books called ‘Stagings’ (which she sent unsolicited to critics, curators, and other artists), inhabited with figures drawn in simplified, bold outlines, reminiscent of flipbooks. In the late 1980s, her work expanded in scale but retained this interest in a serial narrative: she created altarpiece-like configurations, with central panels surrounded by smaller sequential paintings that mimic the predella of medieval altarpieces. In the 1990s Applebroog further shifted the form of these multi-narrative works with her ‘marginalia’ (as in the drawn or written illuminations in the margins of a book), in the form of smaller image fragments which either affix to a painting or stand alone.

One of these polyptych (multi-panelled) paintings, ‘Emetic Fields’ (1989, 2.7 x 5.1 metres), consists of eight separate panels which echo the parts of an altarpiece: in the central panel a woman stands beneath the bows of an apple tree, a despondent modern-day Eve; small comic strip-like panels around it mimic an altarpiece’s predella with a number of discontinuous, disconnected sequences of simply outlined figures performing everyday tasks; and these are flanked by panels to the left and right. These panels jut out from the wall at an angle as ‘wings’, creating three-dimensional space, and in a more detailed style they show a surgeon and Queen Elizabeth II, as (rather disparate) figures of authority. The image field is made up of earthy tones of green, ochre, and copper red, and the surface is increasingly complex as you look closer, the oil on canvas first smooth then textured, liquid then chalky. Between these multiple panels of seemingly disconnected narratives the eye reads between the macro and the micro. The experience of viewing these multi-panelled works involves a kind of additive process whereby the narrative is built incrementally across separate but connected image planes.

Mythological allusions, art historical references, and images from popular culture are woven through the works. Applebroog has described being entranced by the ‘fairytales’ of modern life: the promise of eternal happiness from winning the lottery, or a beauty contest, or having a royal wedding; and ‘happy ending’ films, infusing the old fairytale formula with “new urgency, a threat of danger, and then the final release”.  She describes wanting to rework old fairytale imagery into fragmentary, non-linear narratives, with no beginnings or endings: “mine only have middles”. Alongside the formal potential of the polyptych paintings, there is a psychological element that opens up when considering Applebroog’s history. In 1969 she was admitted to Mercy Hospital for mental health reasons, and many of Applebroog’s titles nod to the medical world into which she was plunged, from hospital names to drugs such as in ‘Camp Compazine’ and ‘Emetic Fields’ (drugs to suppress and to induce vomiting). When in hospital she was unable to form coherent sentences, and this seems to relate to her patchwork mode of assembling the paintings. As the art writer Timothy Hyman has interpreted it, Applebroog is not interested in embracing multiplicity; rather, she is trying “to keep things from falling apart.”

Applebroog’s installations of structures and marginalia build further on this approach to non-linear narrative: the audience is sent on a physical excursion through the freestanding or propped up painting structures to piece together some form of narrative order or content. Her ‘totem’ marginalia stack several canvases on top of one another, with recto and verso sides depicting different slices of scenes, while others are vertical panels with a small fragment affixed, like ‘Marginalia (Stairs)’ where a woman, in murky sepia tones, makes her way down the stairs, with a fragment to the left showing her hand on a (floating) segment of bannister.

While the serial, frieze-like arrangements do encourage or challenge the viewer to make narrative connections across works, such as the doubling of figures and fragmented shapes, the narratives don’t quite align. Gaps and spaces around these forms are particularly important, creating a disrupted, disunified space which extends the possibilities for connections across the works, as well as amplifying the physical form of structures that begin to echo the architectural space of the mural, albeit fragmented. The art historian Ernst Gombrich wrote a survey of the fresco, and noted that when presented with photographs of frescoes, it is rare that they are shown in full and are instead more often depicted panel by panel, as ‘paintings in isolation’. Viewed in this way, their narrative sense and full production of meaning can never quite be reached, for murals require the viewer not just to behold them visually but also to experience them spatially, an experience re-envisaged and restaged in the work of both Applebroog and Wylie.

Fracture and fragment: the  place of memory in Rose Wylie’s friezes

The communicative potential of the mural still lingers, but the previous necessity to convey stories, events or ideologies visually to a predominantly illiterate public, for instance during the Mexican Revolution, has given way to more formal and conceptual concerns. As with Applebroog, Wylie plays with narrative time and with experiential time, both for the viewer and the maker, as she paints from memory, depicting scenes or fragments that she recalls, or thinks she recalls, from films. Figures or emblems are often repeated across the canvas, and there is an interest in rhythm, pattern, and motif that belies the initial impression of simplicity.

Wylie works in oils on un-primed canvas, and processes of addition and revision are crucial to her work: she glues and staples pieces of canvas to right mistakes or alter a composition. The glued layers of canvas might anachronistically remind one of the layers of a fresco which, when removed from its site of making, can eventually be peeled away and hung in a new location. The physicality of the canvas, glue, hardboard, and threads adds to the ‘object quality’, Wylie explains; she likes ‘big things’, like billboards, and early decorated churches in which paintings cover the space from floor to ceiling, and doorway to archway. Wylie’s works are often made in a sprawling series which can be exhibited as frieze-like painting installations, in parts, or in varying configurations.

Although her subject matter references film, news images, and everyday experience, Wylie’s affinity for the ‘ancients’ ranges from Egyptian Hajj wall paintings (painted on the houses of pilgrims journeying to Mecca) to Persian miniatures. In conversation with these historical modes of making and displaying paintings, Wylie’s works begin to encompass the surrounding space of the architecture or environment. With the increase in scale, the image space is no longer contained only within the four sides of a board or canvas, and this allows a narrative to grow and spill over, unbound by more restricted delineations.

The initial source imagery alters and evolves through Wylie’s imperfect recollection of detail. One still image that Wylie happened upon inspired the multi-panelled painting 'NK (Syracuse Line-up)' (2014), the title an amalgamation of Wylie’s interest in the ancient and the modern, and high and low culture: ‘NK’ refers to a paparazzi image of Nicole Kidman, while the mention of the historical Sicilian city Syracuse and repetition of the painting’s figure recall depictions of religious processions, often in friezes or mosaics, many of which can be found in Syracuse. The actress, in a backless red dress, is depicted seven times across four adjoining canvas panels. The repetition of the figure, always from the back or side, is like a segment of stop-frame animation. The differently-placed strap of the back of the dress points to Wylie’s loyalty to her own incomplete recollection as she goes along the process of painting, the image lodged in her mind as a trace of the event.

Wylie’s 'Queen Sheba' panels (2012) wind around two perpendicular walls of the gallery, adjoining canvas panels eking round the edge like a horizontal book propped up. One rendition of the Queen of Sheba figure stands in the middle of the ‘fold’, as if in the inner spine of a book. Wylie paints King Solomon as the footballer John Terry, as a symbol of wealth: the black-and-white monolithic portrait looms far larger than the other elements; detached from a body, it faces inwards on the frieze of canvas panels, rather than looking outwards beyond the composition, in this way becoming an endless back-and-forth of looking.

As well as the jumble of references, Wylie’s method of storytelling productively complicates an expected chronology of narrative, rejecting linearity and adherence to one perspectival convention: figures are repeated at different stages and in different perspectives. These might represent different times being at play, a complicated muddle of past and present, fiction and fact; or might instead be operating on a symbolic level. There is a cinematic quality to Wylie’s paintings, and indeed murals might be seen to anticipate, or be in conversation with, cinema. Wylie’s attempts to represent time across an image appear to fuse cinematic concerns with those of Persian miniaturists and the Italian Masters, experimenting with arrangements within the spatial setting that will best guide the viewer’s eye.

The anachronistic tendencies in Wylie and Applebroog’s paintings might have less to do with projecting contemporary ideas onto historical forms or times, and more to do with, as Hal Foster puts it, “the recognition of the complex temporality of any work of art, not only as we stand before it in the present of our own experience, but also as different times are inscribed in the work as it passes through history.” In Wylie’s case, this passing through history is read and re- constructed highly subjectively, relying on the shaky but powerful force that is memory.

With both artists, the direct engagements with their times and with art-historical influences, provokes a conversation with both the past and the present at once. These modes of visual expression are grounded in material engagements with the mural as well as forging dynamic relations to space and time within a constellation of relations and resonances. In Wylie’s and Applebroog’s works, these relations emerge primarily through the innovative format of seriality and non-chronology, creating gaps or intervals between works that bracket time, exploding the khronos of the present to create a state of exception, the kairos. Although recalling historical modes of art practice, perhaps this seriality, seen in both artists,  is the element that pulls it back to the present. The artists do not aspire to restage the public space of the mural, but they do court these forms of viewership, perhaps irretrievably lost, and as long as they figure in the memories or imaginations of the viewer they still hold possibilities for curiosity and experimentation, playing with form and narrative in fragmentary, non-chronological ways to lift the viewer out of time.

 Grace Crabtree is an artist and a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. She graduated from the Ruskin School of Art in 2019 and is doing the Correspondence Course 20/21 at Turps Banana Art School.