The Thammasat University Library has acquired an influential book about history through the generosity of Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things is shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus. It is by the American art historian George Kubler. The Shape of Time should be of interest not just to TU students who are interested in art history. Students of history, philosophy, aesthetics, and politics may also find useful material in The Shape of Time for preparing academic research projects and theses.

Originally published almost sixty years ago, The Shape of Time discusses how things change in history. Instead of the usual way of classifying objects according to a certain style that they were created in, Professor Kubler suggests that we may consider how objects and images offer solutions that develop at different eras. As new things appear and are later copied, they always change. This process can be seen throughout history. Professor Kubler was a renowned expert in Pre-Columbian art. Pre-Columbian art was made by people of the Caribbean, North, Central, and South Americas until around the time that Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas. The TU Library owns a number of books about Pre-Columbian art.

The Shape of Time examines the legacy of art as material culture. It argues that what we call art can include all things that are made by human beings. History is always changing the way we see things. As we learn, we are constantly experiencing a new sense of discovery, in part through art objects.

Reactions to The Shape of Time

A number of American artists were inspired by The Shape of Time and the ideas it proposes about the role and function of artworks over time. Some wrote about it and others created works inspired by it. They include the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, the artist Robert Smithson, and the conceptual artist John Baldessari. Robert Smithson’s work is described in a book, Modern & Contemporary Art by Michele Dantini, in the TU Library collection. It is shelved in the General Stacks of the Boonchoo Treethong Library, Lampang Campus.

Professor Kubler’s approach was unlike most art history, which often discusses the lives of the artists. Instead, Professor Kubler wrote:

Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art. It then becomes urgent to devise better ways of considering everything men have made. This we may achieve sooner by proceeding from art rather than from use, for if we depart from use alone, all useless things are overlooked, but if we take the desirableness of things as our point of departure, then useful objects are properly seen as things we value more or less dearly.

Among Professor Kubler’s other observations:

• Purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning without it.
• However useful it is for pedagogical purposes, the biological metaphor of style as a sequence of life-stages was historically misleading, for it bestowed upon the flux of events the shapes and behavior of organisms.
• We always may be sure that every man-made thing arises from a problem as a purposeful solution.
• The historian’s special contribution is the discovery of the manifold shapes of time. The aim of the historian, regardless of his specialty in erudition, is to portray time. He is committed to the detection and description of the shape of time.
• Unless he is an annalist or a chronicler, the historian communicates a pattern which was invisible to his subjects when they lived it, and unknown to his contemporaries before he detected it.
• The cultural clock runs mainly upon ruined fragments of matter. No matter to what hazardous lengths we let out our line they still withdraw again, and further, into the depths. … however, runs mainly upon ruined fragments of matter recovered from refuse heaps and graveyards, from abandoned cities and buried villages. Only the arts of material nature have survived; of music and dance, of talk and ritual, of all the arts of temporal expression practically nothing is known elsewhere than in the Mediterranean world, save through traditional survivals among remote groups.
• The universe has a finite velocity which limits not only the spread of its events, but also the speed of our perceptions. The moment of actuality slips too fast by the slow, coarse net of our senses.
• Although inanimate things remain our most tangible evidence that the old human past really existed, the conventional metaphors used to describe this visible past are mainly biological.
• The history of art… resembles a broken but much-repaired chain made of string and wire to connect the occasional jeweled links surviving as physical evidences of the invisible original sequence of prime objects.
• Instead of an idea of style, which embraces too many associations, [I] have outlined the idea of a linked succession of prime works with replications, all being distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same kind of action.
• Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.

The Shape of Time concludes with the observation:

Everything varies both with time and by place, and we cannot fix anywhere upon an invariant quality such as the idea of style supposes, even when we separate things from their settings. But when duration and setting are retained in view, we have shifting relations, passing moments, and changing places in historic life. Any imaginary dimensions or continuities like style fade from view as we look for them. Style is like a rainbow. It is a phenomenon of perception governed by the coincidence of certain physical conditions. We can see it only briefly while we pause between the sun and the rain, and it vanishes when we go to the place where we thought we saw it. Whenever we think we can grasp it, as in the work of an individual painter, it dissolves into the farther perspectives of the work of that painter’s predecessors or his followers, and it multiplies even in the painter’s single works, so that any one picture becomes a profusion of latent and fossil matter when we see the work of his youth and his old age, of his teachers and his pupils. Which is now valid: the isolated work in its total physical presence, or the chain of works marking the known range of its position? Style pertains to the consideration of static groups of entities. It vanishes once these entities are restored to the flow of time. Not biography nor the idea of style nor again the analysis of meaning confronts the whole issue now raised by the historical study of things. Our principal objective has been to suggest other ways of aligning the main events. In place of the idea of style, which embraces too many associations, these pages have outlined the idea of a linked succession of prime works with replications, all being distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same kind of action.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)