Saints and sailors

“SO, WHAT IS TIME? WHEN NO ONE ASKS ME, I KNOW THE ANSWER; WHEN I WANT TO EXPLAIN IT TO WHO IS ASKING THE QUESTION, THEN I DON’T KNOW ANYMORE”
This is what S. Agostino wrote in “Le confessioni” and it well synthesises how difficult it is to define time. The definition provided by Zingarelli, author of the renowned dictionary of the Italian language, is: “time is an indefinite space where events flow inexorably”, while rhythm is: “the regular succession of something in time.” Clear and simple definitions dealing thoroughly with the issue at hand in a single sentence.

The matter becomes more complicated when investigating the etymology of these terms. Indeed, time seems to derive from: “cutting”, while rhythm comes from: “flowing”.
Normally, one would imagine exactly the opposite!
Can one be lost in the maze of time …following S. Agostino’s idea or Albert Einstein’s idea whereby time is relative? Thinking of today, of our daily routine where we obsessively save minutes to build up free spaces, where we run around like crazy, eating, talking, making phone calls, driving, working, doing all of this in the fraction of an instant, with the illusion that this mixture of hectic actions will produce wealth and happiness, we do not realise that we are progressively losing contact with the present, with our time.
Writer Umberto Eco says that, in art, “represented time is the time in which and through which the enunciator (narrator, writer, painter) produces his work and, sometimes, the production stages of the work are narrated within the work itself (think of the traces of dripping matter, which is what perhaps is mostly appreciated in Pollock’s paintings)”.
Let’s think, then, of the latest illy collection cups: Jannis Kounellis decorates them by making a single movement: he dips them three thousand times in black paint so that they become unique through that very movement which becomes a ritual: a ritual picking up a rhythm that “flows” into the artistic production which is “cut” by time.

Whereas Marina Abramovic, who is usually a rigorous representative of sufferance (Leon d’oro at the Venice Art Biennial in 1997 with a performance where for days she brushed piles of bones while singing monotonous melodies of her then tortured homeland), today plays with a ball on a sunny and far away beach, making us participate in a private moment of joy, donating a new self : time is stopped by a snapshot.
Hence, artistic creations go beyond places, ways or cultures; their uniqueness and greatness lie in the fact that they encompass archetypes that have to do with the human mind and are, therefore, universally recognisable, even outside conventions or temporal classifications.