Time and the modern: Current trends in the history of modern temporalities

Abstract

In 1958 George Kubler, the American art historian and scholar of Mesoamerican culture, articulated the importance of time to historical practice. 'The aim of the historian', he suggested, is to 'portray time' or to capture 'the manifold shapes of time'.1 Instead of arranging artworks according to chronological time and thus according to successive periods or styles, Kubler proposed a non-chronological approach that would emphasize how the date of a specific art object (for example, a cathedral) was less important than its relative position in a chosen sequence (for example, the development of a cathedral's Gothic arches). Although Kubler's work remained grounded in linear notions of sequence that have long been criticized for its reduction to 'prime objects' and progressive development of artistic techniques, his protest against chronology and the utility of historical periodization reveals a crucial aspect of modern time: the continued resistance to singular accounts of progressive, linear time in the twentieth century.