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(1993) The aesthetics of communication, Dordrecht, Springer.
Time, that Great Sculptor is the title of a collection of essays by Marguerite Yourcenar1, in which she blends her passion for art with a sensitive and moral reflection on time. This title already poses the problem of the relation of time to space, sculpture being, along with architecture, a spatial art. But there is more. Yourcenar is essentially referring to the aesthetic function, or rather, the aesthetic functioning of time. "The day that a statue is completed, its life, in a sense, begins. The first stage is reached, when, through the care of the sculptor, it is taken from a block to a human form; a second stage, alternating throughout the course of centuries of adoration, admiration, love, contempt or indifference, by successive degrees of erosion and wear, will bring it back bit by bit to the state of unformed matter from which its sculptor had removed it"2. The aesthetic place of time must therefore be discovered
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-1773-9_3
Full citation:
Parret, H. (1993). Time, that great sculptor, in The aesthetics of communication, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 39-62.
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