„Everyone lives with peers and those of different ages in a wealth of simultaneous possibilities. For each person, the same time is a different time, namely a different age of themselves, which they share only with their peers.‘“ – (Wilhelm Pinder) –

The dominance of clock and calendar time can create the misleading impression that everything has been said about the experience of time when phenomena or events are defined by specifying a date and time in terms of their location and course. In fact, the experience of time is more multifaceted and, beyond its objectifying historical context, is always shaped by the dispositions and life circumstances of the subjects or social communities who observe, participate in, remember, or are affected by phenomena or events.

Beyond dating, there is an axis of the experience of time that is easily overlooked out of habit. On this axis, what is observed is judged according to its contemporality and placed on a scale ranging from familiar/outdated/obsolete/unfashionable through contemporary/modern to new/future-oriented/visionary. That is to say, the determination of a calendar point in time is usually accompanied by unspoken modal references relating to a background of experiences and expectations. The familiar points to a past, that is known; the new to the unexpected, that surprises; the modern to what is typical of its time, which did not exist before; the visionary to what is possible in the future, which has never existed before.

Furthermore, the role that the age of the observers plays in assessing the temporal relevance of dated events or phenomena should not be underestimated. Different experiences and expectations of people of different ages living at the same time color what is observed with regard to its orientation towards action, perceiving it as more or less urgent, more or less challenging, more or less noteworthy, but also as too late, at the right time, or too early.

Moments in which something happens that is identified by involved observers as an event or phenomenon are therefore never simply one-dimensional points in time, but are always embedded in multidimensional spaces of time spanned by different coordinates of the experience of time.

The preceding considerations are a generalization of a concept developed by the art historian Wilhelm Pinder, with which he presented art history in a temporally differentiated way. Three dimensions – historical dating, stylistic classification (anti-modern/modern; contemporaryity), and the artist’s age or generation – are used to create three temporal planes. The first plane depicts artists living at the same time according to their stylistic classification and age; the second plane depicts artists of the same age according to the date of their stylistic classification; and the third plane depicts artists working in similar styles according to their age and historical context.

With his concept, Pinder aimed to counter the narrative of a linear succession of art styles with a more complex and thus more realistic description that addressed the temporal classification of artworks within the tension between the simultaneity and the same age (Gleichaltrigkeit) of the artists. Pinder also spoke of the „non-simultaneity of the simultaneous,“ because artists of different generations created their works at the same calendar time. This approach allowed Pinder to replace the linear succession of styles in conventional art histories with a more complex representation, in which simultaneously living generations of different ages, under mutual influence, created works of different stylistic characteristics at the same time.

Literature:

Wilhelm Pinder, Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte Europas (1928), especially P. 9 ff.

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