The Blindboy Podcast - The Linear understanding of Time in European Art

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

Art hot takes from a covid fever dream. Western culture historically understands time to be linear, fixed, and unmovable. I explore the ways this impacted European portrait painting and how West African art changed it Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bola bus you worthless husbands, welcome to the blind boy podcast. My voice is slightly different this week because sadly I have finally gotten the coronavirus. I'm all boosted and vaccined and all that shit so it's quite mild but it's not pleasant. I've just returned from some gigs in Barcelona and Madrid so I don't think I got COVID in Barcelona or Madrid because I was wearing my mask and avoiding indoor spaces I think I got COVID

in Dublin fucking airport before I left for Spain because Dublin airport at the moment is an absolute hell hole it was when I went there I've never seen it as busy in my life Dublin Airport at the moment is an absolute hellhole. It was... When I went there, I've never seen it as busy in my life.

Dublin Airport was so busy that I couldn't find a space in any part of the airport to even take a phone call. It was like being at a festival and no one was wearing a mask. Nobody was wearing a mask. Maybe one in every no one was wearing a mask. Nobody was wearing a mask. Maybe one in every 100 people was wearing a mask. I was wearing a mask.

But this is. Masks only work if everyone's wearing them. So. I got myself a little bit of coronavirus. I'm. I'm doing okay. I'd rather not have coronavirus. But.

A little bit of a fever. and a small few sniffles. However, this does mean that I will not be gigging in Brussels this Thursday. So if you were coming to my gig in Brussels, you should have gotten an email. That gig will be rescheduled for sometime in the autumn. I apologise. I'm glad I took my antigen test before I fucking left for Brussels though because I wasn't feeling right I was just I was feeling weak and feverish and I knew that up in Dublin airport I would have had to go to Dublin airport again at 2am for a 7am flight

because the queues are so bad in Dublin airport and my body just said to me you're not going to be able for that you have a bit of a fever you are not going to be able to queue outside at 2 in the morning in Dublin airport so luckily I had a fucking antigen test I took it and it said it was positive

so I didn't go to Brussels I stayed at home and I'm glad I did that because first off, I would have infected a lot of people. Secondly, if I'd have fucking gone and queued for six hours in Dublin, I could have made myself a lot more sick. Instead, I was able to rest.

If you're wondering, why am I doing a podcast if I'm unwell? Because this is my job. This is my job and I adore it and I love it and there will always be a podcast each Wednesday. If I get hit by a fucking car I will do a podcast from my hospital bed about the history of getting hit by cars. I've worked my entire life to get to this place right now where I'm doing something I truly deeply love, which is this podcast. So I don't take sick days. I appreciate what I have too much and I want to put out this podcast even though I'm sick and hopefully my sniffly voice will not interfere with the podcast hug.

But of course, if you're a brand new listener, maybe go and listen to some earlier podcasts to familiarise yourself with the lore, to listen to me when I don't have coronavirus. But if you're a regular listener, if you're a steeple chasing Rita, then you understand the crack. Welcome back. I had the most wonderful time in Spain.

In Barcelona in particular. Where they have completely decriminalised cannabis. Where you can go to a cannabis club or a dispensary and tell them what effects you want and what you want to smoke. And they will give it to you. And tell them what effects you want and what you want to smoke. And they will give it to you. And I said, I want something that makes me feel creative. And giggly and happy and energetic.

And not paranoid or really tired. So they gave me this stuff called Mac One. Which was completely fresh and smelled incredible. So I had a little bit of that. And I went to a lovely quiet art gallery and I looked at the paintings of Diego Velazquez specifically paintings that he did of Spanish royalty of the 16th century and I was just stoned off my tits listening to the song Night Moves by Bob Seger on repeat, marvelling at the brushwork of Diego Velazquez. And looking at how all the Spanish royalty were heavily, heavily inbred.

Aunts, uncles, sons, daughters, all of their portraits. And Velazquez was an incredible portrait artist. He was from the Baroque period. So when Velazquez painted someone it was very realistic, contained a lot of the person's personality in the painting. But when Velazquez painted Spanish royalty the paintings begin to look quite surreal because all of the subjects in the portraits. They have giant jaws. Known as the Habsburg jaw. You see the Spanish royal family.

For hundreds of years. The Habsburg family. In order to maintain power. They just had to inbreed with each other. And they inbred so much that they developed this thing called the Hapsburg jaw which was a protruding jaw but even the portrait of Charles II and he was only a young fella in the portrait. It's been said that he couldn't even chew his food because of the inbreeding and I stared at those paintings for a long long time

I stared at that portrait of Prince Charles the second for three renditions of Night Moves by Bob Seger and that song is six minutes long so that was 18 minutes staring at the same painting thinking about how the

Spanish royal family had effectively bred themselves like pugs, like the way the royals of France bred dogs to the point that they had odd-shaped faces. And I'm not making light of or making fun of people who look differently through breeding or even through inbreeding but I think with the Spanish royal family it's it's a different type of curiosity because this was something that was very very deliberate and they weren't necessarily nice people these are the people who are colonizing America and engage, inventing and engaging in the slave trade and placing greed and power over the health of their children. But it did all this under the

wonderful glow of decriminalized cannabis. Because it's not like the stuff you get here. Over here, you just get a bag of, do you want it or not? And it could be three months old and you don't know what's in it and you can't predict the effects but in Spain where it's decriminalized you can predict the effects you know you're safe I can use it responsibly I'm an adult and me personally I like to have the odd bit of cannabis but I'd love to be able to live in a country where I can do it safely and responsibly and make informed choices and know what I'm putting into my body and how much of it. You can't do that in Ireland at the moment because it's illegal. If it was alcohol that's illegal we wouldn't be able to make responsible choices.

We'd just be drinking poutine that someone made in a shed and possibly going blind. The only downside to that particular weed that I had in Barcelona and Madrid was it made me walk around Spain and when I'd look at people they would look a lot like someone I knew back home and then I'd walk up to him and say hello, and I can't speak Spanish, and I hate small talk. Except for one fella, outside a Starbucks in Madrid, and when I said hello to him, I explained to him what was happening, and I said sorry man, I'm from Ireland, and I'm after smoking this strong Spanish weed, and I thought you were someone I knew from Limerick. A fella I went to school with, called T Tarky who once got so badly sunburned

that his skin started peeling like his entire face formed this one uniform translucent mask that was peeling off him. I wanted to peel his face off but he refused to put moisturiser on his skin

because it would be too effeminate so he just let his skin peel for three days. The same fella actually, I think I mentioned him on a podcast before, we were on a school tour and he was sitting at the back of the bus and he was trying to moon passing traffic.

Actually he wanted to do more than moon. He wanted to moon them but also incorporate his dick and balls into it in a way that you'd see them from behind we used to call it a fruit ball so he tried to fruit ball passing traffic but as he poked his bare arse out the window of the bus he executed it with such enthusiasm and gusto that he fell out of the bus and scraped his entire anal genital region on fucking asphalt and it was hilarious

I haven't seen this man in over a decade and I thought I met him outside a Starbucks in Madrid so it was a very enthusiastic hello that I would have given this stranger I didn't say that to the Spanish fella but I said to him look I'm fired on him after smoking a load Spanish fella but I said to him look I'm

fired on him after smoking a lot of Spanish weed. I thought you were someone I knew. He was really sound about it and then I ended up introducing him to the music of Bob Seger and then he recommended that I get a local Madrid drink called Horchata which was a strange little milky, a sweet milky drink, which I quite enjoyed, so that was a nice interaction. It's made from wolf nuts. I'd never even heard of what wolf nuts are, but they have them in Madrid. And horchata is also

a Mexican drink. I think the Mexicans got it as a result of Spanish colonization, but in Mexico they don't make it with wolf nuts, they make it with rice. So I have a little, a hot take for you this week. I'm going to do something around art history. I've been using my time being ill with COVID to lie down and do a lot of thinking really. A lot of fever dream hot take stuff. So before I got this virus, one thing I was really, really, really happy about is I looked at photographs in my phone from like a month

ago, right? And it felt like a long time ago. I couldn't believe that these photographs in my phone that were literally just one month old. I looked at them and it felt like, wow, that was ages ago. Holy fuck. And I felt really happy to experience that because. Over the two years of lockdown lockdown that's something that disappeared like I really didn't enjoy the two years of lockdown I don't think anyone actually enjoyed it

but the last thing unease and stress that I have from the two years of lockdown it's that my perception of time became distorted I describe it as the the COVID coma like

2019 or sorry early 2020 we entered the fucking pandemic and we didn't really come out of lockdown until 2022 and my brain doesn't know what to do with those two years I feel a sense of confusion. I feel a sense of confusion,

and I feel a sense of injustice. Before COVID lockdown, my only frame of reference for this was, do you know that week around Christmas time? That week around Christmas time, where you don't know what day it is. And there's that little six days of confusion around Christmas time where you're like, is it Tuesday? Is it Wednesday? I don't know. Nothing's open. Everything is topsy-turvy. My routine has been disturbed.

Before COVID lockdown, that was just one week. But two years of lockdown was basically that. And when I think of 2020 or 2021, because all I did was stay at home, because that's what we all did, and because I did so little and stared at the same four walls and had such lack of spontaneity in my life, I lost The Sopranos and Mad Men. And then in 2021, I watched Gamara and Oz.

And that's pretty much all I have. My body has aged two years, but my mind doesn't feel as if two years have passed. So when I looked at my phone last week and looked at some photographs from a month ago and it felt like ages ago that felt fucking wonderful and the reason that one month ago felt like ages ago is because my life has spontaneity and events and travel and movement and not every single day is the exact same. The variety and vitality and surprise of just living is now back and now my relationship with time is healthy again and that feels fucking wonderful. I can extract quite a lot of meaning from that. I can extract quite a lot of meaning from that.

I have a sense of achievement of having lived a whole fucking month. I feel like I've earned something. During lockdown, I didn't feel like I was earning anything. Every single day was blending into the next. And worse than that, over lockdown, my main social interaction was social media. Looking at Twitter, looking at Instagram. And social media is not in any way a reflection of real life. All emotions are turned up to 11.

All colours are brightened when it comes to social media. So during lockdown, if people were fighting online, if there were stressful things happening online, if someone even said a mean thing to me online, during lockdown, it was very, very painful and it was hard to escape. Whereas now, because I have routine in my day, I have my office, I'm meeting people on the street, I'm travelling to gigs. Now if there's stress online, I just go, ah, there's some bullshit online, who gives a fuck, that's not real life. And that feels wonderful too. But mostly, my relationship with time is back to normal.

And the key word there is my relationship with time. Because time is weird. Ultimately it comes down to how we experience it. Like the first 10 years of my life feel like an eternity. Whereas the 10 years of my 20s don't. Time is just a unit of data that relates to our experiences. And we use time to hold on to those experiences. But perception of time is also culturally specific. Like my perception of time is quite Western. So is yours. If you live in Western society society we have a very linear western

perception of time now that can be very very hard to grasp because we accept and take time as an absolute truth and our culturally specific language and words around time are limited to the culture that we're in. So in the West, it can be hard to even describe a concept or notion of time that isn't perfectly linear. Now the thing is with linear time, as in time is continually moving forward, always moving forward, the thing is with linear time. The reason we know that it's merely down to how we perceive it. Is because science can show us that it's not the case. Alright now I don't know a shit ton about quantum physics.

I don't know a shit ton about relativity. I'm not a scientist. I do have a podcast with an expert in this. It's called Quantum Tarantino, I believe, from two years ago. If you want to listen to me speak to Michael Brooks was his name, I think, who was a quantum physicist. He speaks about time. But basically science shows us time is not linear.

We can experience it as that. But quantum physics can show us that time is not linear. We can experience it as that, but quantum physics can show us that time is not linear. It can bend. There can be multiple instances of time. Things can happen within quantum physics that truly break our perception of what reality and time is. So we're objectively wrong, even though subjectively linear time is what makes sense. Now, why in the West do we have a linear perception of time? One theory is that our culture is eschatological. Now, eschatological means that the world starts and it will one day end. So if you think of Western culture, you tend to trace it back to the Abrahamic religions. So the first line of the fucking Old Testament of the Bible,

and the Old Testament of the Bible is like four and a half thousand years old I think the first line of the Old Testament in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and Western culture whether it be Judaism, Christianity the fucking Greeks, the Romans the foundations of Western thought

is eschatological the belief that time started, it's continually moving, and it will one day end. That's an eschatological viewpoint of time. And our entire culture, view of reality, view of self, view of other people, everything is based around this eschatological, linear, continually moving forward concept of time. And all of our words and language and concept of what rationality is and concept of objective truth, it's all based around that. Now, Western eschatological culture does have a non-linear time, but it tends to occur in heaven and hell. So on this earth, there's your linear time, you're born and you die.

Then you go to another area, which is eternity, and there's your heaven, your hell, your purgatory. But it's not entwined with our lived reality in any way. your hell your purgatory but it's not entwined with our lived reality in any way it's it's like linear time is what happens when you're physically alive and non-linear time is like dangled in front of us as a goal so when you die that's where you get your heaven or your hell or your purgatory your eternity outside of linear time. But within our Western understanding of reality, it's linear. So what are examples of non-linear perceptions of time in a culture? Pre-Christian Ireland.

I've been speaking about Irish mythology the last few podcasts. The story of Oisín visiting the land of Tir na Nóidh. Oisín was able to access this other plane of reality where time behaved differently. People didn't age, but it wasn't like heaven or hell after he died. It was a place that he could access within lived reality. There's indigenous Australian cultures that have, they have a concept called the dream time, which it's even, it's difficult to understand using the English language, it's difficult to explain using the English language, I've read about it, and I hope I get it right, and apologies if you're an indigenous Australian person listening to this and I get it wrong but from what I can read

the dream time appears to be past present and future all intertwined in one in in a kind of flowing continuum like one example that I read that allowed me to understand it slightly was there was a folklorist around the area of Melbourne who was speaking to indigenous Australian tribes and this tribe remembered the Irishman Ned Kelly. Ned Kelly was a bush ranger, he was Irish, he was an outlaw, he shot a bunch of police, he's like a folk hero in Australia but this particular indigenous tribe around Melbourne remembered him. But when the folklorist who was using the English language was trying to understand the indigenous Australians understanding of Ned Kelly the folklorist found a barrier for language because the indigenous Australian tribe, so me, Irish Western person, I understand Ned Kelly to be a man who lived in the 1840s

and now he's gone, he's dead. He existed back then in that period for 30 years or whatever and that's it and I'm cool with that but when the folklorist asked these indigenous people around the area of Melbourne what Ned Kelly meant to them Ned Kelly was alive and dead and everywhere all at once and that was totally okay with them now to us with our western view of time, that sounds quite ridiculous. That's not something we can see as observable. But like I said, modern physics would disagree with the western view of linear time. Like Einstein's theory of relativity showed that time is relative. It can be bent and warped.

Quantum physics can show us that certain particles appear to exist outside of the rules of time. I mean the most famous experiment within quantum physics is Schrodinger's cat where a cat in a box is both alive and dead at the same time if no one is around to observe it. Then you've got like eastern cultures, cultures where Buddhism come out of, where time is cyclical, like reincarnation. You don't die, you're reborn, everything is a cycle. Also there's certain African cultures that have cyclical time. Time is a cycle. It's not a straight line of beginning continually progressing towards an end. And of course the big question is, is time like intrinsic to the human animal?

Like is it something biological within us or is it a social construct? Because regardless of the culture, we would have a concept of individual biological time. You're born a baby and you die as an elderly person. But how do we know that stone age people viewed that as time being an external thing that's aging them? As time being something that's outside of the human body. So where does this etiological time come from? Well one theory, and again this is a theory from anthropologists,

is, I mentioned there about eschatology, which is the Abrahamic religions. God created the earth and one day the earth is going to end. Linear. Well, eschatological beliefs started in the same place, the area called the Fertile Crescent, which is now like modern day Iraq. Between 10 and 15,000 years ago, this is where they said the Neolithic revolution happened, where humans in that area went from being hunter-gatherers, which means they moved continually in search of their food, they stopped doing that, they settled in one place and they discovered farming.

Effectively the human control and domestication of nature. The concept of work, the idea of surplus, these are all things that came about when humans all of a sudden could grow food. The theory is that hunter gatherers would just need a short warning in order to change their path and move with a crowded deer or they would be aware of the seasons that it's going to start raining we need to move on. Whereas as soon as farming became a thing it required long-term planning for the year in order to grow crops and plan how much you needed and how you could feed yourself in six months time. What's referred to as the birth of civilization, the

birth of villages, towns, cities and staying in one place and controlling the environment. In order for that to occur humans needed to record, measure and predict the passage of time. And when they'd stay put in one place, they might notice, oh fuck, the sun moves the same way every single day and we can measure time using shadows from the sun. Or the moon moves a certain way and this is very predictable. And the same thing with the stars when you stay in one place and look up everything is very very predictable and appears to move like clockwork and from that humans get the concept of time as being a thing that's outside of them and that's fixed and also farming gave humans the experience of having a surplus

you see hunter-gatherers who are consistently moving they wouldn't have surplus because in order to have surplus you have to stay put but they would move all the time to meet their needs whereas at the neolithic revolution you're not chasing wild grass you're domesticating grass and growing it and breeding it and creating wheat and then growing wheat harvesting it having loads of it surplus and then needing to plan out via time how many months is this wheat going to feed me and in order to have the grain and in order to plan and then you see the beginning of polytheistic religions pre-christian religions where you have many gods so basically if you're farming you had many gods which controlled the weather the seasons the conditions that would lead to a fertile crop.

And you had to be able to pray to these gods in the right way, in the right place, at the right time, to ensure crops. And there around the Neolithic revolution is where anthropologists say the concept of time as being a thing outside of ourselves starts to appear within humans with the foundation of agriculture but then what do you have because of agriculture but you have lots of humans staying in the same place towns villages cities start to emerge so by the time of the bronze age happens The Bronze Age happens, which is about 5,000 years ago, 3,000 BC. Let's say Egypt or Mesopotamia, where writing is invented. With writing, you then get the need for recording history. Because with these cities, you now have kings and dynasties,

as in families that throughout generations are now recording events in time to express their entitlement to power. A bit like, you know, when I was talking about being in that gallery and looking at the Velazquez paintings of all the Spanish royalty. There was a reason for that. Here's fucking King Charles, here's fucking King Charles here's his mother there's his grandfather record who was in power so that it's there to show in memory

I am entitled to this power here's the proof this can never be forgotten and we need to have linear time in order to show that this happened this person lived for this amount of time then they died

then they gave birth to my da, he lived and died for a certain time, then I was born and that's why I ruled this city. A hunter-gatherer society where ownership of land and surplus and property doesn't exist might not need that. They might be comfortable with time is a continual flowing cycle and our ancestors are all around and dead and alive all at once. Also in Mesopotamia and Egypt you see the invention of the sundial and the water clock and the recording of a day being a thing

and years. What you see is that the concept of time is independent to the events happening in it. Time is a thing outside of us that we all have to agree upon. The past is the past. It cannot be changed. All we have is control of the future. And then you get the Iron Age. Let's say the creation of the Old Testament in the Fertile Crescent. That's when you start to see a kind of strict agreement upon linear time and you see the eradication of cosmic time like when i spoke there about pre-christian irish mythology with fucking

oisín and tir na nóil you know oisín is able to access this separate plane of reality where the tuatha de danann exist and they exist in a separate type of time, a type of cyclical eternity and Oisín can access this. That's cosmic time. Well in the fertile crescent, what we now call the Middle East and the creation of the Old Testament, Judaism, that's where you see linear time being created. Yahweh, God, creates fucking time. God created the heavens and the earth and it's going to keep going forward until it ends on judgment day. And the time that God created is the one you're living in right now. And it's irreversible. You can't change it.

You can never go backwards. You must only go forwards. And time is a resource that is not to be wasted because it will end one day. And while this is happening, in Greece, you have the foundations of Western philosophy. Now, in fairness to some of the Greeks, they weren't as strict with linear time in their thinking as the Abrahamic religion was. There was a fella called Parmenides and he argued that reality is essentially eternity and that the concept of time is just a concept. It's something that you witness but effectively we can never understand time. It's completely outside of our awareness which is quite close to what quantum physics would say are Einstein's relativity. Then you have Plato kind of agreeing with him, agreeing with

Parmenides, saying that time is the moving image of eternity. And then you have Aristotle's idea of time, which is the one we kind of stuck with. Aristotle views time as completely unchangeable, a fixed thing, definitely exists and it's determined by the spheres in the fucking sky, by the planets and the stars moving around and because you can predict the way that the planets and the stars move then time is a thing outside of humans that exists and it's quite fixed so the western concept of linear time is kind of a mixture between aristotle and then the old testament saying that time was created and time will end and it's a line and once shit happens it can never be changed it's always a line going forward and there's a line. And once shit happens it can never be changed. It's always a line going forward.

And there's a limited amount of it left. Then around the 4th century there was a philosopher called Saint Augustine. And Saint Augustine. He came up with a theory about time. Which is quite easy to understand. Nowadays that we have video games. So Augustine's, Saint Augustine's Theory of Time kind of mixes

the biblical understanding of time with Aristotle's understanding and Plato's understanding. So I play a video game called Red Dead Redemption. Okay. And this is a very realistic video game where there is a world within it

and there's a character and there's nature and there's days and nights and it's very realistic but I'm sitting in my reality playing this video game so even though in my video game my character sleeps and eats and a day passes my character's day is like 20 minutes in my time so that's kind of saint augustine's theory saint augustine's theory was that god exists in his own fucking time god created time so god is basically like the person with the controller playing Red Dead Redemption. And we are the characters in the video game with our perception and experience of time within those parameters of our little world and our little universe. And we can't see anything outside of that.

But God, because he made it, he has his own time and it's whatever and in a way me playing Red Dead Redemption I live in eternity I could play Red Dead Redemption for one of my days and maybe 60 days have passed in the game but my character doesn't know any different so that was Saint Augustine's theory time is Time is fixed. You can't change the past. However, the time that we exist in, those are rules of time that God made up. And God is somewhere on the outside having crack. But ultimately, the only time we need to concern ourselves with is this linear time of reality we have right now. And then you've got your heaven and hell afterwards that's outside of that. That's your cosmic time.

Now, around the late Middle Ages, like the 11th century, that's where we start to get this concept of time being a thing that you could waste. Or time being precious. Time being very, very important. I'm talking like the 11th and 12th centuries and it starts to happen with the emergence of modern capitalism this is where time is used as a way to extract money from people's labor around the 13th century you had like wealthy clergy and the aristocrats living in castles we'll say. And then around them is the town where the regular people are now working to like make and produce goods.

So they're not necessarily out in the fields obeying the time of nature and growing things. Now you have towns of people who are labourers and craftspeople who are effectively clocking in in order to make money for themselves but also money from the person who owns the business. It was also at this time that Christians stopped considering usury as a sin. Up until the 13th century Christians couldn't make money from money. So you couldn't like loan someone money and then charge interest on it when it's paid back. You could, charging interest to somebody is using time to generate money from nothing. I loan you 100 quid, it's 10% each month. If you pay me back in 6 months, you then owe me 160 quid. I've earned 60 quid from 6 months of time.

That used to be a sin in Christianity. In the 13th century they stopped making that a sin. Giant mechanical clocks started to be made around the 14th century in towns and workers were expected to work to clock in depending on hours and minutes. The powerful people in medieval society started to become obsessed with measuring time because time is now a thing that can make them money through other people's labour. So by the Renaissance, time becomes intertwined with greed and profits and this is sent, this message is communicated from the top down from the wealthy to the people who are working for the wealthy to generate wealth. So time stops being this

philosophical concept that has to do with how you live your life or meaning or god or spirituality. Time is now money and time can be wasted and time determines your success or your poverty. Linear time becomes an obsession and then you get the birth of modern science. You get the likes of Galileo who was observing in detail the planets and how they you get the likes of Galileo who was observing in detail the planets and how they moved around the world and Galileo kind of rejects Saint Augustine's theory that yes there's linear time but God has his own time outside of this and this is eternity and don't be worrying about time because there's eternity waiting for you. Galileo says fuck that I'm looking at the planets.

Time is an objective reality. It's continually moving forward. It's fixed. It has nothing to do with how you observe it. Time is a thing that exists and it's linear. And then finally what you get is Isaac Newton. And Isaac Newton just states straight up, time is a thing.

It exists. Absolute true and mathematical time of itself and from its own nature flows equably without relation to anything external and by another name is called duration and that's not really challenged until Einstein so that there is the the western concept of linear time going right back to the Bible, and to the fertile crescent. So that's my COVID fever dream research, into the western concept of time,

and how we arrived at it. But I don't want, this podcast isn't necessarily about time specifically, I want to bring it back to art, in particular, early 20th century cubism, and how time, how non-western concepts of time influence

cubism. And I want to do that after the ocarina pause. So it's time now for the ocarina Oh my fucking voice lads. It's time now for the ocarina pause. I like to think of the ocarina as existing outside of time,

while music is wonderful because it's an art form that uses time as a medium. the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Jimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder. April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth.

Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying.

Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. What's not real? Who said that?

The First Omen. Only in theaters April 5th. That was the ocarina pause. I kept it nice and low there so I didn't disturb anyone's dogs. This podcast is supported by you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash theblindbuypodcast. This podcast is my full-time job. This podcast is how I earn a living.

I love making this podcast. I adore every second of it. I wouldn't even miss an episode that I'm sick. That's how much I love making this and the sense of duty that I have to turn up every Wednesday regardless and deliver a podcast to you. If you enjoy this podcast, if it gives you relaxation, solace, whatever the fuck, please consider paying me for the work that I put in to make this podcast. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Buy Podcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month.

If you met me in real life, would you say, fuck it, I like his podcast, I'd buy him a pint? Well, you can via the patreon page but if you can't afford that don't worry about it you can listen for free because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free so everybody gets a podcast and I get to earn a living it's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness also it keeps this podcast independent. I'm not beholden to any advertiser.

No advertiser can tell me what to speak about. Or change my content in any way. I can do my own thing. And make sure that each week. Whatever I'm speaking about. I'm genuinely passionate about it. And I care about it. And I think that's what makes a good podcast. When the person who's making the podcast

actually gives a shit about what they're talking about I just want to do a little plug for my UK tour that's coming up I shouldn't call it the UK fucking Scotland Wales and England alright I'm gigging in London on the 16th of June

in the Troxy on Friday the 17th I'm in the Manchester Academy. I'm in the Glee Club in Cardiff on the 22nd of June. I'm in the Glasgow O2 Academy on the 23rd of June. That's all this month. Please come along to these gigs. They're going to be fantastic crack. Also if you bought tickets to my Logan Hall gig in London in 2020 that was cancelled because the pandemic happened, you're allowed to come along to the London Troxy gig. Those tickets are valid. You should have gotten an email from Ticketmaster. At the start of this podcast, I mentioned my time last week in Spain, smoking Spanish hash and observing the beautiful portraits of Diego Velazquez

when he was painting Spanish royalty and I view the traditional western portrait style as something that emerges from a sense of anxiety that results from the western linear understanding of time.

Specifically, our western construction and understanding of time is quite a fearful one, especially from the 14th century onwards, when time became intertwined with the production of wealth, when time became something that you can waste, something that you must control and capture. The portrait, the painting of a person sitting down looking at the canvas, the portrait is an expression of this anxiety. It's an attempt to try and stop and capture linear time. But only very wealthy people, like popes, kings, queens, merchants, could afford to have their portrait painted throughout the 15th, 16th, 17th century.

Now this is a tough concept to grasp, because we live now in a time where we have videos. We have videos and we have cameras. And you can use technology to capture moments. But in the 14th, 15th century, they'd never seen a camera. They'd never seen a video camera. And for someone like Diego Velazquez, the painter, to paint the King of Spain in the 1600s. He would have had to ask the King of Spain to sit still for 12 hours.

Sit still, don't fucking move, because I am trying to freeze time in one moment and record your image using paint. We take that for granted, but that's quite unnatural. Only a culture that is fearful of time and views time as something that's disappearing or can be wasted tries to capture it in one little moment like that. People don't sit still for ages like a statue. That doesn't exist. So why do Western portrait makers of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages try to do that, to capture a person sitting perfectly still? That's a conscious decision. And it doesn't have to be that way. Like if you think of cave paintings, and cave

paintings could be 30,000 years old. These are Stone Age people. You think of a cave painting, a Stone Age artist who most think of a cave painting. A Stone Age artist, who most definitely did not have a linear concept of time, would have painted a buffalo on the side of a cave. Now this buffalo isn't just one buffalo. If you look at how ancient artists painted animals, they would paint like multiple buffaloes. But what that painter is doing, what that prehistoric artist is doing, they're incorporating time into their work. Because buffaloes don't stay

still, they move. So the prehistoric cave painters were trying to include the passage of time into how they visually represent the buffalo. Then that stops in western culture, specifically around the middle ages, where we try to capture and stop time. Because we're afraid of it, it's something that can disappear, and you're left with something quite unnatural. One of my favourite things to do when I look at portraits that are painted from the 14th, 15th, 16th century, portraits that are painted from the 14th, 15th, 16th century, is how everyone who's being painted looks like a big grumpy cunt. And the reason they look grumpy is because they're being told to sit still for 12 hours while they're being painted. It's not natural. So what you have there is called figurative representational art. It's a static interpretation of reality and time as trying to capture one

moment and that can only emerge from a culture that observes time as linear and something that can be wasted. So when did that stop? It stopped at the start of the 20th century with the introduction of an art form called Cubism. The artists I'm speaking about here are the likes of Picasso or George Braque or even Cezanne even though he wasn't a cubist. But if you if everyone can think of a Picasso I'm using Picasso as an example because he's very famous and I know that a lot of people who listen to this podcast aren't like interested in art. But if you think of a Picasso portrait of a woman or a man, it doesn't look exactly like a woman or a man.

They might have three faces or four hands or the foot might be turned one direction and the hand is another. A Picasso portrait or any Cubist portrait from about 1906 onwards does not look like the traditional portrait. What's going on there and why was it radical at the time? Well, a couple of things had happened that changed how portraits were done. Number one, in the late 1800s, photography had been invented. Our anxious desire to stop time in its moment, the western desire to be fearful of time because it's something that will slip away from you, that can't be wasted, culminated in the

invention of the camera. Now a piece of technology can literally capture time like that in a second and there's your portrait. The photograph is the ultimate technological expression of anxiety towards time but naturally what this does is it causes painters to shit their pants. When photography became invented and now the rich people didn't want their portraits painted they wanted this new piece of technology to get a photograph of him painters were going well what use am I now

how can I ask this king to sit down for 12 hours while I paint him when he can just get his photograph taken or even the photograph of a landscape because landscape paintings are also quite similar how can I capture this landscape in one moment in time of a landscape because landscape paintings are also quite similar. How can

I capture this landscape in one moment in time? How can I freeze this? How can I control time because I'm afraid of it? The camera had created a huge challenge there too. So you had a number of art movements emerging. I did a full podcast before on Impressionism. When the camera challenged landscape painting in the late 1800s you had the Impressionist painters like Monet saying okay well a camera can take a photograph of this field but only I a human can truly see the colours as they interplay in what I observe to be reality and can I express this on a canvas and then from impressionism you get expressionism and with expressionism you've got the artist

saying alright a camera can take a photograph of this field but this field isn't just visual information. This tree right here. It's not just a tree. I get feelings from this tree. This tree makes me feel happy. This tree makes me feel sad. How can I try and paint the emotions into this painting? How can I do what this camera can never do? Now in 1906 another very important thing happened. This is when Einstein came forward with his theory of relativity, basically shattering Isaac Newton's theory of

time as being completely fixed and linear and unchanging. But Einstein's theory of relativity completely smashed 4,000 years of the Western understanding of time as being linear. Einstein basically said, here's the deal, lads. Time is not fixed. Time is not linear. Time is interconnected with space and time can be warped and bent by gravity. The first time science basically said, here, Western people who fucking wrote your entire concepts and ideas in Abrahamic religion and the theories of the Greeks,

you're wrong. Time is not linear. Time is something a lot more strange and a lot more weird than you think it is. And you're wrong. And this upended the Western world and the Western way of thinking about time and thinking about reality. And this is where we get the phrase modernism from too. When art, from we'll say the 1860s up until the 1960s,

when art responded to new discoveries of science and technology, that was modernism. So back to the portrait, the Western European portrait of someone sitting still capturing a moment in linear time, that was now thrown into the air. And the first visual artists to really respond to this were the Cubists, specifically Picasso, Pablo Picasso. His first painting that really challenged the portrait was called La Demoiselle d'Avignon, which is, it's a very famous painting. It's five nude women I believe they're sex workers in a brothel they're not painted in a way that we would consider to be realistic at all

their proportions are all over the gaff their faces don't necessarily look like what we understand to be human faces there's several different angles at play this painting would have been incredibly revolutionary at the time now if you go if you look at this painting and you're wondering what's so special about this well it's because what picasso has done here is he has introduced time into a painting. He has introduced the concept of time into the static portrait. But Picasso gets a little bit too much credit for that. Not a little

bit too much credit. He gets way too much credit for this. And here's what I want to explore. It's no secret that Picasso took huge influence from West African art and West African masks. Specifically in this painting, you can see two of the figures in this painting, their faces are identical to West African masks. So around from about 1900 up until 1906, Around from about 1900 up until 1906, Picasso, while he was in Paris, and also the other painter that was with Picasso, George Braque, they had been visiting displays of African art in Paris. Now, the French had been colonising West Africa. The vast majority of North West Africa were French colonies and they were doing the regular shit

that colonisers do. Violence, extracting wealth and incredibly huge amounts of racism and dehumanising and devaluing the people of those areas. So what the French were doing was taking the artwork from these areas, masks, sculptures, and displaying them in museums in Paris, but not displaying them as works of art in their own right, but as colonial trinkets. they would have referred to it as primitivism, primitive art. These weren't being viewed as important pieces of art like the painters of France or the painters of Spain.

This wasn't even seen as art. These were considered as just the bullshit decorations of what the French would have considered to be a lesser culture. These would have been displayed not as an example of achievement, but almost to kind of laugh at them. Look at these simple little shitty masks that the African people are making. They don't even look like humans, these masks. They're so silly.

And this is why we deserve to colonise them. And this is why we deserve to take everything they have and to rule them because look at their awful silly art doesn't even look like real stuff my god so this is how african art would have been presented in the museums and galleries that picasso would have visited but obviously that view of african art is hugely insulting de dehumanizing, ridiculous and wrong. Pure colonialism, the idea that one culture is more important and more valuable and more intellectual than another. But what makes the African masks and the African artwork so important is that the cultures that made them weren't constricted by western notions of linear time so you had certain african masks and let's just say it's a mask of a woman and it might have

three faces one to the side one to the front and one to the other side now the, in their ignorance, were looking at this as silly or unrealistic. But what the African artists were most likely doing was they were trying to incorporate time into their portraiture. There's a word in the Yoruba language, which is a language of West Africa, called wakati, which is a concept of time where time isn't linear it's something that unfolds and can flow and has multiple layers within it so when you make a sculpture of a person with that concept of time what you do is you observe the actual real person when you sit with a human being they don't sit still for 12 hours. They move and they laugh and they make expressions. So what do you do? You incorporate that into the artwork. If that means they need to have three faces then that's what you do.

You're bringing in the dimension of time as it moves into your artwork Picasso spotted this and he robbed it so Picasso then went and painted Cubist paintings and what Picasso was doing was this linear time shit this western linear time

this, the idea of the portrait being this flat, still capture of a moment this is irrelevant we have cameras to do this i have this new thing called cubism where we incorporate time and dimension into our paintings so when you look at a picasso painting and there might be two heads or you look at it and you go jesus the shouldn't be that direction. Why can I see the bottom of this person's foot when I'm looking at him from above? What Picasso was doing was incorporating time into his paintings. If you walk around a person, if a person moves you're not just seeing them from one angle. You're seeing a person from multiple different angles

at multiple moments in time. And cubism was an attempt to represent multiple layers of time, multiple layers of perspective at once on a canvas. But the point that I'm making, I suppose, is that I don't view cubism, which is considered to be Picasso's invention, as this wonderful, radical thing that happened in Western thought. Now that Einstein fucking discovered that time flows, or that the camera could capture one moment.

capture one moment. What Cubism needs to be seen as is West African cultures had a far more sophisticated, fluid, observational and realistic concept of time in their culture and in their language which they brought to their visual art. They incorporated movement and changing perspectives and the lived reality of experience in a person in time in their art and Picasso just robbed from it. Yes, like he was honest about the fact that he was taking influence from African art but the great intellectual leap there it wasn't Picasso's great intellectual leap. intellectual leap there. It wasn't Picasso's great intellectual leap. Western culture had a very limited view of time as being linear and as something that could be wasted or taken from you.

And this was expressed in hundreds of years of Western art. This anxiety anxiety this anxious way to make a person sit still and paint them unrealistically the realistic portrait is the one that has five heads and six arms because that's how we experience time when we sit with another person and to deviate from that to draw a person in time from multiple perspectives, this was considered radical, absolutely radical and genius and creative and insane. But really, it's that the Western concept of the flow of time is linear was just limited. Right, so that was my podcast this week. That was quite a rambling hot take.

A fever dream COVID hot take about the Western concept of time and portrait painting. I hope it made sense to you. It's very difficult doing art podcasts when I don't have anything to actually show you when I have to describe it. Dog bless.

I'll talk to you next week and hopefully my voice will be back and I'll be a lot better. You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishi Keshe-Hirwe, We'll be right back. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder. April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca. Thank you.