How Much Time does One Need to Leave the Room? Cover Image

Kiek laiko reikia, kad išeitum iš kambario?
How Much Time does One Need to Leave the Room?

Author(s): Kristupas Sabolius
Subject(s): Philosophy
Published by: Lietuvos kultūros tyrimų
Keywords: time; space; khōra; imagination; virtuality

Summary/Abstract: This article, by considering different concepts of temporality, examines two situations of spatial entrapment: Luis Buñuel’s film „Exterminating Angel“ and Marina Abramovič’s performance „The Artist is Present“. In the first case, fictional movie characters are not able to leave the room space because of a „mental block”; in the second, a living artist decides to spend three months in the museum space wordlessly meeting her audience. This paper shows that the presence in a particular place has its own specific parameters of duration, unexplainable according to the traditional ratio of symmetry between temporal and spatial axes – an understanding, which can be found already in Kant’s writings. Therefore, the spatial and temporal interface is reconsidered through Plato’s conception of khōra, linking two dimensions in a virtual connection. Thus the analysis of the situations offered by Buñuel and Abramovič, in the context Bergson’s, Husserl’s, the Stoics’ and some psychoanalytic theories, reveals the modes of liberation from the illusion of space as well as refers to the experience of intensified primordial temporality.

  • Issue Year: 2012
  • Issue No: 8
  • Page Range: 75-91
  • Page Count: 17
  • Language: Lithuanian