The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things

by George Kubler

When it was first released in 1962, The Shape of Time presented a radically new approach to the study of art history. Drawing upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and linguistics, George Kubler replaced the notion of style as the basis for histories of art with the concept of historical sequence and continuous change across time. Kubler’s classic work is now made available in a freshly designed edition.

“ The Shape of Time is as relevant now as it was in 1962. This book, a sober, deeply introspective, and quietly thrilling meditation on the flow of time and space and the place of objects within a larger continuum, adumbrates so many of the critical and theoretical concerns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It is both appropriate and necessary that it re-appear in our consciousness at this time.”—Edward J. Sullivan, New York University

This book will be of interest to all students of art history and to those concerned with the nature and theory of history in general. In a study of formal and symbolic durations the author presents a radically new approach to the problem of historical change. Using new ideas in anthropology and linguistics, he pursues such questions as the nature of time, the nature of change, and the meaning of invention. The result is a view of historical sequence aligned on continuous change more than upon the static notion of style—the usual basis for conventional histories of art.

"A carefully reasoned and brilliantly suggestive essay in defense of the view that the history of art can be the study of formal relationships, as against the view that it should concentrate on ideas of symbols or biography."— Harper's.

"It is a most important achievement, and I am sure that it will be studies for many years in many fields. I hope the book upsets people and makes them reformulate."—James Ackerman.

"In this brief and important essay, George Kubler questions the soundness of the stylistic basis of art historical studies. . . . The Shape of Time ably states a significant position on one of the most complex questions of modern art historical scholarship."— Virginia Quarterly Review.

Genres: Art, History, Nonfiction, Art History, Philosophy, Theory, Design

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 10, 1962

Reviews

[Elin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was first introduced to this book my freshman year of college, in 2002. It was so difficult for me to read that I didn't get through it for a few years. Eventually, I revisited it, and I'm so glad that I did. The Shape of Time changed that way I saw art. It helped me understand that ideas in art flow from one artist to the next, and that these ideas have a life span of their own. The beginning stage of an idea, or as Kubler calls it, form, develops quickly and unpredictably. The form is poorly defined, and contains vast areas for exploration. As the form enters its middle age, the most fruitful period of its life occurs, where the rules of the form have become set and there is still lots of room to explore and develop. In the final stages of a form, innovations within it becomes stale and working within the rules of the form requires a huge effort.
Example:
Let's say that the first Western movie comes out. It's a new idea, but not tremendously well executed. After some time, the golden age of westerns comes along. Westerns become better, themes are explored, these are the westerns we remember. Eventually, the western becomes a tired cliche and we move on to action movies.
Kubler elaborates on this idea with a dense, precise writing that one has to push through. I found the second half of the book, however, much easier to read than the first. I recommend this book for artists trying to understand their place in broader culture.

[Hooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book (like "Prints and Visual Communication" and "Understanding Media")provides insights into the very nuanced techniques of the human creation. It's a great antidote to the disembodied internet world we live in now!

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A laborious read that does not really have a conclusion. But full of great concepts.

“Without change there is no history, without regularity there is no time.”

“In the absence of society and instinct, existence would float as if unbound by gravitation in a world without friction from precedent, without the attraction of example, and without the channeled pathways of tradition.”

“It is in the nature of being that no event ever repeats, but it is in the nature of thought that we understand events only by the identities we imagine among them.”

“Why should actuality forever escape our grasp? The universe has a finite velocity which limits not only the spread of its events, but also the speed of our perceptions. The moment of actuality slips too fast by the slow, coarse net of our senses. The galaxy whose light I see now may have ceased to exist millennia ago, and by the same token men cannot fully sense any event until after it has happened, until it is history, until it is the dust and ash of that cosmic storm which we call the present, and which perpetually rages throughout creation.”

“Every copy has adhesive properties, in holding together the present and the past.”

[Jeff Friederichsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An art historian, a sociologist and an archaeologist walk into a bar…

…and this is the book they would write, an analysis and theory of the origins and lifespans of humanity's output of objects both utilitarian and aesthetic. A fascinating topic, discussed in a somewhat circular but self-reinforcing manner. Kubler's arguments and theories, although not quantifiable due to the extremely subjective nature of their topic, seem innovative and modern more than 50 years later. I read this as a layman with an interest in social science and art, and it tackles questions I never expected to see answered. What social and natural forces determine the success or failure of a cultural artifact? What are the commonalities and differences of tools and purely aesthetic objects? Why the Beatles, and why then?

A dense but rewarding book.

[Libby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the IDEA of this. And I love the execution of maybe ... half of what's actually written? It's a short book, but it could have been shorter - and maybe would have been better for that too.

There's a lot of sharp, good, important ways of thinking about art history (if that's what we're calling it) but there's also so many mastubatory sentences that sound very intellectual but are essentially just dumb metaphors that perpetuate the stupid problems that still exist in art historical circles today.

What I really want in my art theory reading is just a 100 page slamdunk on Wolfflin though.

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kubler, inspired by set theory in mathematics casts the questions/problems that artists, sculptors, architects, and engineers have been faced with and are the subject of art history, and then solutions and movements that arose from them instead as the mental form and class of being of a field or topic. Kubler claims that by identifying a problem, we erect what he calls the closed set rather than an open sequence to which newer and newer entries can be made as new discoveries are made, fresh perspectives are arrived at, and actual new innovations in engineering and new movements in art are ushered in the present. For him the example is the struggle for regularity in the nave bays of cathedrals in Gothic architecture – a solution to which actually became the basis for much of barrel-vault architecture in general). While some of these insights seem to be obvious in the understanding of the simultaneous chaos and constructiveness of scientific innovation, historiography has much to learn from Kubler.

[Daniel]

Wonderful perspective on art history, full of interesting analogies and concepts. Throw away the arboreal narratives of the evolution of style, based solely on artists' biographies; in with physical analogies of signals that are transmitted and relayed, strengthen and depends. History as astronomy, analysing the light of dead stars as they were still alive. A focus on things and their artistic uselessness as a resolution to a problem, not formalist but morphologist. Especially interesting was the analysis of prime objects, their repetitions and their collection as a form that responds to a certain problem. And the analysis of these forms in different epochs, concurrencies and localities.
Sometimes the author can't help but display some eurocentrism in the choice of language of European art and technique being superior or more developed. But it's possible to remark this and still find useful applications to this methodology.

[Caleb Miller]

Kind of goated. was not attuned to all the cybernetic shit he’s doing the first time I read this

[Katherine McCarthy · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book offers many interesting positions and ruminations on time and style, it is continuously crippled by backwards thinking and a false understanding of PreColumbian history. Although Kubler has experience writing history in these areas, this publication reveals a misunderstanding of interactions between Europeans and indigenous people. His insistence on the death of indigenous art after the European invasion demonstrates a lack of understanding on the persistence of style and tradition in the Americas that is essential to these arguments. Kubler also repeatedly mentions the “superiority” of European style and technology that is also inherently false, and skews his arguments on art of the ancient Americas. While many of these issues are specific to art from on geographic region, it is safe to assume that this viewpoint goes beyond the Americas, and thus forms a problematic mold into which Kubler’s scholarship resides.

[Dave Peticolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A curious book about the unfolding of history, in particular the history of made objects, especially art, but touching also on the relationship between artists and artisans and their place in a historical series. The author argues against the use of analogies between an artistic movement and a lifetime, i.e., the "birth", "growth", and "senescence" of some movement such as Impressionism. Instead, the history of a physical form should be understood as the development of the internal logic of the form itself as it is applied to some problem, artistic or practical.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Shape of Time" is a great book to read on vacation. It is hard to muster the concentration required without some time where things aren't hectic. Its contents largely are thoughtful, if maybe slightly underdeveloped, and generative, although sometimes in a way just trying to figure out if what its saying is sensible. I think it was probably useful as a book setting up a program of inquiry and I'd be interested to understand how it played out in related disciplines: anthropology, art history, material history, and even design. However, as I'll set up at the end, I think this program isn't the most compelling one to be followed given today's perspective, and I'll say more at the end about my point of departure.

If I were to put the idea in my own words, what it's after is to look at all of the man-made objects of a particular time and place, and see what motivations connect them, no matter their purpose or non-purpose. The theory is there are going to be multiple concurrent threads of motivation, but that we're going to be able to pick out some early objects that start to grapple with a particular kind of motivation, prime objects that establish some kind of form or motif, objects that develop the motif, reproductions that extend the reach of the object without adding much, and endpoints which signal a turning away from those motifs as they become obsolete or irrelevant. One solid observation from this is that people tend to quickly abandon utilitarian objects once they become obsolete, while objects with aesthetic contributions tend to get held on to, even if their motifs are no longer reproduced.

One aspect of this book I find highly unconvincing is the assertion that the production of all objects comes from response to some sort of problem, and indeed that people only do something in response to some kind of problem. I would have liked to have seen some examples of how this played with the above theory. I don't think I believe it, except in the trivial sense of everything we do is some kind of implicit decision. A different framing is to see the creative act as a way of being: producing creative work is just what some people do. In some sense, you could see all activity as a set of conscious and unconscious decisions, and which choice to make is a problem. I really don't know how that's helpful in understanding what's going on. I tend to prefer impulse or motivation. I think asking why people in a particular culture had or didn't have a particular motivation or impulse is more interesting.

It's plenty to say, in a particular time and place, what forms of production, motifs of style, and elaborations of motifs arose, and which only arose at a different time and place, and look to what explains the difference. There are so many great factors: demography (just are there enough people to contribute), power/prestige, semantics (what networks of concepts are available), technology, networks of communication, norms and norm-breaking, etc. The book is good at placing a baseline on this, which is the transmission of signals and how they get amplified or dampened. One can almost feel the impact of information theory colliding with the humanities given when this book was composed.

The book talks a lot about the apparent temperament of particular practioners and how we might not observe practioners who would be twarted by not having an 'entrance' by virtue of coming to a particular mode of production at a bad time to absorb their preferred style of contribution. I'll say I'm not entirely sure about this; I can imagine some folks with a creative bent being adaptive to their circumstances, and others not. Still, though, it is an interesting idea to look at a particular body of work from some contributor and look at how they advanced the forms and motifs in front of them, and to see if between contributors there are archetypes, and where those break down.

The book has a really ugly bit on colonialism that I think really didn't grapple with motivations in a colonized society very well. It's unfortunate, because you don't get a heck of a lot of examples for the rest of the concepts outside of this part.

As a motivation for my own thought, I don't find this proposed program particularly compelling. I think its limitation of applying to man-made objects obscures the overall set of material choices we make, which is how to live in habitat including relationships to both material creations and other living things. The amount of production and (with information technology) analysis that is best for our own flourishing offers a critique of how much of this program we should undertake. The broader situation, the patterns and motifs of differenetiation and arrangement, are a superset of production as such. I think the analysis of form and motif is a tactic, but not grand strategy, in coming to the kind of picture I think this work is after.

Overall, I'm glad I read this book; it's thoughtful and provocative, but it would be a weird way to actually proceed given our world today. It itself is another thread of motifs, needing elaboration.

[Nat]

This seems like a work of proto-cultural anthropology, full of mind-bending aphorisms and galaxy-brain summaries of millennia of culture. I think there's an argument here about "prime works" and replications, but I'd need a serious read through again to figure it out. It has aspects of its era, and reads like an abstract work of analytic aesthetics from the 1950s, with lots of analogies to closed and open mathematical series.

Some nuggets:

The rhapsodist can suggest a few clues to the experience of a work of art, if he himself has indeed experienced it. He may hope that these hints will assist the hearer to reproduce his own sensations and mental processes. He can communicate nothing to persons not ready to travel the same path with him, nor can he obey any field of attraction beyond his own direct experience (p.10) [This reminds me of Cavell on criticism]

...the cross section of the instant, taken across the full face of the moment in a given place, resembles a mosaic of pieces in different developmental states, and of different ages, rather than a radial design conferring its meaning on all the pieces (p. 25) [this is probably nonsense but it sounds cool]

The modern professional humanist is an academic person who pretends to despise measurement because of its 'scientific' nature. He regards his mandate as the explanation of human expressions in the language of normal discourse. Yet to explain something and to measure it are similar operations. Both are translations. The item being explained is turned into words, and when it is measured it is turned into numbers (p. 76).

There are six types of artistic careers: precursors, hommes à tout faire, obsessives, evangelists, ruminatives, and rebels... (p.84)

Urban life is not enough. The provinces all have cities, but the tedium of provincial city life is proverbial. It is tedious because the provincial city is like an organ that usually can only receive and relay messages from higher nervous centers: it cannot issue many messages of its own, other than of pain or discomfort... (p.86)

A living artist often may encounter harder competition from the work of artists dead for fifty years than from his own contemporaries (p.106)

...the present always contains several tendencies competing everywhere for each valuable objective. The present was never uniformly textured, however much its archaeological record may appear to have been homogenous. This sense of the present which we live each day, as a conflict between the representatives of ideas having different systematic ages and all competing for possession of the future, can be grafted on the most inexpressive archaeological record (p.110)

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

The history of art is the history of repetition, interspersed with sufficiently distinct "prime objects". For every "need" there is then a series of artworks that try and answer that need.

Kubler develops this "fibrous" picture of art history into a remarkably profound scheme for understanding human activity. For indeed every human action occupies a totally unique place in space and time, yet nearly every activity mimics an activity that came before it. However, this mimicry is never perfect, changes are introduced intentionally and unintentionally, and over time they accumulate.

For the art historian or archaeologist, these series/fibers of artistic behavior can be identified, and characterized in various ways. For instance, series tend to have an early portion full of energy and less formulaic, but also less polished and a late portion with clear, strict, conventions.

Students of digital humanities, especially "science of success" a la The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success and the more ambitious uses of bibliometrics, will find that many of the key ideas were prefigured in this book, albeit qualitatively. In that sense, this book plays a similar role to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which spelled out many of the ideas about urbanism that would be recast quantitatively decades later in various studies of cities as complex systems.

The biggest drawback of this book is its extremely dense, somewhat circuitous style. I found myself rereading the same paragraphs several times to unpack the sentences. Perhaps this was intentional. It forces an experience of active reading that contemporary readers may be unfamiliar with. Mercifully, it is not a long book, so even reading it several times slower than a normal book is not unreasonable.

Apparently the book had a big impact on artists in the 1960s and continues to be discussed to this day


In short, this small book is so packed with interesting ideas that I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone with an interest in art, archeology, philosophy or history.

[Melis Baloglu · Rating 5 out of 5]

''The number of ways for things to occupy time is probably no more unlimited than the number of ways in which matter occupies space. The difficulty with delimiting the categories of time has always been to find a suitable description of duration, which would vary according to events while measuring them against a fixed scale. History has no periodic table of elements, and no classification of types or species; it has only solar time and a few old ways of grouping events,z but no theory of tem-poral structure.''

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un saggio, rivoluzionario al tempo, che invita ad uno sguardo sulla storia della produzione culturale umana che valorizzi alcuni aspetti sovraindividuali. Una scrittura chiara con argomentazioni convincenti, per quanto le tesi non riescano ovviamente a rispondere alla domanda fondamentale di Focillon sul senso del tempo presente.

[Kiely · Rating 4 out of 5]

a good book with lots of very interesting and relevant ideas considering the place of objects in history and the ideas of art objects divorced from their makers. sort of blew my mind but also i know i'll be thinking about Kubler's theories for a while.

[milli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ho iniziato questo libro quasi 10 anni fa. Il concetto di base è molto semplice quanto rivoluzionario, purtroppo ho faticato molto con le argomentazioni di Kubler. Contenta comunque di averlo letto tutto, anche se con un bel po’ di ritardo.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/4 stars

[Vanessa_Lin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revisit after two years. Kubler is a scholar influenced by several disciplines. So new inspirations for me since now I have a bit understanding of archaeological theories besides art historical ones.

[Seneda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely thought-provoking. The ways in which Kubler proposes a reconsideration of our comprehensions of "things" and their history are still very novel.

[Harley Lond]

This is a tough one.

[Ray Ogar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glorios! Feels like Ong’s orality but in terms of form and art/history.

[Alessio]

nobody told me this was a book of luminous poetry

[Timothy Yim-Stueve · Rating 4 out of 5]

weird and cool

[Karla Kitalong · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few insights, but a bit outside of my sphere of interest. I was snared by the title.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

While reading this I went from being totally confused to discovering great insights into the study of art and culture. I sometimes felt the terminology the author used and some of his observances may have changed in the 50 years since the book was originally published. Well, sure.
If I had to read this all over again, I would probably read the conclusion first. It is an excellent summation of his position and the fluidity of art, style and culture. In my own case, it would have better prepared me for what I was embarking upon. I can imagine returning to this book to review the ideas here.

[Sasu Kakir]

Very academic; not an easy read - yet I enjoyed regular epiphanies through its high level/long perspective analysis of artistic and cultural endeavour and production. In the end, I compared it to exercise: grunting and sweating and counting down the reps/minutes/kms during, but high immediately after (occasionally during), followed by lasting health benefits.

[Georgina Ohrstrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

see my reading insta for full review but i really enjoyed this. Very challenging but so helpful in understanding the framework of history and the way aesthetic "movements" can be evaluated as reactions to prime works. A lot of really interesting comments on what classifies true invention.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was OK. A good read to brush up on methodology.

[surfurbian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dry as a bone. Could have been boiled down to about 5 pages. But those would have been really good pages.