Painting untimely

Abstract In his essay ‘Painting and time’ (1979) John Berger offered a diagnosis of the fate of modern painting: under the rule of modern capitalism’s sense of time the tension between the timeless and the ephemeral that had defined the character and achievement of western painting has been lost. Producing nothing but ephemera, capitalism destroys the timeless leaving painting with nothing to paint. But here Berger sets aside his usual insistence on the defining particularity of art’s objects and opts for a different voice – that of the social analyst. I suggest that, in trying to construct a typifying generalizing conceptual knowledge, this voice misses the definitive difference of art’s things – their contextual uniqueness. In contrast I propose painting as challenging itself to confront the infinite calculability of the linear tenses of techno-capitalist work-time. Defined by its abjection in the face of measurement-without-end, it compounds all tenses, thus throwing out of joint our routine experience of time’s passage through fixed tenses. Painting’s driven ‘subject’ becomes not Berger’s ‘ephemera’ but the experience of ephemerality itself. Its unwavering commitment to analogic-becoming marks its defining otherness to all digital coding.