Aporetic experiences of time in anti-narrative art

I present art as a potential source of aporetic temporal experiences. The experiences in question are aporetic by virtue of both their anti-narrative quality and their potential to disrupt or short-circuit dominant models of experiencing temporality. I argue that contemporary art shares with earlier artistic trends a critical attitude towards dominant narratives but has its own particular way of dealing with time. In the first section, I frame narratives and temporality within a critical approach in which our current culture is seen as imposing ways of living and thinking through narratives. The focus in this article is on artistic expressions that take a critical stance in this context. In the second section, I sketch a genealogy of anti-narrative artistic phenomena. I explain that while the Avant-gardes played a more experimental role, the art of the sixties was oriented, according to influential art critics and academics, to decoding dominant discourses. In the next section, I discuss current studies in narratives, which open the door to new kinds of narratives other than the classic ones. In Sections 46, I show the temporal and anthropological relevance of these new narratives through a rereading of Ricoeur’s theory of the complementarity of time and narrative. Through a personal and original interpretation of the Ricoeurian aporetic of time, I argue that we can experience temporality and other aspects of our life*self-identity, moral values, and historical events*outside of consistent narratives, although the experience may be critical or disappointing. Finally, I illustrate this thesis by reference to two contemporary works of art, both shown at Documenta (13).This article has been written in the framework of the research project ‘‘Aesthetic Experience and Artistic Research: Cognitive Aspects of Contemporary Art’’ (FFI2012-32614, 2013-2015)