Giacomo Balla (1871-1958)

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. 1912.

Noise, speed, movement -- these are words associated with the Futurist artist Giacomo Balla. His work tends to have a strong abstract quality such that the viewer doesn't necessarily recognise in the image any particular familiar object right away -- or if he s/he does, it is brought forth by lines indicating sweeping changes and motion. The painting of motion inevitably seems a bit of a trick, doesn't it? "I shall paint a series of moments within a single frame!" Says the magician. But even film does not do this -- each frame is an individual photo. And yet, isn't this in itself something quite amazing? How do you separate one instant from the moving the river of which it is a part? And then look at the language I've just used -- 'a part'. We partition as often as we can --- of course. We cannot see the whole world in one glance; we see it as a section, or what we perceive to be a section, because the continuity is too blurry, too outstretched to be contained by our eyes; and so we segregate and then try to amalgamate. And thus we pull 'moments' or 'instants' together like a string of pearls and suddenly it's not the movement of a painting that seems so absurd, but its apparent stasis. And yet when we say this, we forget that the painting is not merely a portrayal; it is a record -- not of the thing it represents, but of the motions and strokes that went into its creation. And, of course, it too is constantly changing, some colours perhaps at a greater speed than others.

I wonder if Balla was thinking along these lines as he painted the chain-links on the dachshund's leash four times, along with its (temporal and spatial) matrix. Did he hear it too?