Uninterested in conventional linear histories and their well-worn patchwork of archive footage and talking heads, Blank preferred to make intimate, rounded portraits.
Western museums are categorizing, conserving entities, invested in solid objects, linear histories, datable names and quantifiable values.
Believing that London defies chronology, Ackroyd jettisons linear history in favor of a huge collage of his home city.
The resulting mix-and-match approach is part of an international museum trend that has left some people fretting that linear history, the old history, "the way things really happened," will be forgotten.
If you are looking for a complex story line or a linear history of one of America's greatest industries, you have come to the wrong place.
Instead, it reflects recent curatorial trends, which lean toward mash-up or collage aesthetics, with paintings hung in pairs or groupings that consciously disrupt the flow of linear history.
A linear history of the British newspaper industry would look as complicated as the family tree of the Hapsburgs, only in this case the family tree would be inverted, broad at the top and narrow at the bottom, as the readers' choices shrank.
The best movies in this mode--Luchino Visconti's "The Leopard" (1963), Roberto Rossellini's "The Rise of Louis XIV" (1966), and Yves Angelo's 1994 "Le Colonel Chabert," among others--not only are dedicated to reconstructing vanished worlds, but challenge the truisms of linear history.
Redrawing the hominid tree to avoid linear sequences would not only curtail anagenetic (transformational) interpretations of hominid evolution, but it also would support the verbal message in the exhibit that hominid evolution did not have a linear history.
That is, in the collection, art is removed from its natural or historical context and creates a new sense of space and time, not reducible to linear history or any sense of origin.
The first 'take' depicts cultural geography as having a sequential, linear history of ideas, from environmental determinism and the 'Berkeley School' of landscape geography to 'new' cultural geography and nonrepresentational theory.
