Methodological Issues of the Relation between the Philosophy of Time and Contemporary Art

The purpose of this study is an analysis of the possibilities of applying the philosophy of time in the interpretation of contemporary art. The practice of searching and finding correlations between works of contemporary art and philosophical concepts of time is carried out both by researchers and by the artists themselves. However, in a number of cases, the very fact of constructing such a correlation is not methodologically, and especially philosophically-methodologically, justified. In this work, an attempt is made to take into account the conditions of possibility of the practice itself (the correlation between philosophy of time and contemporary art) and to justify it through a convincing philosophical methodology, without imposing any particular position about contemporary art, or, conversely, ignoring any part of it. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the potential of relevant approaches to the study of contemporary art — phenomenological, formal, structural, structural-semiotic, ontological. Based on this analysis, a methodological conclusion was made, which was based on a structural-semiotic approach. А number of the original methodological ideas were proposed: “philosophical” formal and structural analysis, as well as “artifactual” and “conceptual” correlation methods, depending on predominance of theoretical or conceptual parts of the work. Finally, we demonstrated the possibilities of systematizing our practice using a historical-philosophical approach.