Ali Banisadr: Is Time an Arrow or a Wheel?
By Ali Banisadr
I once titled a painting Is Time an Arrow or a Wheel? (2023). The question has stayed with me because I have never really experienced history as a straight line. We are taught to understand it that way: one period replaces another, one ideology defeats another, one style is exhausted and gives way to the next. But in life, and especially in painting, time seems to behave differently. Things return. Images return. Violence returns. Myths return. A gesture can disappear for centuries and suddenly become alive again in another image, another culture, another moment.
Some time ago, while thinking about music, I made a small diagram: a circular form with an arrow moving through it. Underneath I wrote, “linear intention inside circular environment.” I made it after noticing that so much of the music I love moves this way. It spirals. It turns, repeats, accumulates, but it still moves forward. That diagram feels relevant to history too. Maybe time is not only an arrow or a wheel. Maybe it is the arrow moving through the wheel.
Francis Fukuyama’s idea of an “end of history” depends, in some sense, on the arrow: that history has a direction and might eventually arrive at its destination. But looking at the world now, I find myself thinking more about the wheel. Forces we imagine we have moved beyond return in altered forms—war, nationalism, religion, tribalism, the struggle for power. History moves forward, but it also circles back.
This is one reason I have always been drawn to Aby Warburg and his idea of the afterlife of images. The past is not simply behind us. Images migrate. They carry memory with them. They change form, disappear, return, attach themselves to new meanings. Sometimes an ancient story can feel more present than yesterday’s news.
Maybe what has ended is not history, or art history, but our confidence in the straight line. In this sense, Hans Belting’s idea of the end of a singular history of art feels very close to the condition we inhabit now. Everything seems available at once.
