The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things is a short book by George Kubler, published in 1962 by Yale University Press.

It presents an approach to historical change which challenges the notion of style by placing the history of objects and images in a larger continuum.

Kubler begins the chapter by discussing "The Limitations of Biography" where he lays out the problems encountered when thinking about objects through the histories of their makers.

[1] Within this section he discusses the importance of the point of entrance of the individual maker into the ongoing history of their objects, the role of biological and physical metaphors, and the relation between scientists and artists.

In The Shape of Time, Kubler considers all man-made objects with the idea that everything is invented because of human desire and need.

Kubler also discusses the role of the historian, the nature of actuality, and lays out his idea of self-signals and adherent signals.

At this point in Chapter 2 Kubler compares great moments in art and inspired ideas to "dead stars".

The self-signal of a hammer, for example, is its "mute declaration" that its intended use is to be grasped by the handle, thus extending the individual's fist through the peen for driving a nail into a plank(24).

The adherent signal of the hammer is the patent and protected trademark of a specific manufacturing address stamped on the handle.

Using the example of fine art, Kubler explains that the self-signal of a painting is its colors and their arrangement on the two-dimensional surface that alerts the viewer to concede to a visual language that will produce enjoyment.

"Part of the self-signal," writes Kubler, "is that thousands of years of painting still have not exhausted the possibilities of such an apparent simple category of sensation" (24, 25).

Kubler points out that neither adherent signals, which speak only of meaning, nor self-signals, which prove only existence, are enough to assign value to a tool or artwork.

The unique personality reforms the replica as prime by an erosion of its former manifestation understanding of its conceptual replication and places it within contemporary language.

Stagnation occurs when ideas and objects are perpetually replicated, and chaos ensues when society is bombarded with numerous inventions.

Replication of the object, in Kubler's terms, is rife with a natural variation produced through inevitable minute changes within the production process.

The ways in which we think about change and respond to our environments, in Kubler's estimation, govern not only the rate at which inventions are made, but also whether we choose to retain them, and to what extent they remain in our consciousness after the fact.

From the "gravitational field[s]...in the cosmos" to the "different systems of intervals and periods" of humans, animals, and nature, time is so diverse that it is hard to "describe all the...kinds of duration" (84).

"Public demand recognizes only what exists, unlike the inventors and artists whose minds turn more upon future possibilities, whose speculations and combinations obey an altogether different rule of order, described here as a linked progression of experiments composing a formal sequence" (85).

Artists challenge the limitations of their historical time and view change as an opportunity to create a unique occurrence.

He uses paintings of the Twelve Apostles as an example ('Apostolado by Zurbarán); individually they can stand alone, but grouped together there is more of a sense of the artist's intention of how they are to be viewed and interpreted: "usually our comprehension of a thing is incomplete until its positional value can be reconstructed" (97).

In addition to art, architecture (as well as public fixtures or monuments) is to be read the same way, "buildings in their settings are a sequence of spaces best seen in an order intended by the architect" (97).

The smallest being the "annual crop of fashions" which he backs up with contemporary and historical patterns, and the largest, which he says are few, are our defined periods in history: "Western Civilization, Asiatic culture, prehistoric to barbarian and primitive societies" (91).

The artist's life can be categorized into four periods:"preparation, early, middle, and late maturity, each lasting about 15 years, resemble the indictions of the Roman calendar" (102).

Examples that support his 60-year theory are the doubled 60-year durations, such as the Mayan sculpture in the fourth and fifth centuries as well as Japanese woodblock prints around 1650.

Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, stated, "Kubler's telling of the history of things remains a key text, his vision a compelling mixture of the habitual and the poetic in human behavior.

For him, human creativity is a constantly repeated attempt to refine answers to a set of questions that change only slowly.

But this universal habit is punctuated by the great works of art, ways of doing and seeing that he compares to stars, influencing, shaping and illuminating even after they have been destroyed.

If we are reduced to describing objects in terms of the traits that they possess, "are we not arriving again at an historical concept very close to that of style in some of its more refined interpretations?"

Pages 145, 146, and 147 have additional examples about the ways in which Smithson disagreed with Kubler's theories about prime object and replica mass.

There have been comments that Kubler offers many variables and possibilities but no concrete and identifiable system of categorizing frames of codification.