Time, space and art: The Olympic poster and the chronotope

Abstract

The visual aesthetic of the Olympic Games fuses time and space into the commodification of sport and culture. Rarely does poster art function beyond commodity and advertising. Spanning over a hundred years, the Olympics has adopted the poster as an artefact of the games, documenting the event’s spirit in concert with the essence of the host city. The union of time and space functioning under one aesthetic device, the poster, brings forth Mikhail Bakhtin’s revolutionary theory of the chronotope that the Russian philosopher and critic exposed in language and literature. This article will look at the poster not as evidence of the commodification of sport but as a dialogic medium of time and space. By investigating the nuance of typography and visual aesthetics of Olympic poster art concerning the chronotope, the poster elevates beyond advertising tool performing as a form of artistic dialogue within the culture. This novel interpretation of the Olympic poster as a dialogic exponent of the chronotope will reimagine Olympic art as temporally communitive. Specific poster examples will compose a conversation that reflects a nexus of time and space. Revolving around the intertextual temporality of Bakhtin’s chronotope, the Olympic poster comes to life.