In his final years of sanity, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
became obsessed with an idea. What if time formed an infinite loop?
What if life not only ran forward, relentlessly propelling us toward
the future, but also doubled back on itself to produce the “eternal
recurrence of the same”? Nietzsche made a few failed attempts
to prove that the cosmos actually has this circular structure. Ultimately,
he proposed the idea as an existential test aimed at challenging
his readers to affirm the value of life as a fluid process without
any pre-given aim, goal, or meaning.
The truth is, we live both the line and the loop at once. We
are carried forward on the stream of time and, each moment,
are different
from who we were. We grow, learn, age, and move ever closer to
our deaths. Yet our lives are equally marked by repetition.
Days, weeks,
and years endlessly repeat their interlocking loops. Our very identities
and characters are formed by our habits, those actions and passions
we continually repeat. And memory constantly throws us back to
past moments that we live again.
Historians and anthropologists note that these twin conceptions
of time are themselves recurrent features of human history and
culture.
Yet surely each age lives them differently. Our modernity is marked
by a peculiar conjunction of repetition and difference propelled
in large part by developments in technology. From photography and
phonography to video and mp3, recording technology is essentially
a form of externalized memory. It allows the unique and fleeting
moment to be captured and repeated ad infinitum. Circumventing
life’s
entropy and the linearity of time, recording allows the dead to
speak again . . . and again and again. In the profusion of recorded
media,
we live the eternal recurrence of the same.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t until the 1960s that American and European
artists began to explore these powers of repetition. It’s no
coincidence that that decade also marks the advent of postmodernism,
which rejects modernism’s grand, linear narratives of heroic
development, emancipation, and historical progress in favor of temporal
recycling and non-linear form. Aesthetic minimalism is emblematic
here. From Philip Glass and Donald Judd to Thomas Brinkmann and Carsten
Nicolai, minimalism exchanges the line for the circle, the arc for
the loop. And the loop is the stuff of which vast swaths of contemporary
video and audio art—minimalist or otherwise—are made.
But, Nietzsche’s phrase notwithstanding, repetition is never
the repetition of the same or the identical. It is always allied
with difference. Repetition provides a stable backdrop against which
alteration—auditory and visual, temporal and spatial—is
made manifest. Steve Reich’s Come Out (1966), for instance,
runs a 5-word tape loop through two playback machines. At first,
the loops run in unison. Yet, due to slight differences in tape speed,
the two machines gradually move out of synch, creating a whirlpool
echoing phrases. Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1970)
equally generates difference through repetition. A text describing
the very process of the piece is read into one tape recorder and
then played back repeatedly into another. Each loop amplifies the
room resonance such that, after a dozen repetitions, articulate
speech has become submerged in a wash of abstract, metallic sound.
Against this historical backdrop, Group Loop explores
the role of loops in contemporary audio and visual art, focusing
on the ways that loops help us to perceive and to conceive relationships
between repetition and difference. The exhibition aims to reveal
the capacity of loops to generate and degenerate material and to
intensify our perception of time, memory, and lived experience.
The conjunction of time, memory, difference, and repetition is
poignantly manifested in William Basinski’s Disintegration
Loop 1.1(2002)—at
once a formal experiment recalling the tape work of Reich and Lucier
and a moving elegy to the victims of September 11. A static shot
filmed from Basinski’s Brooklyn rooftop records the last
hour of sunlight on that fateful day. Waves of smoke billow by
as lower
Manhattan is slowly engulfed in mournful darkness. The audio track
documents a parallel movement of repetition and temporal decay.
A somber melodic loop recorded by Basinski in the early 1980s is
gradually
reduced to near silence as the playback machine slowly scrapes
away chunks of magnetic material from the deteriorating tape.
Nicholas Nixon and Steve Roden mark recurrence and change via slices
of time presented in series. In a set of annual portraits that
span a quarter century, Nixon’s celebrated Brown Sisters photographs chart the course of history and the entropic force
of time manifested
in the faces and bodies of four siblings. The series presents infinite
opportunities for spatial and temporal comparison and contrast.
As the eye traces the contours of family resemblance, each individual
photograph reveals the play of difference and repetition at the
genetic
level. At once methodical and fluid, the whole set forms a kind
of calendar, in which days and months recur while the years press
on.
Roden’s Feldman Drawings (2005) series is equally a kind of
calendar marking repetition and difference. Every evening for a single
month, the artist listened in the dark to a recording of Morton Feldman’s
Piano and String Quartet. In response to the music, Roden drew with
colored pencils on sheets of paper—one color and one page per
day. These drawings are at once recordings and improvisations, that
is, repetition and alterations. Stylus to page, Roden’s body
and hand became a sort of primitive phonograph, translating Feldman’s
music into two-dimensional space. At the same time, Roden treated
drawing itself as a sonic art, allowing the sounds of his pencil
markings to improvise with the music. Roden sees his practice as
a form of sampling, through which a recording is repeated with
a difference.
Nixon marks time in years, Roden in days, and David Grubbs in seconds,
minutes, and hours. Ingeniously simple, Grubbs’ Between
a Raven and a Writing Desk (2000) exploits two basic features of the CD format:
its capacity to hold 60 minutes of continuous sound, and the ability
of a standard CD player to repeat ad infinitum. With these two elements
as the installation’s hardware, Between a Raven . . . is a
musical clock: a 59-minute and 56-second composition (allowing four
seconds for the repeat function) in which musical events emerge every
quarter hour, separated by stretches of ticking percussion. Aptly
balancing objective and subjective time, Grubbs’s rendering
is both mechanical and loose, with minor events and differences temporarily
diverting time’s pulsing repetition.
Filmmaker and textile artist Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Crochet
Film (2004) offers another meditation on time. The installation
features a pair of conceptually interlocking loops: a loop of film
and its
crocheted replica, the one depicting the creation of the other.
Though identical in size, the two loops represent very different
durations.
The film passes through its cycle in a minute and a half, while
the crocheted film represents four and a half hours of work. The
installation
also draws attention to the very process of crocheting, which generates
new objects through the repetitive interlocking of tiny loops.
It is not measured time but the infinite present that is explored
in video pieces by Euan MacDonald and Heike Baranowsky. The most
minimalist works in the exhibition, these video loops focus on
difference and repetition in their most basic forms and highlight
the mesmerizing,
hallucinatory power of their conjunction. The seamless loops in
MacDonald’s
Poor Blumfeld (2002) produce impossible movements that captivate
eye and ear alike with their off-kilter rhythms and asynchronous
pairing. Baranowsky’s Schwimmerin (2000) employs a two-second
loop to produce an infinite line that, depending on your temporal
orientation, is either Sisyphean hell or fluid bliss.
Loop and line, process without progress—all this brings us
back to Nietzsche and the doctrine of eternal recurrence. To live
the line and the loop is both our fate and our fortune. To affirm
both is, Nietzsche thought, to really live, to desire the now and its again. Beyond progress and the narrative arc, to live this way
is to realize that the circle is virtuous, not vicious, and that,
as Prince sings, “there’s joy in repetition.”
|
