I DID, DID I - Curated by Kes Richardson and Darren O'Brien

I DID, DID I

Installation view featuring work by Dominic Kennedy, Kes Richardson and Catherine Parsonage

ASC Gallery, London, 2013

I DID, DID I was an exhibition curated by Kes Richardson and Darren O'Brien, staged at ASC Gallery, London, between September 21st and October 26th 2013. The exhibition featured pairs of paintings by Howard Dyke, Kate Groobey, Dominic Kennedy, Catherine Parsonage and Kes Richardson.

Dividing the space into two distinct areas, theatrical flats were placed in such a way as to create two identical, separated spaces. These mirrored areas contained one of a pair of paintings, with it's twin (identical or not) found in the other. The order and spacing of the hang was the same in each of the two rooms.

Focusing on works created in series Richardson and O'Brien set up a unique viewing situation whereby the visitor encountered the elements separately but in close spacial and temporal proximity, hung in such a way that they could not be viewed together. Carrying the memory of what was recently seen into the next space, the set up engendered a close consideration of the distinguishing marks of each work causing the viewer to scrutinise the paintings for similarities and differences. Details and differences became at once pronounced and questionable as the visitor paced from one space to other in order to check what had just seen in relation to what may or may not have seen before.

Installation views featuring works by Kate Groobey and Howard Dyke (top) and Dominic Kennedy, Kes Richardson and Catherine Parsonage (bottom).

Roni Horn - Pair Objects

Roni Horn – Pair Field, 1991
solid forged copper, stainless steel
eighteen different pairs of identical objects

Spanning sculpture, photography, drawing and print Horn's work often orientates itself around notions of 'sameness' and 'difference'. Regularly commenting on her sculptures as being ‘site-dependent’, Horn borrows from the vocabulary of Minimalism whilst embracing the specificity of its surrounding location and the intrinsic material qualities of the objects themselves.

In her Pair Object series Horn's produces two identical objects out of materials such as copper, steel and glass and displays them in close, but not immediate proximity to each other. The work explores a sort of tension as the two identical objects are altered minutely by the different spaces that they occupy. 

Similar to her work 'You Are the Weather', where she took photos of a girl in a thermal bath milli-seconds apart. She asks the audience to experience an almost identical form as an act of rememberance, an echo or repetition that allows us to reconsider our initial perceptions. 

"The pair form, by virtue of the condition of being double, actively refuses the possibility of being experienced as a thing in itself. The simple state of doubleness includes, as integral, the space or interval between. So twice over, this work insists on a recognition of circumstance." Interview with Roni Horn

Jacques Derrida - Differance

Jacques Derrida Differance
1968, published in Margins of Philosophy 1972

'Differance' is a neologism coined by the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida to describe the play of (spatial) differences and (temporal) deferrals in the role of generating signified meanings. His use of the term revolves its simultaneous double signification of two apparently different meanings. 'Differance' differs from the word 'difference' only in writing - the substitute of the 'e' for an 'a' is not vocalized.

The text linked below is a transcript of a lecture delivered to the Société of The Sorbonne in 1968 in which Derrida talks us through his thinking around this term.

The essay draws on the double meaning of the french word différer - in English translated as either to differ or to defer. Derrida identifies deferring as a temporalizing effect and differing as spatial. Drawing on Saussure, he points towards the deference at play in any system of signs -the signified is never truly present -, and the differences that enable us to make sense of words - "Within the system of language, there are only differences". Derrida places 'differance' here - neither a concept nor a word, but the possibility of conceptuality itself. 'Differance' is what makes the movement of signification possible, it produces the differences that makes language possible.

When Derrida talks about 'writing' or 'text' it serves us well to remember his often quoted statement that "Nothing is outside of the text" (1) - far from a reductive statement that priveleges writing above all else, this indicates his expansive thinking of what constitues writing: "And thus we say “writing” for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing.” One might also speak of athletic writing, and with even greater certainty of military or political writing in view of the techniques that govern those domains today." (2)

Derrida draws a distinction between language and speech, arguing that speech participates in an existing language and is constituted by it; it is language that makes speech possible: Differance is speech's relationship to language.

Full text here.

(1) "...That Dangerous Supplement..." in Of Grammatology
(2) The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing in Of Grammatology

Tom Smith - The Future Hasn't Been Written Yet

Tom Smith - The Future Hasn't Been Written Yet, 2011

The Future Hasn't Been Written Yet by Tom Smith is a dual channel film that simply displays the ending of Back To The Future and the beginning of Back To The Future 2 simultaneously. 

Made four years after, the sequel film starts off exactly where the first film finishes. The actors and the film crew have the difficult task of re-staging the last ten minutes of Rober Zemecki's film. With the actors now being older and the replacement of one of the actors, Smiths' video illustrates the discrepancies in the two films as they fall in and out of sync with one another. 

Often working closely with appropriated footage from Holywood, Tom Smith's work asks us to think about the constructions and mechanisms involved in creating cinema.

Open File showed the work as part of the ‘Admitting The Flats’ event at MK Gallery in May 2012. 

Cory Arcangel - Sweet 16

Cory Arcangel Sweet 16

2010 (installation view)

Cory Arcangel's Sweet 16 is a musical composition and video installation which applies a 'phasing' technique to the first 16 bars of Guns 'n' Roses Sweet Child O' Mine. Slash's instantly recognisable guitar riff repeats and builds, leading us up to the drum roll where our expectations are conflated as the song loops back round to the beginning. 2 versions of the riff overlay with one a note shorter than the other, looping over and over until they come back into time 15 minutes later, and creating some startling auditory effects along the way.

Phasing, devised by American minimalist composer Steve Reich, is an example of process music. In process music a simple device or compositional system is devised and applied to a piece of music and then allowed to play out to its conclusion. In phasing compositions 2 or more pieces of music are overlayed, identical in all aspects but their lengths. Reich's phasing compositions began with his magnetic tape experiments, such as 1965's It's Gonna Rain, where Reich took 2 recordings of the same sermon and played them together on different machines. The slight mechanical differences created a 'phasing' effect when the tapes went out of sync. Reich later developed and appplied the technique to compositions such as Clapping Music (1975) in which one player plays a piece a semi-quaver shorter than the other, going out of sync a half-beat further each time until coming back in to time 144 bars later. 

Arcangel's composition follows this same logic, applying the techniques of the 20th century avant garde to an example taken from popular culture. 

Félix Gonzáles-Torres - Untitled (Perfect Lovers)

Félix Gonzáles-Torres - Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1991

Made in 1991 by Félix Gonzáles-Torres, Untitled (Perfect Lovers) uses two identical, shop bought clocks. Displayed adjacent to, and barely touching one another, the two battery-powered clocks were initially set to the same time, but as time passes they inevitably fall further and further out of sync with each one another.

As a beautiful and simple allegory of love and partnership, Gonzáles-Torres pairs together two ubiquitous objects which are ultimately destined to disrupt their perfect harmony. He is known for combining the impulses of Conceptual art, Minimalism and political activism. During his life time he repeatedly commented that his primary audience was his lover, Ross Laycock who died from AIDS 6 years before his own death from the disease in 1996. Bringing an autobiographical sadness to the work, ideas of mortality are introduced to his allegory of love and synchronicity.  

Christian Marclay - The Clock

Christian Marclay The Clock

2010 (still)

Experimental musician and appropriation filmmaker Christian Marclay's masterpiece The Clock is a 24 hour looped video work. The piece is composed of thousands of appropriated film clips featuring references to the time - sometimes incidental (someone passing a clock, or a incidental shot through of one through a window), sometimes direct (someone looking at a watch, or referring verbally to the time). The film runs in real-time, acting, as the title suggests, as a clock.

The clips cycle through rapidly, eliciting a cascade of recognitions and associations in the viewer. The film becomes a meditation on time, cinema and the images that form the collective conscious.

Building on previous works such as Telephones (1995) and Video Quartet (2002), Marclay's work is a tour-de-force of video editing, constructed with a team of assistants of researchers. Since Marclay began working in this way we have seen the advent of YouTube and the rise of easily-available digital video. Coupled with this, the increased accessibility of video-editing software has made montage film-making in the manner of Marclay's early work a trope most often executed by bedroom editors generatnig amusing web content. Marclay stages the trope on an epic and spectacular scale, with a poetic elegance that mesmerizes and enthralls.

Winner of the Golden Lion award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, numerous 24 hour screenings have been staged when it has been shown.

Christian Marclay The Clock

2010 (excerpt filmed in gallery)