Circle as cycle.

"Instruction ([4.sup.#]): It's only just begun." (1) Douglas Gordon's text, spread across an exhibition wall, could be a fitting subtitle for P.S. i's exhibition "Loop," as well as a playful tribute to the tale of Sisyphus-that mythical figure who endlessly pushed a stone up a hill, only to have it fall back down under its own weight. Sisyphus's task was destined to begin again and again, an endless repetition of the same action that ultimately results in a sense of stasis. This notion underpins the works in "Loop," a thought-provoking selection of film, video, sculpture and performance by Chief Curator Klaus Biesenbach for P.S. 1. (2) International in scope, "Loop" encompasses room-sized projections, projections onto glass, works presented on monitors, text and photography-based work, sculpture and a sound installation.

The idea of the loop brings to mind repetition, non-linearity and circular motion. We are familiar with the loop as an exhibition presentation format that enables us to view rolling video or DVD programs, but this show profiles artists who place the loop at the center of a work's content and structure. For Biesenbach, artists' treatment of the loop reflects broader "rhythms of culture" as seen in advertising, techno and electronic music, and the media. Depending on the artist's intention, our experience of these loops varies from the almost seamless-where a meaningful sense of duration disappears-to those where the breaks are recognizable, forming their own time-based rhythms that are still without narrative in the traditional sense. New media theorist and critic Lev Manovich, writing on digital cinema in The Digital Dialectic:New Essays on New Media, (3) comments on the loop's rise, fall, and rise again in the history of cinema--from its heyday as the structural base of the Zootrope, Phonoscope, Tachyscope and Kinetoscope, to its relegation to "the low-art realms of instructional film, the pornographic peepshow, and the animated cartoon" (4) and finally to the renewed appreciation of its role as the forerunner not only of cinema but also of computer programming. Manovich cites Nathalie Bookchin's Databank of the Everyday (1996) as an example of the way in which artists can also alter the "linear flow of data through control structures such as 'if/then' and repeat/while'; the loop (being) the most elementary of these control structures." (5)

In "Loop" time becomes "an object that can be partitioned into small, repeatable and manageable units...time as a phenomenon that can be caught in a loop by constant repetition of the same action." (6) When viewing the works, we become aware of the role of editing-in terms of the duration of each loop, how it is constructed or manipulated, and how it affects us visually, physically and psychologically. The duration of the "units of time" in the show varies considerably, from two seconds in works including Christoph Keller's 15 channel DVD installation of a repeated single motion of animals in Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (2001) to Bruce Nauman's one-hour looped video Bouncing in the Corner [1.sup.#] (1968). This literal difference in duration does not detract from a work's capacity to induce hypnotic, mind-numbing, humorous or even claustrophobic effects. What we see in each work are short, repeated actions that have no outcome--whether this is a two second loop of an iguana stepping gingerly along a twig in Keller's work, Nauman's own torso bouncing incessantly against a wall, or Heike Baranowsky's Schwimmerin (2000). In this beautiful but disconcerting piece, Baranowsky cuts out the part where the swimmer would breathe before putting her head back into the water in an almost seamless way, like a glitch in a scratched CD. In another of her works, The Hare and the Hedgehog (2000), three films of cyclists in a Berlin velodrome are shown at different speeds, so that the cyclists appear to perpetually pass one another, and fall back-something that, as the title suggests, also questions the importance of the end goal.

Biesenbach acknowledges the historical context for much of the contemporary work on show by including video pieces by Bruce Nauman and Marina Abramovich--part of an artistic generation that made other forays into the idea of the loop, including Robert Morris's Finch College Project (1969) that was recently shown in the Whitney Museum's "Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977." (7) Nauman and Abramovich touch on several key ideas explored in the show. Nauman's single channel video, Bouncing in the Corner [1.sup.#], shows the artist's own torso ceaselessly rocking in the corner of a room, his hands hitting off the wall. In addition to making the viewer almost painfully aware of the body in space, the endless repetition of this act creates a sense of futility that is also present in Marina Abramovich's Relation in Movement (1976-1980)-a 34-minute loop of a performance that took place over 16 hours on a site in the Paris Biennale in 1977. Here Abramovich counted the revolutions made by a small truck that was driven by her collaborator, Ulay, and observed the increasingly dark circle left on the site as the tires wore down. This piece not only revealed their ongoing interest in concepts of time, but also contained a circularity of movement that is used in different ways by contemporary artists Carsten Holler, Marijke van Warmerdam and Nedko Solakov. Their works use circular motion that is without destination, having no beginning or end; they also "occupy" physical space, involving the viewer in a ceaseless circularity. In Carousel, German artist Carsten Holler literally takes a carousel from a fairground in Leipzig, and slows it down to the point that-unless you stand still next to it--it seems motionless. A carousel's success usually comes in the thrill and speed of the ride, but by effectively rendering the carousel "useless," Holler denies that experience in order to highlight the relationship between speed and entertainment value. One room is devoted to the performance of Nedko Solakov's A Life (Black and White) (2001) in which two workers paint the walls of a room, one with white paint, and the other with black. As they rotate around the room, continually painting over the wall completed by the other--another homage to Sisyphus--both fail in their task of making the room either white or black. In Marijke van Warmerdam's Kring (1992), a slowly rotating projector casts a 42-second-long 16mm film loop around the walls of the room-a "second-hand" but still spatial simulation of her original actions, as she turned 360 to film a circle of people around her in the Marrakech marketplace Djaama el Fnaac.

Almost none of the works have a linear sense of narrative. New York-based artist John Pilson's Mr. Pickup (2001) and Canadian artist Rodney Graham's single channel video installation, City Self Country Self (2000), perhaps come closest--but with a twist. Pilson's almost slapstick "scene" of a realtor--who keeps dropping papers in his office and failing to get them to a meeting-is viewed simultaneously on three monitors, side-by-side. The same loop has been started at different times on each monitor, in the manner of a ceaseless musical round, or canon. Part of a trilogy that includes Vexation Island, Graham's City Self Country Self presents a "story, based on a continuous nursery rhyme, of the build-up to a meeting between a country man and city man (types parodied by Graham himself) in the streets of a nineteenth-century French town. The film "slows down" at the point when they meet: a clock "pauses," the cityman kicks the countryman, a hat flies in the air, and the cycle begins again. Graham's longstanding interest in psychology, and the work of Freud in particular, perhaps contributes to making this "narrative" seem like a recurring dream.

In some works, our experience of the loop is perceptual, rather than physical. With Ceal Floyer's Light Switch (American (1992-2000), we look repeatedly at what appears to be a light switch on a wall, dramatically lit in a darkened space. As with much of her work, Floyer sets up expectations only to confound them: despite the presence of the projector, viewers check several times to see if the light switch is real or not. Her work is also "culture-specific," using, in a former venue, a German-manufactured light switch to ensure its effectiveness for a Berlin audience. Douglas Gordon's text piece uses only the power of suggestion: once you have read the words "It's only just begun"-apart from trying to keep the similarly titled Carpenters' song out of your mind-the idea of an "endless beginning" remains. In the show, artists test and manipulate our over-familiarity with the repeated imagery that surrounds us, particularly in the entertainment and news media, where we may witness endless clips of the same foota ge. From a distance, Dutch artist Mik Aernout's Glutinosity (2001) may look like televised footage of police intervening in a political protest, but it soon becomes clear that it is anything but. Exhibited on a substantial double-sided screen, Aernout's piece "occupies" the gallery space much in the way that a physical protest might, but the action is in fact choreographed on a stage, a shallow space that is tightly shot by Aernout. Watching the looped sequence over and over defuses the situation as the actions of the protestors and uniformed police become increasingly "theatrical"--one person even moves horizontally across the stage on wheels.

There is a distinct social and political commentary in the work of Belgian artist Francis Alys and Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, both of whom now live in Mexico City. In Alys Reenactments (2000) two projections are shown side by side: one is "real" footage of Alys buying a gun and carrying it through the streets of Mexico City until arrested, and the other is a re-enactment of the same event, this time done with the cooperation of the police. The notion of strolls (or paseos) is a longstanding interest to Alys (as seen in his now "fabled" walk in Copenhagen under the influence of a different drug each day) or in The Loop, a journey that he made in 3997 from Tijuana to San Diego without crossing the Mexican/U.S. border. In circumventing the expected travel routes, this loop in a sense became an alternative structure, both physically and psychologically. Santiago Sierra examines time as an exchangeable commodity that is determined by specific cultures and economics. In works such as Four People Elevating a Be nch Four Inches Above the Ground for an Hour Every Day (2001) Sierra uses the device of repetition to comment on the exploitation of Third World labor. This performance--that took place at the Kunsthalle der HypoKulturstiftung, Munich, and is documented in "Loop" through photographs and text--involved paying workers the minimum legal wage to repeatedly lift a bench designed by architects Herzong and Meuron. Santiago reduces an object that usually brings with it a certain exclusivity and "high art" status to a burden connected to a useless task.

Susan Philipsz's sound installation, a rendition of the song that also titles the piece, The Internationale (1999), is played every ten minutes over a loudspeaker in P.S. I's corridor, adding another dimension to our spatial experience of the loop. This is the only such piece in the show--a pity given the number of artists currently working in the areas of sound and new media. The importance of the loop to techno and electronic music was acknowledged in an exhibition talk/performance that explored the loop as this music's "lingua franca"--covering approaches such as repetition, overlaying and build-up of looped structures, and the manipulation of the start and end of the loop with specific software. In thinking of "variations within a loop" in music, Yutaka Sone's video Birthday Party (1999) comes intriguingly to mind. In a piece that mimics the "narrative" of the film Groundhog Day (1993), Sone documents the celebration of his birthday over five consecutive weeks in 1997, each day in a different environment , and with different people, including strangers, family, friends and the homeless. As with other works in the show, Sone's work touches on the aging process, a linear "narrative" that is disrupted by the format of the loop. Disruption of linear flow is also apparent in musicians' use of software to gain access to ever smaller units of sound, scientists' dissection of DNA and the work of Paul Pfeiffer, who uses digital media to take a "microscopic" view of a single frame, in order to create new "artificial" sequences such as those seen in Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom (2000).

It is within the context of such explorations in art, music and science that the show positions itself. Whereas much contemporary artwork deals with the fast, but linear, pace of our own times, with its emphasis on goals, outcomes, lifestyles and immediate gratification, "Loop" reflects more complex perceptions of time that continue to emerge alongside changing information systems, technologies and communication networks. As artist Nathalie Bookchin comments: "it is only logical that the computer program's loop should replace photography's frozen moment and cinema's linear narrative...as a new form of digital storytelling; there is no true beginning or end, only a series of the loops with their endless repetitions, halted by user's selection or a power shortage." (8) Whether or not each individual artwork manages to communicate this effectively ends up being less important than the message of the show overall. The exhibition emphasizes not only the loop's capacity to seduce, mesmerize or reinforce a message, but also its ability to subvert and change ideas of how we experience narrative in all aspects of life.

NOTES

(1.) Also Included in the "Heaven" exhibition, marking the opening of the new P.S. I space in 1997.

(2.) "Loop" at P.S. I Center for Contemporary Art, December 9' 2001-January 20, 2002. curated by Klaus Biesenbach, chief Curator, P.S. I, and Artistic Director, Kunstwerke, Berlin.

(3.) Peter Lunenfeld, ed., The Digital Diolectic: New Essays on New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

(4.) Lev Manovich, "what is Digital Cinema" in The Digital Dialectic, p. 187.

(5.) Ibid.. p. 189.

(6.) Klaus Biesenbach, introductory essay, "Loop--Allea auf Anfang," Magazine 03/01, published by Klaus Biesenbach for P.5. I/MOMA and Kunstwerke, p. 20.

(7.) "Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art" was curated by Chrissle lles. Whitney Museum of American Art. October 18, 2001-January 6, 2002.

(8.) Natalle Bookchin, statement from Databank of the Everyday, quoted in The Digital Dialectic, p. 189.

Loop

P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center 

December 9, 2001 - January 20, 2002

ANNE BARLOW currently works at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, where she has organized projects including: Trust Me; Graham Gussin: States of Mind; Sontext: Post-Meridian; and Jacqueline Fraser. Formerly a curator at various institutions in the U.K., Anne Barlow has contributed to numerous publications, most recently for Karma El Azem at Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2001), and the Edith Russ House for Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany (2002). She has acted on juries to select work for public collections, exhibitions and art commissions, and has participated in numerous television and radio arts programs on contemporary art.