DESIRE AND REPETITION

A screening programme devoted to the relation between repetition, desire and moving image. Artists include Michael Curran, Boris Charmatz, Mike Dunford, Annika Larsson, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Bruce Nauman. 

Curated and organised by Tim Steer as part of LUX’s first curatorial residency.

 

The screenings were preceded by a four-part blog that can be read here: 1, 2, 3, 4.

 

Within the work of artist James Richard and Dara Birnbaum (Video 1) repetition is used as a mechanism to disrupt the viewer’s scopophilic gaze. The way video is caricatured to its extreme repetition is the interruption of an experience, as mechanical division.

 

As is discussed in the third part of the blog, repetition is also the establishing of continuity. Without continuity Benjamin says: “would cease to be one and would therefore enter into the realm of the mark as such; but this is something that we cannot imagine”. Desire is killed as there is no chance to imagine a possible future. Without repetition we cease to exist, gesture is linked to the singular original in contrast to the multiple mechanical, yet both are interlinked as the gesture would be lost without the receptor and translator.

 

In the video works shown at the Open School East, there was a constant frustration when watching these works in their repetitive nature, no one moves from their seat. Desire turns into a constraint imposed as Deluze and Guattari point out "produced, machined and mobilised by the social: there is only desire and the social, and nothing else”.