Situation no. 41 begins with a happy new year card
posted to regular gallery visitors before
the exhibition commences
ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF REPETITIONS IN ART
Blue: Did you read what was handwritten on those cards?
Grey: You didn’t look, did you?
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– data room
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ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF REPETITIONS IN ART
Blue: Of course, didn’t you? How could one help but look — they’re there, aren’t they?
Grey: But a card is private, in a public sort of way.
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– passageway for those who looked
– passageway for those who didn’t
– looking library
– storage room for lost plinths kept in corners that can’t be found
– library of repetitions in art
– chair
– first floor: repeated colours
– second floor: repeated stripes
– the orange phase where everything happens twice
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ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF REPETITIONS IN ART
Blue: Private or not, I’ll tell you one thing, the design’s been done before. It’s a copy of a famous fabric pattern I’ve seen in a museum, somewhere.
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– data room
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ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF REPETITIONS IN ART
Grey: Everything, these days, seems to have been done before. Everything’s a repeat of something else.
Blue: Yes, but sometime’s there’s a difference, isn’t there?
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– waiting room
– a different chair to sit in after painting a coat of green
– ‘untitled green: to be repeated’, painted green, five times
– corner where someone once whispered ‘happy new year’
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ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF REPETITIONS IN ART
Grey: Maybe in time and space, but so what? If I were playing my favourite record and it got stuck, midway — repeating the same thing over and over — I would change it.
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– data room
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ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF REPETITIONS IN ART
Blue: Of course! And if it didn’t get stuck you would play in only once.
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– leaning room, for one red painting only
– split room
– where someone waits for the red painting to be hung, listening to the same sad song three times
– where no one waits
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ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF REPETITIONS IN ART
Grey: Only once! Are you crazy? I play my favourites again and again. But that’s different, isn’t it? Anyway, don’t you have a meeting at the Bureau* to go to?
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– data room
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ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF REPETITIONS IN ART
Blue: Yes. They want me to look at some results of a survey they conducted recently; something about ‘temporal spacings of repetitions’ in art. They’re meant to be quite pleasing.
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– where someone telephoned someone else, to invite them to look at the latest survey’s painted results, but got an engaged signal
– stairs that go nowhere
– stares that come back
– empty centre of the data room where information collected from undercover investigations is leaked
– room for a mathematician equipped with survey results, calculator and stamp pad; and the hope to measure difference in time’s repetition
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ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF REPETITIONS IN ART
Grey: Pleasing? I’ve heard that they’re just stripes — again!
*Bureau of Repetitions in Art
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– data room
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BUREAU OF REPETITIONS IN ART
Due to an increasing demand to investigate the temporal spacings of repetitions in art, the Bureau has finally devised the following survey and requires your assistance to complete it.
Your instructions are to receive eight ‘happy new year’ greetings cards (designed specifically for this project) posted to you on separate days. Upon receiving each card, please mark the date and time on the adjacent form.
The data thus collected will then be analysed by our mathematicians, who will make public the results in the form of a wall painting.
We thank you, in advance, for your participation, and ensure that the covert nature of this investigation is necessary to further our understanding of art.
PARTICIPANT TYPE: N – CURATOR OF CONTEMPORARY ART
