A406, North Circular Road
ENSA Paris-Malaquais
Paris, 2008
In the late 1960s, Douglas Huebler, a representative of the movement
known as photoconceptualism, developed the Duration Pieces series. Here,
photography borrowed its conceptual aspect from obedience to a precise shooting
protocol, fixed not in space, but in time. For Duration Piece # 4, Bradford,
Massachusetts, for example, to photograph a playground and the children within
it at regular or irregular time intervals, or according to a program
established independently of the subject to be photographed and applied with
clocklike precision. The point of view thus moves not in space, but in time.
The exhibition of the photographs could not be conceived without the
simultaneous presentation of the protocol that gave rise to the images
produced. Cutting out time in the form of the measurement of duration was to
take on the function of a veritable map, where the visible could be located.
The layout of London’s North Circular Road seems to play a similar role
for Benoît Grimbert to that of the temporal map for Douglas Huebler. It takes
on the role of a landscape rendered abstract by its sole function: to reduce
journey times. The fluidity that all ideal “circulation” aims for pre-dates the
road’s design and projects its demands onto what already exists. Speed is its
horizon, both point of view and vanishing point. To this abstraction of
quantified temporal flows, photography opposes its fixing action and offers its
storage capacity.
The edges of the frame are razor-sharp, cutting a hole in the landscape
that leaks out on all sides, blurred by movement. They halt the flow of time
that the high-speed track literally metaphorizes, i.e., according to the
etymology of the term, transports. Interrupting the flow, photography contains
it as memory, organizes it, proposes a storage modality. We call these
different modes images; in reality, they fabricate a place (topos), collected from
the requirements of contemporary urbanism.
Here, photography is the term that identifies the image with the place
it fabricates. It is the seat of this operation of identification, the time
required for this process. It is as a modality of memorial arrangement, that
photography, like architecture, can be deposited as a trace of spatial
experience and constitute an architectural tool.
Julie
Cortella, exhibition text
Exhibitions
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