One Minute, One Hour, One Month… One Million Years

23 February—23 March, 2019
The Island Club

CURATED BY: The Island Club and Kerenidis Pepe Collection

WITH: Ignasi Aballí, Eva Barto, Alejandro Cesarco, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, Haris Epaminonda, Aurélien Froment, Dora García, Mario García Torres, David Horvitz, On Kawara, Jochen Lempert, Julien Nédélec, Nina Papaconstantinou, Vittorio Santoro, Ariel Schlesinger, and Elsa Werth.

One Minute, One Hour, One Month… One Million Years operates at the interstices between day and night, wake and sleep, work and rest. Where time bends and boundaries become porous. Where language, in form and function, surrenders to the weight of interpretation. For the duration of the exhibition The Island Club will be open from 17:36 to 21:36. As the sun sets and commercial activity gives way to leisure time, the exhibition unfolds across buildings – shopfronts and public spaces in proximity to The Island Club – and can be explored through a walk.

With fleeces, with vestments, I have tried to cover the blue-black blade. I implored day to break into night. I have longed to see the cupboard dwindle, to feel the bed soften, to float suspended, to perceive lengthened trees, lengthened faces, a green bank on a moor and two figures in distress saying goodbye. I flung words in fans like those the sower throws over the ploughed fields when the earth is bare. I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO: Yioula Economou (Sunoptical), Evangelos Evangelou (Foto Matik), Marios Demetriou (Marios Locksmith), Panayiotis Pieridis (#20 Stoa Anexartisias), Spyros Polycarpou (Collector’s Shop), Georgia Raounas (Georgia Raounas Jewellery Design, #44 Stoa Anexartisias), K. Salamiotis & Sons, (Salamiotis Souvenirs), Andre Zivanari (Point Centre for Contemporary Art) and Will Wiebe.

 

A READER
COMPILED BY WENDY TRONRUD

 

EDWARD HITCHCOCK The Sandstone Bird

A thousand pyramids have moulder’d down,

Since on this rock thy foot-print was impressed;

Yet here it stands unaltered: though since then

Earth’s crust has been upheav’d, and fracture’d oft;

And deluge after deluge o’er her driven,

Has swept organic life from off her face.

Bird of a former world! – would that thy form

Might reappear in these thy former haunts!

O for a sorceress nigh, to call thee up

From thy deep sandstone-grave, as erst of old

She broke the prophet’s slumbers! But her arts

She may not practice in this age of light.

 

EMILY DICKINSON J160 (Just lost, when I was saved!)

Just lost, when I was saved!

Just felt the world go by!

Just girt me for the onset with Eternity,

When breath blew back,

And on the other side

I heard recede the disappointed tide!

Therefore, as One returned, I feel,

Odd secrets of the line to tell!

Some Sailor, skirting foreign shores—

Some pale Reporter, from the awful doors

Before the Seal!

Next time, to stay!

Next time, the things to see

By Ear unheard,

Unscrutinized by eye—

Next time, to tarry,

While the Ages steal—

Slow tramp the Centuries,

And the Cycles wheel!

 

EMILY DICKINSON J1748 (the reticent volcano keeps)

The reticent volcano keeps

His never slumbering plan —

Confided are his projects pink

To no precarious man.

If nature will not tell the tale

Jehovah told to her

Can human nature not survive

Without a listener?

Admonished by her buckled lips

Let every babbler be

The only secret people keep

Is Immortality.

 

GERTRUDE STEIN Excerpt from Composition as Explanation

Now there is still something else the time-sense in the composition. This is what is always a fear a doubt and a judgment and a conviction. The quality in the creation of expression the quality in a composition that makes it go dead just after it has been made is very troublesome. The time in the composition is a thing that is very troublesome.

If the time in the composition is very troublesome it is because there must even if there is no time at all in the composition there must be time in the composition which is in its quality of distribution and equilibration. In the beginning there was the time in the composition that naturally was in the composition but time in the composition comes now and this is what is now troubling every one the time in the composition is now a part of distribution and equilibration. In the beginning there was confusion there was a continuous present and later there was romanticism which was not a confusion but an extrication and now there is either succeeding or failing there must be distribution and equilibration there must be time that is distributed and equilibrated. This is the thing that is at present the most troubling and if there is the time that is at present the most troublesome the time-sense that is at present the most troubling is the thing that makes the present the most troubling. There is at present there is distribution, by this I mean expression and time, and in this way at present composition is time that is the reason that at present the time-sense is troubling that is the reason why at present the time-sense in the composition is the composition that is making what there is in composition.

And afterwards.

Now that is all.

 

SAPPHO Fragment 34

Stars that shine around the refulgent full moon

Pale, and hide their glory of lesser lustre

When she pours her silvery plenilunar

Light on the orbed earth.

 

WALT WHITMAN Excerpt from Slang in America

The science of language has large and close analogies in geological science, with its ceaseless evolution, its fossils, and its numberless submerged layers and hidden strata, the infinite go-before of the present. Or, perhaps Language is more like some vast living body, or perennial body of bodies. And slang not only brings the first feeders of it, but is afterward the start of fancy, imagination and humor, breathing into its nostrils the breath of life.

 

HENRI BERGSON Excerpt from Matter and Memory

In a fraction of a second which covers the briefest perception of light, billions of vibrations have taken place, of which the first is separated from the last by an interval which is enormously divided. Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; and in truth every perception is already memory. Practically we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.

 

WILLIAM JAMES Excerpt from A World of Pure Experience

Relations are of different degrees of intimacy. Merely to be ‘with’ one another in a universe of discourse is the most external relation that terms can have, and seems to involve nothing whatever as to farther consequences. Simultaneity and time-interval come next, and then space-adjacency and distance. After them, similarity and difference, carrying the possibility of many inferences. Then relations of activity, tying terms into series involving change, tendency, resistance, and the causal order generally. Finally, the relation experienced between terms that form states of mind, and are immediately conscious of continuing each other. The organisation of the Self as a system of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfilments or disappointments, is incidental to this most intimate of all relations, the terms of which seem in many cases actually to compenetrate and suffuse each other’s being.

In this matching and corroborating, taken in no transcendental sense, but denoting definitely felt transitions, lies all that the knowing of a percept by an idea can possibly contain or signify. Wherever such transitions are felt, the first experience knows the last one. Where they do not, or where even as possibles, they can not intervene, there can be no pretense of knowing. In this latter case the extremes will be connected, if connected at all, by inferior relations–bear likeness or succession, or by ‘withness’ alone. Knowledge thus lives inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop towards their terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that the starting point thereby becomes a knower and their terminus an object meant or known. That is all that knowing (in the simple case considered) can be known-as, that is the whole of its nature, put into experiential terms. Whenever such is the sequence of our experiences we may freely say that we had the terminal object ‘in mind’ from the outset, even although at the outset nothing was there in us but a flat piece of substantive experience like any other, with no self-transcendency about it, and no mystery save the mystery of coming into existence and of being followed by other pieces of substantive experience, with conjunctively transitional experiences between. That is what we mean here by being ‘in mind’. Of any deeper more real way of being in mind we have no positive conception, and we have no right to discredit our actual experience by talking of such a thing at all.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edward Hitchcock, “The Sandstone Bird”, first published in 1836 in The Knickerbocker.
Emily Dickinson F132 (1860), first published in Todd, M. L., Higginson, T.W., eds., 1891, Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series, Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers.
Emily Dickinson F1776 (undated), first published in Todd, M. L., ed., 1896, Poems by Emily Dickinson: Third Series, Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers.
Gertrude Stein, excerpt from “Composition as Explanation”, first published in 1926 in The Hogarth Essays: Second Series, Vol. 1, London: The Hogarth Press.
Sappho Fragment 34, translated in 1883 by J. A. Symonds. First published in Wharton, H. T., ed., 1885, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation, London: David Stott, Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, and Co.
Virginia Woolf, excerpt from The Waves, first published in 1931; London: The Hogarth Press.
Walt Whitman, excerpt from “Slang in America”, first published in 1885 in The North American Review, 141 (348): 431-435.
Henri Bergson, excerpt from Matter and Memory, first published in French in 1896. First published in English in 1911, Translated by N. M. Hall and W. S. Palmer, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., New York: The Macmillan Company.
William James, excerpts from “A World of Pure Experience”, first published in 1904 in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1 (20): 533-543.