Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 2009
Rotating disc, opaline plexiglas, adhesif, motor
90 x 90 cm

The figures in the bronze statuette have their eyes fixed on the far end of the room, as if hypnotised by the stroboscopic disc and its double reversed rotation effect. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow reuses the title – itself a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth – of the collection of texts by Aldous Huxley which Bettina Samson also draws on for her Llano del Rio pop-up (Ozymandias).
The phrase forms a circle around a stroboscopic disc which makes the head spin by turning counter-clockwise, in the opposite direction to our reading of the words. The concentric dots and lines on the disc seem at first to come to a halt, then to advance furtively before moving back again: the illusion is of ceaseless changes of direction, with the central motifs almost always conflicting with the peripheral ones.
The yellow lighting – from neon tubes that enable this retinal persistence effect – harks back symbolically to the Mojave Desert, where the Llano del Rio community originally set up and where, later, the writer Aldous Huxley underwent a mystical psychedelic experience not far from the ruins.
Visually condemned to inertia and maybe even to retrogression, the repetitive formula “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” evokes an endless yet paradoxically future-free day after, and like a mirage or a hallucination nullifies all progressive aspirations.

Text by Anne-Lou Vicente in “Bettina Samson”, La Galerie, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec (exhibition 5 December 2009 – 13 February 2010).

Photography: Cedrick Eymenier.

 

 

© NETTIE HORN