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.