Skipping the Page takes as its starting point the idea of tempo as it relates to the printed page, for a group show that touches on several different artistic disciplines beyond the traditional understanding of book arts. In doing so it invites us to consider the technology of the book as a device to depict and respond to the passing of time, within a cultural moment when other technologies are more often foregrounded as appropriate to the task.
All of the art works in Skipping the Page invoke an idea of rhythm, of mean tempo – in many cases invoking that rhythm only to compromise it with acts of ambiguity, failure, culture jamming, disruption, acceleration and deceleration from an expected tempo of an action or process. The works in Skipping the Page then, are varied in form but united in exploring the uneven rhythms of the passage of time. As Henri Lefebvre noted in “Rhythmanalysis”, rhythm is revealed as much in its disruption as in its sustained presence and many of the works in the show celebrate and contest this unevenness – or deliberately create situations where it might arise. And at a cultural moment where a war can be supported or disputed partly based on whether the events of a single day marked either a moment of Nietzschean rupture or acceleration of an ongoing globalizing process (with all the attendant political and ethical consequences for either reading), Skipping the Page is a modest suggestion that now is an appropriate time to begin revisiting some ideas around tempo, velocity, acceleration etc. that dominated parts of critical thinking in the 1990’s but have somewhat (been) disappeared from the landscape since.
