Spontaneous repetition

Repetition in art has another representative in abstract expressionism, particularly in work of Jackson Pollock. His drip painting technique was a spontaneous and repetitive process which has resulted to magnificent pieces. ‘The drip paintings speak of oneness, for Pollock must have felt they were the pictorial realization of his transformed consciousness. Drip paintings are the merger of opposites. The image and the pictorial ground become one, the gesture and image become one, drawing and a kind of writing become one and finally the work of art is the ritual process.’

The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, Maurice Tuchman, p292

‘Clement Greenberg rendered the repeating strokes in a painting such as Pollock 1943 Mural as available only to vision, serving them from the kinaesthesia intuited by the viewer , and from automatism’s hidden relation to the automatic…Greenberg claim that such paintings gave viewer a way to negotiate the ”dull horror” of life in advanced industrial society, came from the unarticulated linkage of Pollock’s serial brushwork to repetitive, machinelike, technological modernity-lived in the body, if rhetorically denied.’

Sensorium, Caroline A.Jones,p 9


Jackson Pollock,Mural, 1943

Repetition in Video Art

‘Influenced by the experimental dance, music, and film of the time Bruce Nauman decided in 1966 that ”if I was an artist and I was in studio, then whatever I do must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.” He began to make works generated out of his daily activities in the studio, assigning himself specific repetitive tasks…he made works that had no particular beginning or end and were meant to be played on a continuous loop.’

Sensorium, Caroline A.Jones,p 79

Bruce Nauman, Dance or exercise on the perimeter of a square, 1967-68, still from a black and white, 16mm film, 10 minutes

RepetItion in process and the final piece

Antony Gormley's 'Field for the British Isles' consists of approximately 40,000 individual figures. Each of them were created in St Helen's, Merseyside in 1993; and with collaboration between Gormley and the local community. ‘Each one of these works comes from a lived moment. It is a materialisation of a moment of lived time, in the same way that my other work is a materialisation of a lived moment in time, and they have a very particular presence, each of them.' he said.

Poetic Repetition

Chris Ofili's room at Tate Britain was another representation of repetition. It reminds me of colorful temples in Sri Lanka. The technique of pointing as the process of creating these paintings is meditative effort. The figure of monkey, which is a holly animal in some cultures along with the spot lights which helps to shot the world outside is a representation of a spiritual and poetic repetition in my opinion.




Mantra

In Sufism another way of achieving a higher level of awareness is repeating a word over and over as a Mantra. Also in in Hinduism and Buddhism a word or a sound repeated to aid concentration in meditation.



Repetition and Difference by Gilles Deleuze

To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent.


From the stand point of Freudianism, we can discover the principle of an inverse relation between repetition and consciousness, repetition and remembering, repetition and recognition (the paradox of the ‘burials’’ or buried objects). The less one remembers, the less one is conscious of remembering one’s past, the more one repeats it-remember and work through the memory in order not to repeat it.


Repetition change nothing is the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it.

What is it to recycle something, to use it again, to repeat it? What happens when an artist quotes, samples, references another? Is it stealing? Does it bespeak a lack of creativity? Or, on the contrary, does it speak to the miraculous, calling forth life from the dead, Lazarus-like, imbuing the old with the new? Repetition may very well be the key concept of the twentieth century -- although is certainly predates it. Don Quixote, for example, is an exercise in repetition: the same adventure over and over again, but somehow different each time. Indeed, difference is the key to repetition. After all, if there were no difference, every instance would remain the same thing, rather than be a reproduction of that thing. Repetition, then, is a concept of creativity, perhaps the concept of creativity: it is how the existing world is shaped into new worlds.

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Steve Reich is a minimalist composer who uses tape loops to create phasing patterns. His compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures and slow harmonic rhythm.