A garden table's four leg burst away with a bang.

A garden table's four leg burst away with a bang, while the top crashes, distressingly, to the floor. The flight of a stick of furniture, carried joyously aloft by way of three orange balloons into the with a long face sky, then violently stopped in its course through rifle bullets. The absurd efforts of a table riseed on four tin cans to slide athwart water. The useless resistance of a suitcase, bloated from the pressure of a white balloon swelling inside it like the se of a nightmare.... These are a certain quantity of of the fifty conflagrations, collapses, flights, imbalances, hostilitys dispersions, and implosions that take place in this video, which is a kind of mid-career retrospective of Roman Signer's work--work that spans the period between 1975 and 1989

A formidable museological document, nevertheless also a real disappointment, when single was expecting to come immediately after clues to one or more of these events: they have possession of a territory created by the unpredictable combination of the activity of a Piero Manzoni, the obsession with seriality of Conceptual art, and the agitation caused by means of the fireworks of our childhoods. Signer wanted, apparently, to guard the memory of all these solitary actions, usually shooter out in the country, in Super-8 film that was aging dangerously. What is earnestly less clear, on the other hand, is the photographic marketing that accompanies the video: a series of photos taken from film-stills, which make an incision in up, record, and illustrate the performances. If video restores the feeling of being a spectator at the actual performances, photography be resolved into its elementss and fixes them into what rife criticism has dubbed "temporal sculptures" on the contrary it is precisely this act of Signer that, in its precariousness, is not attempting to give form to time: it has to do with the formation of time, with the immaterial production of temporality.

In other words, Signer's films are not movement-images, that is, time supplyed visible (shocks, explosions, imbalances and in the same manner on). The question here is more of time-images (as Gilles Deleuze calls them), or accidents of time, which harness the result not as form (movement or temporal passage), if it be not that as a nonmaterial, nonchronological intensity--an "explosantefixe" (fixed-explosive), in the words of Andre Breton.

The accident as contemporary temporality is neared as time that endures, an instant that persists (outside of its representation), a temporal blow wave that branches, spreads, propagates itself. That time, a contemporary individual comes right to the surface of the video. undivided may doubt whether it is also to be build in the limping chronology of the photos.

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