Cactus Land

WHAT IS “CACTUS LAND” IF NOT BARBED WIRE?

Chris Marker Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, 72.

Owls at noon, night birds in the day, things, objects, images that don’t belong, and yet are there. Leaflets, postcards, stamps, graffiti, forgotten photographs, frames stolen from the continuous and senseless flow of TV stuff (what I’d call the Duchamp syndrome: once I’ve spotted 1/50th of a second that escaped everybody, including its author, this 1/50th of a second is mine). Bringing into the light events and people who normally never access it. It’s from that raw material, the petty cash of history, that I try to extract a subjective journey through the 20th century.

Everybody agrees that the founding moment of that era, its mint, was the First World War, and that it was also the background on which T.S. Eliot wrote his beautiful and desperate poem The Hollow Men. So the Prelude to the journey will be a reflection upon that poem, mixed with some images gathered from the limbos of my memory.

After reproducing the above passage, Raymond Bellour, in his essay “Marker’s Gesture,” comments: “These lines, dated 6 April 2005, appeared (in English) at the entry of the dark room where Chris Marker’s Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men was presented, on the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s reopening in New York.” [13]

Martin, Adrian and Raymond Bellour, Chris Marker Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, Brisbane, Australia: Institute of Modern Art, 2008.

Chris Marker
Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men 2005
two-channel eight-LCD-screen video installation
19 minutes.
All images courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York