Days and nights in York

The subject-matter

So then I decided to make a work whose theme would be the day – or, to be more precise, the days and nights. Such a work interests me a lot because it clearly demonstrates a problem artists have been facing for many centuries: that of the relationship between the prototype and the image of it.

Days and hours exist and are experienced in their own duration, which is simulateously our duration as well. They cannot be placed out there facing us, yet in a way they are our lives. They have no shape, body or type – or rather, they are not apparent through their shape, body or type. Yet they are conceived in the mind by way of our lives and of the way we have made in order to measure them.

They are our days, our life, which we will measure when our time is up. Then, I have the impression, the scale of that measurement of days to ourselves will be 1:1.

The measures

Now to our plan. It occurred to me that each hour could be measured as a cubic centimetre – or still better, as one hundredth of a metre. The use of the metre (the French metre, that is – the one introduced on 18th Germinal of the third year of the Revolution) as a unit of measurement struck me first as a very reasonable and self-evident solution which would enable me to find the shapes and types of our incorporeal, typeless days. In other words, the unit of measurement could be one hundredth of the equivalent of one ten millionth of a quarter of the earth’s meridian. Taking a subdivision of the meridian as our unit of measurement, we will make up a scale which will help us understand the magnitude of the planet, or rather, to see ourselves in relation to it.

Of course, we also have the English yard with its three feet of twelve inches each. As a unit of measurement, a foot seems more familiar to me. That is because to some extent it is the unit of measurement with the greatest affinity to the human scale. Perhaps for that reason the English foot is closer to the ancient units of measurement used in Persia, Greece and Rome.

I could also have used Malevitch’s favourite unit of measurement, the ‘arshin’, a medieval Russian variation of a Turkish unit based on the length of the arm, and of course I could have taken the ell.

In the end, however, I was left with the foot and its division into inches. Each inch is an hour in time, then, as the light and darkness take shape in the sky of York. I made that decision because it dawned me that to use as a unit of measurement something which is connected with our footsteps, with the foot which is ultimately  the length of time it takes us to walk a distance, is to reintroduce the concept of time into our measurements.

It is something rather similar to the 1:1 ratio which, as I said earlier, will be the final reckoning between ourselves and our days.

G.H.