Owls at Noon

Prelude: The Hollow Men
April 27–June 13, 2005
Museum of Modern Art
New York City

“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 limboes of my memory.”
– Chris. Marker

“Wenn die Philosophie ihr Grau in Grau malt, dann ist eine Gestalt des Lebens alt geworden, und mit Grau in Grau läßt sie sich nicht verjüngen, sondern nur erkennen; die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.”
– G.W.F. Hegel