The Repeated Signal

… It is what persists …

This is from The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse edited by Eik Kahng (2007):

… [George] Kubler posited repetition as a fundamental mechanism by which to measure the uneven rhythms of history.

… In Kubler’s opinion, the concept of period “style” introduced a type of art history that suffered from an uncomfortably wide margin of subjective error. Using his own long experience as a historian of non-Western antiquity, Kubler sought to resurrect the merits of form as a legitimate and more “objective” means of finding the shape of time, which, as he argued, is made visible only through reiteration and rupture: a material syncopation or prolonged rubato still graspable in “The History of Things”…

… For Kubler, repetition is the art historian’s primary means of investigation. It is what persists as a tangible history of things, if only in fragmentary form, even when the civilization that produced that history may have left no other trace.

… There is the electro-dynamic imagery of the repeated “signal” the pulse of which may dim over time or may even be interrupted, only to be resumed centuries after its initial generation.

-Julie