Following HOMETIME, Apple Pie, the archetypal food of home, re-presents documentation of performance as event.

Just as the phrase ‘marathon’ fails to fully describe the arduous nature of a 26.2 mile run, this singular image, of shifting punctum, recalls the time and variation of marked materiality in a durational event. Following the work of Chantal Akerman, this is a film which considers representations of real time and the utilisation of ‘extraneous elements...the minor event receives an attention involving expanded duration’ (Margulies 1996 p. 23).

Like Jaspar Johns Zero through Nine (1961) this static image creates a paradoxically static yet processional narrative through the numbers 1 to 26 that make up a marathon event. The final .2 of the task, appears briefly, proportionately, at the end as punctuation and final marker, in a solid state in contrast to the fluctuating staticity of the previous merge of numbers that flow in a blur. Like Johns work, of which ‘It has been suggested that his intention in superimposing the figures was partly to create a multiple image, so that each time the eye adjusts to focus on a number the spectator perceives a slightly different picture;’ (1) this single image is ephemerally without a complete clarity, the constant of which accentuates the transient nature of such an event.

Apple Pie Marathon offers a single, accumulated solution to the documentational complexities of performance to camera representations. At each stage of such a making event a product is produced but the evidential nature cannot describe the nature of durational labour involved, nor convey the element of timescale with a totalitarianism of ‘event’. Akin in domestic allegiance to Martha Rosler’s similarly ‘culinary lexicon’(2) Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Apple Pie Marathon demonstrates an object at each marker of division. Unlike Rosler’s central, housewifely figure, the ephemeral object alone is shown here as representative of the labour, the maker is absent, invisible, irrelevant.

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(1) http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/johns-0-through-9-t00454/text-catalogue-entry

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics_of_the_Kitchen

Margulies, Ivone 1996. Nothing Happens. Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Pub. Duke University Press.