There is something inexplicable about Ground Zero as signifier. It is rooted simultaneously in horror and irony, in both the unspeakable and the so-far unspoken -- in what can’t be undone and what has yet to be done. Quick associations are an inescapable aspect of encountering language, of employing it. The same could be said of time, the myriad ways we decipher it, attempt to grasp its senseless curve, translate it into form. This disconnect appears in the ways we glance in passing at our watches, round up to the top of the hour when answering with the time, or in the way all the clocks in our homes and cars slowly slip from standard, from nuclear time, daring us to account for the difference. Here we encounter a swirling nexus of concrete abstractions. Images of doomsday clocks, nuclear anxieties, notions of catastrophic rupture all coexist parallel to more immediate and human implications: no-body can escape. Felix Gonzalez Torres’ twin clocks slowly ticking out of sync over years come to mind. But the political shadow of recent histories looms large, obfuscating the individual. So we arrive at Ground Zero as both place and absence, and despite the best efforts of a collective impulse to memorialize, it remains unstable. The monuments here, if they can be considered as such, subvert scale. Both larger than human life, but so much smaller than any overtly permanent fixtures, they memorialize the futility of the very act of memorialization. The gold-lacquer veneer suggests something ersatz: a bellboy concierge cart, a stainless steel structure gilded in gold-leaf, a pioneer plaque hurled hopelessly into the void. Physical humour tempers the temporal angst. In this context, a clock that ticks counter is a device for mitigating impermanence, at the very least meeting it halfway. Precision is seen as a cumulative myth, but one worthy of ornament. The negative space above the clock faces is an affront to design, more barrier than invitation. These are not instruments for re-orienting oneself, they are a destabilizing presence that take up space and suggest time.
–Sasha Semenoff
