The work opens with this written message: "Two people who know each other are in the same space. While one person predicts continuously the other person's behaviour, the other person recounts (by memory) the other's past behaviour." Framed by the screen, two people face each other. They are holding a microphone. We watch them standing and sitting and making various movements. Sometimes they move out of camera shot. One of the performers continuously predicts the other's behaviour, while the other recounts the first's behaviour. "This works like a loop, a feed-back or a Moebius ring, rather like R.D. Laing's 1 psychological double knots: both participants try to describe behaviour from the recent past or the near future, but they never reach the present. The present does not exist. The impossibility of reaching this absolute present, is the defeat of this modernist idea that all preconceptions can be swept away." 2 This face-off between the two performers is perceived like a mirror image where movements have a slight time lag. In certain respects, this work is close to the installation Present Continuous Past(s) of 1974. In Past Future Split Attention, a knowledge of past actions is necessary to enable a step by step prediction by deduction of future movements. But this deduction process may be hindered by a sudden change of movement by one of the participants. Dan Graham notes: "The memory of the past (in the present) depends on each unstable moment of the projected future. This future is neither sure nor established; it's just a group of developing probabilities. The present moment is nothing other than a series of broken past memories that make sense because of their projection into a potential future. There is a link between archaeology and a study of the future." 3

Dominique Garrigues

1 Ronald David Laing (1927-1989), founder - with D. Cooper Ë of antipsychiatry. He wrote L'Equilibre mental, la folie et la famille (1964, in collaboration with A. Esterson) and Noeuds (Paris, Stock, 1971).
2 Dan Graham, Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, published by Paris-Musées, 1987, p. 35.
3 Dan Graham, Ma position. Ecrits sur mes oeuvres, Villeurbanne, Le Nouveau Musée - Institut / Les Presses du réel, 1992, p. 118.