The theme of the 1978 Olympics will be "Progress"A man walks back and forth in a concrete shelter, taking one step forward and two steps back, then two steps forward and three back until he is marching ten strides forward and nine back again. The promised “Progress” of the title is obviously lost somewhere in the past. The pacing spectre jitters back and forth in time unable escape.
The shelter and its occupant are part noble and part comical, somewhat like the heads on Easter Island.The concrete structure he haunts is a remnant of a cancelled Utopia, echoing the bold forms and subsequent decay of High Modernist Architecture, Vast building schemes like Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh or Olympic arenas are an attempt to impose the logic of an idealised future upon the present. This specific structure from the Clontarf Road in Dublin is part of this global narrative. This classically absurd motif was generated by sequencing twenty seconds of video into a potentially infinite progression.
