# Repetition and Seriality [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seriality_(art)) ( 20th century–present ) ## Description Repetition and seriality as aesthetic and theoretical devices across art, music, and film — the use of the repeated unit, the loop, and the series (rather than the singular masterwork) as a way of organizing time and form, linking [[Gilles Deleuze]]'s philosophy of difference and repetition to concrete practices in structural/materialist film (loop printing, repeated shots), serial and minimalist music and visual art, and Pop Art's serial image. ## Key Tags #structural-materialist #philosophy #deleuze #seriality ## Essential Works - Deleuze, Gilles. *Difference and Repetition*. Trans. Paul Patton. Columbia University Press, 1994. - Central philosophical text arguing that repetition always produces difference rather than pure sameness; underpins much theorization of seriality in art - Krauss, Rosalind. "The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition." *October* 18 (1981): 47–66. - Argues that the grid and serial repetition, not originality, structure much modernist and postmodernist practice ## Details Seriality appears across the vault's core interests in distinct but related registers: philosophically, as Deleuze's argument that repetition is never identical return but always generative of difference; musically, as the serialism of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method and its extension into total/integral serialism; visually, as Minimalism's repeated modular units (Judd, LeWitt) and Pop Art's mechanically repeated image (Warhol's silkscreen grids); and cinematically, as the structural film's use of the loop, the repeated shot, and rephotography to foreground the film apparatus and duration itself over narrative. ### Key Theorists - [[Gilles Deleuze]] - *Difference and Repetition* argues repetition is the vehicle of difference, not sameness — a key frame for reading serial and looped works ### Exemplary Practitioners - [[Paul Sharits]] - structural/flicker filmmaker using repeated frames and loop structures as core formal material - [[Kurt Kren]] - Austrian structural filmmaker whose serial, mathematically-scored films (e.g. *48 Heads from the Szondi-Test*) organize shots by strict repeating patterns - [[James Tenney]] - composer working in serial and process-based music, applying repetition/permutation as compositional structure - [[Andy Warhol]] - serial silkscreen repetition of a single image (Marilyn, Campbell's Soup) as both Pop strategy and structural-film practice (*Empire*, *Sleep*) ### Related Concepts - [[Slow Cinema]] - shares an interest in duration and the repeated/extended shot as resistance to narrative momentum - [[Video Art]] - feedback and loop structures in early video synthesis parallel filmic seriality - [[Avant Garde Film]] - structural/materialist film, the loop, and repetition are central to this broader tradition ### Creative and Technical Practices %% none yet %% ### Associated Movements or Institutions - Structural/materialist film - 1960s–70s film movement (P. Adams Sitney's coinage) foregrounding shape, loop, and repetition over content - Minimalism - visual-art movement using serial, modular repetition of simple forms (active 1960s–70s) ## References ### Primary Sources Bibliography Deleuze, Gilles. *Difference and Repetition*. Trans. Paul Patton. Columbia University Press, 1994. ### Secondary Sources Bibliography Krauss, Rosalind. "The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition." *October* 18 (1981): 47–66. Sitney, P. Adams. *Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000*. Oxford University Press, 3rd ed., 2002. — coins and defines "structural film"