Juan Crego has defined this work as a “videomemory”. The piece is structured around a predetermined temporal interval, a natural year, that of 1992, during which the artist recorded ten seconds every day. For the days in which he wasn’t able to carry out his mission, ten seconds of black screen fill the gap. And so this peculiar diary of 366 days adds up to the figure in the title, that is 61 minutes.
The date stamp in the domestic video camera attests to the consecutiveness of the days, and the entire video thus becomes a chronograph of everyday life. Images look unpremeditated, arbitrary and recurrent, they correspond to the places, itineraries and surroundings that the artist and his camera pass by. The latter is on standby until it is activated for the short predetermined interval. Within this regular and precise rhythm we can also discern the cosmic flow of time being reflected, the alternation of seasons, the meteorological changes. In its constant pendular movement – from the interior to the exterior, from the subjective to the objective – , the entire video is a succession of moments and of badly termed dead time intervals, for in fact, they are filled with life.
Since the late eighties Crego has been producing a series of videos that combine the formal appearance of a home video, private and familiar, with predetermined structural patterns, systemic albeit open to chance. In this piece, and a previous one, the duration of the tape is determined by a kind of equation of specific calendar units – a year in 3660 segundos, a month in Daniel, marzo 1990 [Daniel, march 1990], the chronicle of the first month of life of Crego’s son – and the preestablished length of the shots filmed daily (10 and 30 seconds respectively). As in other works, the length of the shots is given by the specific recording device being used, or by a first shot that is recorded over, unknowingly, by succeeding ones; or by rewinding the tape and thus partially erasing any previous shots (for example, in Lunes, 27/01/92 [Monday 27/01/92], the shot of an alarm clock is left intact at the beginning and at the end of the video, and so imposes the length of another particular videomemory). Most of these works are then presented exactly as the tapes leave the videocamera, without editing, after a lapse of time that can go from a few hours to a whole year.
Premised on an examination of everyday things, Crego’s work features the constant of memory, as well as his infidelities, his dissipation, his fragmentary disposition. He works thus with the remembered and the forgotten, creating an inseparable duality.
