In The Night Watch, Lucy Lippard and Brendan Earley collaboratively edited Arthur C. Clarke’s 1948 short story, The Sentinel, and broadcast a looped recording of the story into the gallery. In Clarke’s original text, three scientists land on the moon to hunt for rare minerals, but end up finding and destroying an object of untold significance. Lippard takes on the narrator’s identity. Her retelling issues from an unseen source carrying a calm, measured tone. Earley and Lippard edit away the narrator’s original gender, and the ‘story’s’ voice is posed as a merely human one, neither male or female.
Seán O Sullivan
