I cheated on you three times, the first one out of pride, the second out of spite, and the third just for pleasure. Lyrics by Paquita la del Barrio.

The piece Three Times by Gustavo Artigas is made of three photo sequences in which we see a man being run over by a car. There are almost no differences between the three sequences, and the event they depict is identical. Although the images seem spontaneous and naturalistic, we are told that they are in fact a mise en scène: the pictures have been taken over three consecutive days (21, 22 and 23 of February at 4:00 pm in Rosas Moreno Street, Mexico City). No one was informed of this event in order that it might seem spontaneous to neighbours and people passing by. Nevertheless, the man being run over is a movie stuntman: this is not an accident, but acrobatics.

The title, Three Times, points to the repetition of the event, and it is this repetition which dilutes and ultimately nullifies the sense of spontaneity. The indexical quality of the pictures — their dependence upon a narrative context — is suspended by the apparent lack of consequences of the event depicted. This is not a still from a film which suggests a time after and a time before, nor a tableau in which a complete Aristotelian action is described. The event appears closed, with no external origin or effect.

Many of the motifs in Three Times appear elsewhere in the work of this artist. Artigas had already worked with stuntmen in Spontaneous Human Combustion (2002), in which a man sitting next to a female lecturer suddenly bursts into flames for no apparent reason, and in Emergency Exit (2002), in which a man riding a motorcycle enters the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City only to crash through one of the lobby walls. The references to male stereotypes of power and competition have also been constant in his work: an interest in team sports, violent physical acts and Hollywood-like spectacular catastrophes.

However, if all these references appear to lend the work the tone of a boyish prank, it also has a darker side. For Domino Effect (2000) for instance, the artist organised a dominoes tournament in Havana between four male Cuban artists and four female prostitutes: whoever lost a move had to drink rum until he or she could no longer play. The prize for the winner was a bottle of rum. Another example is Unlucky Tourist (2005), in which a woman climbs the Tajin pyramid in Veracruz, Mexico, just to be struck by lightning when she finally reaches the top.

To some extent, the images in Three Times are simulacra of those ancient events which became separated from causality, removed to a plane of reality which is in some sense outside of time: the zero time of foundational myth. But far from establishing order, they disarticulate any possible one.