”Time is an otherworldly concept and truth an unreliable beast.”
-Mike Nelson
Immersion At Work
Is this a dream? Here we are in the slick, uber-modern Hayward Gallery where cash payments are like yesterday, baby. And the indicia is all bits of paper pinned to noticeboards. And that aesthetic is adhered to throughout. Though it may better be called an anti-aesthetic, a foregrounding of bog-standard plain-ness. A film is projected onto brown plywood boards.
To some, DIY is a punk philosophy about rejecting consumerist culture. To Mike Nelson, it would seem to to have a more literal definition - bodging bits of wood together in sheds while reaching for your bevel. He’s not artist-as-craftsman, posing in a smock, so much as handyman-as-space-creator. The show proudly states it took over thirty builders four months to assemble, leading you to picture them sucking their checks about the right cowboys who’d staged the previous exhibition.
The worst thing you could do at this point would be imagine this is another example of Instragrammable art - works staged as a photo-op for punters to quickly click and share. In fact it’s the very opposite. As Jeremy Deller has said “to be fully appreciated, [this] really is an exhibition that needs to be seen in person.” Nelson himself has pointed out: “my instinct has always been to make immersive works. They should have a spatial aspect but also a psychological effect on the senses.” (And please remember all that while you peruse my inexpert photos.)
And this is a little like the way Abstract Expressionism responded to the prevalence of colour photography, art taking a direction where it couldn’t easily be snapped and captured. Saying art shouldn’t, in a direct physical sense, be too easy to access, it can leave you sounding like an elitist. But the truth is that what’s too easily clicked on is too easily clicked off, and everything passes by in a blur. (The trend for turning already existing artworks into ‘immersive experiences’ is probably a more risible, commercially oriented variant of this.)
There are five environments to explore, all reworkings of installations Nelson has staged elsewhere. ’The Asset Strippers’ places once-familiar agricultural machinery on plinths, the way we present ancient artefacts. No longer connected to their use, we can’t do other than to frame their form, turn them into sculptures. In this way, looking at other people looking at them can be more significant than looking at the machines themselves. The name comes from Nelson buying them from asset sales, and most likely they’d otherwise have been sold for scrap.
Nelson has commented on placing “artefacts cannibalised from the last days of the industrial era in place of the treasures of empire that would normally adorn such halls”. But truth be told this worked better when a fuller version was staged in the ornate, august halls of Tate Britain three years ago.
Memory Merely Flickers
There’s frequent other references to the fallibility of memory. Nelson has mythologised about the Amnesiacs, a biker gang of Gulf War vets who suffer from PTSD flashbacks. (Perhaps based on the Hells Angels being vets of World War Two.) And here we have ’Amnesiac Shrine'. Naturally we never see the gang, only the residue of their actions, as if getting their flashbacks second-hand. And these often take the form of cargo-cult attempts to reassemble the past, a ‘fire’ with red plastic sheeting standing for flames (handily illustrated), objects stuck together in the shape of a motorbike, animal horns as handlebars, and so on.
While the exterior of ’Triple Bluff Canyon’ is a bunker-like building almost entirely buried by sand. It’s very similar to images in Chris Marker’s ’Sans Soleil’ (1983). A film which starts with what looks like young children on a road in Iceland, all bucolic and charming. Then shows us the same space later, after a volcanic eruption, where only the peaks of roofs are discernible from under a covering of black ash. Memory merely flickers, always in danger of being smothered by forgetting.
You can go inside the bunker, after some English queuing, and discover an old-style darkroom. Pictures are hung up to dry, as if resisting the weight of the sand outside. Yet they’re no more comprehensible to us than the machines in ’The Asset Strippers’. That placed foreign objects in a space recognisable to us, while this does the opposite, placing us in a foreign environment - but the result’s the same. It’s like they’re in language which lost its comprehensibility when this space was vacated, and now remain like a residue.
While the first environment we cross, ’I, Impostor’ is like a cross between a very run-down branch of B&Q and a hoarder’s attic. We realise these aren’t random items; everything is prepared, the wood cut into precise shapes, some objects even labelled for assembly. Yet we don’t see any plans for this, they’re placed together as uselessly as those drying photos. It turns out these are the pieces for an installation Nelson once staged, but not for us here. (Though it does, if I’m honest, seem an outsized means of establishing this point.)
The Absence Hits
’The Deliverance and The Patience’ is a jumble of interconnected rooms. Unlike ’Triple Bluff Canyon’ there’s no way to cross them in a linear fashion, you just have to wander and hope for the best, multiple-choice doors jarring with any attempt to form some sort of narrative. I’ve still no idea if I went through them all. They’re stripped back, floors often bare and walls reduced back to beams, and full of archaic objects, bakelite phones and the like.
And what’s through those doors seems entirely unconnected. One’s an old-style travel agents, another a gambling den, another looks like someone slept rough in it, another again is dominated by an occult shrine (again handily illustrated). While the door to each is unique, as if at the same time you’re in a physical space you’re crossing some sort of portal. (Each door squeaks so loud, drawing attention to itself, that it must surely be a deliberate feature.)
Nelson writes on one of those noticeboards of how the links between rooms are more conceptual, like jumping between scenes in a film. And, as you were probably about to say yourself, memory works in a similar way. We remembers incidents in an encapsulatory fashion, like a series of rooms without the connecting corridors, a few roof peaks amid a whole load of blackness. Plus, memory can link together physically apart spaces.
But more than that… What should feel prosaic and straightforward, the instant-hit advent-calendar moment of seeing behind another door, doesn’t at all. The absence hits you as much as any presence. There’s the constant feeling of elusiveness, of missing something.
Reviews mostly talked of reconstructing what happened in those rooms, putting together the clues left us like detectives. Which makes them seem too much like puzzles, waiting to be solved. (And notably the same reviews didn’t offer much of a solution.)
And it would be as easy to read all this as an exercise in nostalgia, a lament for the analogue, hands-on past, an old man shaking his fist at an iCloud. But that isn’t it. Instead it uses the (real or apparent) materiality of the past as a means to convey estrangement. Perhaps its always the past which feels material, becoming solid in hindsight, while the present just passes past us like water through our fingers. Whatever happened back then formed us, made us what we are. And is now inaccessible to us.
There’s something formalist about this whole show, art which is largely about the making of itself. You need to picture it all being put up, the saws going across and nails into those bits of wood. At one point there’s a full reproduction of Nelson’s studio. You could scarcely stress the materiality, the madeness enough.
But this takes us to a paradox. You physically walk through those spaces. You could pick up and move objects should you choose. Yet I often felt like a kind of phantom, an insubstantial being. Despite - or perhaps because of - this being my past. I once answered bakelite phones like those, went to travel agents to buy physical plane tickets. Yet that world I lived through I’m now watching from the outside. It’s the act of rebuilding that world which shows us how disconnected from it we are. (It would be interesting to see how those a couple of generations younger than me reacted to this show.)
Experience, at least the forms of experience which seem formulatory to you, always fall the other side of the line. And so the best way to experience this show would be quite alone. But short of breaking into the gallery overnight, and perhaps sleeping in the sleeping rough room, there isn’t much of a way to test that.
Crucified By Graph Paper
The largest environment, ’Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster’, is the biggest break. It has no references to time or memory but instead offers a discombobulation of the human body. What might initially look like stones are statue heads, the sort of thing which often adorn church walls, but are here trapped within that wire grid. And my high-falutin’ explanation for all this is…
…okay, I haven’t got one. All I can tell you is what it feels like to look at.
With its rigid structure the wire frame is imprisoning, the heads like people caught in the gears of some soulless mechanism, crucified by graph paper. But all those open spaces are simultaneously insubstantial, like a spider’s web. Which adds to the nightmarish quality of the image, making it seem both oppressive and unchallengeable. It stakes out a space you can’t get in, while those heads can’t get out. Though the heads look stone rather than concrete, the addition of a cement mixer suggests that within that space they’re being made on some kind of production line, like a mechanical queen bee populating its hive.
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