All posts tagged Mike Nelson

GRACE by Alvaro Barrington @ Tate Britain

Like the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern albeit on a smaller scale, the long central hall at Tate Britain – technically known as the Duveen Galleries – is a large space which Tate uses to host a succession of sizeable installations. Earlier this year it was host to Hew Locke’s Procession. Until January 2025 it is the site of ‘GRACE’ by Alvaro Barrington.

Here’s some biography from Barrington’s Wikipedia article:

Alvaro Barrington (born 1983) is a London-based artist. Primarily a painter, Barrington often incorporates yarn, wood and other media into his work. Barrington was born on in February 1983 in Caracas, Venezuela, the son of a Grenadian mother and Haitian father. He grew up in Grenada and then from aged 8 lived in Brooklyn, New York. In 2015, he moved to London and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art completing his MFA in 2017.

So Venezuela, Grenada, New York, London, a very cosmopolitan background.

‘GRACE’ is promoted as a homage to the women who shaped him. It is a ‘personal exploration of identity and belonging’ divided into three parts or ‘acts’, designed to honour: 1) his grandmother Frederica, 2) a close friend and sister-figure Samantha and 3) his mother Emelda. Or, as the artist puts it:

‘GRACE is the constant reimagining of Black culture and aspirational attitude under foreign conditions. GRACE here explores how my grandmother, my mother, and my sister in the British Caribbean community showed up gracefully.’

The wall label introducing the show goes into more detail. It tells us the name GRACE references the song Amazing Grace and also his art professor, Nari Ward’s exhibition of the same name. He explains that ‘in my community’ renditions of Amazing Grace interpret or make it their own and gives an extended description of a frail and elderly Aretha Franklin giving a stirring rendition of President Obama, and how the she was supported by the whoops and cheers of the crowd. To sum up:

Grace is the constant reimagining of Black culture and aspirational attitude under foreign conditions.

The three sections or chapters also map onto three ways of making art – depicting, evoking and embodying – as defined by the US artist Terry Atkins. A second wall label then carefully explains the three chapters of the installation.

Chapter 1. Frederica

The first section is for his grandmother Frederica. It tells us that his mother, Emelda, got pregnant when she was 17. There is no mention of a father. Instead he tells us his grandmother looked after both of them. He was raised in a shack on Grenada whose roof was made of corrugated tin. Rain fell on it with a drumming sound. His grandmother covered the furniture with plastic covers to keep them clean.

So this explains why you enter the installation under a suspended corrugated steel roof with the noise of a tropical rainstorm coming from loudspeakers. The sound of rain hitting the roof is combined with a soundtrack featuring NTS radio programmes selected with Femi Adeyemi, newly commissioned compositions by Kelman Duran, Andrew Hale, Devonté Hynes and Olukemi Lijadu, and songs by Mangrove Steelband.

Installation view of chapter 1 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain, showing the long low corrugated metal roof and series of wooden benches covered in plastic (photo by the author)

Under this roof are placed rattan and plastic seats embellished with braided fabric and draped with plastic quilts containing embroidered postcards and works on paper by Barrington’s long-time collaborator Teresa Farrell. Wooden walls contain windows and textile works.

Installation view of chapter 1 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain, showing one of the half dozen wooden benches containing various drawings, covered in plastic, and decorated with fabric work (photo by the author)

Chapter 2. Samantha

Emerging from the Caribbean rainstorm section, visitors arrive at a four-metre-high aluminium sculpture of a dancing figure. The figure is modelled on – and made in collaboration with – Barrington‘s close friend, Samantha. She is one of what the wall label tells us is famalay (a Trinidadian term for one’s chosen family). Barrington tells us this is his tribute to the Notting Hill Carnival which he contributes to every year. The large imposing futuristic figure stands on a large communal steel drum and is adorned with ‘Pretty Mas (masquerade)‘ jewellery by designers L’ENCHANTEUR, a costume by Jawara Alleyne, and nails by Mica Hendricks.

Installation view of chapter 2 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain, showing the metal sculpture of Samantha rising from a base made of corrugated metal and steel drums, and in the background the large energetic paintings strung from scaffold stands (photo by the author)

But this figure is just the centrepiece. Placed around it are big paintings attached to scaffolding. These depict ‘traditional Mas’ characters and carnival revellers.

Installation view of a stand of paintings in chapter 2 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

Another one:

Installation view of a stand of paintings in chapter 2 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

These paintings refer to the Caribbean tradition of ‘J‘ouvert’, in which participants cover each other with paint, mud and oil and dance till dawn on carnival Monday.

Installation view of a stand of paintings in chapter 2 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

Another one:

Installation view of a stand of paintings in chapter 2 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

But there’s more again. Overhead are suspended vast archway canvases designed to convey the passage of time from sunrise to sunset and create the sense of a day spent in the ‘vibrant carnival streetscape’. The overall idea is that this is a ‘protective space’ that the carnival community has created in the streets for people like Samantha to freely celebrate herself.

Chapter 3. Emelda

Barrington’s mother moved from Grenada to New York seeking work when he was 8. he tells us that at that time (it must have been 1991) the Black community in the US was under relentless attack. Lack of hope and economic opportunity and the widespread availability of drugs like cocaine meant many people in the community self-medicated with drugs. Politicians responded with mass incarceration and the ‘war on drugs’. The reality of New York was unlike anything his mother could have imagined in peaceful Grenada. Even a visit to the corner store risked an incredible variety of violence. Barrington remembers the grace his mother showed in these situations.

So the aim of the third chapter is to convey all these mixed and complex experiences. Overhead the skylights in the gallery cupola have been coloured like a stained-glass window to create a contemplative, cathedral-like atmosphere.

Installation view of the skylight covered with colours to look like a church window in chapter 3 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

Down on the ground a boarded-up corner kiosk has been made to American prison-cell dimensions. The kiosk sculpture is fitted with moving shutters and surrounded by crowd control barriers with barbed wire, invoking the mass imprisonment of Blacks in America.

Installation view of the fenced-in kiosk in chapter 3 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

Beyond these, incongruously, are old-fashioned wooden church pews covered with plastic quilts. These contain pillowcases which feature drawings by Barrington. These pictures reference the unwavering love and fear felt by Black mothers for their children who are frequently at risk of harm from state violence.

Installation view of the wooden pews bearing crude paintings covered in protective plastic in chapter 3 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

Thoughts

So, three chapters: a tropical storm falling on a metal-roofed shack in the Caribbean; the liveliness and music of the Notting Hill Carnival; resilience in the face of violence and despair in New York.

I liked some of the primitivist paintings in the carnival section for their energy and rawness. And, of course, the metal sculpture of Samantha literally rises above everything else. It is the most ‘attractive’ part of the show for several reasons: 1) she’s an attractive young woman, and we are biologically hard-wired to be drawn to beautiful young people; 2) it’s the only really figurative piece in the entire installation and so is instantly relatable, like a shop-window mannequin; 3) although it’s meant to be about the here and now, for me the shiny metal finish and colourful outfit have an appealing science fiction vibe. For some or all these reasons it’s no accident that this is the image which Tate uses on all its promotional material.

The statue of Samantha in chapter 2 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

The low corrugated metal roof which greets us at the start has an impact but the opposite of that intended. The wall label says it’s meant to convey the warmth and security of his boyhood home in Grenada but, instead, it feels like the makeshift roof of a shelter after a nuclear apocalypse, from some dystopian future.

And try as I might, I couldn’t find anything appealing about the wooden benches covered in plastic in chapter 1 or the wooden pews covered in plastic in chapter 3. The paintings, if that’s what they are, on the benches and pews in both sections, look like they were made by infant school children.

Close-up of some drawings covered in protective plastic draped over a pew in chapter 3 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

And the single, solitary, lonely little kiosk in the last section, whose metal grille, for some reason, slowly opened then slowly closed then slowly opened again, all behind a ring of metal fencing…If this had been by Martin Creed I’d have found it funny. But here, according to the wall label, it is bearing the freight of two vast social and historical issues: urban violence in Black communities and the mass incarceration of Black men in the USA. That’s a lot of weight for one poor little kiosk to bear and rather than reflecting on those Weighty Issues I was mainly struck by a) the oddity of the object itself and b) feeling sorry for it.

I’m predisposed to like industrial materials and settings and ruins, which is why I like the photos of Jane and Louise Wilson, the whole idea of Arte Povera in Italy and minimalism in the States, and Mike Nelson’s industrial installation in this very space five years ago. And my favourite art movement is probably the Vorticist-Futurist art of hard edges, geometric shapes derived from modern urban life with its blizzard of cars and planes and building works and machinery. All of which goes to explain why I’m only half joking when I say I thought the best thing in the whole installation was the shadow cast by the wire fencing round the kiosk onto the gallery wall.

Shadow cast by wire fencing on the wall of the Duveen Galleries in chapter 3 of ‘Grace’ by Alvaro Barrington at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

I jokingly pointed this out to the friend I was visiting the gallery with and, to my surprise, she agreed.

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by Simon on September 21, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture
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Posted by Simon on September 21, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/21/grace-alvaro-barrington-tate-britain/

Cecilia Vicuña: Brain Forest Quipu @ Tate Modern

The enormous empty space of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern has been a challenge and inspiration for artists to fill with novel, thought-provoking, immersive or interactive installations for over 20 years. Latest artist to rise to the challenge is Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña and her installation is titled ‘Brain Forest Quipu’.

Installation view of ‘Brain Forest Quipu’ by Cecilia Vicuña at Tate Modern. Photo © Tate Photography (Sonal Bakrania)

Biography

From Wikipedia:

Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile. Her work is noted for themes of language, memory, dissolution, extinction and exile. Critics also note the relevance of her work to the politics of ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. Her commitment to feminist forms and methodologies is considered to be a unifying theme across her diverse body of work, among which quipus, palabrarmas and precarious stand out. Her practice has been specifically linked to the term eco-feminism.

Overarching title – ‘Brain Forest Quipu’

Only slowly did I realise the complex nature of Vicuña’s piece. Her project is given the overarching title ‘Brain Forest Quipu’ and consists of four separate and discrete elements, being:

  1. the sculpture – the ‘Dead Forest Quipu’
  2. the soundscape – the ‘Sound Quipu’
  3. the videos – the ‘Digital Quipu’
  4. the series of events – the ‘Quipu of Encounters: Rituals and Assemblies’

The sculpture – the ‘Dead Forest Quipu’

The main thing to see and respond to is the two separate installations, one above the sloping entrance ramp, the other the other side of the bridge, in the main hall space.

Both are huge ‘mobiles’, circular frames near the ceiling from which hang 27-metre long cascades of material. These include long strands of unspun wool and plant fibres and rope, among which hang a range of organic materials, found objects, cardboard and whatnot. These ‘curtains’ tower over visitors, evoking huge ancient trees of some imaginary rainforest or ancient mangrove swamp.

Installation view of ‘Brain Forest Quipu’ by Cecilia Vicuña at Tate Modern. Photo by the author

What is a quipu?

The quipu is an ancient South American recording and communication system made from knotted threads. Best to quote Vicuña herself on the subject:

‘In the Andes people did not write, they wove meaning into textiles and knotted cords. Five thousand years ago they created the quipu (knot), a poem in space, a way to remember, involving the body and the cosmos at once. A tactile, spatial metaphor for the union of all. The quipu, and its virtual counterpart, the ceque (a system of sightlines connecting all communities in the Andes) were banished after the European Conquest. Quipus were burnt, but the quipu did not die, its symbolic dimension and vision of interconnectivity endures in Andean culture today.’

Or:

The quipu (also written as khipu) is an ancient recording and communication system. It was used by the Quechua people of the Andes from 2500 BC through to the 16th century at the time of the Spanish conquest. Quipu means ‘knot’ in the Quechua language and consisted of a long textile cord from which hung multiple strands knotted into different formations and in different colours that were able to encode as much complex information as the alphabet. Although the exact meanings behind the knot formations are not now known, it is thought that they were used to record statistics, poems and stories, thereby creating a tactile relationship to memory and the imaginary. Cecilia Vicuña has been exploring and transforming the quipu in her work for over five decades. Her knots and materials are unlike the traditional form but inspired by it. Vicuña’s quipus work conceptually as sculptures, poems, performance, sound, and film, where a word, a gesture, or a group becomes a knot.

Ecofeminism

Part of Vicuña’s ecofeminism is an emphasis on collaborative, communal work, in contrast to the western idea of the isolated creative genius. Thus all aspects of the piece are collaborative: Vicuña has worked with London-based artists, activists and members of the Chilean community. Some of the objects incorporated into the sculptures were collected from the banks of the Thames (which, of course, flows just a hundred yards from the Turbine Hall) by women from local Latin American communities. Like so many 20th century artists she is incorporating found, damaged and everyday objects and fabrics into the work, materials that Vicuña calls precarios.

In this respect – artistic fascination with junk, detritus, the wreckage of our destructive civilisation – she is very reminiscent of Mike Nelson, whose impressive installations are currently on show about a mile down the Thames at the Hayward Gallery.

The soundscape – the ‘Sound Quipu’

There’s music, too. Vicuña worked with Colombian composer Ricardo Gallo to create created the soundscape i.e. New Age-ish, South American-inflected, pan pipes-type ambient sounds which are broadcast across the hall. The soundtrack includes Indigenous music from around the world, Vicuña’s own voice and music from fellow artists, alongside field recordings of nature and moments of silence.

It consists of 4 stereo tracks of approximately 8 hours each, containing 168 sound files from 23 contributors and 1 archive (played from within the ‘Dead Forest Quipu’); and one 8 hours quadraphonic sound file (played underneath the Turbine Hall bridge). There’s an intimidatingly long list of all the contributors and details of every track if you go to the Exhibition Guide page and select SOUND QUIPO. The one thing you can’t access, slightly irritatingly, is the actual soundtracks themselves.

This video gives a good sense of the sight and sound and shape of the whole piece:

The videos – the ‘Digital Quipu’

According to the wall label there are also videos by Indigenous activists and land defenders seeking justice for their people and our planet although, in walking from the installation hanging above the entrance ramp to the one in the main hall, I don’t think I noticed this. But then the Turbine Hall is quite a disorientating place, with hordes of people trekking across, either coming in or going out or walking across to the ticket office, or walking from there over to the lifts to the galleries.

Tate Modern is the most popular modern art gallery in the world with over five and a half million visitors each year. Pause to watch the video or look up into the dizzying height of the installation and you’re likely to be run over by coach parties of tourists.

Save the rainforest

For as long as I can remember good-hearted people have been earnestly campaigning to save the rainforests. This was a campaign when I was at university 40 years ago. A friend went to work for the WWF rainforest campaign 40 years ago. In terms of popular campaigning and awareness, Sting, Paul Simon and Neil Young all made albums or tracks on the subject 30 or 40 years ago. Numerous charities have been beavering away. Countless documentaries.

Despite all this the destruction of the Amazon rainforest (and rainforests around the world) continues apace. The Amazon in particular still appears to be being destroyed to create land where farmers can grow soya and ranch cattle to provide America with cheap burgers and fries.

Sadness

Therefore, of the many ways the wall labels suggest we respond to the installations (to create a space for new voices and forms of knowledge to be heard and understood, to become aware of the struggles of Indigenous peoples) the most likely or compelling one is mourning: if you do stop to think about the subject, it will be to mourn the destruction of the forests, the runaway catastrophe of climate change, and the complete deracination of the powerless Indigenous peoples.

This appears to be why the installation is titled ‘Dead Forest Quipu’. The stripped-bare feel of the dangling frames symbolising the destruction of green life, its transformation to metal skeletons and dry brown husks, bone-white of the objects representing the bleached bark of trees killed by drought or intentional fire.

Installation view of ‘Brain Forest Quipu’ by Cecilia Vicuña at Tate Modern. Photo © Tate Photography (Sonal Bakrania)

Social weaving – the ‘Quipu of Encounters: Rituals and Assemblies’

Not that you actually see this on your visit but apparently the installation is being accompanied by a series of global events, or ‘knots of action’, connecting ancient Andean tradition and contemporary culture, inviting visitors to become active participants in the prevention of climate catastrophe.

Tears of the forest

Maybe the sculptures should have been made waterproof and had a continual trickle of water running down every strand, dripping into enormous pools at the bottom, to symbolise the million tears wept for the loss of the planet’s lungs and all those irreplaceable species.

The promotional video

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by Simon on March 15, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 15, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/03/15/cecilia-vicuna-brain-forest-quipu-tate-modern/

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons @ the Hayward Gallery

This is a great exhibition. You should definitely go. Fun, spooky, scarey, immersive, yet strangely liberating and uplifting. Completely different from the hard study required at something like the Tate Modern Cezanne blockbuster where you have to pay attention, read and study. Here you walk about and through and under and experience your own sensations, moods and thoughts.

Mike Nelson

British artist Mike Nelson specialises in big installations, room-sized installations, huge installations, assembled from industrial junk and derelict objects, knackered old tyres, abandoned doors, auctioned-off industrial equipment, bric-a-brac salvaged from junkyards, abandoned buildings, car boot sales and much more.

All this stuff and more is assembled into strange and eerie combinations and installations, some you look at, but some you can actually enter and wander through, all of them designed to tease and nag at the corner of your mind, with their eerie sense of abandoned building sites, derelict workshops, underground bars, rough plywood hoardings, half-plastered rooms.

I reviewed an installation of some of these works at Tate Britain back in 2019. There I go into some detail about the autobiographical reasons why I like modern art made from industrial junk, namely the number of labouring jobs I did when I was a teenager and young man, and so how powerfully evocative I find old industrial machinery, equipment, tools and especially tyres – car tyres, lorry tyres, their smell and feel and the black rubber marks they leave on your skin and clothes were a big part of my boyhood.

Anyway. Let’s consider some of the key works in this exhibition:

I, Imposter (2011)

A really big room filled with wide apart shelves crammed with all kinds of bulky non-descript industrial products, miscellaneous furniture and fixtures, with big palettes and wooden sheets leaning up against the wall. Atmosphere of a derelict warehouse. BUT the key fact: all illuminated by a low level but intense scarlet light. Not daylight or fluorescent light, but blood-red, deep dread, womb-red luminence. Abandoned, eerie, spooky. Straightaway taking you to another place, into the realm of horror movies or intense science fiction.

Installation view of I, IMPOSTOR by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

The Deliverance and the Patience (2001)

Next we move onto a big gallery space in which has been created out of wood a maze of narrow corridors, unpainted, with damaged, derelict half-built walls – a zigzag of short passages with wooden doors of different styles, presumably picked up from skips across London, leading into claustrophobically small, low-ceiling walls, some of which have further doors leading you on into the maze, others don’t so you exit the way you entered. The process of navigating this space is surprisingly unsettling and, at one point, I felt a surge of the panic I get when trapped in really small, confined spaces, like the real panic I experienced when I once went potholing with my son (and a guide).

Typical corridor scene inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Anyway, each of the ‘rooms’ – barely more than cubicles – are like tiny stage sets: one is a cramped bar with a photo-mirror of Elvis on the wall; another has old oil paintings of sailing ships and some model ships on the bar along with ‘Do not spit’ signs in English and Chines. Another is a sort of travel agents’, with a narrow counter and ancient posters of old-style air stewardesses standing in front of passenger jets. Another contains a small green baize table on which is a miniature roulette wheel, some tarot cards, and on the wall behind a communist-era Chinese poster of young model communist striding into the brave future.

The pokey little ‘travel agency’ inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

As far as I can tell these don’t ‘mean’ anything. They are meant to be experiences, of eeriness and spookiness. A world of other times and lives which have all been abandoned. Wreckage. Remains. Detritus. As in a thousand and one science fiction movies where the entire human race is whisked away leaving meals half eaten and cigarettes still smouldering, for the dazed survivors to blunder amidst.

The ‘gambling den’ inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Triple Bluff Canyon (2004)

If all this cramped interiority is getting a bit claustrophobic, you then go up the steps to the upper galleries, which are dominated by one huge installation titled ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’.

Installation view of Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed) by Mike Nelson (2004) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

First off this is a wonderful work, combining everything I love in modern art: big, imaginative, made of industrial detritus, a profound comment on modern society at the same time as being funny, a kind of art joke. And, reading the wall label, you realise there’s more to it than meets the eye, in fact three distinct elements:

First off, it’s a homage to an American artist named Robert Smithson who, in 1970, half buried a woodshack in 20 tonnes of earth. Nelson has recreated the basic idea, but replaced earth with sand, maybe in reference to the Gulf War and the West’s general inability to stop meddling in Arab countries.

Second, the tyres. From what I could make out, these are part of a separate series of works which are simply collections of wrecked, damaged and abandoned tyres which can be found alongside motorways and highways around the world. Each little collection is simply titled after the road where Nelson found them. And so these tyres are titled ‘M25’.

Third, you see the white rectangle on the right of the photo, well that’s actually a doorway into a corridor which curves round into the woodshed itself which has been turned, by being half-buried, into a grim, spooky bunker. First of all the corridor is only 10 yards or so long but curves quite steeply, so that I was lucky to enjoy quite a cinematic moment; because I’d got as far as the door into the bunker when I heard footsteps behind me. A woman with very loud heels had entered the curved corridor and was walking very slowly, with a very loud clack of each footstep, behind me, following me, but because of the steep curve I couldn’t see her. Rather than push the door and go into the bunker I waited and it turned into a surprisingly tense, eerie couple of seconds as I waited for my mysterious pursuer to appear.

The Uncanny

I’ve been rereading Freud. Freud wrote an essay on The Uncanny. My understanding is that we experience ‘the uncanny’ when something we perceive reminds us of, evokes and stirs, childhood feelings and emotions which themselves are concealing deeper ‘truths’ or drives or instinctive wishes, which we have successfully repressed. The uncanny is the dread we feel in situations in which our childish fantasies and fears appear more real and true than our adult knowledge and perspective.

This description applies 100% to the feeling I had after getting lost in half a dozen cramped, subterranean rooms in The Deliverance and the Patience, and then his uncanny moment inside ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’

Eventually she came into sight and wasn’t actually the science fiction-cyborg-horror monster my unconscious was momentarily panicking about, but a regular gallery goer – so I held the door into the bunker open and we both went inside. Into another womb-like cave, entirely lit by blood-red lighting.

Installation view of I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom) by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

The wall label tells us that this interior is a separate work from Triple Bluff. This is ‘I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom)’ which makes explicit reference to its nature as a mock-up of a photographer’s darkroom. Except it doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels like a cave, an underground bunker. The equipment on the bench doesn’t look like a professional photographer’s but is another collection of junk and detritus, and what’s the big boiler dominating the far end of the room? It feels like a room in a hobbit house late at night. More doors lead onto a half-wrecked room which is open to the sand pouring in from the main installation, again with a strong feeling of dereliction and abandonment, as in thousands of science fiction movies.

View from inside the sand bunker looking out – I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom) by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Absence

When I was a literature student ‘absence’ was an important concept in critical theory. I think I read about it in the work of French philosopher Pierre Macherey. Put very simply, what is absent from a work can sometimes tell you more than what is present. But you don’t have to dig that deeply to realise that what all these installations have in common is the absence of people.

This is emphasised by the way so many of them are types of locations which ought to be populated, such as the bars and gambling den and travel agents of ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’, the hobbit-bunker of I, IMPOSTOR, or the eerily empty red warehouse at the start. That’s why I’ve mentioned several times the powerfully eerie sense of abandonment and loss that pervades the exhibition.

(I was reminded me of the phrase Homo absconditus which curators coined for an exhibition of painting by Norwegian artist Harald Sohlberg.)

Asset Strippers

Moving along the upper floor we come to another large room containing five items from the series Nelson calls ‘Asset Strippers’. I’ll quote my review of Asset Strippers’ when I saw it at Tate Britain.

There are old weaving machines, heavy-duty metal cabinets, two huge old-fashioned weighing scales, the threshing wheels of a tractor attachment, the huge rubber tracks from a mechanical digger. Nelson has collected knitting machines from textile factories like the ones he grew up around in the East Midlands, woodwork stripped from a former army barracks, graffitied steel awnings once used to secure a condemned housing estate, doors from an NHS hospital, and much, much more. It is a rag and bone yard, a paradise of defunct paraphernalia artfully arranged so that each piece creates a space around itself, defines its space, creates a psychic zone of defunct power.

Installation view of ‘Asset Strippers’ by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

In my review of the Tate Britain display I tackle Nelson’s intended aim of commenting on the destruction of British industrial manufacturing and the trope of cliché that tells us we live in a post-industrial society. For some reason, at some point, I was struck by the word ‘strippers’. I know the title refers to the kinds of financial companies which buy up businesses not to run them at a profit but to gut them of all their assets and sell on the shell, and Nelson is implying this modus operandi can be applied widely across British society in the neo-liberal era i.e. the last 40 years.

But this time round I was struck by the word ‘strippers’. As in strippers in a strip club. And for a while I enjoyed perceiving each of these carefully assembled artefacts as Dada joke reworkings of the human figure, using abandoned industrial machinery.

The exhibition then takes you back down to the ground level where there are two more enormous works:

Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster

Apparently this is one of a series of such works which are designed to parody the notion of an artist’s studio as ‘a place for authentic production’. As a thing what’s noticeable is the heavy industrial vibe of the big wooden hoardings but most of all of the threatening thick-wire mesh matrix. Only when you look closely do you realise that the grey balls suspended throughout it are in fact grey clay models of human heads. As far as I could tell, all the ones I saw looked like the heads of Black people and all of them are hung upside down. Why?

Installation view of Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power and their interconnectednessl future objecs (misspelt); mysterious island by Mike Nelson (2014) Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery

The Amnesiacs

Up the ramp behind this is a similar work, also using big industrial wood framing but much finer wire mesh to create what look like a series of rabbit hutches. These contain objects created from the standard sources to illustrate a fictional gang Nelson has created and which he calls The Amnesiacs. This little conceit combines a wistful yearning of ‘cool’ imagery from American culture (biker gangs from ‘The Wild Ones’ onwards) with Nelson’s characteristic feel for dereliction and decay.

Installation view of The Amnesiacs by Mike Nelson (1996-ongoing) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

I particularly liked the ‘motorbike’ which is actually constructed, in a semi-Dalì kind of way, from two old tyres, two walking sticks for the front wheel prongs, antlers for handlebars, three yellow rubber rings supporting the antlers, which themselves rest on an orange helmet standing in for the petrol tank, with the main body of the ‘bike’ being a packing case covered in a fleece. The way that Nelson has recreated an everyday object out of readymade material adds support to my idea that the asset strippers might in fact be sly, Dada-joke sculptures of the human body…

Thoughts

Spooky, surreal, claustrophobic, anxiety-provoking, wonderfully imaginative, beautiful, thoughtful, silly, funny, surreal and a bit disturbing. it only took me 45 minutes or so to go round the entire exhibition but it was a very intense 45 minutes, and I staggered out of the gallery feeling like I’d watched half a dozen different movies and read or read a bunch of upsetting and disturbing science fiction short stories. Go experience it for yourself.

As in life: some doors open, some do not. You nly find out when you try them.

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by Simon on March 13, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 13, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/03/13/mike-nelson-extinction-beckons-the-hayward-gallery/

Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers @ Tate Britain

The Asset Strippers by Mike Nelson

British installation artist Mike Nelson (b.1967) has filled the central atrium of Tate Britain with a rich collection of objects plundered from Britain’s industrial heritage, the entire installation titled The Asset Strippers.

There are old weaving machines, heavy-duty metal cabinets, two huge old-fashioned weighing scales, the threshing wheels of a tractor attachment, the huge rubber tracks from a mechanical digger. He has collected knitting machines from textile factories like the ones he grew up around in the East Midlands, woodwork stripped from a former army barracks, graffitied steel awnings once used to secure a condemned housing estate, doors from an NHS hospital, and much, much more. It is a rag and bone yard, a paradise of defunct paraphernalia artfully arranged to clutter and fill Tate’s long narrow central space.

Installation view of Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain. Photo by the author

My experiences of manual and physical labour

I absolutely loved the sight and smell of this installation. It took me right back to my childhood. I grew up in a village store-cum-petrol station. I started working in the shop when I was about 11, graduating to the till when I was 14. They let me serve on the petrol pumps when I was 16, waiting for cars to pull in then leaping up, pulling the cold, metal, petrol nozzle out of its socket on the pump, and guiding the long, thick, dirty, rubber tube away from the pump itself and over towards the fuel filler door. Some doors you could open manually, some you had to ask the driver to ping open for you. Unscrew the metal cap or pull out the cheap plastic cap. Insert the nozzle and pull the trigger, setting off the familiar noise of the fuel pump. Asking the owner how much they wanted, then asking if they wanted their oil and water and tyre pressure checked as well.

Off to one side of the forecourt was the tyre bay where customers left their cars for a few hours and where a succession of the village lads eased the rubber tyres off with long heavy metal tyre levers, and patched up or replaced the inner tubes. Later there was an expensive new machine which gripped and removed the tyre from the metal wheel with great snorts of compressed air.

The bay was dark and smelt of rubber and oil and Swarfega. Out back of the main house was a huge shed, really a small warehouse, in which were piled hundreds of tyres of all shapes and sizes in vertical columns, towering tubes of smelly dirty rubber, often half full of stagnant oily rainwater which spilled over you as you made your way along the narrow walkways between them looking for a particular size and manufacture.

Beyond the village were the fields where you’d see the migrant workers endlessly bent over the ploughed furrows during the summer and autumn, picking vegetables, cabbage and kale, sometimes in the blistering sunshine, sometimes in the driving rain, chucking them onto the flat-bed truck pulled by a tractor which lumbered slowly in front of them. I stood at the pumps in a waterproof coat, the rain streaming down my face as I filled up another car, and wondered which of us had it worse.

Like many students, I got Christmas work as a temp postman. Going out on the rounds was fun, so long as it didn’t rain. I was fascinated by the big sorting rooms, with their arrays of metal cabinets and pigeonholes, the hundreds of fraying postal sacks everywhere, and the huge industrial weighing scales. There’s a pair of giant scales here in this exhibition. They are set on a brace of stinky, oily, creosoted old railway sleepers, with a couple of big granite rocks surreally placed on the scales themselves. They made my heart sing.

Installation view of Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain. Photo by the author

Working as a dustman

Later, during my A-levels and in the holidays from university, I worked on building sites, and in factories. I worked as a temporary dustman in my local new town, up at 5a , on the road at 6.30am, done by noon. (Most of the dusties had second jobs they did in the afternoons. Each round had been designed to end at a pub where we a) processed all their rubbish b) had a well-earned pint.

There were two roles – pullers-out and chuckers-on (plus, I suppose, the driver). Pullers-out were dropped at the edge of this or that estate and spent an hour or so pulling out every single rubbish bag from every single rubbish bin and assembling them in piles out on the pavement. The cart would be off somewhere else for a while, clearing up another area, then, suddenly, would come storming into the puller-outs’ estate, and the chuckers-on would jump down from the bar at the back of the cart and walk along beside the cart as it drove slowly through the estate, stopping at each pile for the chuckers-on to, well, chuck the rubbish on.

The blighted landscapes of the 1970s! Rundown estates, high-rise blocks, wheel-less Ford Cortinas up on bricks, abandoned kids’ bikes and toys strewn across grass verges littered with dog poo, and everywhere rubbish, rubbish, rubbish spilling out of ripped bags onto the verges and pavement. Chicken bones, all sorts of packaging, half-eaten meals, unknown rotting vegetable matter, cardboard, sacks of ashes and burnt coals. A world of waste, every day, pulled out, piled up and chucked on by sweating, dirty, working men.

Installation view of Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain. Photo by the author

How Mike Nelson assembled The Asset Strippers

All these thoughts and feelings and memories came flooding back as I strolled among this wonderful graveyard of old, heavy industrial machinery and furniture (cabinets and benches, looms and equipment). Work. The universe of work and the countless tools and devices and machinery which people have built and worked with over hundreds of years.

Mike Nelson assembled this collection by scouring online sales and auctions, focusing on big ‘statement’ pieces of equipment which were being sold off from closing-down factories or defunct businesses. He then arranged them:

  1. as units – most of them being made up not of one object but a pair or more of objects artfully combined
  2. carefully situated these ‘units’ throughout Tate Britain’s long narrow atrium, to create a walk-through phantasmagoria of industrial junk

The curators suggest that the pieces appear first as industrial artefacts, then you realise they have been assembled into sculptures, and from that point onwards they shimmer back and forth between mementos of the real world and aesthetic contrivances. Maybe. But my sensibility was too flooded by their size and bulk and strong industrial design. I just saw them as beautifully engineered and designed tools.

Are we really living in a post-industrial society?

The wall labels claim all these wonderful objects are testimony to, or heirlooms of, ‘a lost era and the vision of society it represented’.

I can’t help wondering if that’s true. Every week the dustmen still come and empty my bins, in fact there are more trucks than ever since there are now separate bins for waste, recycling and food, as well as periodic visits by the big caged van which takes large objects, as well as the one you order up to remove garden waste, cuttings, and prunings.

Someone picks all those up by hand. Someone drives the dustcarts back to the depot, which is supervised, run and maintained by people, who then supervise the sorting of bags into different skips, which are then sent to waste food aggregators, or to the incinerator or – at my local tip in Wandsworth – loaded onto river barges and sailed slowly down the Thames to be offloaded and carted up slopes of waste and thrown into vast landfill sites in Essex.

People do that, all of that. Driving the carts, humping the rubbish, loading the barges, skippering the tugs, docking the other end, unloading, carrying from the docks to vast holes in the ground with big diggers. Hard physical work, all down the line, involving dustcarts, huge containers loaded by massive cranes onto giant tugs pulled by big trawlers down to industrial docks and unloaded onto giant diggers which carry the waste across derelict landscapes to the big holes.

Maybe it’s not ‘industrial’ in the sense of taking place in big factors, but it is industrial in the sense of being highly mechanised and relying on giant machines powered by oil.

Installation view of Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain. Photo by the author

Certainly all this wonderful equipment has been thrown away. But that doesn’t mean all the functions they performed have been superannuated. Far from it. It just means they’ve been replaced by newer, more effective equipment.

Indeed it is a little too easy to dismiss heavy industry, manufacturing and labouring as having somehow disappeared from Britain. For sure, the vast coal mining industry has more or less vanished, ship building pretty much gone, and industries like car-making and steel-making are much reduced and hugely more automated than they were in my youth (in the 1970s).

But, to quote the Manufacturers’ Association:

UK manufacturing is thriving, with the UK currently the world’s eighth largest industrial nation. If current growth trends continue, the UK will break into the top five by 2021. In the UK, manufacturing makes up 11% of GVA, 44% of total UK exports, 70% of business R&D, and directly employs 2.6 million people.

In other words, there are still lots and lots of our fellow citizens working with heavy machinery, in light and heavy industry, making things. And tens of thousands of people still work in docks and shipyards, at distribution centres and industrial warehouses, in agriculture and in food packing plants up and down the country, and in the basic kind of street cleaning/rubbish collection, gas-water-electricity mains maintenance jobs which I’ve described above. In manual labouring jobs.

A moment’s reflection makes me think of the huge HS2 project, and the Cross-Link project, both huge feats of engineering which require skilled workers and supervisors working with very heavy drilling, tunnel-making and railway-building equipment.

So it feels, to me at any rate, just a bit too easy for the curators to dismiss these objects as:

remnants from a bygone era… [with which] Nelson creates a melancholic journey through Britain’s recent social and political history.

Or to comment that the installation:

presents us with a vision of artefacts cannibalised from the last days of the industrial era…

Go ask the Manufacturers’ Association if we truly live in a post-industrial society, and they will tell you that the death of Britain’s manufacturing industry has been much exaggerated. And in any case, many of these artefacts are not truly ‘industrial’.

Take the ‘doors from an NHS hospital’ which are included in the show. We still have NHS hospitals and they still have doors, so these objects are hardly ‘cannibalised from the last days of the industrial era…’

Similarly, the steel awnings used to block up the doors of abandoned council properties – well, I see the same kind of thing quite often as I cycle round my part of London, blocking up derelict buildings with steel panels still seems to be ongoing practice. So, again, there’s nothing particularly ‘industrial’ or ‘post-industrial’ about them.

The concrete tubing which features at the end of the hall, arranged on a couple of old telegraph poles, I’ve seen massive concrete tubes like that being installed in the current updates to the London water mains. And telegraph poles – we still have them, don’t we?

Many of these artefacts aren’t symbolic of anything, they’re just worn-out examples of objects which we still use and which still make up the built environment around us. To call all of this stuff ‘post-industrial’ or relics ‘from the last days of the industrial era…’ is to simplify their origins and effects.

Sure there are old-fashioned weaving looms and light engineering machinery which, yes, I dare say that’s been superseded. But rubber tyre tracks for diggers, doors for hospitals and metal grilles blocking up abandoned council houses – these are types of objects still very much in use.

What I’m driving at is I think the aesthetic and emotional, and even historical-intellectual, effects of this installation are far more complicated than the curators, and maybe even the artist himself, imagines. Some of the objects are relics of now-defunct industries and technologies. But others are just knackered examples of machinery and industrial designs which we are still using.

So the display is – in my opinion – saying something about the continuity between Britain’s heavy industrial era and the present, so-called, post-industrial age. Revealing unexpected continuities amid the wreckage of obsolescent machinery.

The dignity of work

Anyway. I loved this installation and loved these big heavy old smelly objects, loved their shape and size and weight, loved their smells of rubber and oil and machinery. I bent right down to smell the tough, rubber smell of the digger’s tracks, I wanted to open and close the huge heavy metal cabinets, I wanted to make the looms work again, I wanted to stand on the big red scale and see if it still works.

These are objects of love and veneration because they contain within them the cumulative toil and effort and care and labour of generations of workers who have spent the best hours of their lives building, installing, maintaining and using this equipment.

For me this huge installation is a hymn to the dignity of working life – which I know as well as anyone, is often undignified, dirty and degrading in itself – but which gains in human dignity by virtue of the effort and concentration and care which has gone into it. Here’s the section of big concrete tubing laid out on a ‘stand’ made of telegraph poles I mentioned earlier. I loved its round shape. I loved the smell of the wooden poles and the lost functionality indicated by the couple of white porcelain insulators, the bit which held the electric wires separate from the main pole and visible at the bottom of the photo.

All placed on rust-resistant-painted steel bars and laid on the kind of massive tarpaulin sheet you find in any number of industrial site.

Installation view of Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain. Photo by the author

The installation is divided into three sections, with knackered wooden partitions dividing them off and creating walkways across the atrium for visitors going to other exhibitions. Even these partitions are made from the remnants of old buildings, with heavy wooden doors which many of the visitors I saw hesitated to touch or open because they looked, well, old and intimidating.

What beautiful objects! What an inspiring installation!

It prompted all kinds of half-articulate thoughts and feelings. Made me remember all the physical labouring job I’ve had, the memory of all the things my hands have held and lifted, in sun and rain and snow.

And reflect poignantly on the trillions of man and woman hours of work which have been expended in this country, in the toil and use of so many machines, so much equipment, from trawlers hauling in nets in the North sea to coalminers using heavy drills in South Wales, from the shipbuilders riveting and welding on the Clyde, to the fleets of light engineering factories along the A4, where my old man started his working life.

We commemorate the dead of the Great War or D-Day in big public ceremonies. I can’t quite see how it could be done practically, but we should also rejoice celebrate mourn condole and remember the vast amount of work work work our forebears carried out, day after day, dutifully, sometimes with love, sometimes with loathing. For better or worse we live amid the result of all their efforts. It is insulting to dismiss this vast, unimaginable legacy of toil and sweat in a few glib sentences. This exhibition is a moving tribute to the pith and marrow of our forebears’ lives, to the achievements of all their work.

‘Work’ by the Blue Orchids (1981)

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by Simon on July 19, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture
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Posted by Simon on July 19, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/mike-nelson-the-asset-strippers-tate-britain/