LONDON — I managed to keep Art and Life in entirely separate boxes until yesterday. Here is what happened.
I was supposed to cover a show called Extinction is calling at the Hayward Gallery. This catastrophic title had really made me move forward. Then, almost immediately, things started to go wrong. The bus I was expecting to take to the South Bank Center disappeared from the digital screen at the bus stop, as if it had always been a ghost of my imagination. So I took another, which dropped me under the adamant statue of Abe Lincoln in Parliament Square, on the north side of the Thames. Twenty minutes later, having crossed Westminster Bridge against what seemed like most of the rest of suffering humanity, there I was, late and exhausted, at the Hayward Gallery.
Curiously, this partly jagged state of mind seemed, on later reflection, to have been the right one for the occasion.
Featured artist Mike Nelson specializes in immersive installations. They exist to piss you off, to make you feel like most things could go wrong if you just let them. The first looked like some kind of riddance of this and that, all bathed in a strange red light. Long hallways of stuff. Lots of scrap wood and scraps of pallets stacked in a heap on shelves, or against the wall, like tombstones resting their backs for a century or more of extra thought.
That red light really gets on your nerves.
Then you’re out, blinking in the light, breathing steadily again, and gazing across a whole expanse of empty space toward the next. It’s a long wooden wall, with a single (unmarked) door to enter. No, I can’t come in, says the employee who is waiting for me to open it, because there are already too many people.
Too much! I thought I was practically the only person in the building. Not so. They had all been swallowed up in an immersive way. So I decide to walk along the outside of the wall, turn a corner and look for another door, which I find. Now almost all of Nelson’s doors are makeshift, often very old, cases salvaged here and there. Like this one. I open it abruptly.
You can’t come that way, another employee tells me, because that’s the exit, the end point of your journey. Well, that door isn’t marked, I answer, and anyway I didn’t think there were any rules to this game. She softens when I smile, painfully.
I enter a very small room, which opens onto another room, which opens onto another room, etc. and a model ship. Another has a mirror so you can check your hair. Yet another has Persian rugs to walk on, carefully, and could be some sort of seedy sanctuary. It’s all conjecture, of course. Sometimes I find that I occupy the same space as a few other people, which is rather unpleasant, as if we were all listening to each other.
As I walk around, I find myself thinking back to various performances I saw maybe 20 or more years ago at the Center Pompidou in Paris or the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt by people like John Bock and others, which consisted of this kind of prank stuff — you kinda spot a decrepit room at the corner of a nicely done gallery, but you can’t get in there because the wall has partly collapsed. on all the trash cluttering up your own attic.
As I find myself thinking about the slow life and death of concept art, and if it bothers me that this thing I’m walking through today is utterly lacking in visual appeal, I spot a man of my age who slipped through a door I hadn’t even spotted.
Everything’s good? I ask him. He looks anxious.
I don’t know where I’m going, he replies. But not cheerfully.
If I myself knew where I was going, I could even offer to help her.
Mike Nelson: Extinction Calls continues at the Hayward Gallery (Belvedere Road, London, England) until May 7. The exhibition was curated by Yung Ma with Assistant Curator Katie Guggenheim and Assistant Curator Anusha Mistry.
