Mike Nelson and ‘object articulation’ by Elaine Tam
I am 18 when I encounter Mike Nelson’s The Coral Reef (2000). In 2010, I had just moved to London from Asia; I hadn’t yet made any real friends; I hadn’t a clue about the city, what to do in it, never-mind art, so you must realise it was extremely unlikely for me to even have been there. I was completely unaware that art could do ‘that’. I hadn’t yet learned the word ‘curator’, hadn’t learned that such a thing as art jobs existed, nor that there was a place in it for someone like me. Art was some place ahead of or beyond me and although I am now years further into something people call a ‘career’, with an ‘actual’ art theory degree under my belt, I contend I prefer to keep it that way.
For this to be possible, experience must usurp expectation. No amount of vinyl sporting meretricious words should be able to testify to the experience of the art on the walls behind it. Neither should the prowess of language far outstrip the impact of the work, leaving it miserly and impoverished. A disclaimer: by impact, I do not mean something grand, of a large-scale, or inspiring queues of rapacious influencers. I mean a work that garners an interiorisation, a threshold-crossing that sees to the imprinting of an experience on both memory and intellect and that, like a good coat, can serve you for years to come. Back to The Coral Reef, housed beneath those magnanimous vaulted ceilings for which Tate Britain is known, a sort of dwarfing – culture is a hyperobject that will outlive you and this is its tomb. Reading the summative text in idle, I see ‘object articulation’ captured in single quotes – the artist’s words, supposedly. A faint registration of this peels away and somehow sticks.
Fast forward a decade and then some. I am standing in the Hayward Gallery’s first floor space in the artist’s presence. The meaning of ‘curator’ elides me and I am 18 again, estranged from this context, a foreigner to this world – I, Imposter. I’ll let everyone else ask something before me, wrestling with self-doubt, trying to take inspiration from their seeming confidence.
‘Could you say a bit more about ‘object articulation’? Oh, and, if I may, I’d like to hear more about what you read.’ The sound of my voice drains away, as I put the trembling nib of my pen to my notebook, hating myself.
I arrived to this moment having just stumbled through The Deliverance and The Patience (2001), for which the aforementioned Tate Britain work, The Coral Reef, is an antecedent. Both take the form of immersive sets, that one engages with by taking passage through a network of rooms. Each room is unlike the next and they are linked by delipidated white-moulting corridors which behave as palette cleansers. Each room houses a design of Nelson’s imagination – assuming that all replication is also incanted from the place of the imagined, that is, memory – with decisive colours, movements, sounds, lighting, objects, scents. The lazy turn of an overhead fan stirring up a tentative liveness; a looming shadow cast by a suspended lamp, into which the mind reads figuration; ‘Do Not Spit’ signs from the wood bannisters from Hong Kong’s Star Ferry, catapult me back to a long-forgotten childhood, the lurch of my stomach, perfume of gas and salt mixing in the air. The level of specificity here can be surprising – the choices are obstinate and astute to the degree that they are invariably charged, possessed by a certain level of artistic assertion. Or do I mean coercion? To get closer to how it feels: a world that draws you in, inviting you to collude with it. For the artwork only truly exists there, in that very moment of virtual collusion, as an untouchable private experience.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Deliverance and The Patience, interior, 2001. Various materials. Photo: Liam Harrison. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Deliverance and The Patience, interior, 2001. Various materials. Photo: Liam Harrison. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
The art cynic with damaged nerve-endings will, having seen far too much ‘environment’ art, waltz through undiscerning and therefore unscathed. I, on the other hand, cannot help but attune myself to the meticulous detail, the stable of choices that can so variously invoke a haphazard rush or dismaying quarters, as doors all around me flap, someone always having just left the room – the presence of absence. Nelson not only literally builds up each mise en scène but also attends to its atmosphere and confused sequencing, considering its multi-sensorily, its vantage points, viewing corridors, every texture and pattern. And here, by texture and pattern I might mean that of the fabric of reality. The realisation of this is not without the use of cinematographic and photographic instinct, given how the eye’s work can be likened to that of a camera, toiling in the darkroom of the mind. Indeed, the red-soaked I, Imposter (2011) is encountered in two parts and serves to bracket the exhibition – the first room of the exhibition that seems ‘nothing’ but storage, later, a darkroom hideout in the upper galleries – revealing that the photographic is somehow crucial to Nelson’s thinking.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, I, IMPOSTER (the darkroom), 2011. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
When you stumble through a door, something extraordinary happens. The last scene is for the moment redacted; a half-spun narrative suddenly curtailed. Some might recall this device from choose-your-own-adventure books, breeding grounds for a different type of involvement. Taking on the character of nightmare or dream, the portal-quality of the succession of doors Nelson describes as serving a function akin to the film editor’s cut. To these ends, I could not help but be reminded of Inland Empire (2006), David Lynch’s warren-shaped film with a rabbit-suit donning character who behaves as half-glimpsed mascot and guide. Ensnared by Nelson’s The Deliverance, one becomes Lynch’s Laura Dern – one’s hold on reality slippery, sanity like water sliding off the plane of a knife. Entering through the knobbly wooden door, each unknowing participant is imbibed by the artwork’s strange game, falling through the backend of the plot, unwittingly finding oneself backstage, only to learn: the artifice is real.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Deliverance and The Patience, exterior, 2001. Various materials. Photo: Liam Harrison. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, I, IMPOSTER, 2011. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Rewind a little. The Hayward Gallery exhibition ‘begins with the end’; a cavernous room bathed in red light housing rack upon rack of the disassembled remains of Nelson’s 2011 Venice Biennale installation entitled I, Imposter, a means of immediately subverting the ‘law’ of the survey show which defaults to linear chronology. If you sense an apocalyptic intimation somewhere therein, that is because there most certainly is one, Nelson’s exhibition title ‘Extinction Beckons’ and his seminal work The Coral Reef making all but subtle reference. Nelson openly courts the idea of a place beyond the human timeframe, always an appropriate or urgent topic in the now and something that art should be adept at doing, being as it is that the art museum is a living tomb. It is this idea of a ‘beyond’ that must lean on fiction most heavily; to imagine life devoid of the very thing it consists of, the foreign concept par excellence and a matter we can only approach obliquely with fiction as its trojan horse. The elaborated thought-experiment, where mankind ritually invokes a disaster of some kind or another in an attempt to outdo the juddering timeline of progress, is something for which writer JG Ballard is perhaps best known and of whom I just learned Nelson is a reader. It is only fiction that can offer the grounds for speculation, a ring-fenced zone of danger where hypotheses can be put to test.
In spite of my 18-year-old naivety, today I revel in learning that narrative, speculation and fiction-as-method are important to Nelson. It is these very modes that impart to his work a complexity that disallows easy pigeon-holing into existing discourse on the object and readymade. As with the phantasmagorical journeying of William Burroughs, to the labyrinthine adventuring of the characters created by Jorge Luis Borges, two writers the artist cites, in response to my anxious question – Nelson directly implicates us in a vision and feeling of his own devising. In his essay ‘The Long Con’ (2015), Benedict Singleton investigates the word ‘plot’ and its manifold meanings: plot as delineated space or land; as architectural plan and future-oriented diagram; as narrative structure, whereby it takes on the quality of having been devised and thus comes to insinuate something of a more sinister design (to ‘plot’ against). All three associated meanings come to bear in the way Nelson has approached his artistic practice and the Hayward Gallery exhibition – from the overarching course the viewer takes, to the internal logic of each installation and the dialogue ensuing between them which unfolds in space and time. Understood in this way, the ‘double-take’ Nelson introduces by way of a second encounter with I, Imposter may be best understood as a plot twist – I think I’ve been here before. So, too, might the lagging instalment of Triple Bluff Canyon (the projection room) (2004) in the gallery’s penultimate space, where Nelson turns the workings of fiction-ing to more overtly autobiographical material by re-creating his old South London studio. This spin-off has the creator become subject in a remarkably intimate gesture that exteriorises and loops personal time. Our roving access through gallery-turned-mental-palace reaches its plotline climax with this break in the ‘fourth wall’, Nelson is also a victim caught up in the plot he has himself created. It is an uncanny rejoinder that also consoles: the future is bleak, but Nelson retains his sense of humour.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, Triple Bluff Canyon (the projection room), 2004. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
All of this undoes any sense of the artwork as a bound and fixed entity. I am 18 again, departing dizzied, giddy, a soundtrack I conjured spontaneously in one of the many rooms replaying in my head. I can’t even recall the name nor artist of said song, it’s probably something novel I unconsciously picked up at a gas station or off license. (For what occurs when sensation alights from a singular experience? It doubles back to the impression one didn’t know one had logged as memory.) Invention, one realises, is not something that an art viewer gets to do very often, given that artworks are so often foreclosed by intended meanings, worse still, poorly drafted exhibition text. By contrast, open-ended narrative and continual invention is the privileged condition of viewer who trespasses into Nelson’s art; it is not just an invitation, it’s a pre-requisite for engagement, and you cannot enter and not engage, of that he makes sure.
https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/art-exhibitions/mike-nelson-extinction-beckons