Mike Nelson

All images courtesy of the Artist and The British Council


Mike Nelson
IL ‘impostor
The British Pavilion at the 54th Biennale di Venezia
04.06.2011- 27.11.2011

It feels quite apt to write about this exhibition in hindsight, given its anachronism.

Mike Nelson, IL ‘impostor, as he calls his installation in this years British Pavilion, has feigned an authentic Turkish Caravanserai. These roadside inns where travellers and traders could meet along their journey, supported ancient trade routes such as the Silk Road, which date back to 440 BC. During the 12th century Venetian merchants exploited a trading privilege granted to them by the Byzantine Empire in 1082 for helping defend them against the Normans. Venice prospered greatly. It’s possible to imagine these very same traders staying in a building very like this as a result.

I was fortunate enough to invigilate this exhibition for the duration of one month. Spending this long in the different enclaves of the space changed my perspective, ranging from indifference, to interest, to violent dislike, right through to mild enthusiasm- difficult if you have to explain it to a variety of people! However, there is a sincere (and extremely ambitious) execution wrapped up in its inherent insecurity.

I think it’s safe to say we all found it hard to verbally justify Mike’s intentions relating to the history of Istanbul, given the past as a bit of a dead end cul-de-sac, still, experientially though, this is something to be seen. There was a bit of a sense of the Natural History Museum about it, but without the ethical anthropological baggage, and it directs a cool post-colonial questionable jibe with a hint of self-reflectivity towards this kind of alchemy.



As you walk through the installation, you stoop you way through a clockwise spiral, a maze of dimly lit low enclaves, until you reach the center. Here it opens out into a vast courtyard with smooth concrete walls stretching to the heavens above you. As you return, you walk exactly the same way you came, which looks completely different from this direction. You unravel over your previous steps and then come to the front door where you are free to either pick up where you left off, or start all over again. As one elderly visitor put it, she “felt like she had come to the end of the road, died, and then been given a fresh start”.

The context of a “national” pavilion seems to add a post-colonial aspect to the work, as one visitor put it whilst briskly exiting the building, “It’s just not British”.

Gabriel Orozco

Lintels, 2001, All images courtesy of the Artist and Tate Modern


Gabriel Orozco
Tate Modern
19.01.2011- 25.04.2011

Being as alone as you inevitably are, and aware of the system, but not inside of it strictly, puts you in an interesting position to take what you want, and leave what you don’t.

In this way Orozco has an acute understanding of humanity, full of it’s contradictions and disparities, but seemingly accepts and declines to think about all of it, unless to some positive end, or to make work.

At first glance it seems to be some general art Provera re-think, given Orozco’s perchance to give new life to old objects, appropriating rubbish and lint from a washing machine as one might adule human remains in a graveyard. But on closer inspection, the clinical white gallery is utilized to great ironic effect, with objects literally telling a story through their collected shape and history of bumps and scratches.

There is a feeling of history being an almost maliable structure, at which we are at the forefront of during the present. I sensed from him an astute pride in the human race, and an almost naive love for humanity. He takes enjoyment in the playful aspect of life, where he re-invents games and toys whilst adding his own sinister twists. The re-curring theme of cars was, for me, an admittance of the addictive nature of obsession and almost sticky contagiousness of trend, which becomes human when tipped over the flood gates and swept up into popularity.

His work evidences an understanding of the disparity between the momentary nature of existence, and the never-ending cycle of evolution, which is discernible particularly in his work “Horses Running Endlessly”. There is also an understanding, and even utilization of the common misinterpretation, especially during childhood, that one’s mind is at the center of everything, and everything that happens is to either please or displease the mind in question. Indeed, Orozco shamelessly plays with the admittance that you can never step out of your own head.




Cats and Watermelons



Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe, 1995





Breath on Piano, 1993

Gerard Byrne- Case Study: Loch Ness (Some possibilities and problems), 2001-2011

Gerard Byrne
Towards a Gestalt Image - Loch Ness & Fact
Research ongoing since 2000 AD.
Image courtesy the artist.






Gerard Byrne
Towards a Gestalt Image - Loch Ness & Fact
Research ongoing since 2000 AD.
Image courtesy the artist.

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes 14.01.2011 - 03.04.2011

So off we trotted one Saturday afternoon to Milton Keynes gallery, stopping off at Wetherspoons for a Wuwu on the way. Coined by some town-planning optimist as a “Boulevard”, MK gallery itself lies up a long stretch of desolated office sprawl, which bizarrely had something of the ambience of totalitarian Russian communist architecture. The gallery, and it’s curator I suspect, benefit from this anonymity of Milton Keynes, in a kind of opportunistic freedom and lack of competition, both of which cannot be bad for the gallery or it’s shows.

When he speaks about his work one would expect Gerard Byrne to be slightly cagey as to build suspense surrounding the presentation of 10 years of research into the Loch Ness legend. 10 years is a long time. However he appears relaxed, and beyond that, even excited to talk about the 10-year process he went through. A process, he describes, as a whittling down of the material, a selection process to sufficiently blur the boundaries between fact and fiction.

The exhibition opens with Byrne relating the growth lines of a tree, to the reported sightings of the monster throughout time. The viewer is then sufficiently primed for “truth”.

Following the didactic tree analysis is a film within a small projection space of a local man speaking about the local legend, in true scots dialect. On the other side of the tree lie three waist height museum display cabinets containing real copies of Loch Ness’s local newspapers with articles actually feigned by the publisher to increase sales during the 1800’s. Media manipulation is nothing new, albeit now existing on a massive scale. And there is almost an acceptance of it as being a form of someone else’s truth.

By the last room I was sufficiently primed and ready to lap up any lie the artist threw at me. We were then confronted with a room full of ambiguous photographs, which not only question themselves, but their own subject matter, construction and layout. The shapes and “subject matter” are ambiguous as they are oblique, merging into whatever you want them to be. Having understood the first parts of the exhibition, the last room leaves the viewer scrabbling to piece together some idea of the artists intentions, made even more pertinent by the feeling that even the Byrne himself didn’t know. As he gladly admits, it was a struggle and not once was ever sure it was worth it. Well we certainly enjoyed second-guessing ourselves around this exhibition and it proved to be well worth the visit.

Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark

Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s

3 March 2011 - 22 May 2011

Barbican Art Gallery

Laurie Anderson, Installation shot from Athens Biennale 2009

I first encountered Laurie Anderson’s work 3 years ago in Athens Biennale. It was the video where she dressed in a red cat suit and filmed herself on various rooftops in NYC performing seemingly meaningless repetitive movements. I remember being struck by this work in relation to the rest of the artists exhibiting there. Anderson was probably the oldest artist there, from a different era altogether. Her work struck me as being more playful than the rest, with a freedom of expression often sought after by this generation of artists, but rarely found, because paradoxically the more you seek freedom the more contrived and less free it becomes.

I then wondered if it was misguided, or socially appropriate, to interpret standing on a roof dressed in a cat suit as being free. Is it wrong to interpret a work based solely on the era it is placed within I found myself asking myself? Does it then reduce it to a predominantly simplified understanding of the past, or worse still, and possibly quite cynically, a nostalgic typecasting of a whole generation of artists?

Was Andersons work more free because she was making it in an era only just coming to terms with the phenomenon of global media, and a globalized art world? Did that allow her a freedom of expression we lack today?

Therefore a large part of my understanding of this exhibition (retrospective at Barbican) was based on my very naïve and simplified understanding of the 70’s as an era. For me it’s the era of rational thought, people power, change, rise of documentation and archive, meaning being detached from image, buying bra's after burning them and realising breasts start to droop eventually without them, flower power growing up and, just like the 60's, probably too much acid. It’s probably the era I most admire, but thinking rationally am glad I’m not a part of. We probably have more freedom now, but paradoxically either aren’t aware of it, or have forgotten how to use it.

Anyway, as you enter the exhibition there is a pillow with a speaker inside, which starts to work as the participant places their head on it. Interactivity, which forces the viewer to deconstruct their usual interpretation of art as being something untouchable to be revered and admired from afar. There were 4 performances that took place intermittently throughout the day. I stayed for only three.

Trisha Brown, Walking on the Wall, 1971. Photograph by Felix Clay

The first was Anderson’s “Walking on the Walls” (above) which was exactly as it sounds, a group of 5 performers attached to ropes suspending them from the ceiling, walking along a wall horizontally. Kind perspective trickery which appears to be quite a common theme throughout.

Trisha Brown, Planes, 1968. Photograph by Rune Hellestad

The second was a climbing based piece called Planes (see above), whereby performers climbed on a wall that was being simultaneously projected onto with images of long legs or buildings that tower into the distance. It was another interesting play with perspective.

Trisha Brown, Floor of the Forest, 1970. Photograph by Rune Hellestad

The third, and for me the most interesting, was the Floor of the Forest, which consisted of a grid of ropes that strung together items of clothing for people to climb in and out of. The performers would lug themselves into the clothes and then hang like deadweights for a time, before moving to the next “outfit”. Definitely worth a visit.