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ANXIETY |
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In 2001, Mike Nelson was one of the artists
nominated for the Turner Prize, and also represented Great Britain
at that year’s Biennale in Venice. In a subsequent interview
with John Rogers he talked about his impressions of these events
and reflected on some of the signature features of his work.
Mike Nelson’s work can be characterized by its references to fear and anxiety.
In the light of this, in addition to the interview with the artist we have included
here a short overview of other works and artists that also deal with angst: in
relation to a dread of existence as such, to the state of the world or the fear
provoked by violence.
ANXIETY
DAVID G. TORRES
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In 1968, Bruce Nauman locked himself in his studio and made his famous series of video recordings: standing and leaning back into a corner (Bouncing in the Corner); painting his body black (Flesh to White to Black to Flesh); walking back and forth across the studio (Stamping in the Studio); playing a violin with an odd tuning (Violin Tuned D.E.A.D.); and adopting different positions between the wall and the floor (Wall/Floor Positions). These pieces link a minimalist definition of the artist’s work through his position in space and his actual working routine (an approach that was maliciously parodied shortly afterwards in 1971, in John Baldessari’s film I Am Making Art), with the presentation of situations of anxiety. It was this anxiety that would form the core of subsequent pieces by Bruce Nauman, though this time from the point of view of the spectator. These are the corridors, the cubes, the filmed closed spaces and oppressive rooms of the seventies: Live Taped Video Corridor, a long, narrow corridor with two video monitors at the end, one showing the corridor empty, the other showing the spectator from behind, walking away; Going Around The Corner Piece, a large white cube with surveillance cameras and monitors in each corner causing a similarly dislocated effect; Yellow Room (Triangular), a three-sided room bathed in yellow light; and White Breathing (part of the Herbert collection now at MacBa), a room containing irregularly spaced cubes that condition the spectator’s movements through the space.
In two pieces completed in 1988, Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer) and Rats and Bats (Learned Helplessness in Rats II), Bruce Nauman transferred this system of oppressive yellow spaces, corridors, surveillance cameras and monitors into small and transparent yellow Plexiglas structures, this time for rats. He had already used animals suspended on large carousels, but here the rats are enclosed. And “the rats are in a situation of great stress, they feel powerless, though, of course, the same happens to people” (Bruce Nauman).
2.
Except for a series devoted to a reinterpretation of some of Van Gogh’s landscapes, all of Francis Bacon’s paintings are characterised by the fact that, firstly, they depict enclosed interior spaces, empty rooms in which one can, at most, distinguish a chair, a lavatory, a hanging light-bulb, and secondly, because the centre of the picture consists of an oval framing the space in which a figure is shown. This oval is what Gilles Deleuze, writing in Francis Bacon. Logique de la
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| Bruce Nauman. Going Around the Corner Piece, 1970 |
Bruce Nauman. Rats and Bats (Learned Helplessness in Rats II), 1988 |
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| sensation, a long essay devoted to the English painter, calls “rond”. The “rond” encloses the figure and was the strategy used by Bacon to remove any kind of narrative from the image. His intention is thus to increase the oppressive aspect of the space, underline the loneliness of the individual and turn them into an object, someone with no story to tell.
However, Francis Bacon always said that in his attempts to create images that showed the anxiety of the contemporary individual, their complete loss of hope, he had failed: the anxiety of not achieving anxiety. He also said, however, that in spite of being convinced of the pointlessness of life, its lack of importance, its futility, he was, by nature, an optimist.
3.
At the end of the seventies, Cindy Sherman began her famous series of photographs entitled Untitled Film Stills. These all show Cindy Sherman in a variety of character roles (alone on a highway, sitting on the stairs waiting, in a bedroom, etc.) in black and white photos made to look like stills from real film shoots. Towards the end of the eighties, when she was photographing parts of dismembered dolls, she herself would remain the subject, as a form of “experimenting and making my face look like any other”. Following on from the black and white stills, she began at the beginning of the eighties to work in colour, dressing herself up again, sometimes brunette, other times blonde, in an orange sweater, wrapped in a red sheet, in a t-shirt … This is a further development of Untitled Film Stills a further exploration of the ways in which women are represented.
Perhaps to avoid being categorised in one particular way, the series Fairy Tales and Disasters from the 1980s show a Cindy Sherman who is increasingly hard to recognise. The spaces are oppressive and dark with bits of dismembered bodies, dolls, detritus, traces of vomit. While Sherman’s early series are all about the archetypal ways in which women were represented in B movies, her first offering as a director in the 1997 film Office Killer gave a definitive picture of enclosed spaces, terror, blood and viscera in daily life.
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During the nineties Christoph Draeger began a series of works on disasters. Between 1994 and 2002 he produced large jigsaws showing images of great catastrophes. For example, TWA 800 is a photograph of the reconstruction (like a jig-saw puzzle) by experts and investigators of the plane that crashed on the US eastern seaboard in July 1996; ICE 886: |
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| Francis Bacon. Home assegut, 1979 |
Cindy Sherman. Untitled (Disasters), 1988 |
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The Great German Train Disaster is an aerial photograph of a major train accident. Other jig-saws represent images taken after a tornado has passed through or an earthquake has hit. Christoph Draeger has also built models of scenes showing the aftermath of a disaster, which he has then photographed. In Crash, a video from 1999, he included air accidents from five films (“Die Hard 2”, “Kamikaze”, “Escape!”, “The Hindenburg” and “Fearless”) along with a list of real accidents involving large aircraft.
A year after the attack on New York’s twin towers, Christoph Draeger made Black September. Black September is an installation dealing with the first terrorist act to be broadcast live: the kidnapping of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich on 5 September 1972 (the starting point for Steven Spielberg’s recent film, “Munich”). Christoph Draeger’s 2002 installation returned to the this attack in order to reflect on the relationship between terrorism, globalisation and image. His approach involves creating a video in which he combines the pictures shown on television with a restaging of the events. The video is shown in a space that recreates the hotel room in which the victims were kept. This makes it a precise reconstruction, because while they were there, confined and under guard, they would also have been able to follow the story of their kidnapping live: this is a real horror production.
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Since 1986, Gregor Schneider has made his house in Rheydt the subject of his artistic output: he has changed the layout, reproduced and reduced the different spaces in his house and even exhibited or reproduced them in museums and art galleries as empty, once inhabited spaces that tell hidden, intriguing and distressing stories (see Butlletí, #21, February 2006). Following this theme, in 2004 he presented a supposed photographic history of the life of the Schneider family: pictures of the house and its contents and, at times, its inhabitants washing dishes or masturbating secretly in the shower.
In 2003, Schneider staged a large exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg: rooms from his house with false mirrors through which one could see without being seen and then, by contrast, be seen without seeing but know that you were being
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| Christoph Draeger. Black September, 2002 |
Gregor Schneider. Steindamm, 2003 |
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watched, enclosed in one room with excrement or in another with something that looked like a body in a plastic bag, a filthy garage filled with garbage, a folding door as its entrance and no other way out. Finally, one of the pieces had nothing to do with his house. It was a blind alley. From what was usually the museum’s entrance, Gregor Schneider constructed an entrance to a dark alley, lit by a single street lamp, with stains on the walls and rubbish on the ground, winding towards a dark corner. The alley remained open 24 hours a day in the centre of Hamburg with no special surveillance. This same blind alley was recreated at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, though this time straight rather than winding, and with a half-closed garage-style door as the entrance.
6.
In his Turner Prize exhibit in 2001, Mike Nelson, one of the five selected finalists, represented a large installation comprising a number of rooms and passageways forming a maze. Such mazes, full of references and found objects and built in enormous spaces form one of the defining features of his work. Another is that Mike Nelson always works with literary references, ranging from Albert Camus to Borges via Kerouac. The beat generation poet is clearly the reference for After Kerouac, the installation on display at the CASM: a long spiralling corridor that goes nowhere. At the end of the road rewritten by Mike Nelson there is just a pile of tyres; an apocalyptic, catastrophic end at which we arrive, disorientated to various degrees by the twists and turns of the path we have been led along.
Mike Nelson works with archetypal images from the cinema and literature that we associate with fear and anxiety: the maze, empty corridors, doors, abandoned tyres and even a sense of disorientation. In this piece, his reference to Kerouac and the beat generation also creates a feeling of unease. The end of an ideal view of freedom that shaped the crisis felt by that generation is here revised and updated. Now that a political element has attached itself to fear and anxiety, they seem to be associated with a lack of hope: fear and anxiety linked with times that are just as terrible, as Jacob Fabritius said when writing about Mike Nelson. |
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