British artist Mike Nelson created an installation for the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, UK in 2003. Here we discuss the merits of the work in relation to the American artist Robert Smithson, and the nature of contemporary installation art.
The scenery is of Nelson's installation; as it appears as a landscape placed in the interior of the gallery, muted and theatricality adorned with dusty re-politicised metaphors and narratives that creep toward you out of the shadows of what is an often lonely and hallowed space: this is Mike Nelson's work "Triple Bluff Canyon".
It is often felt with Nelson, the ghost of some eccentric senior citizen, once eminent in his own field, floats down the artist's corridors like a phantom from a metaphysical science fiction novel. But in this case his subtle theatricalities, made up of sequences of meticulously constructed, interconnecting installations and intricate personal props each alluding to an entwined narrative of some distant murky character, appear on one level to pack a quite contemporary political punch.
Within Nelson's worn yet strangely monumental buildings, half buried in great sand dunes and set within the space of yet another form, that of the white cube gallery space, we see an homage to the land work "Partially Buried Woodshed" situated at Kent State University by artist Robert Smithson.
Smithson's work at the university later became an intrinsically political object due to the chaos of its day. This was the result of a campus protest on May 4, 1970 against the American invasion of Cambodia that led to the shooting of four students by the National Guard.
The connection between the work and the shootings became explicit and prophetic to the artist once someone had daubed "MAY 4 KENT 70" on its form, which the artist re-appropriated as a socio-political identity to the work.
In this installation the main work would appear to arrive with a ready-made reference to a latter day political chaos; that of WMD's and the current conspiratorial vein running through the events in Iraq.
The core of Nelson's installation takes its initial form from the work of Smithson then instils a contemporary leitmotif, that of an increased theatricality, Consisting of a tertiary view post the subjectivity of contemporary media intervention.
The work becomes almost a stage for shaky camera work as imaginary bullets whiz past the lens; we reach this part of the installation via what seems like the entrance to a theatre. As you journey through these telescoping and labyrinthine corridors, news reports flit in and out of the mind, a derelict housing for - possibly - weaponry?
In which I believe at one point I saw the intentional gag of a petroleum drum half submerged in the sands... oil in this desert country? Surely not. In this instance the emptiness of the piece creates a vacuum of detail if not atmosphere.
In which; current affairs appear to seep through its wooden slats and joins and superimpose them on the mind of the viewer. And at once this oil drum juxtaposes itself with the "expose" graffiti on Smithson's earlier piece.
Woven through the work we see references to Smithson's geological formations revealing the "shifts of time". An ebb and flow as we imagine Nelson's sands blowing over his own politicised "woodshed".
Of course it is no wonder that children wish to climb on these dunes as they might Smithson's ancient geometry of past creations, but with Nelson the shift is into the internal space inhabiting a cerebral landscape (there is no great weight on Nelson's "woodshed" as there was Smithson's).
His shift of time, his discussion of entropy lies in smell and imagination, carefully placed dirt and dust and not in the disintegration of structured forms straining under a mass of soil. In this case Nelson's sand dunes are hollow, and the dystopian stage is set.
