GHOSTING GALLERY SC OR GHOSTING SPROUT
On the walls is an exhibition of Italian drawings from the 18th Century and it’s lots of scenes from life and illustrations of animals. There are pictures of women washing clothes. They are smaller than A2. Some chalk and some ink. You’re admiring the penmanship. They’re figurative drawings, with completely dynamic penwork, which capture these scenes with the minumum of effort and ink; made with great speed and the beauty that is good drawing.
It’s by one of the Camden Town painters and it’s of his friend hanging-out under the stairs with the artist’s wife and the painter he’s painted is quite famous for being a ladies man, so it’s quite odd that he should choose to have this man and his own wife pose for a painting. And they’re just hanging-out in the half-shadows under these wooden stairs. It’s really moody and beautifully painted. It’s colours are rich and black. The darkness of the shapes make abstract forms. It’s staircases, it’s shadows, it’s beautiful observations of humans, with a little story to add intrigue. They’re both looking a bit shifty in the picture. And you just want to look at it.
There’s a small darkened room on the left hand side and it’s like a miniature theatre, but all that’s in the theatre are these strange papier-mâché possibly domes, that could be stomachs or giant eyes or molecular or organic blobs and the entire thing is lit with red light, so all you can see is into the darkness of this dark cave. There’s something very prop-like about these blobs. They’re not solid enough to be sculptures in themselves, but they’re part of this strange, personless theatre. They’re not smooth or at all like marble. They’re wrinkly and papery and papered-over. There’s something magical or claustrophobic about the space, it could be an interior space, it could be inside the body. It’s like a bodily cavity, which could feel comforting or repulsive for you. It’s enveloping even though you’re not inside it, as if it’s surrounding you even though you’re looking at it through a frame. You look at it for a long time and you feel like you’re looking on your own, although other people look also.
One object really strikes you. It’s a very regular geometric shape, conical but made of angles, not round and you put your head into it. Where you put your head, is a bit wider than your head and it tapers off towards the centre. It’s like it’s made out of glass, and it reflects these rainbow colours, mother of pearl reflections. And when you put your head into it you can see yourself. And you put your head in there and at this moment you totally lose yourself. The whole space around you flips upside down and you really don’t know where you are. It feels like you are in heaven, almost.
In front of you you see a sculpture made from wrapped candy. It’s not in the corner, it’s just on the floor against a wall. The shape the pile makes is rectangular like a grave or a bed, it can be both. It’s colourful candy and you don’t know what it is about. It seems very Christmas-like, they are wrapped in blue-green, something between yellow and gold and they’re all wrapped in shiny wrappers. I think red as well, the primary colours. Someone goes over to it and takes a sweet and you are a bit confused. So, you see there’s a description on the wall. The weight of the candy is the weight of the artist’s lover’s body when he died. Each night the gallery replaces the candy so that each morning it has the weight of his lover. The person who took a piece of candy has eaten a piece of the artist’s work and a piece of the artist’s lover, who died of AIDS. The piece is very emotional and has a lot to do with private human relations.
You see a structure made up of poles. They look like scaffolding poles and appear to be made of metal, but when you look more closely you realise that it isn’t metal… or you might not realise this. The structure has some scraps of material hanging from it. The fabric might be red or green or it could be dirty white, it doesn’t really have a colour anymore. And that’s the first thing you see when you walk into the gallery and you go inside it and you go around it.
It’s looks fairly authentic. It’s like a museum object, made to look old, or does look old, you’re not quite sure. It’s a copy of a tent that was built for the Shah’s celebration of 2500 years of Persia. A tent that remains in the desert. A relic that’s only 35 years old but looks older than the original buildings from Persepolis that are there. Tents that were like temporary pavilions, like the pavilions left from the World Fair here. It makes you think of the failed utopia of the Shah’s project to construct a new Persepolis in the desert. A temporary Persepolis that was all for show.
A film is being shown, of a procession that looks like the ceremony for the opening of the Olympics and represents the different periods of Persion history. It’s very theatrical and fictional. What strikes you about this film is how decayed it is, it’s such a poor copy and it makes that history seem further away than it actual is, it’s hard to believe that it happened in 1973. Only 5 years before the whole thing collapsed, it was a grand gesture at the end of an empire.
You’re looking at the screen and you hear a voiceover in another language, you think it’s German, and you see images of bulldozers and cranes and the colour of the sky is very blue and the ground is very white and dusty. The voice changes to English, it’s a man’s voice with an American accent, and he’s saying that “when he was born they built a city in the desert, a city disconnected from the earth, a floating city” and the images change, and the film which is quite grainy, changes to images of this city, which you recognise as Brasillia. It seems that the film is from the 50s and there are tourists hlding hands. They are middle-aged, upper-class couples, wandering around this incredible futuristic city, which seems very empty and still. And the voice is talking about dead cities and the dream of a city in the desert. The images shift between modernist sculptures and swimming pools and street-signs and the colour of the desert and the sky and very dry fields and trees and it’s all very lonely, but very beautiful at the same time. And the tone of the film darkens even more perhaps and there are shots of skyscrapers from the distance and now the sky is very brooding and heavy and the voice continues talking, talking about this utopian city as a museum, as a place for dead things. And the film is fraying at the edges, it’s old, it’s bleached and decaying, mirroring the failure of the project of Brasilia. The film seems to shimmer.
Very slow shots and actually nothing happening and just the streets of New York and nice atmosphere and her voice and the letters that she’s reading. It’s in colour. It’s quite a long film, it seems like it could last for ever and you would enjoy it. Her voice is very nice, she has this French accent, that’s very pleasant and even if you don’t think about the content it’s enjoyable to just be there and see it. There’s an image of an empty street in New York, which meets another street with cars passing by and she is reading and it has this nostalgic atmosphere. She reads the letters she sends to her mother in France, from New York, her private letters about how she is feeling there and what she does.
It’s B&W. The first shot is 20 minutes and just some cows are passing. There is a shot of a small girl playing with a cat. It lasts for about half an hour. She starts playing with the cat and it becomes more and more rough and she kills the cat at the end. There’s some party happening in the village in a local bar and they’re dancing and getting more and more drunk and it lasts for ages and they all fall asleep everywhere around. It’s raining all the time in the film and there’s a lot of mud and a lot of sky in the shots and everything’s happening slowly. It’s really depressing and you will think about it every day for the next year afterwards. When you leave after seeing it you will think it’s going to rain outside.
The room is dark now and it feels like night time. In the centre of the room there’s a shed and you walk towards it. There’s several windows and you go to one and look in. Inside there’s lots of old records stacked up and there’s old cassette players, gramophones and record players, and there are sounds from inside and from outside. There’s lights in the shed; an old, broken chandelier hanging centrally, various old lamps and wall lights. There’s old peeling wallpaper on some of the walls and some are just wooden. Some you can’t see because they’re covered by the records and by some old pictures too. You can hear the sound of the wind and it starts to rain. Then you hear a train, which sounds like it’s coming really close. The shed starts to wobble and the chandelier and wall lights rattle. There’s theatre lights outside the shed, which react to the sound of the storm: the lighting gets very dramatic and in the far distance you hear there’s an opera singer. It is like you are inside the play or the opera and that’s exciting and unnerving, because you really don’t know what’s going to happen next. There’s the sound of a man having a conversation with a woman and you’re not quite sure where the voice comes from. You get the sense that this shed belonged to the man who’s talking; that these are recordings of conversations they had and that he’s now dead. He is like a ghost because he’s not here and you feel in tune with him. The opera keeps coming back. There’s a sort of crescendo and the lights go crazy.
You are looking out onto a large lake that borders three different countries, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. The sun is setting across the lake on the German side and it gets dark. There is a gigantic white lighthouse protruding from the surface of the lake, which is about 13 storeys high. Next to this is a stage platform about 5 metres above the water. It starts with a shipwreck. A Dutch merchant ship is trying to get to its harbour. They’re very close, but as they are coming home a storm comes up. All of a sudden huge wave machines kick into action and the whole lake begins to foam. Waves splash five metres high over the stage and all of a sudden there are hundreds of men dressed in raincoats running around and constantly being washed overboard and climbing back on. The platform starts to move, so the left side goes down and the right side goes up and hundreds of yellow-coated Dutch seamen tumble down into the lake and bigger waves splash over. The lights on the 13 storey-high lighthouse start to go around and around and around.
More and more things come out of the surface of the lake. Everything seems to be coming from underneath the surface. Everything seems to run on tracks and is lifted up so that everything rises out of the lake like monsters.
Eventually the storm settles.
We are in an open space in nature. Before he starts walking he says that when he was a child he used to watch musicals from America and was really impressed by how well-produced they all were. There were all these beautiful scenes with beautiful women doing synchronised swimming, artistic swimming, making shapes in the water. Under the water there were torches that would shoot huge columns of fire through the surface and into the air. He wondered how it was possible and wanted to make a short tribute to his memories of viewing such films. He says that the moment he opens his eyes he sees a film.
There are two lines of unlit torches about a metre and a half high and he is naked. It is important to mention that he is a really tall person, he is physically big, has a large belly and looks impressive as a figure. He’s 80 years old. He’s carrying a lit torch and slowly walking between the two lines of torches. As he approaches each one he lights it with his. He does this as he moves along the two lines and he does so with difficulty because he’s old and not physically fit, he’s stumbling, but he’s not doing this on purpose, it’s just how he moves. If you see him in Zagreb, which you do often, he moves like this. There’s one participant who is helping. He’s holding a hose and pointing it into the air so that water sprays onto the performer whilst he’s walking and lighting the torches. And when he approaches the end he bows and that’s it.
It seems like there’s a rock band at the back of the room and there’s about three lines of performers and they’re dancing in synch, or they’re doing some sort of gymnastics. Half-dancing, half doing sport perhaps. And the music sounds like evangelical religious music; popular music used to enthuse new members into some sort of cult. They are all wearing similar sport-like or gymnastic clothing, T-shirts and baggy trousers and they’re all doing things like star-jumps at the same time, like in a keep-fit video or something you’d see in communist China, a mass group activity. They aren’t a group of new age Christians, they are performing something more abstract than that. There’s something sinister underlying what’s happening – why are they all dancing the same? Have they been brainwashed or are they just artists who are enthused? You see this one guy who stands out. He looks like he’s flagging, not quite keeping up with the rest. It’s obvious that performance is not something he’s used to doing or rather dancing’s not something he’s used to doing or perhaps even sport, because he’s getting really out of breath. He’s doing these star jumps for you and it’s a spectacle, but you feel quite panicked. Around you, other people are also looking worried about whether he’s going to last out. You don’t know what the end is or where it’s leading and it makes you anxious.
Now this room is yellow; yellow, yellow, yellow, it’s filled with yellow light. It’s the most intense yellow, so everything is yellow or red, even black looks red. It is the most visual thing you’ve ever seen, you’ve ever experienced. It is close to what you’d experience on hallucinogenic drugs, but you are straight. And it moves you, it lifts you out of your regular consciousness, out of your body and it feels, sublime, no, spiritual, like when you perceive something with your own eyes, but you don’t know if it really is how you perceive it. The beauty of this moment, at the end of summer.
That’s what you’re presented with here, and there’s a sense of not revealing everything that needs to be revealed. Or a sense of the structure existing somewhere between history and a work, it doesn’t give you everything you need to go on. It’s sort of a set.
Paul Clarke. 13.9.08. Gallery SC, Zagreb.
All text is edited from interviews with the participating UK and Croatian artists. The words of Ana Husman, Iva Kovac, Elvis Krstulovic, Lala Rascic, Hannah Chiswell, Laura Cull, Amy Cunningham, Naomi Dawson, Samuel Dowd, Florian Roithmayr and Sam Steer, were voiced and can be read here. Thanks to them for their collaboration.
See the Under Construction website for more information about this SpRoUt project. I was an invited participant and presenter. The photo above was taken moments before the performance by Laura Cull. The sculpture of a hunting stand on which I am sitting, a few metres above those at the gallery opening, is by Sam Dowd.
