Yesterday I visited London with a fellow part-time student Gill and her husband Bob, we went straight to the pop up exhibition on the Strand called Infinite Mix, curated by the Hayward Gallery in association with The Vinyl Factory. It was simply amazing, and I whole heartedly recommend it, it’s an eclectic mix of engaging video installations which although they have a very varied content, to me they seemed to have a common theme, they all seemed to be working on theories of Proust. From Martin Creed’s video Work No. 1701 (2013) a short documentary/music video of several physically impaired people crossing a road in New York, unassisted by walking aides, prosthetics, bystanders, or even friends their journey is hard and lonely, to Ugo Rondinone’s Thanx 4 Nothing (2015) a stand-up poet (John Giorno) delivers a kind of eulogy on his 70th birthday, full of references to life and death, the flickering from positive to negative, the lights going out and the poet slowly walking off the stage at the end of the poem.
So to further explain my interpretation. I’ve been reading Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” AKA “Remembrance of Things Past” on and off for sometime now, since it’s a close fit with much of my work. In order to get to the bones of the work quickly I’ve also been cheating by reading abridged versions and summaries such as Alain de Botton’s book explaining Proust’s magnum opus titled “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, a pretty bold proposal for a book. Well I’m not sure it’ll change your life but it might take up a fair portion of it if you read as slowly as I do, it’s over 1.25 million words long, captured in seven volumes. But some people say that it contains the secret of immortality, so who wouldn’t have a go right?
The storyline is needless to say complicated, but one thread, the timeless, deathlessness one is a bit like the Dallas storyline, SPOILER ALERT! the one where Bobby Ewing wakes up in the shower after he had previously been killed in a car crash, it was only a dream; wiping out 12 months of the soap. At the end of Proust’s book the narrator realises that he can be immortalised through the writing of his story, which the reader has just read, job done! Beyond the legacy creation the narrator takes a long and winding journey, the story is full of internal monologues, and the characters tackle life and love, disillusionment and memory. One important reference de Botton brought to my attention was Proust’s theory that it is our own bad experiences in life that enable us to analyse the everyday beauty. Proust wrote:
Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse processes which we would otherwise know nothing about. A man who falls straight into bed every night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, not necessarily great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to study the phenomena of memory.
To me Proust is suggesting the Levi Strauss theory (the philosopher not the jeans manufacturer) of binary opposites, a theory he developed from Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on semiotics. Strauss’s notion was that our understanding of the world is (at least in part) constructed from a collection of polar opposite appreciations, we know that ‘villainy’ is a character trait on one end of a spectrum, with ‘Heroism’ at the other, therefore the explanation of one word can be provided by it’s antonym. Strauss went on to suggest that one position is favourable and therefore dominant for example ‘healthy’ is preferable to ‘sick’, and when you are healthy you rarely think about being sick, but when you are sick being and getting healthy again becomes an overwhelming thought that can be all encompassing.
I thought that these ideas were captured succinctly by Creed, Rondinone, and Dominique Gonalez-Foerster, whose hologram of the ghostly opera singer fading in and out to the recording of Maria Callas (1923-1977) was akin to Proust’s concept of ones legacy providing their immortality.
Further, Proust had a conversation with a young man who was fascinated with a materialist world, he would go to the Louvre to ogle at the palatial works. However Proust took the man back to the Louvre to view the many still lifes of Jean-Siméon Chardin to highlight that the good-life of the visual arts is in fact all around us, one just needs to alter ones expectations and look for them.
This idea rang a bell with Cameron Jamie’s (2007-9) Massage the History film, which seemed to show a desire for materiality and social climbing.
The references within the installations to transcendence seemed to be endless, whether it was spacemen in the heavens shown against a Gospel soundtrack, in Rachel Rose’s (2015) Everything and More, or Elizabeth Price’s (2015) K, in which a voice referencing HAL (the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) talks of sorrow and loss to a percussive background beat, reminiscent to the sound only familiar to those of us who’ve experienced the workings of a CAT or MRI scanner.
Whilst Kahlil Joseph’s hard to watch yet riveting piece m.A.A.d (2014) shows the life of an African-American man, this time a would be gang member in Compton L.A., taking the viewer literally from cradle to grave, in a life of exposure to gun crime, drugs and death. A dual screen (double barrelled) portrait of life in the 90’s in this hard gangland environment, set to a hip hop track synonymous with the culture.
These references culminated with Cyprien Gaillard’s 3D video installation Nightlife (2015). Which opens to an abstract close-up that pans out to present Rodin’s The Thinker (a bronze depicting Dante’s Virgil, contemplating the entrance to hell) the movie goes on to depict animated trees moving and dancing (in the wind) to a repetitive soundtrack (fading in and out). The performer is Alton Ellis singing the line “I was born a loser” from Black Man’s World (1970’s). Cypress trees, which seemingly represent black people are prevented from entering an area inhabited by palms and exotic plants, a kind of paradise (or maybe they’re just not allowed into the nightclub). A tree is shown to be lain dead on the ground, a palm I assumed had been murdered, and at the end a helicopter highlights a needle-less (dead) tree, whilst the viewer is raised up above a firework display, appearing to be heading heavenward as the music fades out.
In short, an amazing must see exhibition.
A short clip from within the installation – ‘Nightlife’ (2015) by Cyprien Gaillard
