- Venue
- Creative Time
- Location
- United States
It's raining so heavily that it's necessary to hop across a bridge of old plywood to reach the shop front entrance of Mike Nelson's huge architectural installation. However the inclement weather is not the only obstacle the viewer need negotiate. As the warehouse space that Nelson has used is the property of the 'New York Development Corporation' the viewer 'hereinafter referred to as the "releasor"' must sign a form absolving the named owners from responsibility for 'losses, damages, expenses, personal injury and death.'
It's the perfect prelude to viewing Nelson's work: Signing your life away through labyrinthine legal texts. There is a sense of imminent danger, of going into the unknown. Despite Turner Prize nominations in 2001 and 2007 Nelson still cultivates his reputation as an outsider through such locations and the frame of cultural reference his work evokes.
The shop front is a decimated Chinese restaurant whose kitchen doorway leads into a maze of rooms and corridors that seem to double at every junction. The initial experience of any releasor is a mix of disorientation and excitement to piece together the fragments that each room presents into some form of narrative. A tattoo parlour suggests the space as a hideout for Nelson's fictional biker gang. However the following rooms with roll mats and tiny Christian or Voodoo shrines are surely the cramped dwelling of immigrant groups. With dark corridors leading to rooms equipped with baseball bats and straight jackets the narrative grows ever darker.
In a cultural world already well stocked with interactive museums and precise historical reconstructions Nelson's work is less interested in carrying the viewer into a historical period than a fictional landscape. The 'Psychic Vacuum' seems to be an imaginary space similar to William Burrough's innerzone, a place where dark fantasy is used to create an unhinged satire on contemporary culture. Straight jackets inevitably suggest Guantanamo and the final room, a giant warehouse filled with sand has been described as the Middle East brought to Manhattan.
However for all the many texts this singular work invokes the strangest and most worthy the viewer's attention is the release form signed on entrance. Its twisted syntax and lexis speak eloquently of the verbal maze of the US legal establishment. The announcement of the NY development Corp as owners of the building make it clear enough that the patchwork history of The Lower East Side of Manhattan, which Nelson presents here , will shortly be demolished by the city for more profitable commercial means.
