At first sight, the chaos of Nathaniel Mellors’s video installations Profondo Viola (2004) and Hateball (2005) seems to reflect the same fragmentation, obscurity and inaccessibility as the soundtrack and dialogues. But actually these installations conduct an acute analysis of the mechanisms of powerabuse and its necessary relationship to language. Mellors’s work destabilises the internal logic of this relationship by means of Rabelaisian plots that are interpreted by bizarre characters in the purposely ambiguous roles of tormentors and victims. Dialogues are choppy, ungrammatical and full of neologisms. The difficult syntax of the scripts seems to command the unusual angles from which the videos are projected, the amorphous sculptures that seem to be on the verge of collapsing, and the experimental music that is heard throughout, often composed and performed by Mellors and his friends. His installation the “Time Surgeon” (2007) centres on the question of who controls language and what the effects are. It is inspired by Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape and Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (or The Pier). In the main scene of this double projection, the Time Surgeon tortures his “Victim” (a bodiless character imprisoned inside a magnetic tape) by sending her into the future and into the past by pressing the buttons of an analogue tape recorder. Torture and video only end when the “Victim” succeeds in confusing her torturer by means of words. In a reference to George Orwell, Mellors reveals how the blurring and distortion of language stand at the base of all forms of power and mistreatment.
Time travel and parallel dimensions of everyday reality are also part of Ryan Gander’s work. He explores and reveals different worlds that could be contained in objects. By unexpectedly juxtaposing diverse elements and accompanying them with short texts or titles, he mysteriously brings infinite stories to light that are there waiting, hidden inside reality. The play and learning involved in the creative process are left open, allowing spectators to become an integral part of them. The traditional trust that exists between artist, public and institution is called into question by continuous testing and reconfiguration of the relationships. Like the Bricoleur’s Daughter (Alchemy Box #2) (2008) is an elegant wooden box displayed together with a list of objects that it contains. The doubt as to whether reality corresponds to the language (the box is closed) is mixed with attempts to understand the logic that informs the list. In I took my hands off of you too soon (2007) Gander compares an image made by conceptual photographer Christopher Williams to a reproduction of it made by Gander himself: an attempt to appropriate and revive a pre-existing artwork, where poetic interpretation and criticism of the concept of authorship coexist side by side. Basquiat (2008) shows one of Gander’s gallery owners re-enacting a scene from the homonymous movie by Julian Schnabel. Later on in the same video, he edits and reads the press release of the new video, opening a gap between form and meaning.
While Gander displays an alchemistic dimension in the transformation of everyday life, Alexandre Singh uses this same component to portray the sculptural nature of language. Singh’s encyclopaedic ambition is injected with stories and mythology from the past that are reworked with corrosive irony and re-activated through the filter of contemporary culture. Assembly Instructions (2008) is a cluster of irreverent collages of black-and-white photocopies of pictures and texts that are framed and connected by dots drawn on the wall. These complex narrative constellations are disorienting for the anarchy and density of their cultural references, which stands in contrast to the clean lines of the installation. Inspired by a museum interior, video installation The Marque of the Third Stripe (2007) presents the life of Adi Dassler, founder of Adidas, in a Gothic key. Set in an imaginary period where modernism coincides with primitive times and the European continent has just been discovered, the video recounts the obscure pact made between Dassler, a modern Faust, and an evil force (similar to gravity) that holds both humanity and the hero himself under its control. Dassler tries to resist by producing sports shoes, but in vain. The story is narrated by six Portuguese women and divided in as many chapters contained one inside the other, the last of which contains the first. During the projection, Singh assigns a geometric black-and-white pattern to each of the words pronounced, visually connected to the lines of a modernist grid and the three-banded Adidas logo. By means of a synaesthetic procedure, Singh transfers the tale’s syntax and content onto the sequence of patterns, holding the spectator in a state of alienation given by the narrated story’s seductive plot and the unfathomable logic that governs the hypnotic projection.
The installations of Mellors, Gander and Singh are explorations modelled by fragmented syntax; small stories told through everyday objects; new forms for the archetypical tales of humanity. Their common ground is extreme attention to language, which becomes a fundamental medium through which the three artists’ installations take shape. Language is used as an element that has the task of undermining the work’s final objectivity, as it continually mutates the relationships between the different components and allows the formation process of the installation itself to stay alive throughout. More than revealing mystic truths or expressing political stances, these artists create parallel worlds that have the power to suggest a different logic with which to interpret reality, giving the spectator the freedom to intervene personally in the work’s process and elaborate an autonomous translation of what the words do not say. Stefano Collicelli Cagol
