Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons
Earlier this week I stood in front of an open door watching two men in a small room make excruciatingly loud noises. They were pulling chains through a lift shaft while standing knee deep amidst scattered tools and mechanical equipment. Then Hayward Gallery director Ralph Ruguff arrived, sternly berated them and firmly shut the door, revealing a sign that read in all red caps: “DANGER - LIFT UPGRADE WORKS BEING CARRIED OUT”.
This was not part of the show but the scene fit right in with the knackered old doors, unloved mechanical equipment, rusted tools, blown-out tyres and hundreds of decapitated heads cast from monster masks that now fill the Hayward. It’s all cobbled together to create three fully immersive, claustrophobic mazes and one meandering, multiple-room construction you can only examine from the outside looking in.
The show starts with the aftermath, a red-lit room that Rugoff says is “what this exhibition will look like when it’s all over”. It’s filled with dismantled pieces from Mike Nelson’s 2011 Venice Biennale, but looks like the leftover parts from what comes next: a labyrinth of interconnected rooms and corridors. If you’re not afraid of tight enclosed spaces then you’ll have enormous fun getting lost inside. Some rooms are dusty and empty, with creaky doors leading to rooms sparsely decorated with the remnants of worlds gone by. And smells! One room carried the stench of really bad BO. Was that part of the art, or maybe the previous occupant got a bit too scared and sweaty? If you escape unscathed, head upstairs where you’ll find an abandoned photography darkroom buried in what adults of a certain age will struggle to unsee as Tattoine.
London’s been oversaturated with “immersive experiences” for about a decade now, but immersive environments have always been the intention of artist Mike Nelson, born in Loughborough, UK in 1967. He’s had quite a head start, which explains why his spaces shift your imagination into overdrive unlike any other I’ve seen.
The current show is a survey, a term Nelson prefers over the more traditional ‘retrospective’, of his previous works, mashed together and reimagined in a gloriously dystopian way. So fully realised that you’ll easily imagine you’ve woken up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But by the time I got out of the third maze and looked back at the sand I started to wonder: what do all these scavenged materials mean, and does any of it matter?
Old stuff falls out of use and gets discarded every day. New things are made that enable better ways to live, so people eagerly move on and rarely look back. Reviews are filled with conjecture regarding what Nelson’s environments imply, since the artist says little and leaves things open to interpretation. But it’s telling that the most commonly heard comments at the preview were all variations of “This reminds me of my dad’s shed!”
In the upstairs gallery, where I saw those loud lift works, you’ll find six stand-alone sculptures comprised of found parts and old machinery. It’s the closest the exhibition gets to traditional contemporary art. One work, finished only a few days before the show opened, contains Mike’s actual tools and piles of nails pulled from the timber used in the downstairs door maze. Mike said it was an attempt to make a survey of himself.
So maybe the show isn’t a warning about the future, but a statement about man’s (or one man’s?) inability to leave the past behind. Which reminds me, you’re all invited to the wake for the 13-year old coffee maker that I just replaced.
Plan your visit
‘Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons’ is at the Hayward Gallery (@hayward.gallery) until 07 May
Adults £15 - £16 / Children (12-16) £6 and under 12s go free / Concessions & discounts available
Visit mikenelson.org.uk and the Mike Nelson Wikipedia page for more information about the artist