Saturday 8 September 2012

'Site' - The Aesthetics of Order and Chance

Mark Wallinger offers a Deleuzian meditation on form and paradox

"The problem of consistency concerns the manner in which the components of a territorial assemblage hold together. But it also concerns the manner in which different assemblages hold together, with components of passage and relay."

- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (1980)


ON show at the BALTIC, Gateshead, until mid-October, Site is Mark Wallinger’s first major solo exhibition in the UK for more than a decade, with four installations themed around order and chance. The Other Wall, 10000000000000000, Construction Site and MARK focus on identity, precision and randomness, echoing Nature’s capacity to spellbind with images both of aesthetic approximation and of structure.
As the centrepiece, 10000000000000000 is a scene composed of 65,536 stones on individual black and white squares. The title is the binary form of 65,536 in decimal, that figure itself the number of charts in Western geomancy, the magic art of divination – that exactitude, though, is one branch of the visual antithesis this exhibit illuminates, that of the apparent and the obscure. On the one hand, the chessboard effect denotes precision and accords definition to the stones, to their individual uniqueness and contrasts of shape, colour and texture. Amid that continuity and linearity, though, we are aware, also, of their seamlessness, their vast array making the stones indistinguishable, chance and randomness within Nature denying any one a stand-alone attraction or quality.


In The Other Wall, Wallinger follows thinkers and artists as varied as Lowry, Sartre and Pink Floyd in making a celebrity of an everyday structure. A wall of red, grey and brown bricks, each is labelled with a set of numbers in white chalk. Mirrored here, perhaps, is our tendency to imbue even the inanimate with salience, the seemingly unremarkable noted, rationalised, adapted. The Other Wall tacitly recalls Duchamp’s Fountain, with the Frenchman’s inscription ‘1917’ citing the year of its production, and, here, Wallinger’s ‘1559’, ‘1914’ and ‘1974’, as three of countless examples, moving beyond such chronology but still exciting speculation as to their purported significance – Years? Codes personal to the artist? Application of utterly arbitrary digits? The succession of numbers follows no apparent logic – ‘1415’, ‘4775’, ‘7023’, ‘6421’, and so on – but the curious specificity with which Wallinger endows each brick stresses what could just as easily be a speculation about Nature as, here, a numerical oddity – amid the apparent chance yet individuality within Nature, does there exist a method, an order, an element of determination to even the most disparate social and spatial mechanisms?


An eighty-three minute beach scene, Construction Site shows workmen erecting and dismantling scaffolding at the water's edge. The sea and the construction, as markers of the natural and the created, conjoin Nature and labour, and yet we also see them functioning independently. The men putting up the scaffolding do not stop to observe the water, an aesthetic that is curiously incidental to their work, and of which, as an audience, we are at most implicitly aware. We are not "here" to observe the lap of the wave, but the efforts of the workmen. The natural scene is not, as might stereotypically be supposed, more compelling by virtue of its beauty or tangibility, since Wallinger offers a curious juxtaposition. The ripple of the glistening water is as much a romantic cliché as it is an aesthetic taken for granted, and thus only unconsciously acknowledged by the viewer. Meanwhile, though, it is not the construction per se that is striking, but the setting for that action, a shoreline.


Therein lies orthodoxy and idiosyncrasy - we are used to seeing scaffolding, and understand its purpose, but not in so arbitrary an environment, one we associate with hedonism rather than work, passivity rather than endeavour. Despite their being fused in one continuous shot, then, order and chance are rigidly dissociated - the power of the water could impede the men's work just as its lull is purely a backdrop; at the same time, the workers are curiously oblivious to either its wonder or its threat, Wallinger having them execute their responsibilities as if they have been commissioned or that this is the traditional arena for such industry. Wallinger makes an idol of logical rigour rather than innate beauty, definition and precision emphasised over magnitude, temperament and chance.


Finally, MARK is a video presentation showing that name on a succession of walls - those of hospitals, prisons, homes, railway bridges, underpasses - different wall designs, sizes, periods, but each carrying that same inscription. "MARK" is, of course, the artist's signature, but, as a term rather than name, conjures the broader social role bound up in such domestic or public spaces - unity, compassion, punishment, servitude, destitution, and challenge. Each makes a mark on society, be it in our perception of those settings, or in their reality.

The sequence tells us much about personhood and personality. Firstly, personhood. Across the places in which "MARK" appears, those who inhabit them may experience variable levels of agency or autonomy, but are bounded by "personhood" - the status, if we are to use a standard definition, of being a person - a condition that defies social, moral or professional differences between individuals, and, in being classified as which, questions of our goodness, opinions or freedom are seemingly immaterial. If, as a term, "human being" is more concerned with the existence of the individual, rather than with any criteria or conditions that must be satisfied to "meet" that definition, then ethical and other judgements about, for instance, our conduct or cognitive well-being, may be subservient to a fundamental and all-encompassing "I".


Secondly, personality. "MARK" is etched into different points on the walls - central, to the left, right, higher and lower. Such variations reflect the differences within an essential truth, that each person has character of different moods, shades and extremities - the personalities that engage the attention, those content or seeking to be more individualistic and leftfield, those who aspire, those with a more subdued demeanour, willing to "follow the crowd". Wallinger attests to those contrasts, giving us a "MARK" who cannot help but catch the eye, one that is offset to one side of the screen, one that is more obscure, beneath our line of vision, or one who is more elevated, driven, focused but not at the heart of the action. Within the psychology of Wallinger's showcase graffiti, we detect assertiveness, modesty, and the enigmatic.

In MARK, Wallinger locates equality within wholly dissimilar worlds and circumstances, be they products of the most benign or appalling instances of chance. Families, patients, prisoners, among others - his unseen subjects might never meet, and yet each desires, acts, speaks, expresses. Pronouncements on the merits and flaws of those we connect with such communities are touchingly answerable to Wallinger's neutral yet creative eye - the "MARK" that does not make statements and suppositions, but instead removes the veil of the most confident, proud, ambivalent or anonymous social categories, to hear the voices and denote the value of those within.

A stark, inspiring and fiercely original perspective on identity, organised chaos, and the reliably erratic schemes and forms within Nature.

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