Arcade Fragments
For a sense of this progect generally, read this post.
Arcade Fragments:
- THE ATOMIC PRIESTHOOD
If the nuclear waste respository under construction inside Nevada’s Yucca Mountain endures for a thousand years – if a seismic event does not cleave the mountain’s shell of volcanic rock, if the buried radioactive materials do not seep into the water table – it is likely to outlast our own civilization. If it endures for ten thousand years, it is likely our languages will no longer be intelligible to the humans that have replaced us. Government officials are not known for taking extraordinary measures to guarantee the well-being of people outside their constituencies, much less their millennium, but public anxiety about such a project is such that the usual charge of guarding the safety of our children and grandchildren has been extended: we must now include distant descendants whose only inkling of our existence might be a mountain pregnat with decaying plutonium and uranium isotopes. The Department of Energy’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management must also find a way of sending a message to whatever comes after us: stay away from Yucca Mountain.
- Alexander Provan’s “Menacing Earthworks”/ The Believer May 08
appropriated from http://reader2.com/phoenix2818/status:to_read/?skip=&style=blocks&perpage=90&sort=date, post being appropriated from http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1859845908.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
- We wanted our audiences to be a working class one, it was as simple as that, we weren’t interested in anything else. But when we [went] to London to see – I think it was – Red Radio, our impression was that the audience was middle class …
We were bitterly disappointed. It struck us as the worst kind of amateur theatre; there was a painted backdrop of a battleship. They’d gone inside with a vengeance. ‘Gone inside’ was the phrase we used to describe the transition from street theatre to curtain theatre. In the process of moving on towards a better theatre they had, it seemed to us, abandoned completely everything they’d learned in the agit-prop theatre. The acting style of the new thing was amateur acting that was a shoddy imitation of the West End.
We came back from London very disillusioned. I remember very clearly the sense of outrage we felt at the way our attempts to engage in discussion were ignored. We felt we had been sold a pup. We had this northern chip on our shoulder, and we resented being talked down to. We also had this working-class thing. We felt we deserved only the best. We said, ‘We’ve got to be better than the other side, better actors, better producers, better singers. We’ve got to do everything they can do but do it a hundred times better.’ That was the end of our contact with the London WTM. From that time on we were going it alone. Our work in street theatre had taught us a lot and we had no intention of abandoning the things we had learned. The Agit-Prop techniques could be adapted and developed, and could form the base of a much more effective theatrical form.
Our aim, we said, was a theatre which would reflect the ideas and needs of the working class. In order to do this we would have to move on a series of different fronts simultaneously. It wasn’t enough to keep the bourgeois forms and change the heroes. To change the costumes was not enough, to change the furniture was not enough, to present a play in the dead setting of the formal stage was not enough. A complete set of stylistic problems had to be solved while at the same time you were developing a new dramaturgy. Simultaneously we should be solving a whole lot of acting problems. We must, we said, create a theatre of synthesis in which the actors will be able to sing, dance and act with equal facility. Now none of these ideas was new.
- Ewan MacColl, From Theatre of Action @ http://www.wcml.org.uk/people/em/theact.htm
Commentators have most recently immersed themselves in the historical potency of the Wilsons’ found environments, in particular the decommissioned buildings of the Stasi headquarters in Berlin [Stasi City, 1997] and US Air Force base at Greenham Common [Gamma, 1999]. The artists themselves continue to investigate potential sites of dramatic narrative. Yet it would be to do Jane and Louise Wilson a disservice to suggest that their works operate merely to invoke the ‘architectural uncanny’ for the sake of theatre. A consideration of their work, mindful of Foucault’s own theorisation of spatial conditions, reveals an on-going fascination with the divergent architectural, psychic and social manifestations of power. Their filmic journeys and kaleidoscopic views are not just spectacular responses to site, but visually compelling investigations into the tension between control and resistance.
- Claire Doherty’s Awaiting Oblivion
with Who Knows Where The Times Goes by Cat Power.
Jane and Louise Wilson’s film, shot in a series of empty industrial and urban architectural spaces, alludes to the ghostly presences of the people, politics and industry that once populated these landscapes. Combined with Cat Power’s version of Sandy Denny’s song, the piece evokes a sense of places lost to the passage of time.
Anyone hoping to be converted to the Wilson ’cause’ should be warned that what follows may not offer such an opportunity. In conversation, the twins do not provide impressive words and lofty analyses. Indeed, listening to them talk about their work, you get the impression you could hand them a history of golf clubs and they’d thrive on it for weeks. What is most striking in their conversation is an evangelical zeal for minor detail. Trying to fathom why they chose Westminster as the location for Parliament, you get nothing but anecdotes: the trials of gaining film access, the labyrinthine nature of its corridors, a doddery old lord they saw there, the periscope at the top of the Commons, when it was built, when it was rebuilt, etc. And not a lot else.
So you have to read between the lines. This reluctance to overtheorise their work is what has enabled others to load so much onto their work instead: to the point where Crawl Space becomes the very incarnation of the Freudian uncanny, Stasi and Gamma replicate the very structure of Bentham’s Panopticon, and the buildings they choose to film become the very symbol of Foucauldian ‘power’. At the other extreme, you can drain them of theory altogether and see the Wilsons as image-driven urban chic trendies, purveyors of a perfect late-90s Wallpaper* aesthetic – albeit with an ironic ’spooky’ edge.
Since Lisa Corrin is taking the former point of view in her Serpentine catalogue interview, I tackle the latter interpretation of the ‘twins as package’, and Jane is immediately troubled. They’ve heard their videos compared to pop promos, but as for the Stasi photographs as fashion shoot fodder, they are horrified. “Hang on, those chairs are from a Stasi prison, not Wallpaper* magazine!”, she protests. “We go to the real locations where the spaces do exist, and if we’d gone in and arranged those chairs like a Wallpaper* spread fair enough, but it’s a document and that’s not Wallpaper* magazine at all. That annoys me. It’s something we’re very conscious of, never going in and intruding too much and not doing what magazines do, which is to fetishise things. We hold back from it. The whole point when we’re shooting is that we don’t go in and say ‘oh, can I move it just like so’, we just leave it. People who say the photographs look like wallpaper should pay a bit more attention.”From the lead in to an interview with Jane and Louise Wilson
From the same interview:
Nevertheless, there is an ambiguity here between their own very earnest (almost reverential) approach to a site, and the fact that the resulting photographs have to be taken without their accompanying travelogue. Their faith in photography’s documentary character is almost absolute: they firmly believe that the places they film are so potent that it’s impossible to impose one’s own vision on them. So anyone could go in there with a camera and achieve the same effect? Louise: “Yes. Definitely. In general, I would say that the architects have done it all for us.” (The twins elect not to mention their very selective choice of filming tools, the Steadicam and the 4 ml lens, which replicate the visual syntax of horror movies and lend a hyperreal, druggy edge to the images that are far from objective.)
Video artists Jane and Louise Wilson, who are identical twins, have created a multiscreen, cinema-scale video installation that focuses on institutional architecture and the collective fears and phobias it can carry. Their work explores how the concept of power is made physically present in architectural design. Gamma was filmed at Greenham Common, an American military base in Berkshire, England, that housed cruise missiles during the Cold War. Decommissioned in 1992, the base now lies deserted, its history captured by the Wilsons in disturbing images that seem both documentary and surreal. Moving through area after area of the site, the Wilsons’ camera evokes a sense of oppression, paranoia, and terror imparted by the everyday materials of military reality and the prospect of nuclear war. Filmed in a style combining Hollywood movies, TV melodrama, news video, surveillance footage, and film noir, Gamma sends the viewer into a disorienting yet intensely absorbing realm.
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