Content provided in partnership with
Customs man - Mark Wallinger's video art - Critical Essay
ArtForum, Summer, 2001 by Rachel Withers
Best known outside the UK for his sardonic send-ups of all things English, Mark Wallinger has emerged as a figure whose themes extend well beyond the manners and mores of the land of John Bull. On the occasion of the artist's selection as Britain's representative to the Venice Biennale, critic Rachel Withers examines a body of work that lately seems as concerned with God as Country.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Mark Wallinger isn't keen on air travel. Flying isn't the problem, he explains; it's the airports. Checking in, navigating passport control, getting electronically frisked for contraband, running the gauntlet of customs officers: These procedures make him feel the state's full weight bearing down. So when Wallinger and his team breezed into London City Airport and shot the video for his installation Threshold to the Kingdom, 2000, without a scrap of authorization, a small revenge was scored. They set up the camera, hit "RECORD," casually looked the other way, and by the time they were thrown out, the footage was in the can. The camera filmed the reflective double doors of INTERNATIONAL ARRIVALS swinging open and shut as travelers made their entrance into the UK. Through simple means--slow motion, precise editing, and a very particular sound track--Wallinger performs a small miracle, a transubstantiation, on this banal material. Shown at the artist's 2000 Tate Liverpool retrospective, "Credo," Threshold to the Kingdom reduced a good many viewers to tears; and it's a safe bet that visitors to this year's Venice Biennale--where Wallinger has been selected to represent his country at the British Pavilion--will be similarly affected. On-screen, the airport doors open; singly or in small groups, incoming travelers (maybe weary, maybe relieved) slowly, weightlessly stride toward the camera and out of view. The images combine with the sharp compassion of Allegri's setting of Psalm 51 to form an allegory with an overwhelming message: These travelers are dead. They've arrived in Heaven; they've been forgiven. At the end of the day, it's all going to be OK.
Aha! the cynics cry. Banal images plus superbly beautiful music equals the most basic cliche in the filmmaker's book; Allegri is the true begetter of this work's gravitas, not Wallinger. The criticism is easily dispatched: Trickery is intrinsic to Wallinger's sophisticated and distinctly ambivalent conceit. Threshold to the Kingdom offers an almost ecstatic vision of a compassionate redemption that, if one peels back the surface, proves to be a sham. The airport arrival suite's purification rituals, after all, are authoritarian hocus-pocus: First your freedom of movement is curtailed, then it's conditionally returned to you--so just you be thankful. Every air traveler knows that behind the airport's doors are the beady eyes of the state's border controls and--a small step away, at least for the imagination--the apparatus that devises and manages the UK's immigration and asylum laws. The desperate people who don't make it across the threshold into the promised land (by air or any other means) are screened from view, literally and metaphorically. In most cases, one suspects, their sin is simply to have been unlucky. The story behind Psalm 51 is equally unedifying. "Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow ... let the bones which thou bast broken rejoice ... Then will I teach transgressors thy ways." These are the words of King David, repenting for a crime spree involving kidnapping, rape, and murder. God subsequently gets his own back with a swift infanticide. It's an ugly fable in which one brutal patriarch imposes talion law on another. It's also, of course, part of the text that many strenuously advocate as the proper foundation of Britain's morals. Yet the psalm, in its choral setting, is beautiful, and the installation is terribly moving. A crisis is forced. The artist giveth, and he taketh away.
Temporal and divine authority are again brought to account in what is now probably the artist's best-known project: Ecce Homo, 1999. Originally commissioned to stand on a vacant plinth in front of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, the piece is a life-size cast of a loincloth-clad man crowned with barbed wire--an image of Christ as political prisoner; a corrective, in part, to the imperial swagger of the square's earthly monuments. Superficially, Ecce Homo seems an uninflectedly humanist statement; on this basis, both the UK broadsheets and the public at large gave its temporary installation a hearty thumbs-up. Critic David Burrows, however, has less reverently observed that Ecce Homo might represent Christ as readymade, in UK parlance the "bog-standard" ordinary geezer turned icon. Furthermore, there's something palpably out of kilter about the figure. Wallinger says he adjusted areas of its face and chest to add an echo of classical modeling, so maybe this supplies an explanation. Proportion is a tro ublesome thing: Tweak one measurement and all the rest will need rejigging. Ecce Homo is a mule, neither a full-blown instance of classical humanist figuration nor a one-off life-cast; neither transcendent homo universalis nor the Real, individual thing. Somewhere between concept and mere object, Ecce Homo could feasibly be labeled "abject," a term that returns it neatly both to the rejected Christ and the Duchampian urinal.
