Robert Wogan at Universal Concepts Unlimited - New York - exhibition of the artist's work

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Michael Amy

Robert Wogan's recent installation, Below (United Radiance), evoked the labyrinthine interior of the SS United States, designed by William Francis Gibbs and launched in 1952; it remains the longest passenger vessel ever built in the U.S. On her maiden voyage, she crossed the Atlantic Ocean in three days, 10 hours and 42 minutes--a record that remains unsurpassed. (The ship, retired in the late 1960s, is moored in Philadelphia and will be restored by Norwegian Cruise Line and returned to service.)

Wogan is an installation artist obsessed with abandoned spaces. He explored the dark interior of the ship one night with an infrared video camera strapped to his head. His construction in New York at Universal Concepts alluded not only to his own lonely pilgrimage through the ship's desolate industrial landscape, but to the mysteries of this man-made environment cut off from contemporary reality.

The small exhibition space was subdivided into four parallel, stainless-steel-lined passageways. In the semi-darkness of the gallery, the loud, repetitive sound of footsteps on metal and heavy breathing greeted visitors who walked down the short corridor opposite the entrance. In the first passageway, light from the bulbs running down the main axis of the ceiling bounced off the immaculate, silvery surfaces. The noise coming from the most distant corridor lured one toward it through two more darkened passageways. Once the final turn was made, the viewer was confronted on the facing wall by a 55-minute loop of footage--shot head-on inside the ship by a fumbling and stumbling cameraman. The grainy black-and-white images of walkways, ladders and stilled machinery were in stark contrast to the slick, shiny surfaces on which these images were reflected.

Wogan's methods of luring viewers into corridors, using loud rhythmic footsteps and breathing, and filling a wall with tedious footage of subterranean passageways, brought the work of Bruce Nauman to mind. However, Wogan's ambition to build metaphors for derelict industrial spaces has a poetry all of its own.