EXHBITION: CELL PROJECT SPACE, LONDON 13.09.2012 - 29.10.2012

REVIEW: ART REVIEW DEC 2012

It’s easy to forget the clandestine conformity that riddles art production nowadays – until you encounter a show like Mark Aerial Waller’s SOLA, which, for all that it involves familiar media (sculpture, video, installation), speaks a different and maybe self-invented language.

As a gallery staffer starts sliding blocky movable dividers around in Cell’s darkened spaces, the first thing one sees is a faux-ethnographic object: a bronze cast featuring two serenely seated, interacting figures surrounded by ziggurats, pillars, tree trunks. It’s a replica of the Louvre’s Elamite Sit-Shamshi, ‘the only three-dimensional depiction of a ritual ceremony in Western Asiatic art’, according to a booklet published to accompany the show; the title translates as ‘the rising sun’.  If the inference is that heliocentricity has shaped human culture for a long time, notably the work is followed by SO-LA (all works 2012), a large screen showing data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory: the burning orb of the sun, monitored by a spacecraft launched on 11 February 2010 with a five-year mission to monitor our nearest star’s deep core, outer atmosphere and solar winds. Technology may shape our current relationship to the sun, but the essential fascination – this conjunction suggests – remains.  More NASA research, articulated by a professorial figure, is intercut with scripted episodes in the show’s main aspect, the 63-minute, multisectioned film Time Together, shot in Lithuania and originally made for this year’s Baltic Triennial in Vilnius. Frankly, this one is a major baffler until about three quarters of the way in, when it becomes slightly less opaque. The fictional segments document interactions between a pretty young woman and an older woman she first meets at a train station. The youthful ectomorph, having missed her stop, accepts a lift from the woman, eats a chocolate and falls asleep like Sleeping Beauty. Later, the pair run into each other again in the city, and presently embark on some kind of oblique training programme that seems to involve the younger woman intercepting strangers, perhaps to expand some kind of secret community; at one point, she tells a family friend that she can now see into other people’s dreams. The film, meanwhile, feels temporally chopped up and is strewn with ellipses, its characters knowing each other one minute, then strangers the next. At intervals, additionally, the professorial figure returns to talk diversely about the effects that the sun, and the solar winds, have on us.

How to string all this together? ‘Ritual events’, the press release says, ‘have been devised to hierarchically mediate between the universe, civilisation and the individual as a means to consider the position of our existence in relation to infinite time and space’, which might harmonise the Elamite figures and the mysterious acts and outcomes in Time Together. But the text later asserts that science is close to proving ‘the existence of history’, which would suggest a simultaneity of temporalities as opposed to how humanity traditionally measures time as linear, related to earth’s orbiting the sun. SO-LA, then, in its conjunctions of past and present, might be a model of nonlinear time that allows for the influence of mysterious ambient forces on humanity; that puts faith at once in science and magic. It might also be a muddle, or the proverbial pint in a half-pint pot. Given the choice between that and a roomful of slick, box-ticking neomodernism, though, I know which I’d prefer.
Martin Herbert