Mike Nelson in conversation about Extinction Beckons

This monumental undertaking saw the spaces of our gallery utterly transformed, to house Nelson’s sculptural works as well as new versions of some of his best known large-scale installations. For a number of the works this was also the first time they have been on display since their original presentations.

For the exhibition catalogue the artist joined Hayward Gallery Assistant Curator Katie Guggenheim for an in depth conversation about Extinction Beckons, including many of the works featured, and the process of presenting these works in our Hayward Gallery. And we present an extended extract from that conversation, here.

Katie Guggenheim: The first room of your exhibition is conceived as a storage room. It contains the remnants of your installation I, IMPOSTOR (2011), but it also refers to another work, The Cosmic Legend of the Uroboros Serpent (2001), which contained The Coral Reef (2000) in its disassembled, stored form. This introduction seems to frame your approach to representing previous works; it also speaks to the reality of the material existence of these works, whose component parts exist in storage long after the ‘live’ experience of the work has ended.

Mike Nelson: The idea of storage, and the re-articulation of materials, is a constant presence in my work. It goes back to the work TRADING STATION ALPHA CMa (1996), which was a constructed storage warehouse in my first show at Matt’s Gallery in London. To include my previous work in its uninstalled, stored form is both a brave and slightly stupid thing to do, because it undermines the sovereign nature of each work. It is only really possible because these things aren’t owned by anyone, which means they are more elastic in terms of how they can be reimagined. I’m interested in dealing with questions around consumption, capital and the invisible structures that we’ve made, that we live within, and that we take for granted.

I’m fascinated by something that only exists for a moment, then collapses. And I think that can be seen very much in some of the more sculptural works, where things just fall back to their very raw material. At a certain moment, they resemble or suggest something; you turn again, and they have just gone back to the matter they once were. Or the objects they were, the material, steel or stone. I think that fragility, that ambiguity, is where the best art lies.

KG: As an artist who has often created large-scale, immersive and even site-specific installations, how are you approaching the challenge of remaking them for this exhibition?

MN: The idea of trying to unravel the history that I’ve made for myself and reconstruct it is rather daunting, not just in physical terms but in emotional terms as well. Having to rebuild old work is not as simple as giving the plans to somebody. There’s a sense of revisiting another time in my life, of competing with my former self to try and reimagine something that can’t be made in the same way again.

All work fails to a certain point, and when you try to remake it, you’re aware not only of the original problems but also of the problems of you at this point trying to reimagine it. My previous experience of remaking work – say with The Coral Reef, which I rebuilt at Tate, or the AMNESIAC SHRINE (2006) work that I rebuilt for Moderna Museet – has informed the way that I’m approaching this survey show, which, even given the huge scale of the Hayward Gallery, is still only a small section of what I’ve made.

KG: Perhaps the most complicated work to recreate has been the enormous, multi-room installation The Deliverance and The Patience (2001). You haven’t rebuilt it before, so this is the first time it will be seen since it was made.

MN: The Deliverance and The Patience has a strong relationship to The Coral Reef. They were built within roughly 18 months of each other. They were the two works that completely changed my standing as an artist, The Coral Reef in a national context and then The Deliverance and The Patience, at the Venice Biennale in 2001, in a more international context.

What those works had in common was a desire to construct a space for the viewer to enter into that could never have existed in reality and was created for that encounter. The relationship between sculpture, space and the individual was very important. Those works were also a reaction to the obsession with video projection in the 1990s, and the lack of patience people seemed to have for looking at objects at that time. The Coral Reef was a structure that entrapped the viewer; even if they were just looking to find their way out, looking was something that they had to do.

KG: The power of your large installations is also that they are overwhelming. They are multi-sensory experiences that completely absorb the viewer in another world.

MN: Some people understand the world through straight, academic structures, and some people understand it through other means – through the eyes, the touch, the feel, the smell. Our experience of the world as we perceive it through our own bodies, our own senses, is a very specific and individual one. We don’t know how anybody else perceives the world, even on a very basic level of what something tastes like, or the colour of the sky. That’s one of the magical aspects of art: the possibility that you might get some sort of sense of one person’s perception of the world in which they exist. That might sound insignificant in a world of billions of people, but actually, it’s through that opportunity to step outside your own experience that you can really understand it.

KG: Are you familiar with the concept of predictive processing? It’s the theory that all of our perceptions are actually predictions. We don’t have the cognitive capacity to process all of our incoming sensory information as continuous live streams. Instead, we operate with predictions that are confirmed or corrected by the incoming sensory information. When it gets really interesting, and where I think there is a relationship to your work, is that it means that everything we see, feel, hear and taste is a prediction, like a controlled hallucination. This puts so-called ‘real’ experience on a different plane of reality – it’s equivalent to memory, or imagination.

MN: I completely agree with that. Our understanding of experience is a construct. We have our own trajectory through life, and we experience a world which other people may not recognise. What is outside of our bodies is far more complex than our eyes could ever tell us. The idea of a memory projected into the future makes complete sense to me. It ties in with some of the writings of Stanislaw Lem, which were a great influence upon me when I was younger. His writing was so complex and confusing. It was categorised as science fiction, but it was more than that. It was philosophical and scientific but incredibly imaginative and humorous as well. If I think of my Studio Apparatus series as a structure that projects the future of my own artistic production based on previous experience, but at the same time parodies that practice, then that is what you’re talking about, ultimately.

KG: Yes. I also think that it could be the case with the immersive installations that simulate the ‘real’ world.

MN: I suppose that brings us back to The Deliverance and The Patience, The Coral Reef and the idea of the construction of a space that you never thought you would enter. But now you have entered. And not only have you entered it – it’s also entered you. It’s now in your memory. 

People who’d seen those two works described spaces to me as if they had existed within that work, but they weren’t in the work. They’d somehow confused the work with their own, real, lived, experience, outside of the construction that I’d made, and through this the work had expanded. When you think of all the different minds that visited it, all their memories, all the different spaces and places that might have been annexed into the work – this was quite an incredible achievement in many ways. There’s this slightly megalomaniacal aspect of consuming all of these memories belonging to other people into this one work. And then the work disappeared.

KG: Often in your work you play with the way that the value, significance and meaning of things – objects and material – shifts over time: the analogue and mechanical technology that has been replaced by the digital, for example, or artefacts with particular religious or cultural significance, discovered out of context at a flea market.

MN: Yes, there was a moment after the fall of the Iron Curtain when Europe was awash with old Soviet military stuff. Objects that had had this almost sinister, mysterious sense suddenly flipped into bits of kitsch. What I find interesting in objects is a sense of the presence of life, and of time, which is hard to manufacture. An object is a marker of time. The idea of time travel has been an obsession since consciousness began. During this period of Covid-19 our reliance upon the Internet has increased, which has somehow artificially accelerated time, but there’s a disjunction between us as animals, physical beings and the flat sense of time that the digital offers. We’re making ourselves obsolete. The first things to go as technologies accelerate are the things that take up the most resources: the large mammals, of which we are one.

This goes back to the idea of making art and to a consciousness of the fact we are what we are. The hand print on a wall in a cave is really one of the most incredible expressions of our existence. Everything we’ve done since is just a very elaborate reiteration of it. We’re talking about what it is to be human, what it is we perceive, why we perceive, what other people can understand – empathy – or whether people empathise at all. All this relies on the construct that we live within, because it is all a construct ultimately, and without that we return to our animal state.

KG: This idea of time travel, or of material things transcending time, is interesting in relation to the conspiracy theory video – Jordan Maxwell’s ‘Basic Slide Presentation’ from 1993 – that is part of your work Triple Bluff Canyon (2004). Today, the content of this video is the stuff that the darker corners of the Internet lives off, feeds off – and we have had to think very carefully about how to show it. But you found the video as an object – a VHS tape – in a San Francisco flea market.

MN: I’ve always had a slight obsession with things that are on the point of obsolescence, as in the industrial machinery in The Asset Strippers or the darkrooms in the works at the Istanbul or Venice biennales. The boxed case of a conspiracy theorist was an interesting object to me. It came from the same flea market as the edition of Arts Magazine with the image of Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) on the front, which became the catalogue for my exhibition, Triple Bluff Canyon, at Modern Art Oxford.

I reconstructed Smithson’s woodshed for Triple Bluff Canyon not just because of my interest in Smithson and that work, but also because the magazine had transformed it into this portable object; objectified it almost as a thing in itself. It was almost conspiratorial, this connection – that the VHS tape and the magazine from the flea market should end up forming the basis of that exhibition.

KG: Some of the significance of Smithson’s work is derived from the events that unfolded after he made it – the political demonstration and police violence at the University, and the work’s partial destruction.

MN: Yes, it was only really after Smithson’s work was made – and after the demonstrations and the shooting of the students at Kent State – that the work was politicised in relation to the idea of burying and covering things up. So my rebuilding of the woodshed was like an unpicking of that structure of what things mean or what they come to mean.

KG: Since Studio Apparatus for Camden Arts Centre (1998), you have often included the means and sites of artistic production in work. tools that see (the possessions of a thief) 1986–2005 (2016) is made from your own tools, and Triple Bluff Canyon includes the entire contents of your studio reassembled exactly as it was in 2004. What does it mean to you to fold the making of the work into the work itself?

MN: The Studio Apparatus series is a mechanism I used, an apparatus, to predict the future of my own making. It goes back to Lem again, and his book The Futurological Congress. At one point, he’s talking about future linguistics, where you distort, morph, combine words to make new ones, and these new words will describe something that exists in the future – a way of predicting the future through linguistics. So I made a new word, futurobjectics, for my own purposes, and then applied it to my own work – where you combine and morph, distort and forget what it meant before, in order to predict the future of your own making.

KG: The methodology of the Studio Apparatus – this idea of constructing new work from previous work – feels very much like your approach to this exhibition. Reflecting on the title, Extinction Beckons, it begins to feel like a kind of survival mechanism – a way to construct the future, but also to make sense of the present.

MN: The paradox of experiencing the desire to exist in the present, while also enjoying the complexities of consciousness, is a tricky one. The human brain’s constant negotiation between remembered pasts and possible futures can compromise a more sensual type of experience. I’m attempting an assessment of a practice that is caught in a similar flux, and that is a difficult prospect. But looking back at the structures that emerged in my earlier work – in the Studio Apparatus series, in the Amnesiacs and their shrines – there seems to be a possible path: a way to articulate my practice in the way that it was experienced and then half remembered.

The title Extinction Beckons articulates these contradictions to some extent. It was the title of my first publication in 2000. The combination of words was taken from a sticker on a motorbike helmet, which was part of the first Amnesiacs exhibition, Master of Reality, in 1997. The motorbike helmet was a flimsy piece of fibreglass modelled to resemble an exoskeletal skull, the kind of protection against a high-speed collision that is optimistic, at best. In this context, presented on a tacky sticker, the statement was really appealing. To me, the inherent optimism of its dark humour negates the bleakness of its sentiment, and this somehow seems to encapsulate all of the contradictions of what it is to be human. 

Main image of Mike Nelson in conversation at the Hayward Gallery by Peter Woodhead