Luke Skrebowski on the art of Mike Nelson

OVER THE PAST THIRTY YEARS, Mike Nelson has expanded the avant-garde's long ragpicking tradition. His dense, material work reconfigures the discarded and the obsolete to produce naturalistic installations that subtly reveal their own artifice. The artist's famously phantasmagoric production avoids didacticism while rousing us from our own ever more dysfunctional neoliberal dreamworld. True to form, Nelson's survey "Extinction Beckons" at the Hayward Gallery, organized by Yung Ma, was a deliberately off-kilter not-quite-retrospective that was highly self-conscious about its own position within our accelerating economic, social, and ecological crises. The exhibition avoided the traditional trappings of the mid-career survey: no vitrines featuring old installation shots, plans, or notebooks here. Instead, the artist remixed his greatest (and lesser) hits—works that were originally strongly associated with specific sites—while self-reflexively examining the practice of reinstallation that this approach entails.

Nelson's exhibition tightly controlled the sequential unfolding of its various mise-en-scènes, directing its viewers along a specific but unexpected route. Instead of entering the show through the Hayward's main inner doors, we had to turn right, into what is traditionally a side gallery. This detour knocked us off-balance from the get-go, disrupting our bodily expectations and de-structuring the gallery's model of optimized "visitor flow." (The effect was understated, however, compared with the lacerating violence that Nelson memorably dealt to the same institution more than a decade ago. For his contribution to the Hayward's "Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture" in 2008, the artist restaged To the Memory of H. P. Lovecraft—a work first realized in 1999 at the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh—battering and scratching the gallery's once pristine white walls, which seemed to have been attacked by some sharply clawed and heavily muscled creature.)

From the entryway, we passed through a large, dimly lit chamber tinged with the distinctive but now outmoded red light of the photographic darkroom, a signature Nelsonian device. As our eyes grew accustomed to the surroundings, we made out a range of objects propped against the walls or placed on rows of heavy-duty warehouse-style shelves: some wrought-iron gates, various sets of floorboards, an old desk fan. These were the disassembled, partially packaged-up components of I, IMPOSTOR, 2011, the celebrated installation Nelson created for the Fifty-Fourth Venice Biennale, itself a reworking and extension of MAGAZIN: Büyük Valide Han, 2003, the artist's contribution to the Eighth Istanbul Biennial. Whereas the earlier work transformed two rooms of a late-seventeenth-century Turkish han into a photographic darkroom filled with archival pictures of its own changing facade, the later piece re-created not only the darkroom but also architectural elements of the Büyük Valide Han inside the late-nineteenth-century British pavilion, carefully disorienting the categories of "East" and "West." At the Hayward, Nelson had reduced I, IMPOSTOR to a barely recognizable kit of parts. The disarticulated presentation mirrored the artist's own idiosyncratic practice of disassembly, storage, and reinstallation: Rather than carefully preserve his site-specific installations in their entirety for acquisition (or destroy them after deinstallation), Nelson warehouses various of their parts haphazardly in storage locations around the UK (originally of economic necessity but in more recent years, presumably, by design, to enforce an ethic of bricolage). Consequently, when he wishes to reinstall a given piece, he must collect its surviving components and remake missing elements as required. (For "Extinction Beckons," Nelson prefabricated his reinstallations in an old Argos warehouse in Orpington, on the edge of South East London, working side by side with a large team of specialized technicians.) Nelson mimics and mocks just-in-time manufacturing (where identical commodities are assembled from standardized parts as demanded by the market), reassembling his "product" on commission but in an unstandardized, unpredictable, and deliberately "poor" form. The show's first room thus served as metafiction, illuminating the production logic of the fictions to come.

Of all the works on view at the Hayward, Nelson's celebrated The Deliverance and The Patience, 2001, originally commissioned for the Forty-Ninth Venice Biennale, was perhaps most faithful to the original in its installation. We entered the hulking drywall-and-studwork structure via a battered door, finding ourselves inside a warren of painstakingly constructed rooms, each furnished to suggest a different counter- and subcultural community, even if the precise identity of the group remains ambiguous. These include a seedy, nautically themed bar whose L-shaped countertop, bookended with tatty model galleons, bears duplicate PLEASE DO NOT SPIT signs taken from Hong Kong's Star Ferry service; a purple-and-blue-walled interior with an impromptu cultic altar topped with skulls, candlesticks, animal horns, and a DVD of the controversial Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba; and a small, bright-red alcove, within which a Chinese socialist-realist poster overlooks a two-person card table topped with a small roulette wheel and upturned tarot cards. A dirty verisimilitude obtains in each, despite the fact that, at the Hayward, Nelson had violently punctured the installation's drywall partitions, exposing the rooms’ artificiality.

The environments exhibit at once a literary descriptive brilliance and filmic mastery of montage, drawing on the ideas and devices of (male) authors and auteurs of the modernist and science-fiction canons (including William S. Burroughs, Stanislav Lem, Sergei Parajanov, and Andrei Tarkovsky). To that end, the rooms position the viewer as an activated "reader," not a direct participant. There is no invitation to "engage" with these environments; Nelson is not interested in mobilizing social relations as art. In fact, Nelson underscores the very absence of the living social subjects who (as his fictions persuade us) originally inhabited and shaped these unpeopled interiors. As Nelson put it in an interview for the show, "I like my spaces very kind of empty, ultimately, with only the viewer, the person walking in, as the thing that aggravates it, sort of articulates it."

If the rooms came across as relics from the past, suggesting cast-in-amber replicas of social environments liquidated by capitalist development, that effect has become more powerful in the two decades since the installation's initial presentation. The interiors paradoxically recall highbrow versions of "immersive" historical attractions, even as their fundamental grittiness provides a measure of resistance to the experience economy. (On my visit, plenty of people were taking photographs of the installations, but none were taking selfies.) The rooms thus summon all the Benjaminian pathos of the outmoded but much less of the revolutionary spark. Yet all political hope is not lost: On the roof of the installation (accessible by a staircase), the artist has added a selection of objects held in reserve and not deployed inside, hinting at potentiality, at new forms that might be assembled from the wreckage of the past.

Nelson's reinstallation of Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed), 2004, began to realize the potential of reconfiguring historical material in ways only intimated in The Deliverance and The Patience. Originally produced for Modern Art Oxford under the title Triple Bluff Canyon, the piece pays homage to Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed, a 1970 work at Ohio's Kent State University for which Smithson half-buried an old farmland structure in dirt with a backhoe just a few months before the murderous suppression of an on-campus protest against the Vietnam War. In his original version, Nelson submerged a replica of Smithson's woodshed in sand rather than dirt, evoking the desert landscapes of the Middle East in the second year of the Iraq War. At the Hayward, Nelson meticulously reconstructed that dune, attempting even to replicate the color of the sand, which was freshly quarried for the occasion, but strewed its formerly untouched surface with blown-out tires. These were the component parts of M25, 2023, the latest entry in a recent series comprising objets trouvés collected from Britain's motorways that, in a nod to J. G. Ballard's Crash (1973), efficiently summon the deathly nexus of the motor and petrochemical industries, whose geopolitical implications become more explicit through Nelson's recontextualization.

The dune called out to be clambered upon; of course, it could not be. Instead, Nelson afforded us the opportunity to clamber inside it, where, at the end of a tunnel, we found not the maroon octagonal vestibule from the original but a darkroom repurposed from I, IMPOSTOR, with photographic prints hanging out to "dry" that portrayed various early works by the artist. Next, we were in the woodshed itself, where we found a barrel of Shell-branded oil partly buried in the sand. This was one of the most suggestive and satisfying remixes in the show. Here, Nelson connected his own practice of installation—the way his works are dispersed and reconstituted in new configurations—and Smithson's dialectic of entropy and negentropy, which, in turn, opens out to larger philosophical questions concerning the passage of time and the inevitability of change. Against a backdrop of unrelenting, deathly dispersal, Nelson conjured the vitality of successive generations of life coming together in new historical constellations.

WHEREAS THE FIRST HALF of "Extinction Beckons" showcased artworks that foreground capitalism's (spectral) social relations, the second half featured pieces that thematize its productive forces, both Nelson's own (via his tools, workbenches, and studios) and society's more widely (through the presentation of industrial machinery and a focus on the readymade). Throughout his career, Nelson has delighted in immersing his audience in an alternate reality and in pulling the rug out from under them. Indeed, this dynamic emerged at the earliest stage of his mature practice: The room-size, Godard-citing Agent Dickson at the Red Star Hotel, 1995, made for the Hales Gallery in London, was followed in short order by Studio Apparatus for Camden Arts Centre—An Introductory Structure: Introduction; A Lexicon of Phenomena & Information Association; Futurobjectics (In Three Sections); Mysterious Island/See Introduction/or TEMPORARY MONUMENT, 1998, wherein the artist literally and metaphorically turned out the contents of his studio in a dense agglomeration of scavenged and flea-market-sourced material. While neither of these works was included in "Extinction Beckons," their interplay could nonetheless be felt throughout.

For tools that see (the possessions of a thief), 1986–2005, 2023, the artist lays out the tools of his trade. On a long, improvised workbench, he had arranged a circular saw, large piles of nails, a crowbar, a carpenter's belt, and a carpenter's square. Underneath, we found various plywood test assemblies and lumpy blocks of concrete. Collapsing process and product, Nelson underscores the residually artisanal character of his production; he has always made a point of the fact that he makes his own work and remains a hands-on creator of his installations today, even though he also now collaborates with professional technicians to help realize them. In so doing, he undermines the managerialist separation of mental and manual labor that structures the hierarchy of social class and, to a significant degree, artistic production after Minimalism, with its hierarchy of outsourced fabrication. Yet there is no simple romanticization of skilled labor here. The piece is equally autobiographical, speaking to Nelson's blue-collar background and to the attendant financial and material constraints he faced early on in his artistic career.

If tools that see evokes the handmade and small-scale, The Asset Strippers, 2019, a collection of large-scale British industrial and agricultural machinery acquired from company liquidators’ online auctions, brings to mind mass alienated labor. The work was originally conceived for, and shown in, Tate Britain's Duveen galleries, the first public galleries in England designed specifically for the display of sculpture. (The space was funded by the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen—an "asset stripper" par excellence—who made his fortune selling the artworks of the declining European aristocracy to ascendant American industrialists.) Nelson nods to this history by exhibiting these appropriated machines as if they were sculpture: Each component of the installation sits on an improvised pedestal cobbled together by the artist from industrial fittings and materials. Yet despite the critique of Thatcherite deindustrialization and the evident tongue-in-cheek, retro-Caro-baiting irony that are both at play in putting obsolete British industrial machinery onto bespoke pedestals for pseudo-formalist aesthetic appreciation in the Duveen, Nelson's "sculpturalization" of the readymade felt like the least sure, and most historically questionable, gesture in the show. What does it mean to undermine the foundational Duchampian move—which amounted to the negation of sculpture—by presenting the readymade in this way? Is this a belated rerun of ’80s appropriation art's knowing, politically quiescent acceptance of the institutionalization and aesthetic recuperation of the readymade? Or does it go further, by way of those custom pedestals, and suggest that the traditional mediums have gathered sufficient power to subordinate the readymade to them? Such a claim would be troubling indeed. For all the sensitivity to the troubled dynamics of Britain's imperial-industrial past and deindustrialized present elsewhere in Nelson's practice, The Asset Strippers also risks nostalgia, appearing to romanticize the relatively stable social relations once afforded by factory work, overlooking the patriarchal and racist dynamics that characterized the history of British industrial labor at home and the immiseration it wreaked and/or relied on abroad. This is a rare blind spot in Nelson's otherwise sharp-eyed look at the politics of production.

Near the show's conclusion, we found Triple Bluff Canyon (the projection room), 2004, the artist's obsessive ethnography of his own studio space, and thus artistic production, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The piece is a full-scale, fully furnished re-creation of the studio in a Victorian house in Balham, South London, that he rented in the early phase of his career. The interior is crammed with raw materials and the tools that he uses to transform them: a book on Conrad, a roll of duct tape, an inverted barstool, a craft knife set on a huge table. A wicker model of a bull's head and a small, crudely worked painting of a chimpanzee hang on the wall. Books, planks, and stacked canvases fill alcoves. Hard up against the wall opposite the fireplace, another workbench rests on filing cabinets. Here, the artist's work most closely approaches the fantastical Borgesian notion of a map at the same scale as the territory. It also inverts Rachel Whiteread's Ghost, 1990, her famous volumetric plaster cast of a similar Victorian room, transforming that work's blank allusions to negative space and Minimalist sculpture into a richly furnished interior that functions as an impression of Nelson's artistic psyche.

Projected onto a wall, a 1993 slideshow from one of the conspiracists of the New World Order made delusional connections among objects, events, and symbols. If this evokes the paranoid right-wing subcultures whose numbers have proliferated in the period in which Nelson's leftist work developed, it also serves as a dark, inverted analogue of the artist's own obsessive-compulsive meaning-making. By sharing the dense particularity of his own artistic habitat at a particular point in time, Nelson radiates the dense particularity of his own subjectivity. He invites his viewers to engage the richness of his imaginary, assuming and reinforcing the richness of their own. In so doing, Nelson advocates for the ongoing viability of an empathy that rejects the binary of self and other, the binary that has served as the fundament on which a long-brewing late-capitalist fascism has fed. Its deconstruction is thus even more important amid the ongoing collapse of the neoliberal settlement in which Nelson's subjectivity, as well as our own, has been shaped.

Luke Skrebowski teaches the history and theory of contemporary art at the University of Manchester, England.