Interview with Mike Nelson

Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts) (from outside), 2008.

First of all I’m so glad that you’re showing an installation here in Copenhagen. It’s not more than a year ago that I saw your incredible work A Psychic Vacuum in New York, and was thinking: ‘this will never happen in Denmark’. So tell me how this show came to be?

Marianne (Torp, red.) asked me to do a show two or three years ago. She had seen my work Triple Bluff Canyon in 2004 at Modern Art Oxford, and she asked me to rebuild this, but I wasn’t really interested in rebuilding that particular show at that time. People often ask me to do shows or rebuild works, sometimes they only ask once and don’t really follow it up, but Marianne kept her interest and asked me again. I knew that in terms of doing a show here it wasn’t going to be the easiest place to make a work especially for me... but then I knew that Marianne was so committed that the support would be really good.

I understand we should be happy that Marianne is working at this institution?

Yes absolutely, for me anyway, because it’s hard work to make such a thing in here! She showed me the spaces they had up there, which really...well, the space is made for hanging paintings of old masters. But then she showed me one room, and it felt appealing to do just a small work in there, but in terms of the architecture of this museum I really liked the succession of three rooms punctuated by these two lift shaft areas which accentuate the mirrored aspect of its layout.

Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008..

So you were too tempted? – and you even enlarged the project significantly?

Yes, I was too tempted. The motif of replicating and doubling has been a constant devise – however mirroring I’ve never done before, at least not to this extent. I think that several of the shows recently have become almost like a fictionalized critical essay; a sort of moment from an older installation. The tire piece in Barcelona (After Kerouac at Santa Monica, red.), was an example of this; the idea was really born out of the fact that I used to use tires to mark the walls in the big labyrinth works. So these marks on the walls somehow were taken and became their own narrative in their own sense in the work After Kerouac, a sort of meta narrative structure where by focusing in on a detail in a past work another story is told.       

When we were visiting your work last year in New York, Jacob Fabricius told me about your building process: you build everything up perfectly, and then only afterwards you tear it apart again?

Yes, Jacob would know this process intimately having worked together several times. It’s quite difficult to explain to the plasterers and painters, especially when I have already started to knock the surfaces back a bit even while they were still working elsewhere in the space.

Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.

Which considerations are you having before building these gigantic installations? Are you working differently in an institution compared to places like the old Essex Street Market in New York?

The big difference is that the installation in NY could have been real, it’s unlikely, but you could possibly believe it: You walk into a abandoned Chinese restaurant, and then the succession of rooms just continue. Where as this structure could never exist within this museum or a building of this sort. So it was a conscious decision for many reasons to expose it's falsity from the outset, the exposed timber structure is built from a rough sawn type of wood  seldom used these days, this helps to accentuate its sense of being a construct both literally and conceptually.  This I think is read for many only on a subconscious level.    

So you don’t want to make a perfect illusion?

I’m already admitting to this illusion before you even get into it. But I’m also doing this, because it makes you feel you have come to the back of the exhibition, and you think you’re entering it from the wrong side, this sense of somewhere perhaps to be encountered after rather than before is more acute, because we have left the walls unchanged from the previous show - the green paint, screw holes, and even some text – and so you can tell that we seemingly haven’t cared about the back of it. Perhaps you feel slightly like you’ve undermined the devise or the trickery of the artist by somehow finding yourself in a place you shouldn't be, but ultimately this gesture is a sacrifice, a double bluff setting the viewer at ease to prepare them for the greater trick that lies ahead.  It also allows a greater freedom in terms of the fictive nature of the space inside.

Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.		Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.		Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.

I kind of felt like the installation already began when entering the 2. Floor – where you have to follow a nearly invisible X to find the right way...

Trying to get round in this place anyway is – or trying to work in the place – is horrific! You just cannot find anything and you have to go through so many different doors every time you have to go anywhere.

Are you mimicking this in your work?

Actually the communication guy was trying to make it more like this, and I had to stop him, because it was really irritating. So what we have now is very toned down to what they were going to do, which was really awful. They really wanted to make it into some kind of game or something, like: ’Where on earth could the exhibition be?’ But it’s a whole floor anyway, so how could you miss it? By doing that they would have put a certain reading onto it, which I don’t want – the work is not about getting lost in the museum, or some kind of ’hide and seek’ or something...

Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.		Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.
Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.		Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.

You have built the installation as a kind of cabaret scenery – what is your intention with this particular structure?

I came up with the structural devise of the two mirrored buildings punctuated by the lift shaft spaces and connected by the long curved corridor quite early on. The idea became almost academic – like a fictive critical essay on my own practice.  It was almost as if the identity of the spaces had become secondary, redundant in the face of the machinery of the device – somehow I had to find something which made sense of the mechanism itself. So the idea of a theatre came from two directions; firstly in terms of form and space I was reminded of a deserted night club I had built in Glasgow some years earlier, and secondly what became apparent to me conceptually was that it was the theatricality of the gesture of mirroring that was of interest. Hence the second part of the title: ’a structural conceit’ – the work is about ‘the idea’ of theatre I suppose – about the theatricality of the devise. So in a sense that emphasizes very strongly what my intent is in terms of the actual work.

I think of the place as an early- or mid-seventies place where poets or single performers would play, people sitting around the edges of the sunken stage. Certain people might call it a stage set, a built set in which you walk and articulate through your decisions. So not only are you bringing your own histories in terms of the reading of the spaces, but you’re actually physically articulating them as well, navigating them... So in a way, to go back to the idea about the critical essay as an aspect of my work, the theatricality of the viewer being the player is heightened by the sense that they are entering into a theatre. And within that theatre they are the players, walking upon the stage, because the stage for the performers in the fictive theatre in the round is sunken - or at ground level as it were.  From the outside you can hear the sound of footsteps and closing doors almost like a Brechtian performance, in this way the work makes knowing allusions to the development of my own practise and encourages a more controlled reading at this level. These ideas are made more apparent in the subtitle ’A Performance in Three parts’: the performer obviously is the audience.

Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.		Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.

Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.		Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.

You are also working a lot with the viewers’ associations, fx by the strong and different smells in the rooms?

The smells are quite weird in there, I must admit – especially in the big long corridor – it’s intended to smell, but it’s quite hard to predict how it’s going to smell, it kind of depends on what stuff you bring in, and then it’s just the people as well – spending time in the space. And some people become obsessed with the dust; a Dutch critic wanted to know how I transported the dust, which is kind of funny, because it really just appears by itself.

You have a reference to Borges in your title, I also thought about Marcel Proust as a writer with similar topics: it’s all about memory, hidden experiences, associations, time and the theme of ‘doubling’...?

That’s completely right actually, Proust is a good reference point. It’s kind of a strange process - after the first site visit I develop the intentions about what I want to do, and how I want to manipulate the viewer or make the viewer feel from it, and then when I return I have to do it with what I can find. It’s quite complicated with this one because everything is doubled – but also mirrored – so every door you find you have to find exactly the same door but hinging in the opposite directions, which is actually hard. And it’s hard on your head trying to work it out whilst building, even though you’ve planned it all out on a floor plan and stuff. You see, at the moment, I’m not quite sure how it works yet, even though there have been moments of clarity in there – I just finished it yesterday morning, so you never really quite know what it actually is doing to the audience until some time has elapsed.

Can you try to describe, then, what you hope it will be doing?

When you walk through the first space, as interesting as the space is in itself, it works in a similar way to previous smaller works of mine. Then you pass through the lift shaft area and get to this big curved corridor, which you walk along, and then you’re distracted by this door to the right, and you go down and you try it but it’s locked. So you turn back round again but you’re slightly distracted so you practically forget how long you’ve walked and how big the curve is and from which direction you might have come.  You walk back again and you think you’re going the right way, and then you come back to a space that kind of looks the same but doesn’t feel quite right (the second lift shaft space), and then you go back into the structure you’ve just been in, but it’s like…it feels kind of wrong – it’s almost like being confronted with something you’ve just experienced, you’ve just had a moment in the present, and then it passes into your memory and then you’re presented with it again, but it feels wrong. In that sense it is doing what I hoped; this feeling that it looks the same but it feels completely wrong. For some reason, when you’ve entered from one side, the other side feels wrong.

Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.

Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.		Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.

It’s the small displacements in the two mirroring sections – it looks nearly the same, but then again with small variations. Is that on purpose?

I haven’t been obsessive with fixing everything down, because then it becomes really anal. You know, there’s one door with a different colour and so on – because in the end you can’t remember exactly, and these moments when something feels like it has moved slightly makes the uncanny shift in perception worse, it’s a bit like somebody has just been in front of you and is playing tricks on you or something. What I really hoped for from the work beyond the more academic considerations in relation to my own work was something akin to religious iconography, where symmetry and mirroring are often used to articulate sensations of awe or wonder – especially in representations of the occult, or witchcraft and so on – and it does give you that slight sense of something off, or dark and wrong. In terms of Proust, which I think is a good reference point, it kind of brings up that sense of your actuality, of your existence...

It is a bit like déjà vu. I can always remember when I was a child, and the first time it occurs, it really freaks you out – and you had this feeling, well, that can’t be, but I’ve been here before, so is my life in repeating circles?  And your parents just said, ‘well, that’s just déjà vu, it just happens and you accept it.

But it doesn’t explain anything just to give it a name?

No, in that way you don’t dwell on it anymore, you say, oh, it’s just déjà vu... And this work is almost like a devise for a forced déjà vu.

So are you trying to fuck people’s minds up?

A bit.

Compared to other works, you have less stuff in there and also fewer references to political topics fx?

 Well, I’m sure we also had that conversation in Basel [[14. juni 2007] Interview: Mike Nelson] – about the aspect of political art. In a way that bus piece (The Pumpkin Palace, red.) was probably the last work where I used Arabic iconography, which I still feel very legitimate in its use at the time, but now I feel far more uncomfortable, because my interest in the Middle East and the Arab world was and is a personal obsession. Now I feel that there’s a shift in the equation in terms of dealing with that subject matter. It seems like you have three categories working alongside each other: the political situation in the Middle East, the actual situation with people who are involved with it on either side, and then you have your career in the art world. Imagine they all have sliding buttons on them, and as the visibility of the horror and the atrocities to the people goes up, then there’s a value in terms of visibility, or even currency in the art world do likewise. I suppose that I’m just worried that unless you  have something really relevant to say, then you may be just annexing other people’s discomfort or horror for your own kind of game. So I suppose in a way, I’m hoping to make something that effects you! This work could be used in a more metaphorical way, or as an analogy, you could just use it more loosely in terms of a political readings: things that are repeating itself, the mirroring, the sense of discomfort etc.

Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.		Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.
Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.		Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.

You say that you feel uncomfortable with too obvious political statements now – but why has it changed, is it because the world situation has changed? Or is it you as an artist?

Yes, the world situation has changed, but also for me, my interest in the Middle East was not purely political, it was born out of a sort of ’dodgy’ exoticism – I found it very seductive when I was younger, it was somewhere I could immerse myself where the foundations of the belief appeared spiritual as opposed to economic  – but the thing that I was attracted to and really loved about the Arab world is still there, the people are the same etc. – But now as soon as you put in an Arabic text or sign it’s about suicide bombings etc. It’s a difficult territory, unless you make it overtly about that, I suppose my worry about it is that the situation there is very complex, whereas more often than not art about it isn't.

But if you wanted to articulate something political, there are other less obvious topics going on in the world. Isn’t it also an artistic choice to avoid being too politically obvious?

Perhaps in a way it has more to do with getting older. It’s funny because if you read the earlier works of Borges, they are far more bound up with social or political concerns, and then his later work became more esoteric...

Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.		Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.		Mike Nelson: Kristus och Judas: A Structural Conceit (a performance in three parts), 2008.

Talking about Borges – what’s behind your enigmatic title?

Yeah, my Swedish title! It’s just to irritate the Danes and the State Museum (laughter). Kristus och Judas is a fictional book within a short story called ’Three versions of Judas’. The book Kristus och Judas is a story written by a Swedish theologian from the turn of the last century from the university of Lund, which seemed quite appropriate somehow – it being just across the water from Copenhagen. In it he argues that in fact Judas was the son of God and not Jesus, because Judas’ suffering was far greater than that of Jesus. I just liked this sort of idea in relation to the work; the sense that Judas couldn’t exist without Jesus, the dependancy of one side upon the other. It was a sense that one action is done in one space, and therefore the same action has to be applied in the second  – there is something essentially quite odd about it.

When I started making this work I was reading an essay by Stanislav Lem on three different stories by Borges, this led me to re-read two of these stories, which seemed very relevant to the work here. One was the ‘Three Versions of Judas’, the other ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ was a story about a missing fictional universe only referred to in a certain subsection of  a particular encyclopedia. In it I found a reference that said: ’mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the numbers of man’ which I found relevant to a particular sense of dislocation I had experienced in previous works where I had employed a doubled aspect and hoped that the mirroring would do likewise.  In these works there was a sense of a possibility of the rooms repeating to infinity, when in fact the suggestion had only been made by the doubling of one. Subsequent meetings with other visitors along the way brought one to consider a scenario, where they too were replicants of themselves and therefore logically yourself.

This idea about ’deceit’, you are very explicit about it, both in the title and by referring to Judas the traitor – why?

It’s quite nice to turn it around, this idea about deceit and being deceived – it’s inherent within the work because you’re constantly being deceived, and you’re even being told so. In terms of Christ and Judas it makes sense as well, because of course Christ knew he was going to be deceived – he wanted to be deceived, whether he was actually in league with him or not. But I was slightly worried that it would be misread and seen to be about Christianity, which of course it isn’t – but maybe it is about creation?

Thank you