An Ice Bar for Dead Souls

Roger Hiorns’ Seizure is the third Artangel project, after Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993) and Gregor Schneider’s Die Familie Scheider (2004) to use a domestic London space as its canvas. It’s worth contrasting the three pieces. When Whiteread materialized the inside of a Victorian house in Bow, it was her foregrounding of the subtle traces of familial life – a scrap of wallpaper or the imprint of a light fitting – that enabled the work to speak so eloquently of the past. Likewise, when Schneider mirrored a family home across two adjacent houses in Whitechapel, the work drew much of its power from a forensic reconstruction of the details of bourgeois privacy and its traumas.

The context and procedures of Hiorns’ piece could not be more different. We move from the East End (an area of London whose poetic resources have surely peaked after years of overexploitation) to what is by comparison the Terra Nullis of Walworth in South-East London. Rather than the previous projects’ Victorian houses, one enters the courtyard of a two-story block of 12 council flats, part of the Lawson Estate, a mixed development of high and low-rise housing typical of the 1970s. As with Whiteread’s house, the block is due for demolition, but instead of summoning East End ghosts, these scrofulous facades and weed-choked gutterings materialize the decay of the dream of public housing.



After collecting your regulation rubber boots you enter one of the flats. Straight in front of you, at the end of a short hallway, lies what must have been the living room, which Hiorns has left unaltered, its atmosphere that of neglect and entropy prized by pychogeographers. So prized in fact, that it’s become a cliché, which is what makes Hiorn’s piece such a timely departure. For while walking towards the melancholic living room one glimpses to the right its absolute antithesis.



The rest of the flat is furred with blue crystals, finger-thick, poking out from walls and blocking windows so that the only light comes from small spots on the ceiling. The uneven floor is pooled with a sump of the copper-sulphate with which Hiorns coated the rooms four weeks ago, and one can hear the suck and plash of other wellied visitors. This, together with the blue aquarium light, produces an immersive, underwater affect, with the crystals seeming to crust around you like a reef of impossible polar coral. The dankness and coldness of the space thus soon belies its initial sparkling attractiveness. What had seemed a kitschy cave becomes a mineralized womb, an ice bar for dead souls.

One attempts to allay this discomfiture by tracing elements of the original room. Hence the waist-high, horizontal band of crystal must be the moulding you noticed in the living room, while this quartz rose hanging from the ceiling was once a light-shade. At every turn, however, the urge to reterritorialize the space is frustrated by the multi-planar surface of the crystals. The gaze is distracted, unable to settle, continually relayed from point to point.



Once again it is worth contrasting this tension with the hermeneutic that the Whiteread and Schneider projects, in their different ways, encouraged. Both of the latter implied a forensic, metonymic reading, with the meaning of the whole dependent upon the cumulative, incremental registration of minute traces of a lived existence. Hiorns takes the opposite approach. His crystals have colonised the flat to efface any sense of the details of lived material histories, substituting instead a sumptuous, tactile surface that activates a series of pop-cultural registers: pound-shop baroque, pulp fairy-tales, B-movie alchemy.


In doing so Hiorns successfully eliminates the dangers that can threaten work which attempts to document repressed or forgotten lives through the textures of the built environment. Pious notions of authenticity, or a pseudo-elegiac pathos of memory dissolve here in the face of the opulence and high drama of the flat’s interior. Social realism is dialectically undermined by science-fiction and vice-versa. Yet it is in this very movement, through the void the piece opens up between familiar genres and strategies, that it so precisely attends to the unfathomable strangeness of other people’s lives.

Svidrigailov's Eternity

You see, we always see eternity as an idea that can't be comprehended, as something enormous, gigantic! But why does it have to be so very large? I mean, instead of thinking of it that way, try supposing that all there will be is one little room, something akin to the country bath-house, with soot on the walls and spiders in every corner, and there's your eternity for you.

Fydor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment , p. 355.

Scholars and Vampires

'Not every question seems to me worth asking. Scientific curiosity and omnivorous aesthetic appetite mean equally little to me today, though I was once under the spell of both, particularly the latter. Now I only enquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars. There is a man in each scholar, a man who inquires and stands in need of answers. I am anxious to answer the scholar qua man but not the representative of a certain discipline, that insatiable, ever inquisitive phantom which like a vampire drains him whom it possesses of his humanity. I hate that phantom as I do all phantoms. Its questions are meaningless to me.'

Franz Rosenzweig

Local Velophobia

Walworth Road, London SE17, 20th May 2008.

Egg in my Office; Office Egg

Very busy, not paying much attention to my surroundings as the office fills up with reams and reams of paper, shifting in the Spring breeze. What everyone, even me, now refers to as The Document edges closer and closer to completion. One morning I have time enough to notice a scrawny pile of twigs poking out from underneath a chair in the corner. Pick them up, look at the ceiling, wrinkle my brow, put them in the bin, forget about them. On another, as I return from the latest meeting, there's a kerfuffle of wings at the open window. Then at last, it's over. Success. Relief. Beer. The next day, tidying the office, I notice the twigs have returned and get down on my hands and knees to look under the chair. Its only then I realize why the same mute pigeon has been visiting my sill almost every day for the last two weeks.

A Thousand Gateaux

October 1865. The Schopenhauer experience. "A need for self-knowledge and even self-doubt took hold of me with great force. My troubled, melancholy diary entires of that time with their pointless self-accusations and desperate search for sanctity and transformation of the entire core of mankind are testimony to that entire outlook." Founding of the "Philological Club". N. gives up tobacco and alcohol, but becomes a regular at the pastry shop, where he consumes large numbers of cakes and pies.

from 'Chronicle of Nietzsche's Life' in Rudiger Sanfranski's Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, p. 356.

Smeared into Gleam

Isa Genzken's wall pieces, some of which are at Hauser and Wirth, refer fairly clearly back to the late Robert Rauschenberg's screen-prints and combines, not least in her use of the astronaut motif. But where Rauschenberg, through a process of superimposition and collage, forged a means of mapping a culture supersaturated with visual imagery, Genzken, through her seas of shining steel, dotted here and there with tiny archipelagoes of coherent imagery, does something else. Rauschenberg attempts to grasp the experience of the society of the spectacle, but Genzken is content with a notation precisely of the failure of such an attempt. The passage of the eye across the work is thus a constant glissement: the burnished steel notating nothing more than the opacity of Capital's global flows, an infinity of images smeared into a single gleaming surface, in which we think we sometimes glimpse ourselves.