Mark Wallinger
carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Germany
Back in 2004, Mark Wallinger donned a bear suit and spent nine consecutive nights inside the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin for his performance, Sleeper. Rather than a playful or awe-inspiring spectacle, the performance primarily bore witness to the artist’s distress as he padded barefoot, aimless and dejected through the interior of the glass-walled museum. Visitors peered in from outside to watch the artist trapped in his cage. Reflecting on the performance when he won the Turner Prize in 2007, Wallinger recalled a moment when, alone in the middle of the night dressed as a bear in an illuminated glass box, he thought to himself, ‘It is a strange existence that brought me to this point.’
This spectacle of unease – of a creature’s inability to find comfort in its environment – as well as the strange modern circumstances that have engendered these conditions is also the subject of a new work by Wallinger, on view in his current gallery show at carlier | gebauer, which opened last week as part of Berlin’s annual Gallery Weekend. For The Unconscious (2010), Wallinger culled photographs from websites devoted to camera-phone snapshots of people sleeping on public transportation taken by fellow passengers. On these websites, sarcastic copy constructs a narrative: ‘Just another day at the office. Oof. How much longer can I ride the train from 8:30–6 while telling my wife I have a job?’ Blown up, pixelated, and stripped of captions, Wallinger’s versions of the photographs, with recurring motifs of heads at odd angles, eyes and mouths slack, portray bodies straining to set themselves at ease.
But the heavy exhaustion that pulls these commuters into sleep also makes them weightless in their unconsciousness. With the whites of their eyes showing and their mouths agape, they are vulnerable and ecstatic. Wallinger plays with this combination of the eerie and the preposterous in two other pieces on view in the same room. Steine (2010) consists of one thousand numbered stones scattered around the gallery floor, marked with an identifying number in white pen. Despite the simplicity of the organizing principle, the rocks-as-objects and their numbers elude to the desire to read meaning in an arrangement and its markings. In The Magic of Things (2010), a video of edited scenes from the 1970s sitcom Bewitched, Wallinger shows us only the scenes in which Samantha, the witch, uses her supernatural powers to ease her housewifely duties. A knife wobbles through the air, carried on fishing wire, to cut a freshly baked cake; a broken mirror repairs itself with a simple scene cut. But these low-tech effects delight rather than disillusion and both pieces, as well as the lowbrow connotation activated in the title of The Unconscious, convey the impression that even the ordinary, the mundane, and the transparent can be enchanting.
This kind of simple charm and rapt attention is evoked again, and then focused, in the installation next door, entitled According to Mark (2010). One hundred unique chairs stand in ten rows of ten (again, these numbers, and so carefully arranged: how ominous!), facing the back wall of the gallery. Across the back of each chair, the artist has hand-written ‘MARK’ in black marker. A white string affixed to the arm of each chair stretches to a metal ring at the top of the back gallery wall, where the strings converge into a single vanishing point. Wallinger has united the distinct chairs, subordinating them to a unifying activity. The artist has conjured an invisible audience, reverent before his strange and bewitching acts.
Anna Altman
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