Mike Nelson
The Deliverance and The Patience
Essay by Richard Grayson
The
Deliverance and The Patience
Installation view
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"Covered streets like corridors with doors opening into rooms on
either side, hidden terraces high above the sea, streets consisting only
of steps, dark impasses, small squares built on sloping terrain so they
looked like ballet sets designed in false perspective" is how Paul
Bowles described Tangiers, the city in which he chose to live. In the
cadences of tentative fascination we can identify the push and pull of
emotion that the geographies - as much mental as physical - of the place
engendered in him. Things are no longer entirely themselves: boundaries
and state have become slippery, contingent, fluxing between forms: streets
are 'like' corridors, squares 'like' ballet sets: it becomes a setting
for a mysterious and unknowable theatre.
In Tangiers being 'between states' was literal as well as metaphorical.
It was an international zone: a place where no one legislation held sway
and so it became a magnet for western 'outsiders' criminals and bohemians
both, people fleeing the law and/or seeking the luxury of living on the
outside of the law with the concomitant freedom of behaviours granted,
be they sexual or chemical, as well as the liberation that being partially
outside of western economic and financial structures provided in cheapness.
Bowles. Ginsburg, Orton, Gysin and Burroughs as well as gunrunners, confidence
men and crooks all spend time there: For Burroughs the International Zone
became his 'Interzone': a place of potentiality, of licence, of terrifying
protean possibility where dialectics of freedom and domination are in
constant flux. It is a place where, as Prospero says of his Island in
the Tempest, " all that is solid melts into air".
Law ceases to be absolute or monolithic in ports, and at sea it becomes
atomised, contained within the limits of the ship, it threatens constantly
to evaporate and is maintained only through force and the acceptance of
the captain's command. In case of mutiny the equations shift, in case
of piracy the lawful can co-exist with the lawless, subjugation with freedom
in a state of suspended animation. In the 17th and 18th century the heroes
of the British Navy were involved in piracy: the career of Drake was paid
for with gold taken by force from Spanish ships, and much of his crew
was press-ganged: a term that time has made romantic, but which masks
the bleak reality that they had been kidnapped and enslaved. The difference
between Drake and a buccaneer, between upholder of the law and outlaw,
becomes hallucinatory, a statement rather than a state. It is no surprise
then that sailors became prime movers in rebellion, not only with in the
microcosm - the ship, the mutiny - but in the macrocosm - in North America
sailors helped secure numerous victories for the forces against Great
Britain between 1765 and 1776, leading Thomas Jefferson to list impressment
as a major grievance in the Declaration Of Independence. In ports they
manifested 'a militant attitude toward arbitrary and excessive authority,
an empathy for the troubles of others, and a willingness to co-operate
for the sake of self-defense" (Linebaugh and Rediker' The Many Headed
Hydra. Beacon Press, Boston, 2000): attitudes and activities that were
viewed as indubitably criminal.
On July the 25th 1609 The Sea-Venture, a ship carrying sailors and settlers
to the new colony of Virginia was shipwrecked on the coast of Bermuda.
At the time a large proportion of 'settlers' were in fact forced labour,
slaves essentially, made up of Irish rebels, Gypsies, religious protesters,
the dispossessed and the criminal. These people were drawn from prisons
and moved to the new colonies and plantations as the possessions of merchants,
where they were then sold on. A half century later in Barbados a worker
fetched 'one thousand five hundred and fifty pound weight of sugar a piece,
more or less, according to their working facilities" (from the petition
of Rivers and Foyle against slavery to the House of Commons 1659). Virginia,
their destination was represented at the time as a paradise - 'And cheerfully
at sea/success you still entice / To get the pearl and gold/ And ours
to hold, Virginia/ Earth's only Paradise" ('The Alchemist' Ben Johnston).
In fact it was wrecked with disease and starvation and run ruthlessly
as a capital venture by the Virginia Company - a private enterprise dedicated
to maximising return to its shareholders. It was a settlement where people
were reduced to cannibalism, one man killing his wife, chopping her up
and salting her for food. Bermuda conversely was regarded as a terrifying
place full of savages, an 'Isle of Devils' . This description turned out
to be as at odds with reality as was the description of Virginia, Bermuda
was an edenic land 'the richest. healthfullest and pleasantest they ever
saw" (Silvester Jourdain: A Discovery of the Bermudas, Otherwise
Called The Island of Devils. London 1610). Seeing this, many of the castaways
decided to do nothing that would take them from this island, and vowed
to try and set up an autonomous community, outside of previous structure
and law, a new society for this new land. Accounts of this event, and
this island, form the basis of Prosperos Island in the Tempest which Shakespeare
wrote in 1610. (Shakespeare was also an investor in the Virginia Company).
In turn it is transmuted again in the Science fiction film 'Fantastic
Planet'.
The
Deliverance and The Patience
Installation view
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Gonzalo
and Sebastian survey this land, imagining how they might live : 'the commonwealth
I would by contraries / execute all things; for no kind of traffic / would
I admit; no name of magistrate; /letters would not be known; riches, poverty,
/ And use of service, none; contract, succession, / Bourne, bound of land,
tilth, vineyard, none;'...says Gonzalo. the world is to be reformed, recombined
reinvented: The World Turned Upside Down as was proclaimed during the
English Revolution
In real life however, the community failed after ten months, and the authorities
eventually prevailed on the settlers, and they built two ships called
The Deliverance and The Patience to continue the voyage to the plantations
of Virginia - vessels that Nelson has memorialised in the title of this
work.
We move through the wooden door into spaces that shift us between sweatshop
and workshop, travel agents and gambling den, from rooms for pedagogy
to rooms for pleasure. Spaces where we can slip from one state and condition
into another. The immediately startling thing about this is that these
spaces and architectures are unpeopled - we have entered some Marie Celeste,
and we are perhaps the first person to step there since...well, whatever
happened... and first off it is ourselves that we find being shaped and
articulated by the spaces as we are cast in the role of part trespasser,
part archaeologist and part detective: a person moving through the traces
of other's existences trying to understand what catastrophe may have caused
this emptiness and what condition may have shaped the inhabitants lives.
This is a role we know well from films and other fictions, walking through
the ship and into the hatchery in Aliens, pushing open the door of the
empty shack in Evil Dead. In this progress there remains always the unnerving
possibility that the rooms are not as deserted as they seem - a pile of
cigarette butts in the corner suggests recent occupation, and we become
trepidatious, acutely aware of moving into rooms and spaces that are not
our own. Will they return to this biker's bar? - if indeed it is a biker's
bar, for if it is, it must be the hang-out for the Brechtbanditos - will
we be caught in the act?
After a while it becomes clear that there is no single unitary narrative
nor a single mystery, but that there are many, branching out from each
room and door, suggesting an infinity of readings and of occupations.
At the same time, commonalities reveal themselves: there is something
contingent and ad hoc about each location. Spaces have been occupied and
changed - an attic warehouse has been settled, squatted, things have been
made to make do: with the inventiveness that the need for survival brings.
Many rooms suggest the possibility of transformation, or resistance, of
a hard won habitation against difficult odds, others of a vague, half
hinted means of escape, - a seedy travel agents, a bar and the liberation
that alcohol brings. Like moving through the Interzone, Nelson has us
constantly between states, between readings, a spiralling complexity that
multiplies binaries: for every hinted liberation there is an oppression:
the sweatshop, the collections of objects that may have an occult significance,
for every claimed space the fact of the ultimate desertion. It is in this
flicker between states that the dark power of the work ultimately lies,
suggesting the constant moment-by-moment negotiation with the world and
its forces that our existence demands - the series of momentary, grasped,
freedoms, groupings, and organisations by which we empower or comfort
ourselves, the strategies of survival. These utopian moments can occupy
a criminal space - the sailors actions being seen as seditious, the pirate
democracies that existed on Privateer ships, or in the Pirate settlements
described (and fantasised) in William Burrough's' Cities of the Red Night
are all defacto criminal or criminalised.
These are brief flarings in an encroaching darkness and so cannot claim
ontological nor eschatalogical functions or outcome: The people travelling
on the previous manifestation of the Deliverance and the Patience were
leaving the utopian space of their castaway republic, their Prospero's
Island, and travelling to the far more brutal shores of a colonised Virginia.
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