The Book of Sand and What Are You Thinking
The first room I come to is a few short steps down into a floor of soft, pale sand; the change in my step is even more felt than seen. There are also four monitors here softly playing white screens and looping, staticky sound.
The show sympathetically combines the language of minimalism and the architecture of their space, right up to its edges, to balance and transform both. Somehow it retains the lightness of Californian morning radio, wild horses on the plains, the quick stop of a yellow school bus, and the flashness of Silicon Valley.
Two works speak against this initial reading, providing us with counterpoint. First, the yearning tones of a slowed-down Leonard Cohen singing only “please,” reduced to a repetitive audio loop, acts as a devotional love letter to Cohen’s artistry, but also evokes the state of loss and desperation of the drunk (or something stronger) who is having a late night on the couch, being psychically enclosed by their tv set. In the basement, Empire, a fragmented and noisy vision of the Empire State Building, lit in the red-white-and-blue, is fragmented by Perspex screens and sandbags. Perspex makes us think of Covid, now, but I feel the suggestion of riot, violence.
Lastly, there is a tape of Diana, Princess of Wales’ funeral. At first this does nothing for me, but perhaps it was necessary for this UK context retrospective; “and this is what we received of you”, it seems to say, “from here, the UK is a nation in mourning.”
We exit again via the sand. Stepping out of the first time I felt like Truman leaving his show, leaving a scene to which I was born but had only just become aware of. This time I say out loud “in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening and g’night!” to my companion – and so, back into rainy London. This show is light, airy, straightforward, not literal, full of possibility. But it also touches on the darker and more precarious context California occupies; TV-land, consumer-land, within a not-wholly-benevolent America.
Until 17th December
345/200 words