You walk away from the bustling Southbank and into the Hayward Gallery, two doors later you are lost. You have come to see Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons but you have found yourself in a storage room, red darkroom lights buzzing. There are stacks of doors, strange bubble wrapped objects, the remnants of a city, or a set. Before you realise quite what you are doing, you are assembling the matter in your mind, searching for clues, writes Madeleine Kelly.
You cannot stay too long in the storage room, you can’t escape the unsettling feeling that you have trespassed into someone else’s space, that whoever left this mess might come back and find you alone scouring for answers. So you push on to the next gallery; an attendant stands by, a familiar figure that might ground you in the strangeness of Nelson’s worlds.
In this space is a maze of interconnected rooms and corridors. An abandoned cutting room with a rusty pair of scissors, a school desk with a child’s name engraved, a captain’s bar, a travel agent’s office. In each corridor the doors seem to multiply, spitting you back out into strange halls. You bump into other visitors trying to find a way out, both walking into the same room several times. After a while you are panicked, yet somehow also playing.
There is a doom to all of Nelson’s works: the uneasiness of abandoned rooms, the corpses of old tyres shored up in the sand around a bunker. Upstairs, Nelson takes the old machines of our industrial past and makes sculptures, the decline of British industry set atop concrete slabs. Wherever you go you are aware of decay, of things both dead and dying – spaces slowly ravaged by time.
But there is a playfulness too, everywhere you go you breathe life back into what is left. You can’t help it; you are reconfiguring matter into meaning like the old biker gang Nelson imagines in The Amnesiacs. The gang take foam and make a face, take a stick and make a snake. Perhaps, like the bikers, your creations are uncanny perversions, not the thing but the memory of the thing. Perhaps, nothing will return to how it was, but it will return.
Nelson is involved in this strange resurrection too. He is hesitant to call the exhibition a retrospective, which sounds too finite, preferring the word survey. If you have seen his work before, this show will not be a homecoming but a fresh start. Each piece has been reimagined rather than carefully recreated – the first room is the wreckage of his exhibition at the Venice Biennale. At the Hayward, Nelson invites you into the creative process, starting with the storeroom and ending with a recreation of his old studio from which a wire grid spreads out across the room, filled with grim cement casts of old masks.
Nelson’s show is a devastating and dazzling psychological exercise more interested in play than in didacticism. If extinction beckons, it comes not as a total end but a time to question, in the eerie landscape we find ourselves in, what will we make?
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX until May 7th. Times: Wed-Fri 10am – 6pm; Sat 10am – 8pm; Sun 10am – 6pm.
Admission: £15
