DIG

Should you have the opportunity do take the time to visit DIG, a new Artangel commission by Daniel Silver. I’m currently contributing to a new level one course that will be presented by OCA in the near future. It looks at the Creative Arts and examines the themes of time and place which are explored by artists from many disciplines. This sculptural installation by Silver has both time and place as central themes whilst drawing upon archaeology and psychoanalysis.
The piece is hidden away in a long derelict site behind metal grid fences and hoarding on Grafton Way, WC1E. I’m not even certain I’ve arrived until I spot a small sign on the hoarding announcing DIG. In this area of London you are hemmed in by monumental buildings and this sudden gap is a bit like a missing tooth.
Silver has known the site for many years, has had his eye on it and it has become a place to him rather than a space with no meaning. He has a history there now. There are two levels to the piece which is situated on the site of what used to be one of the largest Odeon cinemas in London before becoming an abandoned, unfinished extension to University College Hospital. A house of film has become a relic of a bygone era, no doubt due in part to the advance of digital technology. Silver’s focus, however, is on unearthing relics from a more internal past. On the first level, which seems to be one below ground, we arrive to trestle tables of terracotta, marble and plaster figures, many with obvious finger indentations and lots of repetition, idolatry all lined up in rows. The setting of an archaeological dig creates an artificial sense that these artefacts, many covered in mud, have been unearthed, having last been in the hands of people from 100’s or 1000’s of years ago. It is a very direct reference to the passing of time and memory and how we make sense of the past in the present.
Some of these sculptures are based on ornaments from Freud’s desk in his treatment room. Silver has recreated row upon row of small and often identical sculptures that conjure up strange science fiction echoes of dreams and nightmares with human and animal features mashed together. Aspects of different gods are incorporated in to some. The sculptures are laid out systematically, as the findings of an archaeological dig might be. Some reviewers have interpreted this as a nod towards the nearby British Museum and the rows of replica statuettes that can be bought in gift shops there, however to me it appears that someone is trying create some sort of inner order, to tame the unconscious.
It is on the floor below that this installation starts to work on a more visceral level. Six to seven feet high sculptures of what appears to be Freud’s head on obelisks are set against the decay of the underground space and on the right hand side, in a dark corner are two further tall pieces. One has a dress like shape an is perhaps a priest of some sort or it could be a female form and it is set against the gloom of the basement wall. The surrounding dank concrete and wet muddy floors create a drop in the temperature and to add to that it’s a drizzly grey day. It is at this point that the work begins to plumb the depths of your being and I feel some faint stirring in my belly. To me these two pieces were the most effective and I am still trying to work out why.
Basements and cellars are places are usually dark, pitch black even and we often approach them warily. They are used to create fear and tension in film, particularly in horror movies. As Bachelard points out “In the cellar dark prevails both day and night’ (1). There are no opportunities to open the windows and turn the lights on just to check nothing unpleasant is lurking. Despite this level of the exhibition having one side completely opened up to daylight the venue still taps into this association for me. Dream analysis uses basements/cellars to represent the subconscious or in Jung’s case the unconscious. And in Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space he discusses the significance of each storey of a house in relation to the mind and with reference to Jung.
“Here the conscious acts like a man who hearing a suspicious noise in the cellar, hurries to the attic and, finding no burglars there decides, consequently, that the noise was pure imagination. In reality this prudent man did not dare venture into the cellar.” (2)
There are other interpretations of the piece. One being that Silver is creating a fictional religion for a bygone tribe and this presents me with a whole host of unanswered questions. Where did the imagery of religious idolatry originally come from? Are dreams, the imagination, the conscious and subconscious, and perhaps the higher consciousness sometimes linked to religious experience and meditation all linked? Could these representations have been the result of the imagination, meditations and dreams of past peoples? If dreams are a key to the subconscious, does our subconscious modernise over the centuries? Do we still dream of the same strange creatures we always have and are they different in different cultures? Are the anxieties we feel the same? Do the symbols identified by dream analysts change over time? Again Jung had a theory about a collective unconscious which existed across cultures and times. This is related to his theory of archetypes. For example, we all experience birth and death, these will have a similar presence across cultures in our unconscious, but how they manifest themselves symbolically in our consciousness varies from one culture to another.
I have only touched upon the ideas here, there is so much information available and I can see there is much potential to explore the ideas Silver is playing with in this piece. It inspires me to go and research further both Jung and Freud and revisit their relevance to the art world and also to consider the stories of the origins of religious idols. Please feel free to comment and advise!
DIG runs to 3 November 2013 and is open 11am – 6 pm, Tuesday – Sunday. Admission is free
References:
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston 1994 (first published 1958)
A book recommended to me to start looking at Jung. Jung, CG. Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Image Credit: Tuli Litvak, thepop.com has a gallery of images from DIG