The
teleportation of Neil Webb
In “Art as Far as the eye can see”
,
Paul Virillo uses the term ‘Dromoscopy’ to
describe the illusion that when travelling quickly, by car
for example, the driver experiences the sensation that it
is in fact the world which is receding rather than the car
speeding through space.
One of the defining aspects of the dromoscopic sensation
would be the positioning of the subject at the stable
centre of fast appearing, (and fast disappearing), reality.
At its most intense and self-obsessed, there could be
something Canute–like about it, a refusal to accept
one’s limits in respect of natural phenomena, but in
lesser degrees it serves as an appropriate metaphor for a
familiar subjective/objective experience in negotiating
time and space.
Neil Webb uses metaphors of movement when describing his
work and he has described this most recent piece at Bloc
Space as ‘a kind of cosmic travel’. Instead of
the scopic, the principle sense here is aural, but like
Virillo’s dromoscopic driver, there is still a sense
of movement and it is towards interiority and stillness. To
some extent there is an acknowledgement of the speed and
facts of an external corporeal world, but there is also
withdrawal; it is part fantasy, but is also part pure
presence.
This installation sets out its stall to produce affects, by
effects, and, I would guess, to be measured by them. If the
work engages (if it knocks you out), its good, if it
doesn’t, it fails. Its success may be judged on if,
or indeed, where it transports the ‘viewer’.
Three large, pristine, gloss-black, spray-painted aluminium
panels, hang on three of the walls of Bloc Space. Described
by Webb as ‘voids’ they reference the monoliths
of Kubrick’s “2001”, but these are souped
up and fully loaded. There is a nod, deliberate or
otherwise, to Rothko, in an acknowledgment of the
chapel-like dimensions of Bloc space. There is also an
attempt to make the shiny panels appear to hover by the use
of U/V back light but it’s never quite clear how
effective this lighting is. Unlike Rothko’s
dematerialisations, Webb’s panels are still, cold and
hard facts.
These panels are also the source, if that’s the right
word, of a great deal of sound. They are in fact the
unconventional ‘speakers’ of a sound
installation but are more ‘metal’ than quiet
contemplation. In fact, to think of them as speakers is
slightly misleading. They utilise a process of vibration
via technology developed by Webb, which he originally used
to turn large plate glass windows into amplifying devices.
They are speakers, but not as we know them. Against the
fourth wall a seating bench doubles as a bass bin from
which deep sound rises up through the body.
The sound is loud, very
loud,
and it fills the space with something unfocussed, lush and
ambiguous. It is mostly electronic, spatial, sweeping and
filmic. At over 45 mins in length there is a coy promise of
a climax, some kind of an accretion and narrative in the
work. The teleology of some distant point plays upon the
codes and quotes set within it. Through the use of the
sound of a mellotron and the mediated sound-clips from
‘2010’ there is a summoning of filmic tropes of
space travel, cosmic distances, and outer limits.
There is more than hint of nostalgia here; this is
nostalgia as a melancholic response to a loss of feeling.
It is feeling the loss of feeling amounting to emptiness in
the place where those feelings used to be. The fallible
gorgeousness, pure fakery and past-glories of the sounds of
the mellotron make perfect sense.
Like much Sci-fi, despite its futuristic metaphors,
Webb’s work is a journey into the past. This is
nostalgia for the possibility of a future long since gone,
an imagined future of the 1970’s and 80’s.
It’s strange that the sounds of the future seem so
dated and outmoded, like science fiction is something over.
When did we move away from a future potential, when did the
future become so enmeshed with the present?
The thing of the future is a thing of the past.
Ultimately, this is more Dark
Star than
2001;
it trips you up to remind you that despite all the fakery
there is no loss of effect. In fact, fakery
is
the
effect. Significantly, in the midst of the nostalgia and
oceanic soundscape it is easy to miss the work’s
delicate immediacy. At the same time as the work toys with
references to a future that never was, it also vibrates and
creates real time ‘accidental’ blips, squeaks,
harmonics, vibrations, pulses and sound waves in the
present tense, creating a new performance at every turn.
These are the product of the relationship between the
sounds, the panels, the space, the representations and the
body and are wholly unpredictable yet artfully exploited.
For me, the work really starts to take place where the
sound, imagination and body confront each other. It is here
that the work really begins its act of transportation.
The trembling and harmonics, which rise up out of the more
musically orchestrated passages, confirm the here and now,
and despite their relative quietness, it is these noises
and blips, which create the sense of interior movement. It
seems almost in spite of the cosmic aspirations of the
installation that something is able to take place.
Like resting one’s head against a train window,
feeling the slight vibration on the forehead, watching a
mark on the window bounce up and down on the telephone
wire, the day-dream is rooted in the succession of such
seemingly banal moments unfettered by any magnitude or
distance of the journey itself.
When Webb suggests that the work is about some kind of
travel, cosmic, interior or otherwise, he is right, but
more precisely, where we are taken to is limbo, where the
primary product of the work is an ambiguous elsewhere of
pure technological effect and where the work’s drive
towards an end point is ultimately held in total suspension
by a heightened awareness of the present.
Steve Dutton 2007
Steve is professor of Contemporary Art Practice at the
University of Lincoln.
For further information please visit Steve's website and
blog
steve-dutton.co.uk
duttsville.blogspot.co.uk
Art
as far as the eye can see.
Paul Virillo. Published by Berg. 2007. P.20. ISBN
978-1-84520-611-6
See John Gray’s
Black
Mass for a
brilliant account of utopian ideology driving apocolyptical
thought. Published by Allen Lane. 2007. ISBN
978-0-713-99915-0
This article was commissioned by Bloc Projects
http://blocprojects.co.uk/discourse/dutton-on-webb/