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C110 review
Dublin: Mark Cullen at Pallas Heights
The best of art lets you forget where you
are for a moment. After becoming absorbed with a truly memorable
exhibition you have to take a little time to reorient yourself
to the outside world, to readjust to ordinary reality. Mark Cullen's
Cosmic Annihilator takes this engagement a step further,
creating a disorienting reordering of the space at Pallas Heights
and turning its two-up-two-down geography into something fantastically
different; something which plays with, and alters, your perceptions
of space, and which renders 'ordinary reality' somehow squint
when you re-emerge.
Cosmic Annihilator is immersive installation art, of the kind also created by Mike Nelson, where viewing is a participative progression into another world. Here the world is housed in a unit in a block of council flats which have been on the agenda for demolition for some years. Pallas Heights exists within a community in flux; some tenants have moved out, while others are hanging on for rehousing, or for the long-promised redevelopment.
Crossing the threshold through a blackout
curtain, the senses are initially reduced to a single one, touch.
There is a trick to being plunged into sudden darkness, which
is to close your eyes for three seconds, but forgetting that and
feeling forward, a narrowing passage leads into a viewing space
where illuminated shards of glass create a greenish, glistening,
glowing horizon of a sci-fi cityscape.
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| Mark Cullen: Cosmic Annihilator,
2004, installation shots; courtesy the artist |
The risk of constructing installations on
this scale and in this way is that their theatricality can take
over. The sense of being on a stage set, which Gerard Byrne explores
in In Repertory at Project (September to October),
can make your responses seem contrived and engineered. At In
Repertory, the viewer feels like an actor venturing onto a
waiting stage, and the pervasive sense is one of artificiality.
Cosmic Annihilator escapes this by effectively sucking
you into its world; outside is the artificial, inside is the reality
of intense experience.
Up stairs made vertiginous by the almost complete darkness, the space narrows to a tunnel as you crawl under a construction which is half the long concertina lens of an old-fashioned camera, and half a huge bellows. Proceeding upstairs is like crawling into the belly of a strange machine, progress made possible only by a thin promise of light. Another narrow tunnel that feels like a chute leads off, and onto a viewing area where you are now looking down on another glowing city of glass. Surrounded by mirrors, the glass fragments are both the discarded fragments of broken bottles and windows found on inner city streets, and simultaneously the stuff of small boys' Battlestar Galactica dreams.
From outside, Sean Tracey House is considered to be an eyesore by some, a persistent blot within a landscape being swept by the regenerative broom. Yet signs of life in the windows of the inhabited units of the complex, the washing on the balconies, indicates the realities of lives lived inside. Within this, Cosmic Annihilator is an escapist fantasy grounded in actuality, made more seductive by its beauty. A discovered jewel in an unexpected place, it reminds you that escapist fantasies can be of fundamental importance in a world where ordinary reality is often not very wonderful.
Gemma Tipton is a writer on art and architecture based in Dublin and is Editor of Contexts magazine.
Mark Cullen, Cosmic Annihilator, Pallas Heights, Dublin, August - October 2004
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