Monkey

Despite being something of a maverick in the art world, Mike Nelson has flourished there for more than two decades, and a substantial retrospective of his work, ‘Extinction Beckons’, has recently opened at London’s Hayward Gallery. Infused with a sense of entropy and decay, and sometimes of impending disaster, his installations generally take the form of rooms, or series of rooms, that evoke parallel worlds; to wander through his recreations of such places as rundown minicab offices, shoddy store rooms, seedy bars, gloomy hallways, and wretched sleeping quarters is usually to experience something dark and unsettling. Nelson’s works always suggest narratives of one kind or another, but they don’t unfold rationally or sequentially. He is an artistic bricoleur, a cultural gleaner with a vivid imagination and a love of making things, and the substance of his art lies in its mood and ‘feel’, which are are neither cool nor conventionally conceptual. Nelson learnt cultural theory as a student but soon realised that most of the ideas that engaged him were more effectively articulated in novels, so J.G. Ballard and other authors of what he likes to call ‘speculative fiction’ quickly became sources of inspiration. Writers from Poland and the Soviet Union, such as Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, were among the more significant.

When he came to Dublin to install a remarkable exhibition,‘Tourist Hotel’, at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Nelson talked about his influences, and I recall his enthusiasm for Roadside Picnic, a work of science fiction by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky that tells the story of the aftermath of an imaginary event called the ‘Visitation’, which has taken place in several locations around the world. Neither the ‘Visitors’ nor their means of arrival or departure are witnessed, but unidentifiable objects with mysterious properties are found in the Visitation Zones, each a few kilometres square, in which inexplicable phenomena are also manifested. One of the characters in the novel compares the ‘Visitation’ to a picnic; in his analogy, the animals and birds, like the humans who appear after the Visitors have left the Zones, discover objects that are ordinary and insignificant to those who have discarded them, but which they find peculiar and dangerous.

Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess — apple cores, sweet wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

The rudimentary screenplay for ‘Stalker’, the celebrated 1979 film based on Roadside Picnic and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, was also written by the Strugatsky brothers. There were consequential changes. In the book, ‘stalkers’ trespass into the forbidden area known as the ‘Zone’, steal its extraterrestrial artefacts and sell them; in the film, the Stalker is an illegal guide who is also a kind of psychopomp; capable of finding his way through the dangers of the prohibited area, he leads two men, a professor of science and a writer, to the room at the heart of the Zone where, it is rumoured, their deepest wishes will be granted. Nearly all the science fiction and most of the action in Roadside Picnic are abandoned; the story expands slowly and often inexplicably, as, for instance, when the Stalker tests the terrain for ‘traps’ by arbitrarily throwing metal nuts with strips of cloth attached to them into the distance, reminding his companions that the straightest path to their goal is not necessarily the shortest.

After a draining journey, the three men return and are met by the Stalker's wife and disabled child, who is known as ‘Monkey’. Exhausted by the experience and in some distress, the Stalker tells his wife how humanity has lost the faith and belief that are needed to cross the Zone and to live life well; he then falls asleep. In the last scene, Monkey sits alone in the kitchen reading, and ‘Dull Flame of Desire’, a 19th century Romantic poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, is recited on the soundtrack. Using what appears to be telekinesis, she pushes three drinking glasses across the table, and one falls to the ground. A train passes by; the apartment rattles and shakes.

The Stalker needs to believe, to have faith; he longs for metaphysical purpose and soulful connections but is devastated and disillusioned. His companions, whom he begins by admiring and envying, have been revealed to be flawed, insecure, and self-doubting, just as he is. The Professor and Writer represent the two dominant ways, science and art, through which humanity seeks knowledge and truth, but their lives now hold little meaning or value for them; despite mockery, the Stalker prays for their enlightenment. Unlike the Writer, who is vain and concerned with fame and posterity, or the Professor, who is determined to control or destroy what he doesn't understand, the Stalker accepts failure and uncertainty but also yearns for transcendence. He is nonetheless rooted in home life; its rich emotional attachments are as necessary to him as his missions to the Zone. These contradictions are important. Although Tarkovsky said that he hoped the film would leave viewers with a message of love and hope, its ending is profoundly ambivalent. When Monkey, who is on the threshold of adult desire, mentally nudges the glass over the edge of the table, an act that is followed by the sounds of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, she moves beyond normal boundaries and limits, but in doing so, she also discovers that she is able to manipulate the world.

For further exploration:

Among the many favourable reviews of Mike Nelson’s “Extinction Beckons’: https://www.timeout.com/london/art/mike-nelson-extinction-beckons

A good interview with Mike Nelson: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/mike-nelson-interview-hayward-gallery/

‘Stalker’, the full film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3hBLv-HLEc

The final scene in ‘Stalker’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNiVFCWMrqI

An interesting account of ‘Stalker’ and its making: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4739-stalker-meaning-and-making

A review of Geoff Dyer’s book on ‘Stalker’: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/05/zona-geoff-dyer-tarkovsky-stalker

Image on index page: part of Mike Nelson’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery

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