© Richard Nicholson

Roger Hiorns, installation views of "Seizure," 158–159, Harper Road, London, 2008

©Richard Nicholson

Roger Hiorns, installation views of "Seizure," 158–159, Harper Road, London, 2008

   November 2008 Reviews

Total Enlightenment

Paul McCarthy

Eleanor Antin

Lorraine O'Grady

Ron Amstutz

Raha Raissnia

Alexandra Grant

Dave Cole

Multiple Modernities:
India, 1905 - 2005

Clare Woods

Gemma Holt

Roger Hilton

Joachim Koester

The Talamoni Collection

Amelie Von Wulffen

Robert Smithson The Appendix: Portraits of a Marriage, a Man in a Speedo, and Jesse Helms Dia Foundation Sees Man-Made Threat to Spiral Jetty Great Estates What Would Neil Young Do? The Conceptual Art Father Introducing Ahmet Ögüt Mary Heilmann

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The low-rise housing block on Harper Road will be gone soon, eyed up by developers and kissed by the wrecking ball, its inhabitants already moved on; and Roger Hiorns’s installation Seizure (2008) will go with it, faded blue crystals arcing fast through dirty South London air. Crystals because the British artist immersed part of the building’s interior in copper sulfate solution, waited for it to grow a second, bejeweled exterior, and drained it. Using a method that’s one part high school science, one part Robert Smithson, he previously dipped BMW engines and model cathedrals, bringing them out as spiky surprises in a wardrobe of lapis lazuli. (Extending an oeuvre that’s magnetized itself to rational, man-made structures and transformed them with chemicals and/or natural materials, he’s also splashed steel sheets with perfume and urine, sent Promethean fire roaring up out of a roadside grate, and intermingled metal grilles and engine parts with a substance listed on gallery handouts as “brain.”) A few years ago, Hiorns told me he was looking for a house to work with. Seizure, in its deep affect, still feels like a bolt from the blue.

And how very blue it is; and how disorienting, luscious, awful. The cramped, unfurnished space—one small room, a snatch of corridor, a tiny bathroom—whose walls, floor, ceiling, and sparse fittings Hiorns has encrusted with crystals, is a shrunken version of bed-sit living, which he effectuated by shifting around the partitions of the apartment and by the general contraction of space you get when there are several inches’ worth of copper sulfate crystal growth on a room’s walls. In technical terms, Hiorns built a layered metal tank around the rooms from the outside, then flooded this sealed vessel with thousands of liters of chemical solution, prior to pumping it out and leaving what’s so remarkably here: all surfaces blued, the floor going greenish as it oxidizes, a light fitting gone massive and angularly bulbous with sulfate gemming, its intersecting planes resembling a plastic ’70s lampshade. In the uneven floor, where crystals rise in rough mounds, giant footprint- like declivities dotting the blue-green lunar surface show where a pumping pipe was weighted down.

Process, though, is not the first thing one thinks of in this tenebrous, glowing space. More to the point is an ambient melancholia—the compaction of tenement lives, however theatrically presented. Day in, day out, some unknown somebody took baths in that miniature bathroom, there, with its newly crystalline tub half full of old water. The air is heavy with what’s not known but inexorably guessed at. The crystals go bad in the air, paled like an ice lolly with the juice sucked out, doing so fastest in the heat-death of the single light. They’re beautiful; but they can’t stay, either.

There is another, less-wrenching side to all this, where we can escape into talk about concepts and where postconceptual art might want to go, now. Seizure takes what is fundamentally a natural occurrence, lets it grow unseen, and, at a particular point, arrests it (hence the title) in a way that apostrophizes both growth and decline. It can be decocted in formal terms, in relation to those cliché modernist imaginings of fixity that might themselves be embodied in housing projects like this failed and dying one—as being about willed loss of control, about acceptance of processes that can’t be contained, at least in their specificity. Here’s where Hiorns moves most decisively into Smithson’s hemisphere, the second law of thermodynamics—that all unstable systems tend inexorably toward entropy—pushing our known universe constantly into decay. For feeling beings, though, and particularly in a place as redolent with the texture of life lived as this, a formal impetus will always shade back into the poignant, and in this sense Seizure is a brief, utterly transcendent afterlife that counters, in natural form, the pains suffered by people threaded through the industrial processes of the age—pains that extend, of course, to the notorious inhumanity of 20th-century takes on mass social housing in general, of which story the late-modernist, 1970s-era flats of Harper Road, deemed unfit after three decades, are an obvious part.