As we were in Oxford on Sunday we checked out the new Mike Nelson exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. It includes a new version of Triple Bluff Canyon (above), an installation inspired by Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) and the Gulf Wars that had recently taken place when it was first shown at MAO in 2004. The photograph below is one I took when another version was installed at the Hayward Gallery's big Mike Nelson retrospective in 2023. As you can see, this entropic landscape has now reached a further stage of ruin and the trick of its construction has been exposed. It is not a huge pile of desert sand, the sand is just a veneer covering empty space. Meanwhile America is once again on the attack in the Middle East, this time in Iran, and there is an absence where a clear, legal justification should be. As The Guardian reported, its stated rationale kept changing, 'from Iran planning a preemptive strike to lobbying by Israel.'
Another installation more tangentially connected with landscape is The Book of Spells, a room full of old Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. This concept grew out of an element in Nelson's 2001 ICA show (which has to be one of the best and most memorable exhibitions I've experienced at that gallery). The Book of Spells was developed during Covid lockdowns and reminds me of how trapped we then felt. Confined to a few city streets, 'landscape' felt very distant and it was necessary to subsist on memories of woodland trails and coastal paths. I actually spent those evenings writing myself a personal travel book, covering all the places in Europe I couldn't visit. In an article written to coincide with the Hayward exhibition, Charlotte Higgins talked about The Book of Spells.
They immediately put you out of time, these books. They were once such a touchstone of travel and adventure, and are now obsolescent in the face of the internet. Each marks a moment of history that in many cases is now unreachable: you won’t be holidaying in Moscow any time soon, nor in Aleppo. The room is tiny, claustrophobic, and there’s a strong reminder of the confinement wrought by Covid-19, but at the same time it feels like some kind of unwritten short story. (It reminds me, in fact, of Borges’ The Aleph, in which the narrator encounters, in a cellar beneath a bourgeois Buenos Aires dining room, a device from which it is possible to see every other point on Earth). It is intensely simple in its way and yet heavy with layers of association, and immensely eerie.
