Deep Horizons at MIMA in partnership with the Roberts Institute of Art. Photography: Jason Hynes
From C.P. Snowโs assertion that art and science are divergent cultures through to the work of crossover individuals from the past such as Leonardo da Vinci or todayโs Olafur Eliasson thereโs been a long and fruitful dialogue about the boundaries and interactions between the two disciplines. This is difficult and complex territory ever threatened by charlatanry and itโs a brave museum that tries to illustrate the points of contact.
So here we are at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, where seven curatorial collaborators are involved in an ambitious exhibition focused on the art and science of excavation and all that word implies. Botanist Dr. Greg Kenicer and the astroparticle physicist Professor Chamkaur Ghag represent Science. The collaborative nature of the project means thereโs a combination of artworks from the MIMA collection along with a selection from the Roberts Institute of Art.
This is a mental pinball of a show where the mind pings pleasantly, informatively, from one work to another. The art/science dialogue is entirely appropriate to the location given Middlesbroughโs industrial history, its connections to coal and iron mining, and the art purchasing that came as a result of the profitsโฆ
In keeping with the industrial aesthetic, your attention is drawn first to a sequence of loudly rhythmic noises โ a tick-tocking in various speeds ranging from the rapid Geiger clicks of Kraftwerkโs โRadioactivityโ down to the slowed propulsions that recall the pump-thump sounds that begin OMDโs โStanlowโ. This is Martin Creedโs Work No 180 Largo, larghetto, adagio, andante, moderato, allegro, presto e prestissimo (1995โ2004), a line of metronomes beating in different time, their pyramidal shapes reminiscent of the many mine lifts that once dotted the landscape hereabouts.
In turn this calls Bernd and Hilla Becher to mind and their documentation of coal tipples, bunkers, blast furnaces and the like. Across the room thereโs some of their Water Towers (1972-1992) here in all their retro-futurist glory: enormous concrete egg cups and Brobdingnagian golf tees. Then too thereโs the local imagery of mining. Photographer Robin Dale is from Teeside and shows a sequence of pit images, abandoned iron mines and stacks as with Kilns Chimney from the early 1970s.
Deep Horizons at MIMA in partnership with the Roberts Institute of Art. Photography: Jason Hynes
What weโve casually dismissed or merely missed seeing is excavated from memory as with the Boyle Familyโs constructions โ these part-sculptural reliefs representing actual slices of horizontal ground features are presented vertically, flatly on the wall like a painting. I always associate the Boyle Familyโs work with the cover for one of Tom Verlaineโs solo albums called, appropriately enough, Cover (1984), partly because I first saw the Boyle Familyโs constructions around the time of its release. Thereโs an aerial shot of Tom standing on a traffic island in what looks like the UK from the street markings, the yellow parking lines. The Boyle Family took the concept of photorealism and made sculptures, rather than oil paintings, of random samples of street surfaces. Demolition Site Study with Broken Red Bricks and Rusty Metal (1990โ91) is just that but somehow its very quotidian nature, its overlooked everydayness, quietly fascinates. Theirs is a true Updikean poetry of the sidewalk with its random craquelure-like ruptures of dried mud, its fragments of burnt wood. Kenicer suggests the work becomes โa representative, a proxy, for the wider landscapeโฆthis piece is both map and ground-truth in one.โ
Conrad Atkinsonโs Iron Ore (1977) is a sequence of collages that should anger you; this is agit-prop at its starkest. We see documents that outline illness related to an iron excavator who was refused compensation and how legislation was only paid to coal miners. We read letters from a GP saying the situation โis deplorableโ and that they intend to pursue this โwith the Governmentโ. We see death certificates and letters with details of inadequate respirators: fifty years after these events itโs hard to escape the mounting animosity towards this current government when we remember the recent PPE debacle for healthcare workers during COVID and those who died.
Onya McCauslandโs 54ห 34 07.37 N 0ห 57 42.87 W/Saltburn no 3 (2019) takes waste material โrecycled ironstone mine residue from the site in the title โ and turns it into pigment. Ghag thinks that โat some level, waste doesnโt exist โ thereโs no such thingโฆif we think in terms of cosmic accounting, everything is valuable.โ McCauslandโs painting has overlapping parallelograms of ochre and sienna โ a geological take on Josef Albers if you like.
Theaster Gates would agree thereโs no such thing as waste: heโs known for his urban renewal projects funded by the sales of his works like the sardonically titled In the Event of a Race Riot (2011), loops of decommissioned fire hose coiled behind glass. A variant in the series is here called From Every Mountainside (2013) that looks โ from a distance โ like a giant crimped Ab-Ex canvas or a dumpster take on Robert Irwinโs neon lights.
Hannah Rullmann and Faiza Ahmad Kahnโs Habitat 2190 (2019) is a video taken of the new nature reserve near Calais, previously the site of the refugee camp nicknamed, insensitively, the โJungleโ. This was cleared in 2016 and is now the site of growth by new orchids. As with Cal Flynโs 2020 book Islands of Abandonment this work stresses the resilience of Mother Earth, the planetโs phenomenal regenerative capacity.
Elsewhere, far away from Earth, weโre reminded of deep space by the intense darkness, the deep blacks, by Rashid Johnsonโs Cosmic Slop โI Got Your Backโ (2012) โ a 3D wall work made from an amalgam of black soap and microchrystaline wax. You think about coal again and dark matter reminded that not far from here is Boulby mine โ 1,400m below the North Sea – the second deepest mine in Europe and the site of an underground lab that studies astrobiology, organisms that survive in extreme environments. Dark matter experiments are conducted here too and look for WIMPs โ weakly interacting massive particles. Pleasingly we learn they use something called a WIMP detector.
Boulby is the only place on earth where the fertilizer polyhalite is mined. Weโre with Ghag again and his idea that there is no such thing as waste. It takes seven minutes to get to the bottom of Boulby by lift. People still get hurt down there and only last year Cleveland Potash were fined ยฃ3.6 million after breaches in health and safety regulations between 2016 and 2019. Atkinsonโs concerns about occupational health are as relevant as ever.
Like those metronomes this show keeps beating away incessantly at your brain; itโs one to visit a few times and tunnel into its depths again and again.
