Mike Nelson: The Pumpkin Palace
Until September 12; Collective Off-Site 6 Market Street

The Edinburgh Fringe has spawned an increasingly bizarre range of venues over the years, but none quite matches The Pumpkin Palace, a venue which is itself the show. Part of the Collective Gallery’s ambitious anniversary programme, the weird and wonderful bus, lurking discreetly behind hoardings half way up Market Street, is the work of one-time Turner Prize nominee, Mike Nelson.

Whether it’s called an installation, a sculpture, or conceptual art, it most certainly makes an impression. Picking your way through the narrow corridors, the secret spaces and the debris of underground activities, it’s impossible not to imagine the characters who belong here and the things that might have happened.

Outside, the bus looks like a red crescent field hospital, its windows plastered with Arabic newspapers.

Inside, it’s a claustrophobic maze of gloomy nooks and crannies, each a shrine to a different faith: Islam, Catholicism, witchcraft, opium. There is a medical dispensary, and a metal operating table topped with rusty old knives.

Nelson is showing me around, quite at home in his gothic creation. He’s spent all day in the belly of the bus rigging up a new generator, and has the grime to prove it. His bushy black beard would put Che Guevara’s to shame, and he smokes rollies while simultaneously firing through a battery of ideas. After a week of exhausting work on the bus, he’s running on pure adrenalin.

“I’ve always found it bizarre that the red cross was chosen as the symbol of the international medical institution,” he tells me. “How you could demarcate something like that in the Muslim world after the Crusades was always an absurd thing. They’ve had the red crescent for years, so I’ve always loved it for that.”

The red crescent is just one of the many cultural signifiers to be found in the bus, and it’s the unlikely connections between them that give Nelson’s work its depth. For him, war in the east is directly linked to heroin supply in the west, and so the two issues – affecting completely different peoples – are brought together in the bus.

“These are old drawings from some of the street people in San Francisco – druggie drawings,” says Nelson. “I just found them, and then I cut them and built them in. Look at this one here, a scary man with a syringe.” Towards the driver’s cabin, the artist points to some scrawled phone numbers. “These are numbers for bail bonds – where people have got to ring when you’ve been picked up by the police.”

Subversive activities of all sorts are implied by props which Nelson has picked up across the world. Hashpipes and witchcraft books are relatively tame, but the big shock is the Hamas recruitment video that runs on an old TV in the bowels of the bus.

“I bought it in a flea-market,” Nelson tells me, “off a guy who’d bought 2000 pieces like that – books, tapes, videos – off a collector of subversive or alternative political beliefs. It’s pretty scary stuff. It’s incredibly emotive; it’s quite amazing.”

Nelson is not a recruiting agent for Hamas. His fascination is with the wide spectrum of belief systems that scratch at “the underbelly of the prevalent surface of capitalism”. That capitalism scratches back is witnessed by the very title of the work, adopted from a grafittoed locker door found in a US military base.

“The title, The Pumpkin Palace, brings in an overlayering, pervading atmosphere,” explains Nelson, “of the Anglo-American obsession with the construction of a fiction which manufactures fear of an unseen other… from the witch trials of Salem through to the McCarthy era, and now the Islamophobia of the States.”

It is, in the end, its “pervading atmosphere” which gives The Pumpkin Palace its strength. If you don’t get it, don’t worry. It’s not a riddle with a clever answer, but like a good horror story, its most scary parts are those which are left to your imagination.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 22.08.04