Fearful Symmetry
Until May 21; Merz Gallery

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright,/ In the forests of the night,/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” In these hypnotic verses, William Blake savoured the terrifying side of nature, exploring the conundrum of its breath-taking beauty.

This paradox lies at the heart of the sublime, a concept made famous forty years earlier by philosopher Edmund Burke. Terror “is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,” claimed Burke in his landmark essay on the sublime. “Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close”.

Architecture throughout the ages has striven to express this notion of the sublime, inspiring awe and humility in worshippers and workers. It’s there in the towering spires and flying buttresses of the Gothic age, and in the “fearful symmetry” of brutalist buildings such as Bankside Power Station and the Hayward Gallery.

While many buildings are built to express the sublime, only a few are built to contain it; Torness Nuclear Power Station is one. Home to a multi-thousand ton nuclear reactor, the brutalist shell makes no apology to its East Lothian environment. Aggressively modernist in style, it’s breath-takingly oblivious to the natural curves of the land and sea around it.

In terms of its function, Torness is even more arrogant, handling power so intense that in the wrong hands it could destroy the world. The pleasure of the sublime lies in its potential to overwhelm, and as locals in Chernobyl will confirm, sometimes it breaks its bounds. “When danger or pain press too nearly,” Burke warned, “they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible”.

We can only hope that danger will not press too near to Scotland’s central belt; meanwhile our relationship with Torness remains complex. The uncompromising angles of the white building rise like a brash temple to modernity, a celebration of pure geometry. Its clean lines proclaim clean energy, the dirt remaining conveniently invisible.

It has taken some time for society to acknowledge the concrete beauty of brutalism, and interest in it has only recently stirred. That makes Torness’s status, as potential cultural icon as well as potential death-trap, deeply ambivalent. It would be so much easier if it could be decommissioned and turned into a contemporary art gallery, but the artworks would probably start to glow quite unnaturally.

With Blair’s government poised to follow Thatcher’s forays into nuclear energy, decommissioning looks to be some way off for Torness. Meanwhile, in recognition of the building’s extraordinary qualities, Merz Gallery has brought together an exhibition of three artists’ responses to it. The work in the show, about half of which has been made specially, reconciles Torness’s shiny exterior with its dangerous interior.

The most noticeable thing about the work as a whole, is that it exudes an air of precision and containment. Boxes, and boxy forms, are present in the work of each artist, reflecting the nature of Torness’s own structure. Andrew Mackenzie’s painting style, grid-like and geometric, lends itself to an exploration of the building’s blocky facades, and even the more figurative of his paintings, when applied to Torness, look abstract.

Mackenzie confines himself to the exterior of the building, depicting it on a series of over-painted train tickets. Torness is visible from the east-coast line, and the artist mirrors the curiosity value it holds for casual rail travellers. But by focussing on the opaque surfaces of the building, Mackenzie sidesteps the controversy of the building’s insides.

Tim Taylor, a sculptor who frequently surfs in the Torness area, presents all new work. A scale model of the building sits in the gallery window, made from dull blue surf wax on a leaden base. Inside the base a dim light flickers, suggesting unseen activity hidden from view. In time, the sharp contours of the waxen building will melt down, reminding us that even walls of concrete are vulnerable when it comes to nuclear power.

In case we are left in any doubt, radiation suits hang above the wax model, bearing the names and dates of nuclear accidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Striking a more subtle note, Taylor’s photographic print contains 100 images of himself surfing in the waters around Torness.

The nuclear reactor looms large in the background as Taylor battles the grey waves. He is up against the sublime in two forms: the natural power of the ocean, and the man-made power of fission. In each case, man presumes to be clever enough to use the power to his own end. In each case, he may not be.

Last but not least, David Faithfull presents the show-stopping results of his beach-combing activities near Torness. Fragments of a Tornado fighter, which crashed into the sea only half a mile from the nuclear power plant in 1999, lie around the gallery. Beautifully designed books and prints detail Faithfull’s careful investigation of the fragments, and the possible trajectory of the plummeting plane.

Creating tiny toy-like packages of the wreckage, classifying and documenting them like an obsessive schoolboy, Faithfull attempts to bring some order to the magnitude of this potential nuclear tragedy. The sublime, in this case, was just too close for comfort.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 15.05.05