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 Gallerys
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 its 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, its 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, its 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.
Hes 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
Guevaras to shame, and he smokes rollies while simultaneously
firing through a battery of ideas. After a week of exhausting work
on the bus, hes running on pure adrenalin.
Ive 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. Theyve
had the red crescent for years, so Ive always loved it for that.
The red crescent is just one of the many cultural signifiers to be
found in the bus, and its the unlikely connections between them
that give Nelsons 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 drivers
cabin, the artist points to some scrawled phone numbers. These
are numbers for bail bonds where people have got to ring when
youve 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 whod bought 2000 pieces like that books, tapes,
videos off a collector of subversive or alternative political
beliefs. Its pretty scary stuff. Its incredibly emotive;
its 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 dont get it, dont
worry. Its 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