Ken McMullen: Lumen De Lumine
February 9; Torness Power Station, East Lothian

Richard Demarco’s huge barn is bubbling with energy; his avant-garde collection of art, built up over the last 40 years, is raising countless oohs and aahs from the assembled throngs. They are politicians, eminent artists, gallery directors, farmers, and ordinary Dunbar natives. But they haven’t been invited here just to see the gallery – that’s been a fixture since last September – they’re here to witness the one-off event outside.

In bitter weather on the cold east coast, there’s quite a show of fur hats and winter woollies. Everyone’s come prepared to withstand the temperature in order to see Demarco’s so-called “angel of the true north”, an art film projected at a massive scale on the side of Torness nuclear power station.

Demarco is brimming with pleasure at the sheer magnitude of this project. The “great machines” required to project the film across a distance of 400 metres, to appear 20 metres wide, are probably so power-hungry that it would take a plant like Torness to fuel them. In fact, the equipment is so much in demand that it needs to be packed off to America in the morning.

It’s not just Demarco who’s brimming with pleasure. Sir Adrian Montague, chairman of British Energy, is pretty chuffed too. Sharing a platform with Demarco, he speaks of the “fusion between art, science and agriculture,” before making the implausible assertion that environmentalists are now beginning to see nuclear power as the way forward.

It’s all very strange watching these speeches being made as Joseph Beuys stares down at us from a poster on the wall. “What is to be done?” the 26 year old poster asks, promoting a three-day action in Edinburgh about “alternative technology versus nuclear power”.

Demarco has dined out for decades on his close links with the legendary German artist, who was one of the founders of the Green Party. In the 1970s and 1980s Beuys and Demarco shared a penchant for shaking things up; for being a thorn in the establishment’s side. Now, at 75 years old, with his financial options all but exhausted, Demarco has fallen gratefully into the embrace of the nuclear industry.

This is a dream ticket for the nuclear lobby at a time when they are eagerly currying favour with politicians and the public. What could be better than a warm breeze of publicity about the nuclear industry’s back-slapping friendship with art and culture? British Energy have clearly learned a thing or two about greenwash from BP’s profitable relationship with the National Portrait Gallery.

Richard Demarco has never been shy of private sponsorship, taking money wherever he can get it to keep on moving down his metaphorical Road to Meikle Seggie. No-one can doubt his enthusiasm or his commitment to art in all its forms, but today’s speeches contain none of the frank and fiery debate which Demarco’s past demands.

With the speeches over, the huge grain store door rolls upwards as smoothly as a theatre curtain. Hundreds of people cram like herded cattle into the car park, fixing their eyes on the grey expanse of the power station a mile away. Nothing happens for a while, and then, from a speaker on our left, a woman whispers, “Sein, oder nicht sein. Das ist die Frague.”

To be or not to be, that is the question. On the distant concrete wall, a light appears. Although you can’t tell at this distance, it’s a single 100 watt light-bulb on a cable, being swung by a dancer around her body in the centre of CERN’s Particle Accelerator Number One.

Lumen De Lumine is the work of respected film-maker Ken McMullen, who has spent five years collaborating with scientists at the nuclear laboratories in Geneva. The film, made in 2001, has toured to Rome, London, Geneva, Beijing, New York, and now, Dunbar.

The light-bulb traces a wide circle around the woman, its whipping trajectory reflected in the increasingly menacing volumes of the whirring soundtrack. There is not much visible at any one time – the small ball of light illuminating the woman’s figure only briefly before racing round again.

The movement is performed in a tunnel where particles have in the past been whirled around and sent into collision with each other at the speed of light, creating matter and anti-matter, being and not being (in those Shakespearean words). All the time, there is only a small part of the scene visible to us, perhaps the 4% of matter which cosmology can understand, the rest being dark matter and dark energy.

The film looms large above the A1, where motorists enjoy the pleasure of a traffic jam at conveniently situated road-works. But a mile away at Demarco’s gallery, the experience is similar to watching a small television in the corner of the room, the image distant and dulled by the orange safety lights of the power plant itself.

Inevitably, the meaning of the film is affected by its context. Torness, one of the two nuclear power stations in Scotland, might be an impressive piece of industrial architecture, but its legacy has yet to be gauged. The plant has seen over 200 incidents in the past five years, including one which led to the shut-down of a reactor for over six months. Even without an accident, future generations will be plagued by the growing stockpiles of radioactive waste.

The eerie apparition of McMullen’s film on the plant’s west wall stands as a metaphor for the processes taking place within it. But it also acts as a warning. At first the woman in the film appears to be in control of her swinging light, but then, along the way, it seems to take control of her. I think I know what Beuys would have said about that.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 12.02.06