You don’t enter by the usual door or take a familiar route around Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons at the Hayward. This adds to the derangement of a show in which we scurry through ill-lit and dismal labyrinths of small rooms and dingy corridors, and then find ourselves confronted by the glare of an indoor desert, where a broken-backed shack sits half-buried in a sand dune strewn with shredded car tyres and abandoned oil drums. The interior of the shack feels like the show’s epicentre, a final redoubt. Later we find ourselves looking into a recreation of Nelson’s studio in the 1990s, and wander the perimeter of a skeletal cuboid cage, fashioned from rebar, in which concrete human heads, clownish masks, and grim and gurning gargoyles are strewn about and hang from metal grilles. Are they human trophies, misformed effigies from an unknown belief system or secret cult? Whatever I write feels like a spoiler.
We enter through a kind of storage facility, piled high with stuff on shelving racks and leant against walls, embalmed in plastic sheeting and spilling out of boxes. All cast in a grim and dirty red glow, like a photographic dark room or a goth club. Already we are in a time-lagged alternative dimension. We haven’t even met Nelson’s spectral biker gang yet, or the ranting conspiracy theorist. We’ve not disappeared into the go-downs, with their dodgy companies and free-zone offices. As soon as you are out, an old wooden door beckons, and we’re plunged into a further warren of interconnecting rooms. Take a left, do a right. Door after door, room after room. Lights flicker, an old table fan sweeps dead air in an empty office, a phone doesn’t ring and there’s no one there. This is familiar Nelson territory. Have I been here before? Most likely.
With backtrackings and turnarounds, we come to a spooky blue room with an enormous shadow cast over the floor and wall and what looks like a satanic altar at the end. This feels like Twin Peaks territory. A few squalid rooms and dank corridors later, I’m back again. And what are these terrible scratches on the lower parts of the doors? Did some ferocious animal make them? The plasterboard has been torn off some walls. Who or what did that? All this is fun, first time around.
There is a degree of magical thinking and twisted logic in Nelson’s art. He throws us into the middle of things and compounds our difficulties, segues his own earlier works into new arrangements, juggles historical time periods, messes with our sense of orientation, brings us up short with camp fires whose flames are bits of plastic bunting, fills sleeping bags with rubble, appropriates old bits of industrial machinery and gives us too many details. It is hard to tell the incidental from the crucial. Here’s a poster of Bertold Brecht, an old rifle used as a door handle, a sign taken from a Hong Kong ferry saying Please Do Not Spit. The more forensic you get as a viewer, the more out of control the story, if it is a story, gets.
You don’t have to buy into the arcana of Nelson’s art to be entertained and pleasurably disturbed by it. Coming towards the end of the show (which is where we would usually begin at the Hayward), an old VHS tape is being played on a screen above our heads. Not that one can see images very well or hear much of the narrator, conspiracy theorist Jordan Maxwell, going off on one of his cynical, paranoid spiels about secret cabals and world domination. All this is a lot of nasty fun. As ever, thinking about crisis, end-times, political and ecological doom, add both an urgency and a sexy frisson to the unthinkable. Writers on Nelson often flag authors like JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss and Jorge Luis Borges as inspirations and keys to his work. There’s no doubt they furnish his mental territory. You might add the novels of Paul Auster (particularly In the Country of Last Things), and the writings of Mark Fisher and Robert Smithson to this list. It is hard not to get caught up in Nelson’s meta-fiction, in the same way that people obsess over the hidden symbols in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining or get suckered into bonkers belief systems. Somehow it all feels a very masculine world.
At one point, a staircase leads up to a shallow crawl space between the installation’s roof and the gallery ceiling. Sticking your head out, you become aware both of the artifice of these rooms, and their limits, but also of another level of illusion. It is like looking out over a sea of flotsam, with wrecked TVs, bits of furniture, rolls of carpeting and rubbish strewn everywhere. Everything is both potential and residue and there’s no end to it.
• Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is at Hayward Gallery, London, from 22 February until 7 May.
