Going Nowhere, 1995
Going Nowhere 2, 2011
Going Nowhere has developed into a series, the first piece completed sixteen years ago, Going Nowhere (1995), and the second completed just this year, Going Nowhere 2 (2011). What becomes ironic, as well as provocative, in both pieces is the question: where is “nowhere”, and perhaps more pointedly, how do I get there?
In Going Nowhere a figure begins to walk away from the camera through a drifting snowy landscape. Overtime, the figure slowly diminishes to a mere black dot against the reflective white screen until finally disappearing into the snow covered landscape. It becomes apparent that the camera stands alone, left to observe the absence of the figure gone nowhere, which becomes emphatic as the passing of time takes precedence. Clouds pass, birds appear and disappear, a dog barks, the light changes. Several minutes later the tiny little black dot re-emerges on screen, it is the figure going nowhere, now walking towards the camera from the edge of the landscape. At its most basic, the film is a depiction of a figure traveling to the edge of a landscape and back again yet, to be sure, the film is more a meditation on the notion of existing — of being here or not being here, for does “nowhere”, or “going nowhere”, still exist when you walk away?
Another walk through a landscape takes place in Going Nowhere 2 (2011). Faithfull’s recent film presents a traveller traversing a landscape at the bottom of the Adriatic Sea. The work opens with a figure, dressed in jeans and a white dress shirt, purposefully walking away from the camera in the deep blue sea. Laboriously, he steps through a landscape of fish, rocks and watery light until he too disappears, here into a murky blue distance. Every frame captures the travelling figure on his journey to nowhere, without a hint of the necessary equipment, as down below along the sea floor one must at least have breath and gravity. Thus it is as such that this character journeys through this parallel universe on the sea floor, going nowhere at the bottom of the sea.
The Electrification of Dark Peak (a proposal), 2011
The Electrification of Dark Peak (a proposal), (2011), is the result of a walk through the landscape of the area known as “Dark Peak,” a famous romantic landscape of empty rock-strewn heath-land in the north of England. Ironically this ‘Peak District’ while preserved as a national park and therefore free of the signs of industrial and post-industrial development, is nonetheless surrounded by some of the most densely populated urban areas and post-industrial landscapes in all of England.
Thus the surrounding populations infiltrate the empty landscape in a paradoxical quest to fulfill an ideal isolation, clad in Lycra ramblers enlightening one’s own dark peak. In this way, the rough hewn and lonely landscape that still exists in its so carefully preserved ideal becomes a living simulacra for romantic idealism. Simon Faithfull’s proposal, The Electrification of Dark Peak, proposes, as a prepositional piece, overlays of the romantic ideal with the industrial ideal. Using the photographs that the artist captured during his walk as a ground, Faithfull merges these with his own ‘electronic’ drawings of street lamps and motorway lighting taken from other meanderings the artist has embarked on traveling through various spaces, places, and time zones that conjoin the world.
Limbo, An expanding Atlas of Subjectivity, 2011
Essentially, one could say that Limbo, An expanding Atlas of Subjectivity (2011), is the artist’s, Simon Faithfull, live digital drawing ‘feed’. It is a web-based artwork, and iPhone App, that delivers real-time digital drawings the artist makes en route on any given day, whether it be a trip to the corner store or a trip to Antarctica. Faithfull has been wandering the globe for the past ten years in which he has consistently made drawings on an electronic device to record his presence in a particular place, at a particular moment — somewhere, sometime, on the surface of the planet.
To date, there are over seven hundred observational sketches that have recorded what the artist saw, and chose to represent, in each of these places. Such details of one’s everyday life have over time become an archive of the artist’s mobility, from his daily wanderings in his Berlin neighborhood in Kreuzberg to far reaching destinations like Antarctica, and back. Limbo is this complete and living archive of drawings made available to any connected user, who can as well stay in-sync with the artist’s movement as they are intermittently uploaded as drawn. The ‘digital instantaneity’ of the platform thus mirrors the process by which Faithfull makes his delicate drawings. For the exhibition, Faithfull continues this project making, and making available, daily drawings in and around Berlin during the course of the exhibition. Through the Limbo iPhone App, Twitter, Facebook or RSS, these drawings will be implicitly explicit, direct to the online world. As well, in Haus Der Kulturen der Welt a domestic printer will be installed to automatically print out each drawing as it is made. These drawings will cumulatively be pinned to a large wall map of Berlin re-inscribing the artist’s time and place of drawing. Limbo, An expanding Atlas of Subjectivity is the artist’s subjective, personal atlas of being in the world — the mapping of time and space, as experienced by one individual, ongoingly.
Simon Faithfull
Simon Faithfull, based in Berlin and London, is a contemporary artist whose work has been exhibited extensively around the world. His work has been described as an attempt to understand and explore the planet as a sculptural object:to test its limits and report back from its extremities, to connect and collapse space and to understand how the far and mysterious relate to the everyday and mundane. Recent exhibitions have included solo shows at the British Film Institute (London), Harris Museum (Preston), Galerie Polaris (Paris), Parker’s Box (New York), Stills (Edinburgh) and Cell (London).
Photo: Simon Faithfull