David Blandy
John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, UK
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Until 6 May
ONE of four short films by video and installation artist David Blandy, called The Edge of Forever, opens with a mournful panning shot of Cuckmere Haven in East Sussex. A less apocalyptic place is hard to imagine: Cuckmere is one of the most ravishing spots in the south-east of England. Still, the voice-over insists we contemplate 鈥渁 ravaged Earth鈥� and 鈥渇orgotten peoples鈥� as we watch two children exploring a post-human future.
The only sign of former human habitation is an observatory (the now-deserted Royal Observatory at Herstmonceux Castle). The children enter and study the leavings of dead technologies and abandoned ambitions, steeped in refracted sunlight. Claire Barrett鈥檚 elegiac camerawork here is superb.
All four films in Blandy鈥檚 installation Atomic Light connect different kinds of fire: the fire of the sun; natural wildfires, which are gathering force and frequency as Earth鈥檚 climate warms; and the atomic blast that consumed Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.
There is a personal dimension, beyond Blandy鈥檚 vaunted concern for the environment. During the second world war, his grandfather was a prisoner of the Japanese armed forces in Singapore, and later lived with the knowledge that, had upwards of 100,000 of Hiroshima鈥檚 civilians not perished, he might not have survived.
Bringing this together is a job of work. In Empire of the Swamp, a man wanders through mangrove swamps at the edge of Singapore, while Blandy reads out a short story by playwright Joel Tan. The enviro-political opinions of a postcolonial crocodile are as good a premise for a short story as any, I suppose, but the film isn鈥檛 well integrated with the show.
Soil, Sinew and Bone, a visually arresting game of digital mirrors composed of rural footage from Screen Archive South East, equates modern agriculture and warfare. That there is a historical connection is undeniable: Fritz Haber received the 1918 Nobel prize in chemistry for the Haber鈥揃osch process, a method of synthesising ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen. That ammonia, a fertiliser, can be used to make explosives is an irony familiar to any student, though it isn鈥檛 obvious why agriculture should be morally tainted by it.
Alas, Blandy can鈥檛 resist the sirens of overstatement. We eat, he says, 鈥渨hile others scratch鈥� in the baked earth鈥�. Never mind that since 1970 , according to the UN 鈥� .
Defenders of the artist鈥檚 right to be miserable in the face of history will complain I am taking Atomic Light too literally. I respond that I am taking it seriously. Bad faith is bad faith, however you cut it. If, in your voice-over, you dub Walt Disney鈥檚 Mickey 鈥渢his mouse of empire鈥�, if you use footage of a children鈥檚 tea party to hector your audience about wheat and sugar, and if you cut together words and images to suggest that a jobbing farmer out shooting rabbits was a landowner on the lookout for absconding workers, you simply pile straws on the camel鈥檚 back.
Thank goodness for Sunspot, Blandy鈥檚 fourth, visually simpler film, which juxtaposes the lives and observations of real-life solar astronomers Joseph Hiscox in Los Angeles and Yukiaki Tanaka in Tokyo, who each drew the sun on the day of the Hiroshima bomb.
Here is a salutary, saving reminder that, to make art, you are best off letting the truth speak for itself.
Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on Instagram at @simon_ings
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