MARK WALLINGER SEES HISTORY REPEATING
Maev Kennedy
guardian.co.uk
Friday 9 July 2010 13.22 BST
As he prepares to unveil an outdoor cinema overlooking the Hellespont
and Gallipoli, the Turner prize-winning British artist talks Joycean
epiphanies and wrestling with the ghosts of the past
Mark Wallinger explains his Sinema Amnesia project Link to this
video Most of Mark Wallinger’s work, which won him the Turner prize
and has made him one of the best-known artists of his generation,
has dealt with history’s multi-layered ironies. He has designed a
giant white horse to tower over a post-industrial landscape in Kent
(it will be built whenever the economy starts to boom again). His sad,
slight Christ on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square was dwarfed by
the neighbouring bronze generals. And, in one of his most significant
works to date, State Britain (2007), he relocated protester Brian
Haw’s ramshackle peace camp from Parliament Square to Tate Britain,
having discovered that the one-mile exclusion zone protecting the
so-called mother of parliaments from embarrassment runs right through
the grandeur of the Tate’s Duveen gallery.
Now he is standing on a scruffy little patch of broken concrete,
looking across to the opposite shore of a glittering stretch of water
no wider than a river. We are next to the Dardanelles in Turkey, and
it holds almost too much history even for Wallinger. Thousands of years
flow past this spot: the narrow strip of water is the Hellespont, where
in 1810 Byron followed Leander in swimming to Hero’s shore. (Unlike
Leander, Byron made it.) Ulysses once sailed by, as did St Paul and
Constantine the Great, Emperor Hadrian and Suleiman the Magnificent,
even 10th-century Vikings on their way to scribble graffiti on the
walls of Haghia Sophia in Byzantium.
Now, passing freighters the size of office blocks obstruct the view,
and, on the shore where we stand, tourists pass in the dusty footprints
of Paris and Helen towards Troy, just 20 miles down the road. Across
the water, every year thousands of young backpackers from New Zealand
and Australia start their European grand tour at Gallipoli, where
cemeteries hold more than 50,000 Australians, New Zealanders, Indians,
British, French and the Turks.
“It’s so overburdened with history and mythology, the hardest part
is not to be suffocated,” Wallinger says, with a cackle of laughter.
“Sultan Mehmet got here 500 years before me and put a castle on the
narrowest part of the straits over there, just across from where
we’re standing, a particularly beautiful castle. But it seemed
somehow important to get beyond all this, and say something quite
simple about the business of living here today.”
Wallinger is here to add his own sliver of history, as the UK
contribution to My City, an international art project jointly funded
by the British Council and the European Union.
The project was conceived to celebrate Istanbul’s stint as European
Capital of Culture, and Turkey’s status on the fringes of the EU
– although actually joining the union now looks distinctly less
attractive to many Turks than two years ago, when the My City project
was first conceived.
Wallinger and four other EU artists are at work in Turkey, while
five Turkish artists travel to England, Finland, Poland, Germany and
Austria; Gunes Terkol, an Ankara-born, Istanbul-based artist, has
just presented her performance piece at the Gasworks gallery in London.
Wallinger began by exploring canakkale, a harbour town and naval base
with a waterfront dominated – bizarrely enough – by a giant wooden
horse left over from the film Troy, given by the film makers as a sort
of consolation prize for using Mexico as their location. As he wandered
from the tourist hotels to the ruined castle in the scruffy, historic
Roma quarter, he became more and more fascinated by the constant parade
of passing vessels, from little wooden fishing boats to giant tankers.
“It seemed to me that the boats were the thing. So much of the history
of this place is in them. They still carry almost everything we need
in the world, they’ve been doing it for millennia and they will still
be doing exactly the same job in another thousand years. In a sense
they are history itself sailing past.”
So the idea developed of a cinema screen running a continuous film
of the scene – but showing film taken exactly 24 hours earlier, with
all that sense of sadness of time past and gone forever. The site
he eventually located was a battered little storage shed, right on
the water, which stands next to a small lighthouse as slim and white
as the many minarets piercing the skyline. It stands in the lee of
a stone fortress – now a museum, but still part of an active naval
base – looking across to Mehmet’s twin fort on the Gallipoli shore.
The shed will be demolished (just as soon as the project organisers
work out exactly who owns it), and a modest little building constructed
in its place. When the installation opens in October, visitors who
wander inside – Wallinger hopes it can be done without ropes and
official placards, to preserve a sense of serendipitous discovery –
will find a high-quality cinema screen showing just one film. It
will appear to be exactly the view across the water they have left
outside, but they should gradually sense a disjunct, that something
is not quite as familiar as first appeared.
Cameras mounted either on the cinema itself or the neighbouring fort,
will continuously film the straits and the parade of passing ships,
but the film shown will always be of the scene exactly 24 hours
earlier. In theory, a canny tourist could wave from the Gallipoli
shore, and see it in the cinema on the following day.
“The thought of showing a constant yesterday – a palimpsest of time,
if you like – is a happy one,” he reflects. “A day, 24 hours, is the
smallest meaningful unit of time that you can tell a story in. Within
that space, we can measure ourselves against our own selves. It
becomes a kind of time machine, a measure of how much we choose to
remember or forget.”
The work will be called Sinema Amnesia – the S was chosen for the
near-anagram, but happily is also the Turkish for cinema. And the
building will carry a sign announcing just one film: Ulysses. The name
is yet another historical overlap – a reference not simply to Ulysses’s
voyage in the Odyssey, but to Joyce’s novel, Leopold Bloom’s 24-hour
voyage on the tossing waves of Dublin city; the book, says Wallinger,
is his favourite artwork of all time.
He knew the spot must become his site the moment he set eyes on it.
“As we rounded the corner, I saw the rocky point and the lighthouse
and this hut, and it seemed immediately clear this was where I would
want to put my cinema. And when we came up to the hut, we found a
window had been cut in the back wall exactly the shape of a cinema
screen.” A betting man, Wallinger enjoys signs and portents.
But, before the project can be completed, there is some winning
of local hearts and mind to do. As the sun sets, we head off to an
enthusiastic meeting in another building with historical resonance,
an arts centre which was an Armenian church before the Armenian
population was wiped out or fled in 1915.
Inside, Canakkale’s mayor, Ulgur Gokhan, looks courteously inscrutable
as the curator, Andrea Schlieker, shows slides including one of the
artist’s most famous work: Sleeper (2005), the artist dressed in a
bear suit rambling around a deserted Berlin gallery at night. But the
turning point comes when she comes to images of the piece Wallinger
made for her at the Folkestone Triennal in 2008: a square of beach
pebbles numbered from 1-19,240, representing the number of British
soldiers who died on the first day of the battle of the Somme.
At once I can feel a shiver in the room: every family in Canakkale
knows of somebody who died on the scrubby slopes of Gallipoli in
1915, where Kemal Ataturk, who would become the first leader of the
new Turkish republic, gave a famous command to his troops: “I am not
giving you an order to attack, I am ordering you to die.”
When the meeting ends, Gokhan announces, deeply moved, that he will
invite the mayor of Folkestone on an official visit, and also organise
a special day celebrating the work of Wallinger’s beloved James Joyce.
For Wallinger, there is an unbroken chain linking the slaughter
at Troy, the young men of many nations cut down on the slopes of
Gallipoli, and the present. “Ataturk led that charge where he said
‘prepare to die’, and within 10 years he’d given women the vote and
changed the written language – so this place was the birth of the
republic, really,” he says. “In a way the experience gave a sense of
nationhood to Australia and New Zealand too. It is an extraordinary
place. When you go there and you see a memorial to some 16-year-old
boy who managed to talk his way into the army to fight across the
other side of the globe, it really brings it home.”
In 1934 Ataturk made another famous speech, now inscribed on a monument
across the water: “There is no difference between the Johnnies and the
Mehmets to us, where they lie side by side in this country of ours.”
Wallinger continues the quote from memory: “You the mothers, who sent
their sons from far-away countries, wipe away your tears, your sons
are now lying in our bosom and are in peace.” He is surprised and
embarrassed to find himself choking with tears.
From: A. Papazian