Some heavy shit is going down in the old barn. A bunch of ornery gunslingers are stuck in there. I don’t figure they like each other much. Jerking around, hunching their shoulders, swivelling on their heels, swaggering and feinting as if it’s about to turn nasty. You can peek through the gaps in the rough old siding, even go in there with them. Most of these dudes seem to be women; I’ve even got my doubts about the one with the beard.
These blundering balletic duels, played out in the Danish artist Joachim Koester’s video piece The Place of Dead Roads, are performed by a quartet of human automata, like the robotic extras from Westworld. No shots are fired – maybe they forgot the guns. The whole thing is a dumb-show farrago of amplified grunts, shuffles, turns and sways. I’m reminded of bang-bang-you’re-dead children’s games, where kids take turns to win and lose, shoot and die. (I excelled at the dying bit.)
The video takes its title from William Burroughs’ Western Lands trilogy, in which hangings, strangulations, garrottings and other death-driven erotic pursuits are co-mingled with drugs and giant insects. Burroughs was no Cormac McCarthy, and none of his violence means very much. In McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, the violence is cumulative. In Burroughs, it is all more of the same old shtick that went on through all of his work. So it is with Koester’s 2013 cowboy skit, a high-definition video installation marked by its endless repetition. The shed-like structure of the installation rambles through two further spaces.
A second film in Koester’s Camden Arts Centre show, in London, is choreographed in much the same way, but instead of corralled gunfighters, the disjointed, spasmodic action is played out by a pair of women in florid 19th-century music hall outfits. These vaudevillians squeak and shuffle around on a checkerboard floor. Hands scrabble frantically at the air, heads twitch, arms windmill and mime, indecipherable words are muttered and tail off. With baffling, Tourette-ish tics and gestures, the charade mimics the making and projection of film – a new medium that went on to almost supplant vaudeville and the music hall. Walking between these two films, glimpsing them through the gaps in the slats of the wooden walls, is a reminder of the flickering between the frames of film itself. The third projection is very different. We watch a mantis appearing and disappearing among foliage. It is a creepy little film, but only on account of the somewhat disturbing appearance of the ghost mantis itself, a creature whose body resembles a leaf. The film, then, is yet another form of mimicry.
Koester’s exhibition is called In the Face of Overwhelming Forces. Faced with an overwhelming incomprehension, I press on, miming the act of the Art Critic: pursing my lips, muttering under my breath, screwing up my eyes and nodding sagely to myself, shuffling between one thing and another. All this effort becomes hard to maintain. Luckily, there are three large mattresses parked on the floor of the last room in the exhibition. Before taking a nap, one is given pause by the photographs on the walls, shot in and around the abandoned villa in Cefalù in Sicily, where the English magus and Satanist Aleister Crowley once lived and had his temple before being chucked out of Italy by Mussolini in 1923. One photograph, The Room of Nightmares, takes us into a dilapidated room in Crowley’s villa. I’d rather be holed up with a bunch of twitchy gunslingers than spend a minute in there.
Another short looped 16mm film plays on a wall erected in the middle of the room, showing a man doing some sort of solo dance. At one point, he seems to pull an invisible thread from his chest. I have no idea what this is about. In fact, I have very little idea what any of it is about. The mattresses on the floor are equipped with sets of headphones, so that the weary and the curious can listen to recordings that begin as relaxation or possibly even hypnosis instructions. Down and down we go, letting go and relaxing our bodies from the feet up. I feel like Socrates on the hemlock. Soon I am a mere puddle of goo.
Each of the recordings lead us on a different mental journey. To an unknown city and a basement containing an archive of abandoned futures; to Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers’ home in Brussels, where he had installed a “fictitious” display in an imaginary museum (Broodthaers, it strikes me, owed a lot to Jorge Luis Borges); to the modern ruins of the New Jersey town of Passaic, made famous by artist Robert Smithson. The voice lulls you. Your limbs become heavy. A sea of white noise fills your head. Images come then float away. Important thoughts take shape: did I leave the iron on? Is this nearly over yet? Will someone bring a cup of tea?
What is one to do with all this? The gallery’s File Note – a small essay that accompanies each show – doesn’t help. Nor does the work in the gallery’s reading room, in which six sealed vitrines filled with books both tantalise and remain inaccessible. In case of curiosity, break glass. A mournful droning fills the air, from tapes made by occultist and percussionist Angus Maclise, first drummer in the Velvet Underground. Roaming the vitrines, I come across texts by John Berger, WG Sebald, Roger Caillois and Gilles Deleuze. The usual unusual suspects are all here, apart from Georges Bataille, whose ideas permeate much of Koester’s exhibition.
But it is all so ungraspable. Memories of the complex film installations of Portuguese artists Gusmãu + Paiva that filled Camden Arts Centre two years ago – and radically altered the architectural space – return. They really knew what to do with the incomprehensible and strange, and the overwhelming forces that shape life on Earth. Koester can’t compete. I feel trapped among art that mimics art – and all I want is a nice lie down.
• Joachim Koester: In the Face of Overwhelming Forces is at Camden Arts Centre, London, until 26 March.
