Ibid Review: Duncan Mountford
On the screen a ritual is enacted, the
clearing of a path, a figure engaged slowly, carefully, brushing the detritus
from the walkways in a ruined building.
The lack of any certainty concerning the location of this ruin is reinforced
by the narrating voice telling the story of an imaginary city, a city where the
cleaners are figures of importance, for they clear the ground to allow the
appearance of the new.
The ruin in the video is reflected,
refracted, in the ruin in the gallery; a wall half destroyed and illuminated by
a fluorescent tube in the debris on the floor, a light seemingly caught at the
moment of its slide to destruction; a model of a ruined building on a segment
of earth, and floating in a pool of light as if it was caught in the act of
escaping the gravity of its situation.
Ibid
defies any simplistic narrative of the romance of ruins, for
the ruined structure in the video projection glimpsed though the jagged hole in
the wall seems as much an echo of the future, a foretaste of the ruins that
will be left behind when humankind has gone, leaving behind one solitary last
man engaged in a melancholic act of cleansing.
Yet the clearing of a ruin, the
creation of a space in the midst of the concrete slabs overgrown with the
forest, is also an act of making ready the space for something new. In this there is a connection to all the
strategies of creation, the tidying of the desk before beginning to write, the
laying out of tools before the start of construction, the brushing of the
studio before beginning a new work of art.
Ibid
thus sits at an intersection between what has gone before, the ruined gallery
wall left from the previous exhibition, and the process of creating a new
work. The tables on which sit the monitors
that showing further footage of the brushing of the ruin seem to continue this
sense of interregnum, being quotidian rather than elements of exhibition
language.
Andrew Benjamin talks of installations
as always being in the state of becoming, for the viewer is remaking the work
at each navigation of the space. Ibid
makes this plain, by quoting what has gone before, clearing the ground for what
will come, and in itself being a space that connects to a modern ruin that is
echoing what will come.
The slow brushing continues, at a pace
that speaks more of meditation than of employment. And we watch and feel time stretch.
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