Bonnie Camplin, Patterns (2015)

patterns

There are certain areas of human experience which don’t get on the news, don’t get written into soap opera plotlines and evade the attention of reality TV. They are pretty much off the menu.

But testimony does survive around, say, mind control, belief in ESP, perception of extra-dimensional beings, witchcraft, fringe religious beliefs and a general susceptibility to the occult.

Books have been written. And many of them comprise Bonnie Camplin’s display for the Turner Prize 2015. Wikipedia pages have been compiled, and these too have their place in her show.

The archive is laid out on tables all around the gallery walls. Chairs invite you to sit down and read; a photocopier lets you copy what you need. The artist intends her work is a “research tool”.

Meanwhile, a cluster of five monitors invite you to watch documentary films with a quite different tone to that of BBC4. Taken from YouTube, these deal with secret military programmes, and so on.

Yet all of this information is suppressed or presented with a heavy pinch of salt in favour of a governable consensus. You won’t get on Question Time with a question about SS-controlled UFOs.

It is not even as if Camplin’s authors and witnesses are mad. Madness, according to Foucault, is the absence of a work. But these people are minor video stars and scholars.

But what the French philosopher also tells us is that, “Madness is the punishment of a disorderly and useless science”. Spend too much time with this work, you’ll deserve a sense of derangement.

“Learning becomes madness through the very excess of false learning,”* he also says. And so Patterns, and the SLG show from which it has evolved, can be seen as schizogenic machines.

It’s hard to recall a more dangerous exhibition. Perhaps a monumental installation by Richard Serra could fall on you, but Camplin threatens you with psychological collapse.

That’s not her plan. It appears she prefers, by giving exposure to hidden bodies of knowledge, to expand our bounds of reality. Nevertheless, this piece should have a health warning.

Bonnie Camplin is one of four shortlisted artists in a show for the Turner Prize 2015 at Tramway in Glasgow. This can be seen until 17 January 2016.

*p.25, Madness and Civilisation, Routledge, 1997.

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