Great art is often described as being ‘timeless’, speaking to people across the ages no matter their location or background. And there are other times when a work of art, intentionally or unintentionally, poignantly articulates contemporary events.
One could not help but think of missing flight MH370, a Boeing 777, (at the time of writing missing for over 3 weeks) when looking at Roger Hiorn’s work ‘Untitled’ from 2010, currently on view at First Site in Colchester. Of course on first glance this is because he re-presents the debris from a plane, a Boeing EC-135c, but secondly because we are informed that the engines were originally from a spy plane tasked with intelligence gathering as part of ‘Operation Looking Glass’, begun in 1961.
Stripped of their original housing and context the objects stand as totems to our desire to capture knowledge – perhaps to sooth our anxieties. However in the era of ‘big data’ and global surveillance programmes events such as the loss of flight MH370 show this attempt to know things in their entirety to be impotent. When first seeing the two engines – like a pair of beached wales – they appear neutered, pathetic, sagging under their own weight, gazing listlessly into the middle distance. Indeed when one crouches down and looks at them head-on they stare back as if two misty and confused eyes were trying to make sense of their new environment.
Walking closer to the work one finds a mass of knotted pipework: to a lay person’s eyes it looks almost made up – can all these intestinal bits and pieces really do something, or are they the bare minimum that is required to keep tonnes of metal suspended in the air? Whilst the plane was operational it was kept airborne 24 hours a day – its gaze unbroken; lidless eyes scanning the surface of the earth.
In Hiorns’ various other works (perhaps most notably ‘SEIZURE’ 2008/2013) psychological distress is an unspoken by-product. In this instance the artist has concealed, somewhere in the body of the objects, a measure of crushed anti-depressant drugs. This could point the viewer back to this idea of man’s attempt to repress or deny the anxieties of daily life be it through chemical or mechanical means. But here is perhaps the dark heart of the work – analogous to the events being played out in the Indian Ocean – that there will always be things we can’t see, know or apprehend no matter our attempts to control the world.
