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Sitting Comfortably? Steve McQueen Tells The Story Of Humanity
By Camelia Gupta
27/09/2004
Steve McQueen, Once Upon A Time, 47 of 116, 2002. Leaf Photo: J. Arthur Herrick.
Camelia Gupta headed to south London to see Steve McQueen's latest installation.
Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen presents a major new installation, Once Upon A Time at the South London Gallery until November 7.
In Once Upon A Time, McQueen explores the construction and presentation of knowledge through copies of images selected by NASA in the 1970s to show aliens what life was like on earth.
To this determined and some might say futile attempt to 'sum up' humanity, McQueen adds a soundtrack of glossolalia, which he described in an interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Ageline Sherf for an exhibition in 2003 as "unconscious sound made directly through human beings" .
The soundtrack sounds to my ears like a Catholic mass, spiritual, ritual. The darkened room takes on an eerie sense of 'coming into the light'.
The images tells the story of the earth, beginning with the smallest units that humans can conceive of. Atomic structures, chemical equations fade in and out.
Steve McQueen, Once Upon A Time, 27 of 116, 2002. Conception with silhouette diagram: Jon Lomberg.
The initial effect is very spooky: arcane systems play out across the screen while the glossolalia, sounding like incantations, is unending.
As the glossolalia continues, I can’t help but try to make sense of the utterances. The building blocks of the earth and our attempts to master our planet are undermined and destabilised by the 'gibberish', the limits of our understanding paraded.
As atomic diagrams give way to cells, and thus to diagrams of the body, we’re presented with a NASA-constructed story of humanity.
These images do not tell anything like the whole story of the earth or human lives. Sex and gender are reduced to black and white transactions, stripped of all social, emotional and erotic content.
In many ways we’re presented with an oddly dated view, the sex imagery resembles 50s sci-fi, the presentation makes our own bodies/species strange.
This is especially true for the section dealing with reproduction and birth.
Steve McQueen, Once Upon A Time, 33 of 116, 2002. Birth. Photo: Wayne Miller © Magnum Photos.
The 'vessels' are not especially attractive when viewed so functionally. Images of foetuses, still accompanied by the vocal non-sense, seem alien, horrific. The photograph of the surgeon facilitating birth, for example, seems more like an act of violence.
After more photographs, we’re again returned to evidence-based presentations. The family becomes a set of age and weight statistics, nothing more.
As the piece progresses, we’re shown dozens of images of humans at work and play, but again, the selection process is foregrounded. For all the variety of race, place, gender and age, the pictures are oddly homogenous.
There’s no anger, war, disease or suffering, just a succession of smiling faces in 70s technicolour. The overall effect is hackneyed and saccharine.
Steve McQueen, Once Upon A Time, 77 of 116, 2002. Supermarket photo: Herman Eckermann, NAIC Staff Photographer.
Human mess and chaos is utterly absent, and the result is by turns laughable, pathetic and chilling. The latter half of the selection plays like a tourist board campaign for 'Planet Earth – Have a Nice Day'.
Human achievement is represented by state-of-the-art skyscrapers (which to our eyes are laughably dated) and supermarket displays. A bias towards Western concepts of progress emerges.
The images on which Once Upon a Time is based could potentially still be picked up by alien life forms. Voyager II is currently the furthest manmade object from Earth and Voyager I is not far behind. These images may represent our first contact with other lifeforms, and it’s not a pleasant thought.
So much of what is wonderful and distinctively human is written out and ignored. If in the future life on Earth ends, the Voyager images will be all that’s left of the human race. They do little beyond prove that humans existed, barely hinting at the complexity and history of the human race.
If these images are a mirror held up to our species, they’re a damning indictment of our vanity.
Steve McQueen, Once Upon A Time, 57 of 116, 2002. Crocodile. Photo: Peter Beard.
McQueen immerses us in an absurd and intriguing story, where the filmed past and lived present, collide and points to a possible future.
He clashes images of the 'known' with unknowable sounds to leave us in a limbo space, unable to draw conclusions. It’s a haunting experience.
All images courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York & Paris and Thomas Dane, London, except supermarket photo.
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