David Lillington
Art Monthly, 1998
LENGTH: words 852

Simon Faithfull, Chisenhale Gallery
The idea was simple enough: pump water from the canal, filter it, pump it back. A conceptual piece then, this idea having to bear the weight of all the meanings which might be attached to the piece, no mater how the artist set it up. One had the impression that the concept jumped fully-formed into the artists head.

I knew about the idea. I had imagined one filter, churning away, the gallery almost empty. What I hadn’t expected was the eerily luminous atmosphere of a tropical fish shop after closing time, with 24 plastic containers each lit from within by a light. These home-made filters, filled with bottle brushes, plastic bander tape and pieces of chopped up tubing (and resident to water fleas), were stacked in sets of three on white metal shelf units. A car battery powered the lights for each stack. From the back of the gallery wall issued a transparent plastic tube, through a hole. It branched, vein-like, to reach the filters. Thus the floor was covered with plastic tubes like roots. They channelled back into the outflow tube, which went through another hole. The pump was outside on the canal bank – the first time, apparently, anyone has used this part of Chisenhale property, which is invisible from inside, since the windows are walled over.

Faithfull says that his piece was largely about the mystery of the unseen canal – The Hertford Union – which runs behind the building. From each of the eight filter stacks there emerged, at irregular intervals, and randomly from stack to stack, according to some obscure law of plumbing, a swooshing noise, its effect part photocopier, part beach.

It might have a been a problem, this aesthetic element on what was otherwise an austerely conceptual and mechanical, if humorous, piece. But Fiathfull’s approach is downbeat and the aesthetics remain secondary and, if anything, gave body to the hobbyist, amateur science aspect of the installation: here was something mildly obsessive, as if Faithfull had donned the persona of a mad eco-technician in order to make his essentially nocturnal installation. Thus an element of distance, almost of narrative, entered the show. This would seem to connect with his new website and book, Adelaide, in which the hint of narrative is almost imperceptible but present.

And since the premise of Hertford Union (‘I like the way it sounds like an insurance company or a hospital’) was according to the artist, ‘futility’, all these things seemed perfectly coherent. ‘The aesthetic nature of it was a bonus’ says the artist, and it certainly looks that way; he arranged it carefully, yes, but this care seemed to arise more or less organically from the physical reality of the concept, drain-filter-replace.

Whether or not Hertford Union was meant to metaphorical, it looked metaphorical, and this seems to be part of its conceptual grammar: it became a metaphor for matephors, and its multivalent meanings became secondary to this. What’s more, it was one of those pieces in which the possible meanings seemed to feed back to the object, in what we might call a conceptual loop, and this obviously echoes the shape of the piece. So, what of these meanings? Well, here was a model of the body; ‘it’s meant to look light an 'O' level diagram of a kidney’ says Faithfull, who drew inspiration from hospital equipment (drips, dialysis machines, etc.) It was clearly about connection to the outside world, about how things are alive because connected, and not, in a more modernist way, self-sufficient, or ‘monolithic’, to use Faithfull’s word. It was definitely anti-something, and this was its soul, this perversity. Faithfull qualifies the obvious ‘eco’ aspect of the piece, although it is clearly a major part of how viewers are going to see it. ‘It’s pointless, and that’s the poignancy of it, a tilting at windmills – theres a network of 1000 miles of canal out there… It’s more about the mystery of the canal on the other side of the wall…’ Yes, but only pointless because we see the ostensible intention: clean the canal. But here he seems to be insisting on the aspect which I have described as a type of meta-metaphor. He quotes Wilde’s preface to Picture of Dorian Grey: ‘The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely: All art is quite useless.’ The installation could very easily have been about art – in the sense that you bring stuff into the gallery, transorm it, and send it back into the world. It might – probably is, in some sense, whether or not Faithfull meant it that way – also be about the knid of non-monolithic ‘connectedness’ one associates with Delueze and Guattari’s rhizomes, with ideas about the internet et cetera. If it’s a body, the artist says, It is ‘not Newtonian’.

A common complaint about an installation is that it gained nothing by being translated from drawing into a finished piece. Its often not justified. Not in this case. Here was an installation which worked because it was so physical: it was a highly successful incarnation of an idea. The temptation now for Faithfull might be to aim for aesthetic effect, to try to repeat the trick he achieved with Hertford Union, with its inadvertent beauty. But it’s unlikely he will fall into it. He’s too clear a thinker.