School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemMike Nelson's hybrid scripts( 2015)This thesis takes as its subject the work of the contemporary English installation artist Mike Nelson (born 1967). While Nelson’s work has been included in many major survey exhibitions of contemporary art, this thesis is the first dedicated, scholarly account of his work. It analyses his practice from the late 1980s through to 2013, focusing on the way that he incorporates fictional and non-fictional, and historical and futuristic narratives into his works, with a particular stress on the ways in which his work represents the past. While Nelson’s work is compatible with many prominently theorised trends in past-oriented art since 2000, which includes re-enactment, the archival impulse, retromania, the archaeological imaginary, anachronism, the temporal turn, and the artist-as-historian, none of these models fully accounts for his particular approach. It is my contention that Nelson’s ‘hybrid script’ method, which braids together site-specific, political and fictional narratives upon which sculptural or installation works are then based, is the most crystalline example of this unique approach. The hybrid script methodology has underpinned Nelson’s work since 1994. I discuss it in detail in this dissertation, in addition to considering the ways in which it has changed over the last two decades. My analysis is based largely on archival research and interviews. Nelson’s hybrid script methodology also distinguishes his work from that of the young British art movement, which is exactly contemporaneous with Nelson’s timeline and concentrated in the same city, London. Where the most stereotypical examples of young British art are said to communicate directly, using techniques gleaned from the mass media, Nelson’s works frustrate and delay clear communication through their warren of back-stories. The significance of this finding not only contributes to the history of British art since 1990, enriching a localised art history that can at times appear monolithic under the heavy weight of the yBa moniker, it also contributes to the discursive category of ‘installation art’. While much discourse on the ontology of installation art emphasises the centrality of the viewer’s literal presence in the work — the paradigm of immediacy — I show that, by contrast, the impact of Nelson’s work is typically belated. It occurs at a futural moment of looking back.