"Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others: after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor."
-Franz Kafka
Disquieting Landscapes, a series of photographs and films by Cyprien Gaillard, creates icons of abandonment and false progress in the vein of Robert Smithson.
View over Sighthill Cemetery, a rich chromogenic print, captures a spotlit apartment building by night, framed on three sides by stark black sky. The photograph is big and crisp enough to reveal the atrophy, the end of its conventional function and the beginning of its life as a loaded monolith. In the foreground, cockeyed headstones stare up at the structure, monuments to varying degrees.
Cairns (12 Riverford Road, Pollokshaws, Glasgow, 1967–2008) is the same scenario in a future phase. In this photograph, the centerpiece is a neat stack of rubble, the product of a careful implosion.
The accompanying videos offer more tonal clues. Real Remnants of Fictive Wars is a slow motion 35mm projection in which a cloud of smoke pours from a mystery source, envelopes a tree, dissipates and drifts away. It is menacing and dramatic, but the weaponless, destructionless cloud leaves little more than a temporary stain on the landscape. Gaillard attempts to breach historic fiction. Alluding to no war in particular, we are given an overriding and romantic view of violence. By removing specificity in this vacant reenactment, he creates an engaging contingent proposition.
Desnianski Raion is a series of clips on a loop. In one moment, the frame jitters skyward, flying through, and above the common apartment blocks seen beyond Sighthill Cemetery. Silent save for the light thumping of helicopter blades, the slow winter’s drift has a distinct apocalyptic tone. The sounds fade neatly into moaning club music, enough to dance to or cry to. A calculated brawl that feels like hell’s initiation ensues on the street level, three factions blindly swinging and struggling with no apparent aim. Finally and again, the tower block at night. The video is decidedly less crisp, like a twice-filmed television. Colored spotlights, graphic roses, and a two-bit laser light show bounce across the building as the soundtrack climbs to a slow climax of synthesizers and bass beats. The fine, drugged line between dread and elation. Finally, the building implodes, folding inward, sending smoke everywhere at once.
Disquieting Landscapes is unassuming at a glance. Ruins are powerfully ominous, an oft-used conceptual tool and Gaillard is attempting to preserve them for all their allegoric weight. They remind us of our deaths and the panic with which we cultivate, build, and replace, creating monuments that according to Smithson, rise “into ruin before they are built.”
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