Captivated and Repelled: Invigilating with Mona Hatoum’s Current Disturbance – Roisin Dunnett
Current Disturbance
1996
Installation: Wood, wire mesh, lightbulbs, computerized dimmer switch, amplifier, four speakers
280 x 550 x 504 cm
When was the last time you were moved by an artwork? When we use the word to describe our relationship to art, we are not describing a physical sensation but, I suppose, an emotional one, something spiritual. The physical impact of visual art is limited, and how could it be otherwise, when it is forbidden to touch most work shown in galleries? But there is a physicality to our relationship with visual art, a sensual exchange is taking place. In a gallery, specifically, art pushes us around. We are propelled by subtle but clear forces from one space into another, towards the work (which we are invited to examine) and then away from it again (we are entreated not to touch). Maybe I’ve noticed this push and pull more than most because I spent four years acting as one of those forces.
In some ways being a gallery invigilator is a profoundly unstimulating job. Often casually contracted and low waged, it is physically demanding in a specific, attritional, way: standing up for long periods of time, doing not a lot. Much of the work is just hanging around or directing people to the same one or two places (café, toilets). It has a tendency to be fucking boring, no matter how exciting the artwork on show. Invigilators, however, tend to be knowledgeable about what they’re standing next to, beseeching visitors not to touch or photograph. Their knowledge is critical and intuitive: a lot of gallery invigilators are practitioners themselves. Invigilating is, in many respects, the most ‘just a job’ of all ‘just a jobs’: you’re not selling anything, not even yourself, not even the institution. At the end of shifts, any sense of responsibility I might have developed in the preceding hours vapourised with a completeness and immediacy I doubt I’ll ever experience professionally again. And yet few of the people doing that work have a non-committal attitude to what surrounds them. We did not experience the art in a passive way: we were there to protect it and, if someone asked us, to explain it, as best we could. We were there, day in and day out, looking at it, engaging with it and, inevitably, being moved or even changed by it.
No artwork, however, could compete with the visceral impact that Mona Hatoum’s Current Disturbance had on the invigilators, when it was shown alone in one of the smaller galleries for a few months. I was new to the gallery at that time, it was one of the first pieces I ‘worked with’. The curatorial writing below accompanied the work, and I read it assiduously, many times, in preparation for any enquiries about it (I was, rightly, insecure about my understanding of contemporary art and, as a graduate of English literature, had not yet understood that it could not always be read from left to right.)
Current Disturbance is a room-filling environment made from stacked wire cages, light bulbs and the amplified sound of electric currents. As the bulbs light up and fade out at irregular intervals, they sporadically illuminate the surrounding room and the unruly mass of wiring covering the floor.
This installation by renowned British-Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, whose ambitious work in sculpture and video is rooted in her early performances, emanates a pervasive sense of threat as much as it generates an alluring spectacle.
Referencing both the human body and rigid systems of abstraction, it combines sound and vision to create a highly charged experience.
Often, you can take the claims made of the effect of an artwork by the institution displaying it with a pinch of salt, but, in this case, I must assert that ‘highly charged’ is accurate. The light bulbs inside the cages brightened and dimmed, subjecting the space to a swelling of light before fading into a near complete darkness, in a sequence that had no discernible pattern. The amplified sound of electric current surged, flooded the gallery, and receded, like waves of static. Soon after the work went on display, colleagues began to complain of panic attacks induced by the installation. Our shifts in galleries were usually half an hour long – then we would ‘rotate’ into the next room, with the next invigilator taking over from the previous room. Spending half an hour, often alone, in a room with Current Disturbance, was aurally and visually and emotionally disruptive enough to have a physical effect. Others got tinnitus, or just felt weird and uncomfortable, unsettled. After some discussion, we were supplied with ear plugs, which we had permission to put in when we entered the room containing Current Disturbance and remove when we left again. In some ways it was a curious intervention, as our presence with the work at all was partly to hear and respond to queries from members of the public. With the earplugs in, our role was stripped back to its principal purpose: care of the work, managing its relationship with the people who came to see it, helping the gallery to maintain the contracted balance of ‘towards’ and ‘away’.
I myself never put in the earplugs. I did not want even that protective intervention to stand between us. I was addicted to being ‘moved’ by Current Disturbance. I was quite profligate and frustrated in my loves back then, and I was kind of in love with it.
When I first started working as an invigilator, I had a life outside the gallery that I had begun to find challenging, that challenged me. I brought all those challenges into the gallery inside myself, like a big rucksack stuffed full of problems. Most of the work I was spending time with would soon begin to reflect those problems, become imbued with their flavour, as my life in exchange took on the flavour of the work. I used to tell people that sitting alone with contemporary art all day required a ‘rich inner life’ but in retrospect I think I spent most of my shifts obsessively turning over the same few thoughts again and again. Looking through old gallery programmes is emotional: the love that went with this artist’s photographs, the grief that went with this. I can remember vividly the conversations I had in these spaces with sometimes terrible clarity, the artworks looming all around us. I remember one of my first attempts at conveying the news of a death took place in the gallery. I remember an occasion when my friend came to see me, during a painting exhibition that had become as unbearable to be with as my own thoughts. She had just picked up some photographs she had developed from a trip to the zoo. ‘Show them to me!’ I demanded. ‘I need something to imagine after you’re gone.’ She handed me the plastic slippery envelope and I held each picture before my eyes for a long time: a human scanner. I remember the chameleon, the hazy white blurs of birds in the aviary.
One time my manager and I tried to draw bikes from memory. Memory had begun to be a big deal: how often you can see something, yet not know it totally. Hearing, I found, is better. Most of the films, if they had dialogue, we’d know by heart by the time the exhibition was over. I can still remember lines from Chris Marker’s film La Jete. When I think of Zarina Bhimji’s Yellow Patch I can still hear the creaking hull of a ship, the cry of a peacock. The soundtrack to one video installation was ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, sung by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot. I heard it hundreds of times, and when I play it now, I can smell the white paint of the fresh walls, I can taste the tubs of cous-cous and cans of soup I used to buy from the corner shop for lunch. Each work I invigilated is irreversibly imprinted with a corresponding moment in my life and, merged with its ‘true’ meaning.
The thing I loved about Current Disturbance, though, was that it was kind of annihilating. It resisted, in its sound and in its physicality, the imposition of my experience on it. It’s a work that, like many of Hatoum’s pieces, is both austere and inviting, violent and intimate. Hatoum has spoken about the things she values in an artwork, describing ‘work that you experience on a physical level: you are either captivated and repelled by it in a physical visceral way’ and articulated the mix of ‘attraction repulsion desire revulsion’ that so much of her work elicits.
In a video preceding a show at the Pompidou, Hatoum applies iron filings magnets attached to a monolithic metal cube: Socle du Monde. ‘It’s beautiful don’t you think?’ she says, ‘It’s magic!’. The filings arrange themselves into curving formations and create an effect that resembles a kind of screaming vacuum precisely as much as they do a deep, soft rug. As I watched the video, I imagined the challenge that preventing people from touching it would present.
The light and sound of Current Disturbance created a similar effect to the filings: as well as inspiring a profound unease, the lights were a warm, inviting, domestic yellow. The sound was… demanding… to listen to for long periods, but it was not screeching or ugly. Once a man tapped me on the shoulder to ask if I minded the noise. ‘I LIKE IT’ I mouthed, under the sound of the current. Hatoum’s work, and this work specifically, does resist the viewer in a physical and conceptual way. Current Disturbance generates a forcefield around itself - it has an inhospitable air. But set against that resistance is this other force, the part of the work that’s inviting and intriguing. It embodied and enhanced the ‘push and pull’ of the social contract of the gallery: the work itself invites you close and resists that closeness with an air of threat. An early work of Hatoum’s, The Light at the End, is composed of heating elements that would burn a hand if touched.
Describing the work in an interview in BOMB Magazine (1998) Hatoum said:
‘When I speak of works like …Current Disturbance as making a reference to some kind of institutional violence, I am speaking of encountering architectural and institutional structures in Western urban environments that are about the regimentation of individuals, fixing them in space and putting them under surveillance…’
She said in the same interview:
‘Although the title might direct your attention to one aspect of the work, I hope the work remains open enough to allow different interpretations. A woman here at the New Museum said that the light bulbs fading on and off in Current Disturbance made her think of a sexual orgasm. How beautiful!’
Although I’m not sure I would call Current Disturbance orgasmic, I was certainly intensely attracted to it in a way that had a sensual element, and which bordered on weird. I was, by virtue of my own limited experience, only dimly able to perceive the threat of institutional violence within the work, although the austere, structural, claustrophobic elements its design did assert themselves to me, and manifested as an ambivalence, a discomfort which was only amplified by its ‘moving parts’. It had the effect of making me feel watched, something I already felt acutely in the first year of that job (I later became so comfortable with working in a public space that I used to fall asleep on my shifts, sometimes in galleries crowded with people). I would later become fascinated by the idea of a panopticon, a system of carceral punishment whereby the punished never know whether or not they are being watched and must assume that they are, at all times. Many of Hatoum’s works implicitly know that they are being watched. In Corps Étranger, Hatoum’s own body becomes the object of intense internal scrutiny via a medical camera.
We invigilators stood at an interesting intersection between the observer and the observed. On the one hand, we were the eyes of the institution in the gallery. Not only were we the eyes, but, unlike something like a security camera, we operated as enforcers of the social contract that existed in that space: ‘Excuse me? Excuse me! No photos please.’ But at the same time, we were very intimately involved with and affected by the work, implicated in that way. We were the most viewing viewers of all: we viewed the longest and the hardest. We spent an amount of time with the work that was probably only comparable with the time the artist had spent making it.
Additionally, we were, ourselves, being viewed alongside the work. As ‘implicated’ bodies, we were both responsible to and for the work. Over my years in the gallery, I became used to deflecting the discomfort, which often manifested as anger or irritation, which some things inspired, the sense of having been ‘tricked’ that certain pieces seemed to elicit. In the Hatoum room, as I rotated into the gallery, I saw a member of the public gesture to my colleague, insinuating that she should remove her earplugs. When she did so, he leaned in to shout at her that the work was too loud. We were also able to absorb the affection and profound emotion people felt for pieces that we had nothing to do with creating, selecting or displaying. I used to like it when people, visibly bubbling over with excitement at a work, would wait until the last possible moment before exiting a space, turn to me and then quickly, shyly but irrepressibly proclaim something like: ‘Brilliant,’ before beaming and disappearing onto the next room.
I do not regret that I no longer work as an invigilator, although I did find it hard to say goodbye to the job. I got another one, but never officially quit, suspecting that I would fuck up the new role and be back on the gallery rotation in not too long. I was unofficially added to the bill of someone else’s’ leaving drinks and gently, quietly, removed from the email circulating shifts after a few months. If I was to go back, I would still feel discomfort at offering up information about the work with any degree of authority. But in some respects, invigilating is an incredibly rigorous kind of artistic education. Like other rigorous and slightly punitive methods of learning (getting children to learn reams of poetry by heart, for instance) its outcomes have limits, but benefits beyond question. I don’t think I will ever have the opportunity to know a work as well as those I invigilated: the intimacy of appreciation and the implication of creating won’t be mingled again in that specific way. Perhaps for that reason, I’m not sure a piece will ever again move me, involve me, force me to succumb to its push and its pull, as wholly as Current Disturbance.