Olivia Plender.
Dillon, Brian
OLIVIA PLENDER IS A CONNOISSEUR of a certain mystical or spiritual
Englishness. And mysticism, in England as in the United States, has
frequently been inseparable from politics. Much of the London-born,
Berlin-based artist's work has mined the territory between ancient
or resuscitated belief systems and the imperial, communitarian, or
utopian ideologies that have invoked them. Plender's drawings,
videos, installations, and performances have been concerned with such
narratives as the fraudulent beginnings of Modern Spiritualism, the
mystical-socialist movements of the early twentieth century, and the
return of the gothic and the supernatural in British cinema of the
1960s. Like a number of artists in recent years (think of Susan
Hiller's recourse to auras and telepathy or Susan MacWilliam's
collaborations with mediums), Plender is a cultural archaeologist of
irrationalism. Her singular skill, however, is in mapping the
intersections of this history with art and radical politics during the
past century.
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Consider, for example, Machine Shall Be the Slave of Man, but We
Will Not Slave for the Machine, an installation she made for
"Altermodern" (Nicolas Bourriaud's iteration of the Tate
Triennial) in 2009. This work revolves around the Kindred of the Kibbo
Kift, a consciously archaist outdoorsy organization founded in 1920 by
one John Hargrave, a renegade Boy Scout commissioner who had turned
against the late-Victorian militarism of the movement's founder,
Robert Baden-Powell, and toward rituals drawn from Saxon, Norse, and
American Indian culture. The Kibbo Kift foundered after World War II,
but not before allying itself with a new philosophical-political
movement called Social Credit and being approached (unsuccessfully) by
Labour politicians to become that party's official youth movement.
The video in Plender's installation, Bring Back Robin Hood, 2007,
connects the Kibbo Kift to the present, bringing together the
artist's hand-drawn black-and-white renderings of Kibbo Kift
rituals and contemporary photographic images. The work's own title
is borrowed from recent graffiti the artist saw in London and harks back
to the appearance on Downing Street on February 29, 1940, of a Robin
Hood-styled archer, who fired a green arrow-through the window of No.
10. The array of artifacts and costumes that makes up the rest of the
installation suggests Hargrave was as much inspired by Constructivist
graphics as by ostensibly ancient motifs, so that this curious offshoot
of occult English nationalism seems of a piece with contemporaneous
revolutionary aesthetics.
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Plender's most recent work at the time of my writing also taps
a mystical vein. Are Dreams Hallucinations During Sleep or
Hallucinations Waking Dreams?, 2011, is an installation comprising two
videos, a graphic novel, and a set of table displays, commissioned for
the Folkestone Triennial. In the course of her research in this
typically decayed English seaside town, Plender noted a preponderance of
new age emporiums selling spiritual gewgaws, stores that seem curiously
in keeping with the former port's older, Orientalized architecture:
Palm Court, Rhodesia Hotel, Luxor Arcade. Like some other dilapidated
coastal towns, Folkestone seems to suggest a fantastical past, or
future, not least in the gloomy precincts of its Masonic Hall, where
Plender's work is installed. Here, among lugubrious paintings of
Masons past and plaques recording the names of the lodge's
officials, the first video, shot in the room itself, proposes odd
affinities between esoteric writing and modernist theatrics. A cast of
local amateur actors carry out exercises derived from the
dramatic-educational practices and theories of Jacques Lecoq and Jerzy
Grotowski, but their gestures, inscribing enigmatic messages in the air,
seem derived from some amalgam of mediumistic automatism and Masonic
ritual.
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The second video, shown on a monitor, is directly connected to
Plender's earlier investigations of Spiritualism. It is based on
the writings of Andrew Jackson Davis, the American Spiritualist whose
mid-nineteenth-century books and lectures touched on mesmerism,
clairvoyant healing, and supposed conferences with the dead. In
Plender's video, a woman advances to the camera and delivers a
speech incorporating portions of Jackson's texts, The
Pilgrim's Progress, and direct references to contemporary economic
collapse, resulting in a montage of historical moments. A graphic novel
depicting related scenes was included in the installation, and was
inexpensively on sale at the triennial's visitor center.
In fact, the graphic novel has long been a major strand of
Pleader's practice, pursued in A Stellar Key to the Summerland
(2007), named after one of Davis's books and also concerning
Spiritualism, as well as in The Masterpiece (2001-2006), a series of
comic books named after Emile Zola's fictionaliza-tion of the life
of Cezanne but drawing its graphic imagery from 1940s noir. Set in
postwar London, The Masterpiece finds its painter protagonist trapped in
a haunted mansion while mysterious rituals are set in motion around him.
The overarching argument seems to be that the supernatural functioned in
English culture of the past century as a site for the desire for social
transformation that exercised more avowedly political modernist
avant-gardes abroad. One figure exemplifying the UK's alternative
tradition would be the maverick film director Ken Russell, whom Plender
interviewed for her video Ken Russell in Conversation with Olivia
Plender, 2005-2007. Russell, whose discussion with Plender revolves
largely around the role of the artist, moved easily at the end of the
1960s from producing energetic arts biopics for the BBC to making
idiosyncratic versions of gothic classics, such as his grandiloquent 1988 adaptation of The Lair of the White Worm.
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In much of her work, Plender makes the case that some version of a
cultural underground is hiding in plain sight among the detritus of
popular culture and once vast, now forgotten, social movements. These
last, especially, languish in archives and museums, and in the memories
of their former adherents or enthusiasts. A good deal of attention in
recent years has mined such forgotten aspects of Britain's past: We
might think of Jeremy Deller's interest in the holdings of small
local museums and the traveling "Folk Archive" exhibition he
organized with Alan Kane; the critic Rob Young's history of a
century of visionary and mystical influence on English music. Electric
Eden (2010); or the ambitious survey show "The Dark Monarch: Magic
& Modernity in British Art" at Tate St Ives in 2009.
Plender's own mediumistic ambition has been to reanimate the
remnants of spirits past not merely in their uncanny or eccentric
distance from the present but to summon their potential as suggestive
avatars of the now.
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BRIAN DILLON IS UK EDITOR OF CABINET MAGAZINE. HIS ANTHOLOGY RUINS
IS OUT THIS MONTH FROM MIT PRESS/WHITECHAPEL GALLERY.
