H.G: press coverage

The Independent, 10 September 1995

Sunday Times, 17 September 1995:
“There are no labels in HG, but there is the faintest trace of a narrative. It begins with an elaborate nature morte, a room abandoned after a dinner party in 1895 with lingering smells and the sound of Mahler’s Third Symphony, composed in that year. As you descend into the labyrinthine vaults of the empty warehouse that this medieval prison has become, the effects are increasingly abstract, but traces of the mysterious HG – whom I take to be the would-be time-traveller H G Wells – appear. A scent bottle bearing his initials lies at the bottom of an illuminated fish tank, recalling for me the commercial exploitation at the Maritime museum of the pathetic personal items dredged up from the Titanic. A hospital ward and discreetly placed buckets of blood suggest the first world war. A bound plaster corpse lies in a vault. A cat is caught by roving searchlights hunting through a forest of roof supports.” (Robert Hewison)

The Guardian, 14 September 1995:
“There is much more going on here than merely a series of objects and tableaux beautifully arranged and prettily lit. Wilson and Kuhn create images that ache with resonance for any audience familiar with Western culture and living in the latter half of the 20th century. Who can look at hundreds of pairs of labelled shoes without thinking of their wearers, of the world’s disappeared, of those stripped of their personal belongings and exterminated in a puff of smoke? Or consider a crumpled Coke can without thinking of Warhol?

“What Wilson and Kuhn achieve is the personalisation of history, distilling it from something vast and unfathomable into something intensely personal and meaningful. Like HG Wells’s angel, we can only stare and wonder.” (Lyn Gardner)

The Independent, 11 September 1995:
“Two years in development, HG comes at a time when [Robert] Wilson is increasingly escaping from the confines of the stage and moving into more unruly spaces. At the Venice Biennial last year, his installation, Memory/Loss, which was located in an old salt warehouse, picked up a Golden Lion for Sculpture. A site for HG – a piece inspired at some distant Wilsonian remove by HG Wells’s Time Machine – has been found in the old, bonded warehouse on Clink Street, an unimaginably vast labyrinth of resonant chambers...

“...Wilson’s decisions are based entirely on his intuitive response to the elements around him. His thoughts – as he demonstrates by constantly snatching my notebook and answering questions in spindly diagrams and hieroglyphics – are exclusively in mental pictures. ‘I look at the architecture of the space just to see and feel what is there,’ he says. ‘I get my ideas from the space: the space is low or the space is high or the space is damp or the space is dry. I simply respond to what I can see.’ As in his theatre work, Wilson aims to clear away the interpretive clutter so that there is no distraction to the direct sensory response. ‘Just enjoy the scenery,’ he advises, ‘the architectural arrangements in time and space, the music, the feelings they all evoke. Listen to the pictures.’” (John O’Mahony)

The Spectator, 14 October 1995:
“Installations are a variety of art in which I am generally able to see very little virtue. Indeed, I have maintained that have never, ever set eyes upon one that was as interesting, entertaining or beautiful as a good painting. Now that satisfactorily exasperating line will have to go.

“It remains true, all too often, that the word ‘installation’ signals not only something boring to look at, but also a visual conundrum whose meaning is comprehensible only to those willing – and able – to wade through the accompanying critical prose. When you have succeeded in understanding what it is all about, you often wish you hadn’t, so depressingly vague, pretentious or naïve is the point being made…

“But none of it is true of HG. On the contrary, it is beautiful, exciting, imaginative, and highly entertaining. The connecting theme of time travel – the HG in question being of course the author of The Time Machine – provides the opportunity to mount a series of stunningly theatrical tableaux. In one barrel-vaulted dungeon, a mummified corpse lies surrounded in billowing fog. Above, hovering in mid-air, hang a severed hand and goblet. Through a barred door it is possible to glimpse, in the distance, a sunlit jungle glade with fluttering foliage and crying birds. A ragged gap in the wall reveals a ruined classical city with arrows above which are miraculously suspended in the air. The effect is close to fiction of the magic realist school – a series of detached, mesmerizingly exact, images.” (Martin Gayford)

Art Review, October 1995:
“The texture of the floor changes beneath my feet: it’s soft, warm. It smells like earth, unless it’s soot. I walk up a slope, padding through this strange black powder into another room, attracted by the glimmering of what appears to be a pile of lime. I haven’t seen anything more purely visually luxurious since – well since... a few yards away I was attracted to a bowl of what appeared to be ice cubes, lit from within, but which turned out to be the broken necks of hundreds of transparent glass bottles. In the far corner of the room, there is a dark pit. Its floor, too, appears to be lined with lime, lit with a dim purple light. There is no particular reason why I shouldn’t fall in, or jump. I wonder if the figure standing against the far wall is another critic, or an attendant, or a part of the exhibition.

“‘So, then: what’s it all about?’ Well – but here is a vision of a city, eaten by an enormous animal. Here is a cathedral-sized vault, floored with wet, clear plastic, and dominated by a toy white rabbit, mounted high on the far wall and lit by a spotlight. And here is the exit: a London street full of tourists and office workers, and double-parked from end to end. I can’t believe I’m only a hundred yards from the exhibition entrance. Or that I’ve been underground for little more than an hour.

“‘Well,’ you say, ‘you have teased us long enough: what do you think it means? We know it was evocative and scary, beautiful and funny, hugely inventive and utterly unexpected. But what are they trying to say?

“Apart from all those things, I must admit, I haven’t the first idea. I’ll try to let you know, perhaps, when I’ve been round again.” (Charles Hall)

The Mail on Sunday, 8 October 1995:
“Wilson leaves it to us to draw our conclusions, with the warning that if we try too hard we could miss out on the experience. His vaulting imagination affords humour as well as the drama of a theatrical event. This is the Madame Tussaud’s I always hoped for as a child.” (Daniel Farson)