A couple of years ago I stumbled across a piece of work at Tate Britain. I say stumbled across, because it wasn’t immediately obvious that it was an artwork at all. It was an ordinary looking door in the gallery wall that led to a quite sterile waiting room area. The door in this room led to another, this time a shabby looking mini-cab office and beyond that a series of labyrinth-like rooms, each with a vague notion that they had been temporarily occupied by someone but now lay empty. Each room had a loose theme, a mechanic’s office, a wood panelled room filled with Americana, and rather unsettlingly, a room with a used sleeping bag and strewn with drug paraphernalia. The final room is an exact replica of the waiting room into which you entered, leaving you unsure whether you’d somehow doubled back on yourself and making the experience all the more disorienting.
The installation is called ‘The Coral Reef’ by artist Mike Nelson. It was inspired by a mini-cab office that he passed each day and that looked like it was a front for something else. It seemed make-shift, a transitional space where the door into the back room could lead anywhere - or nowhere for that matter, only to another series of waiting rooms. He specifically created the installation to be immersive and participatory, that you would be entrapped and forced to spend time in it.
I’ve been thinking about this piece a lot lately in relation to the idea of liminal spaces, a term that has become a popular theme in the art world in the last few years and would most definitely be applied to this artwork if it was made now. Liminal spaces can be locations of transition (waiting rooms, airports, elevators, etc.) or a space that closes and reopens (businesses, schools, buses, trains).
Liminal space can also be events that are largely transitional and leave us lingering between the past and the future. This feels like a fairly accurate description of this past year. We’ve all been hoping for things to open back up and go back to some kind of normality but with many of us still unvaccinated, we’re still stuck in the metaphorical waiting room.
There’s a Stephen King movie called The Langoliers, which as you’d expect for King is overly long and a little bit silly, but the main idea of it is rooted in the idea of being trapped between the past and the future. A group of travellers board a plane and those people that fall asleep during the flight find themselves stuck a few hours in the past. When they land at the airport they find it empty, all the food and fuel is going stale. They come to realise that they must escape from the Langoliers, creatures that are eating time that has passed and will consume them too if they don’t get back to reality. I won’t spoil the ending if you haven’t seen it, but suffice it to say the waiting and the anticipation of the unknown is much more scary than the titular ‘big bad’.
I’m not advocating you watch this movie - to be clear, it’s TERRIBLE(but like good terrible?) - but it’s actually very fitting that the place the travellers are waiting to escape from is an airport, what I feel is the most liminal of spaces. And in thinking about all this, I wanted to make some work that reflected both the idea of passing through liminal spaces like airports and the idea that our wait is now ending in terms of the pandemic. I thought it would be fun to mix in a little of the nineties-B-Movie-set-in-a-seventies-built-airport aesthetic of The Langoliers. I’ve also included a little nod to Stephen King in there if you can spot it.
The wait is nearly over, hang in there.
