The Measures Taken

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s The House of Dreams, Serpentine Gallery

‘Shut in a white box
Under the constant neon
Being whitened in a box
Under the silent neon
Boxed in the white neon
Of the silent box
Under the constant wing’
(from Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Astrid-Anna’, on the solitary confinement of Baader-Meinhof prisoner Astrid Proll)

In Powell and Pressburger’s 1945 transcendental propaganda film A Matter of Life and Death, heaven is colourless, a blanched white zone of aphysicality. This is heaven as a sanatorium. Consciously or otherwise, the directors were participating in or parodying a pre-war technological revolution’s white heat. Modernity, when it wasn’t the reflective steels and glasses, was cleanly white and obsessively pure and rationalist. Estates like Oud’s De Stijl houses in Holland cast a picture of utopia in which colour was conspicuous by its absence. Similarly, Wells Coates’ Isokon building in Hampstead is, even now, an arrogant resistance against London’s crumbling earthiness. This whiteness may have faded architecturally into a dystopian grey, but its influence on the sanitary imaginary remains- a gleaming, suffocating cotton wool whiteness covering the walls of every art gallery in the country; the lazy minimalism of the White Cube, providing an oppressively neutral zero-surface.


White Suprematism

‘The blue of the sky is overwhelmed and pierced by the suprematist system and has gone over into white as the truly real incorporation of infinity, and is therefore free of the coloured background of the sky…white suprematism is on the way to white non-objective nature, to white excitations, white consciousness, and white purity as the highest stage of every condition, of repose as of motion.’
Kasimir Malevich, 1919

Malevich was perhaps the first to see a new transcendentalism in the obsessive wiping away of clutter represented by modernist colourlessness, a merging of the spiritual and the sanitary. This colour language would be given a rather different meaning by El Lissitky, with white the colour of the counter-revolution; of the white armies and the white terror attempting to wipe clean the Bolshevik experiment. For Malevich this was imparting a transient meaning onto universals. In this sense Malevich is the inadvertent prophet of the 21st century’s asinine, antiseptic state art- Rachel Whiteread’s White Boxes in the Tate’s Turbine Hall are like an odd refracted version of Malevich and the Suprematists’ Architektons; a kind of visionary monumentalist architecture, destined never to built- though with a hidden reverse by its echoing in Stalinist Gothick ‘zuckerbackstil’ buildings like those on Karl-Marx-Allee in East Berlin. This marks an elective affinity between the state art of Blairism and the Stalinism it so closely resembles in its discourse.

The comparisons with sanatoria aren’t idle- the architektons and their totalitarian successors were designed to accentuate cleanliness and rationality; though with the underside of the dreamlike. This dialectic between the rational and the extreme irrationality of dreams filters through to the Kabakovs’ accidentally fascinating installation in the Serpentine.

White Noise in a White Room- The Artistic-Medical-Clerical Complex

‘Under the Nazis an experiment was made in which they locked a man in a white cell with white furniture. He wore white clothes. And all his food and drink were white. He very soon lost his appetite. He could not eat. He could not drink. The sight of the white food and the white drink made him vomit.’ Adrian Mitchell

Veteran Russian conceptualists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, fittingly for artists raised in Actually Existing Socialism, use for their work the phrase ‘total installation’. The first thing you have to do in the House of Dreams is cover your feet with white plastic bags, lest you should besmirch the dazzling flooring. Then you’re free to pace around a vast, circular complex, essentially containing nothing. The rooms are lined with white curtains, behind which are white mattresses, under white ceilings, white lights, white walls. Talking, obviously, is forbidden. In the centre of the complex are beds placed atop plinths, with flights of stairs leading up (which you’re forbidden to walk up, marking the hierarchy implied by the opening ritual). The exhibition material suggests that the purpose here is an unambiguous space for relaxation, and for dreaming. You’re supposed to go and lie on one of these beds, close the curtains, let your mind drift away from city pressures, like a kind of Ikea version of Brion Gysin’s dreammachines (there is apparently a ‘dream machine’ itself in the space somewhere, but none of the staff know where it is) or LaMonte Young’s New York dream house. It’s not exactly welcoming though- the main feeling is of extreme uncanniness and tension. After walking round this unearthly whiteness for a little while all this warmth and fuzziness becomes a little unconvincing. All the terms like ‘meditative’, ‘contemplative’ and so forth littering the catalogue are all so much mystification.

On the contrary, it seems the Kabakovs have somehow stumbled on the ultimate conflation of three institutions of the production of Power- the art gallery, the hospital and the church (fittingly, some hack in a subsequent seminar on the installation reads a few passages of Carl Jung). The latter all have their little others, more often than not dressed in white- nurses, hospital staff, gallery attendants to ensure you don’t touch the exhibits, and priests. Here that centre of power is absent. There aren’t really exhibits to touch- once the white plastic is over your shoes, you’re on your own. The only power is in the mise-en-scene itself, and in the absent but ever-present imperative to lie down, give yourself up, drift. The exhibition’s spiel may claim that all this colourlessness is designed to let the subconscious flow free, as if such a thing were possible- instead the space is intensely manipulative, reappropriating the cleansing of space for the cleansing and engineering of the dreamworld itself. The Serpentine are laying on Lacanian analysts to discuss this in the dream house- but in an act of curious cowardice, you can’t directly discuss the dreams you might have in the exhibit itself: 'you may not be able to dream in the workshop'. It's fascinating nonetheless to imagine what- if it were possible to relax enough to find out- what the dream house might produce, with its cuddly, coddling microcosm of the torture chamber.