Mike Nelson’s Installations: Dystopian Futures or Contemporary Nightmares?

By Natasha Long

Mike Nelson, The Coral Reef, 2000. Fifteen rooms, lights, columns, chairs, mirrors, printed papers, various materials. Tate website.

Mike Nelson’s artworks are imbued with the destruction of the Earth and permeated with overtones of nihilism. Born in 1967, Nelson is a British installation artist who creates large-scale, immersive works depicting abandoned worlds, devoid of any functioning society and echoing dystopian and science fiction, history, and politics. The viewer can walk through the artworks ensuring both physical and psychological immersion into artistic environments that are futuristic. The desolate landscapes appear as post-apocalyptic wastelands with the utilisation of man-made, found, industrial materials and architectural elements that reference the downfall of humanity. Often discussed as futuristic and fictive, these installations are imagined but crucially reflective of the present, reminding viewers of the suffering, injustice, and fragility of the world today. 

The Coral Reef from 2000 is a network of fifteen rooms and architectural spaces. Each room, referencing different societal groups, critiques capitalism and consumerism in modern Western society. For example, a mechanic’s garage, a ‘Heroin Room’ with drug supplies and a security surveillance office with pornographic images. Other materials throughout the installation found in salvage and junk yards and flea markets, including Marilyn Monroe posters, a toy gun, military memorabilia, and Soviet English-language propaganda. The viewer becomes lost and disorientated in rooms that represent nightmarish experiences of dysfunctional societies. According to Rachel Withers, the objects are indicative of “disturbing characters: revolutionary extremists, satanists, religious cultists, fundamentalists of many stripes”. Viewers are prompted to ponder how close they are to knowing, being, or becoming like these represented individuals.  

Mike Nelson, Heroin Room, (The Coral Reef), 2000. Digital print on paper, 336 x 269 mm. Tate website. 

The medium of installation is crucial for the production of escapist and sensory experiences, allowing viewers to become submerged and a part of these landscapes. Nelson’s practice recalls the emergence of installation art in the 1960s when this medium was characterised by site-specificity, found materials and institutional critique. The medium of installation is therefore an effective way of reinforcing the conceptual nature of Nelson’s artistic practice which is often based on societal upheaval and change. Entirely visceral, when encountering these works viewers need not only visualise a fictional world of destruction but can temporarily experience one. The audience activate the works by generating human existence, assuming form as characters of these otherwise isolated wastelands.   

Mike Nelson, Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed), (2004). various materials. And M25, (2023), found tyres. The Hayward Gallery Website. 

Nelson’s art captures the human experience. The artist believes in the concept of ‘predictive processing’, the theory that our perceptions are predictions, and we construct our own experience informed by our positionality. Thus, these works reflect our own predictions, of what we already know. Investigating the enigma of existing in the present, remembering the past and imagining possible futures, is a flux examined by Nelson across these works. His 2023 exhibition entitled Extinction Beckons at the Hayward Gallery, London, reinforces this, suggestive of an ominous future apocalypse imagined in the present gallery space incorporated with remnants of the past. The title references Nelson’s first publication of 2000 where the words were taken from a sticker on a motorbike helmet. The artist saw this as encapsulating the irony of pessimistic language on an object that has the optimistic capability of protecting the human body.  

Triple Bluff Canyon, (the woodshed) produced in 2004 was shown within this exhibition and proved challenging to install, featuring a woodshed engulfed in forty tonnes of sand. The sand is riddled with found tyres that are incorporated from the work M25 that Nelson produced in 2023 and is the fourth work in a series of collected items from roads globally. Spread and blown out across the desert, the tyres were taken from the M25 road surrounding London. The man-made objects visually juxtapose the natural material of sand. Appearing as souvenirs and remainders of human conflict, these installations carry remnants of a once functioning society now in turmoil, emphasising the pessimistic emotions that fuel Nelson’s work.  

Crucially, the woodshed is a reimagining of a work by Robert Smithson from 1970 entitled Partially Buried Woodshed, depicting a building drowned in twenty lorry loads of earth at the Kent State University in Ohio in January 1970. Both Smithson and Nelson explore the notion of entropy, referring to the exhaustion and collapse of a given system over time. The tragic shooting of four students during an Anti-Vietnam peace protest on campus by the National Guard four months after the work was created resulted in Smithson’s work bearing new political overtones. Nelson’s woodshed, created during the Iraq War, is similarly politically charged. Today, it conjures topical events including the climate crisis and its debilitating effects on our planet.  

Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, (1970), Kent State University, Kent, Ohio. Woodshed and twenty truckloads of earth, 5.5 x 3 x 13.7m. https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/partially-buried-woodshed 

Significantly therefore, viewers are given visions of not just possible futures but also historical and contemporary events. Events that have been the product of human wrath, violence, and conflict. These installations represent not just a future, but also a present and a past. Although creating imagined scenes, in a contemporary climate saturated with political uncertainty, a collapsing ecosystem and human conflict, Nelson’s installations are pertinent reminders of humanity’s ability to self-destruct and the nightmares we experience today. These artworks are rooted in the present and are not, or should not be, interpreted as entirely fictional. They are warnings, but also happenings. However, viewers can choose to view the artworks not as entirely pessimistic commentaries on contemporary society. According to Claire Bishop, Nelson explores the theme of “the impossibility of believing in anything but wanting to believe in something… wanting another system of government or humanity”. Not completely nihilistic, perhaps. Thus alternatively, these installations should be used as encouragement to search for improved ways of functioning as a society, a source of activist change, and hope for a better future.  

Notes:  

Bishop, Claire. Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate, 2005 

Kabir Jhala. “Mike Nelson at Hayward Gallery: behind the London institution’s ‘most technically challenging’ exhibition to date.” The Art Newspaper. February 22, 2023. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/02/22/mike-nelson-at-hayward-gallery-behind-the-london-institutions-most-technically-challenging-exhibition-to-date  

“Mike Nelson in Conversation about Extinction Beckons”. Southbank Centre. April 7, 2023. https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/articles/mike-nelson-conversation-about-extinction-beckons  

Mike Nelson. The Coral Reef (2000). Tate. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nelson-the-coral-reef-t12859  

Rachel Withers. “Mike Nelson at the Venice Biennale”. The Guardian. June 3, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jun/03/mike-nelson-venice-biennale