Sleeper, 2004

Bearings: An Introduction

In October 2004, Mark Wallinger spent ten nights in Berlin’s museum of modern art, the Neue Nationalgalerie, costumed as a brown bear. As curious city dwellers pressed their faces against the glass walls of Mies van der Rohe’s illuminated modernist icon, the artist made various moves, pursuing no obvious plan. He lurched aimlessly around or lay flat on his back, scratched his brown flanks bearishly or raced wildly across the floor, slowly descended the basement steps or ascended them for an unassuming encore. Here, it appeared, was a bear of many moods. Deep into one of those nights, Wallinger sat down and, turning inward, pondered how he had ended up there: a 45-year-old Englishman sweltering in a suit of fake fur, delivering an improvised performance in a German museum after dark. “I was alone, no one was watching me, and there was something both absurd and glorious about this solitude,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘How did I get from Chigwell to here?’”

The steps from his Essex hometown have been at once sure-footed and wonderfully wayward, as this book’s chronological study of Wallinger’s career so far — drawing on extensive interviews with the artist and discussions with those close to and working with him — aims to demonstrate. Since his first London solo exhibition in 1986 (essentially a reprise of his MA degree show at Goldsmiths’ College from the previous autumn), Wallinger has made technically superb oil paintings depicting racehorses and the homeless, videoed himself singing a sentimental hymn while inhaling helium, been photographed in drag as a suffragette jockey, separated the passengers on a New York harbour ferry into biblical ‘sheep’ and ‘goats’, and exhibited a perpetually gushing hosepipe poking out of a gallery window. He has mounted virtually the only public religious statue to appear in England since the Reformation, the Christ figure Ecce Homo (1999). He has won the Turner Prize for State Britain (2007), a 43m- (141ft-) long meticulous recreation of English peace campaigner Brian Haw’s anti-war protest camp, described by Yve-Alain Bois in Artforum as “one of the most remarkable political works of art ever”. He has been commissioned to make Britain’s largest public figurative sculpture — a white horse 52m- (170ft-) tall for Ebbsfleet, Kent — and, thanks to a stringent work ethic, done much more besides. What he has not done, in an ongoing display of imaginative flexibility that stands in contrast to certain ideological idées fixes that his art prowls around, is repeat himself.

Of course, anyone can be a dilettante, a scattershot jack-of-all-trades and master of none. In our post-medium, easy-outsourcing artistic era, such a position might even be considered the new orthodoxy. Yet Wallinger’s work is tied together by consistent, if evolving, thematic concerns, and, furthermore, by a conscientious outlook that has a Y-shaped tree sculpture that looked something like a divining rod, it might have been a self-portrait.)

As a broader illustration of how he works, let us briefly return to Sleeper — the title given to Wallinger’s performance at the Neue Nationalgalerie in the city where he happened to have recently been living, and consequently to a two-and-a-half hour video of unedited footage. What could be more surreally attention seeking, more look-at-me, than a roving bear in a brightly lit museum at night? And yet Sleeper, with a little interpretation, reveals itself as exemplary of a thoughtful, layered, allusive but non-didactic approach.

For example, the bear is the civic symbol of Berlin; and so Sleeper presents an Englishman going to farcical lengths to “fit in” on foreign soil. It is also the emblem of Russia, bringing into the work’s orbit the Cold War history of ‘sleeper’ agents, spies in deep cover. The motif of the bear additionally references The Singing Ringing Tree, a 1950s film/television programme made and broadcast in East Germany (and the UK, where Wallinger saw it in the 1960s) but never in West Germany. Staged in a city formerly split by both ideology and architecture, Sleeper in this light is a spacious poem about viewpoints, what serves to divide us and connect us, how what we see depends upon where we stand and how all manner of formative and ongoing influences make this so. If we were truly to empathize with others — other nations, other cultures, other religions — we would have a grand task of undoing ahead of us. Quite possibly it is unachievable. Maybe, though, common ground is present yet obscured. The Germans and the British, so Wallinger noted in a lecture he gave at Tate Britain in 2007, are in his experience oddly similar peoples, or at least they “in onto the similar problems.”

Under such vexed but perhaps unobvious circumstances, art can diagnose, or better, invite viewers to reach their own diagnosis. It might also ameliorate, offering such unlikely, briefly flaring epiphanies as a wandering bear in a museum at night. Pulling back, it is perhaps not surprising that Wallinger, when he donned his furry suit, initially planned to use his time listening to an audio recording of Ulysses. The humanist themes in Joyce’s novel, and the way that coercive forces and prejudice are counterweighted within it by an imbuing of the everyday with aspects of the miraculous, are echoed insistently throughout the artist’s oeuvre. (The book’s title has, finally and fittingly, recently made its way into his art.) Wallinger also knows the value, in temporarily releasing us from heavy, earthly cares, of a good joke; or even better, a good bad joke. Indeed, the prevalence of humour here might infer something about the magnitude of the problems.

In 2009, Wallinger’s art was a question category on the long-running British television quiz programme University Challenge. If it is telling that an English contemporary artist’s work has become common enough currency to warrant such an inclusion, it is equally notable that the projects referenced — State Britain, Sleeper and Ecce Homo — were radically diverse, public or at least high-profile affairs, and made after Wallinger turned 40, by which point artists are often assumed to have done their best work. Wallinger, conversely, seems to be in his prime, and one question this story so far asks and continues mercurially to answer is this: How do you fashion a compassionate and ethical yet not preachy art, one that can potentially touch large audiences, in an age ever more devoted to crowd-pleasing spectacle and the severance of art from a dimension of social conscience?

Another, of course, is this: How do you get from Chigwell to here?

NIGHTS IN THE MUSEUM

In January 2003 Wallinger had gone to Friedrich Meschede, head of the DAAD’s visual arts department, and proposed the idea of Sleeper: a performance in which a man in a bear costume wanders around in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie after dark. Meschede burst out laughing, then called his secretary in: ‘Listen to Mark’s proposal!’ And indeed Sleeper (2004) — made a year and three-quarters later since Wallinger had to wait for a moment when the building would be completely empty — is, on the face of it, a comically absurdist concept. It is also, however, a kind of TARDIS: bigger, not to mention darker, inside than it looks on the outside.

The piece originated with the Mies van der Rohe–designed museum itself, says Wallinger, and quickly escalated into multilayered symbolism. ‘It’s such an iconic building that it seemed criminally underused. I’d drive past it quite often, and particularly at night it seemed such a waste: this cold thing, a reservoir of darkness. Almost anything illuminated in there would have a presence. I’d been filming bears at the zoo and there were also all those fibreglass bears around Berlin, due to the current German vogue for branding cities.’ But when you think about the Soviet bear — the Russian bear — it is not a cosy symbol (100,000 Berlin women were raped by the Red Army). And, of course, infamously, the Nazis kept bears in Buchenwald. You could say it was a rather over-determined symbol, but the key for me was a TV memory from my childhood, The Singing Ringing Tree: a programme that terrified and haunted a generation. I began to realize that this dramatized fairytale was known by my East German friends but not my West German ones and, in retrospect, it represented this psychic connection across the Iron Curtain…

The Singing Ringing Tree was made as a film in the East German state-owned studios Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) in 1957; it was serialized by the BBC and first broadcast in the UK in 1964. It tells the story of a prince searching for a magical tree, who is transformed into a bear by a malevolent dwarf. Part of the fascination for Wallinger was the cultural specificity of its limited screening. A man transformed into a bear, trapped in a kind of illuminated prison at night, would evoke a different set of resonances for Berliners depending on which side of the Wall they had grown up on. Here, if you like, was a model of how ideology shapes viewpoints. To reinforce the reference, an image from The Singing Ringing Tree was used on the posters advertising the ten-night performance, which Wallinger had pasted up on the S-Bahn and U-Bahn.¹

But Sleeper yielded up multiple meanings, and it also narrates Wallinger’s own experience, as a foreigner in Berlin, of trying to ‘fit in’ — in an absurd manner, by dressing as the city’s emblem. ‘I was an alien in disguise, in a German disguise; one that’s so obvious that they might buy it. I remember, as a kid, reading lots of Richard Hannay-type, John Buchan books, where the rule was “you always double-bluff the Germans”.’ It was that, and also a sense of the poignancy of compartmentalized lives, and other cultures never being properly assimilated.² At the same time, the title refers to the history of spies and ‘sleeper’ agents and the intricate infiltrations of the Cold War, the paradox of someone being asked virtually to become a member of another society because those societies cannot see eye to eye. And, set in a once-split city, Sleeper was symbolic of the divisions and frontiers, the endless carving-up of spatial and mental territory and fashioning of enemies that, in Wallinger’s art, looks like the hallmark of humanity.

And all of this came wrapped in a supremely outlandish exterior. Each night at around 10 p.m., Wallinger-as-bear would appear in the glowing Neue Nationalgalerie and, visible through the glass walls, spend three or four hours improvising within it while sweating inside a heavy furry costume that was, he says, ‘like wearing a sofa’. (There are other ways of suffering for one’s art than making meticulous paintings.) Here was a free, perpetually changing performance for anyone passing by, and also – crucially – a figuring of the marvellous: a strange and potentially epiphanic experience in the heart of the city. The beauty of Sleeper, accordingly, is that it manages to diag- nose the downsides of the human condition, offer a dark history lesson, perform an implicit separation and offer some brightly incongruous compensation for all this, all at once. When Wallinger was awarded the Turner Prize three years later, albeit for State Britain, it is apt that his exhibition at Tate Liverpool consisted of the video version of Sleeper (a two-and-a-half hour stream of the original, on the second official night, had been broadcast live by link-up to the German ambassador’s residence in London.) Its maker may have resisted a stylistic signature in the previous two decades, but in its lightly worn but profound concerns, this is conceptually a signature work.

Asked how Sleeper functions as a layered piece, balancing absurdity and darkness, Anthony Reynolds returns it to the largest scales of thinking and evocation in Wallinger’s work. ‘It needs those extra layers,’ he says, ‘to enrich and re-render it. Because it’s one thing to – as countless artists do – present those issues in artistic form, but it’s another to take you in and let you share an adventure of discovery. So much so-called political art is uninteresting, preaching what you know. In that piece, yes, there are all the issues, the bleak issues which are outside of the person, and all the issues that are in the person as well. The crushing loneliness of it: I don’t mean he’s crushingly lonely, because he’s not in the slightest bit, but then we all alone with our beliefs, our illusions, having to deal with them and wrestle with them.’

Sleeper also provided Wallinger with his own little epiphany, or at least a moment of apt strangeness. On the seventh night, at the end of the performance, a photographer waiting outside asked Wallinger if he had seen ‘the other bear’. Wallinger had not. Around the back of the gallery, it transpired, was a figure in the exact same bear suit, pressed against the glass: a doppelganger. With Wallinger too tired and intimidated to approach it, the bear walked away, never to be seen again. In his book The Russian Linesman, shortly after describing the incident, the artist writes: ‘The two realms of Germany were like twins separated as children and raised in com- pletely contrary ways. Having to cross irrevocably from one realm to the other, or be divided without appeal. This is what I have learnt and it seems very cruel. Germany invented the unconscious, which is not normally credited with respecting borders.’

Text from: Herbert, Martin, and Mark Wallinger. 2011. Mark Wallinger. New York: Thames & Hudson.