Ben Woodeson: Unscripted

Contemporary Visual Arts

By John Calcutt

The smell kicks in. The worst of it is coming from a thoroughly sodden, mouldy carpet in the faked-up bedsit behind the gallery's rear partition wall. It's not so bad when you first step in from the street: a faint back-ground odour; softly blended with a hint of burnt cook-ing, a whiff of rotting food. More imposing is the naked white emptiness of the front gallery space. There's noth-ing much to see here, but not to worry: the main action in Ben Woodeson's Unscripted has been shifted to a place behind and a place below.

Below. There are two doors in the wall at the far end, one painted white to match the wall, the other a nonde-script brown. Several pairs of wellington boots and a cellophane bag dispenser are in the corner near this ugly door. Elsewhere, beams from ceiling spots spark metallic glints from the wooden floor.

There seem to be ten or so, set randomly into the floorboards. They're brass spyholes. You need to get down on your hands and knees for a proper look. Totally engrossed, you don't even notice that your buttocks jut comically into the air. Animal! You're ridiculous on all fours, arse higher than face, devouring bird's-eye fragments of an abandoned subter-ranean scene. You grab isolated glimpses of the desolate domestic landscape in the dingy basement space below. Over here a worn suite; an improbable miscellany of books and magazines is littered around. Over there a sombre kitchen scene: one neat table setting surrounded by an unhygienic ocean of neglect. Your nose senses something which you eventually identify as a saucepan of beans gently burning on the unattended cooker.

Behind. A sign on the wall above the wellingtons advises you to wear them for comfort and protection. The adjacent brown door opens onto a low-lit corridor, florid and cramped after the gallery's open whiteness. Through another door at the far end of this corridor and the smell hits you square on. Now you realise why the boots are advisable as your feet squelch and slop in the marshy texture of the fermenting carpet. Here, in this nightmarish back room, the only source of light is the flickering screen of a silent, untuned TV. You feel attacked by the smell, the damp and the oppressive darkness. Slowly your eyes adjust and you discern a sofa, an unmade single bed, more general detritus. Only moments ago you were peering through another section of this floor, your delicate nose touching it; now it is sucking at your feet, shooting noxious fumes into your head. Living room, living floor.

Later. It is impossible to respond neutrally to Unscripted, so heavily is it loaded in favour of intense reaction. Yet it forces you to earn its finer experiences. If hidden rewards have to be wrested from a work of art, there must be an incentive, a promise that the necessary effort will be repaid. In Unscripted Woodeson seems to offer the dark thrill of voyeurism as the lure, with its attendant dread of the non-visible. The eye's insatiable curiosity forces you to overcome physical discomforts (prostration, the bad smells and stumbling in the dark) and encourages critical reflection (narrative connections are imagined, and spatial experiences are realigned across a range of seemingly disparate and 'unscripted' tableaux). Woodeson makes you suffer and he makes you work, but the payback is generous.

Unscripted was at Intermedia, Glasgow, 12 - 24 July 1999

Written by John Calcutt in Contemporary Visual Arts, Issue 25 1999.