January Highlights: Commemorative Stamps, Sales, Tate London
through a bare gallery in which two huge suspended rectangular light sources brilliantly illuminate the surroundings in five second bursts before plunging all into momentary darkness. The dimensions of the gallery itself are impressive, if somewhat redundant, being more than sufficient to accommodate a fair game of admittedly fore-shortened five-a-side indoor football, at least during the intervals when the lights are on.
Mike Nelson's installation 'The Cosmic Legend of the Urboros Serpent' borrows heavily in both objects and ideas from his earlier 'Trading Station Alpha Cma'. There is an initial walk through a dimly lit corridor over threadbare flooring into mostly empty workshop cum shed before entering a truly claustrophobic set of store-rooms that are overburdened with remaindered bits and pieces of building maintenance. Stack upon stack of left-over lengths of timber, old rescued doors, step ladders that have seen better days, chairs that will surely not be used again -all in disturbingly ordered arrays. A lost world that someone cannot bear to discard into its rightful oblivion of the skip. A past that is tenaciously clung to for sole reason that it is too frightening to let it slip away.
It is surprising that Isaac Julien's evocative short film 'Vagabondia' is currently playing at the Tate Britain rather than across the river at the Museum of the Moving Image. Perhaps the artificial boundaries between film, paint, metal, and stone have at last been irretreviably dissolved. The work hauntingly takes us through a luxurious collection of 18th century artifacts at the Sir John Soane's Museum. It is permeated by overtones of Carribbean slavery and overlaid with a superb soundtrack of African-influenced music by the composer Paul Gladstone Reid, all interlaced with a voice-over in Creole, a private language that even fluent French speakers would find difficult to breach. In the days of pre-colour television the BBC structured visual mirror-imaging to humorous but limited effect within the classic shop-front window scene of Harry Worth. For Julien the duplication of images is central to the camera's progression as it seemingly floats through the Soane - a mélange of reality with the spectral, truth with illusion.
Richard Billingham is undoubtedly the innovator this year. The novelty lies not in his video displays 'Tony Smoking Backwards' or 'Ray in Bed' but in his photography. The magnification in 'Untitled' [1999] is intense showing in absolute detail the anatomical surfaces of an old man's hand. The bulbous, distended veins and the
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