Artist:
Mike Nelson (born 1967, Loughborough, UK).

Material:

Sculptural installation with wood and lights.

Description:

“Like the tip of an iceberg, the shape of the spiral has emerged at intermittent moments throughout Nelson’s career. It is central to the structure of works such as Barker Ranch (1996), which brought together Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920) with a helter skelter fairground ride with its long spiralling slide and the last hideout of the Manson family in the California desert in 1969. […]

Whereas Tatlin’s spiral tower is famously associated with the ‘modernity, energy, and expansion’ of the early twentieth century, Nelson’s use of the spiral has more in common with what Nico Israel, in his book Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art (2017), has termed ‘later-century work’, in which the spiral connotes ‘recoling entropy.'” – Helen Hughes, Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons, London: Hayward Gallery, 2023, p.

“Nelson’s 1993 sculpture Barker Ranch […] is a glib reconstruction of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International lit internally so as to appear like a funeral pyre…” – Helen Hughes.