Installation view of Eloise Hawser: Lives on Wire, Institute of Contemporary Arts London (ICA), photo by Mark Blower
Throughout the story of man and his inventions there’s been a problem with flesh. From Frankenstein’s monster to the pages of J.G. Ballard and the film reels of sci fi horror, something about invention keeps causing a slippage between body and machine in our collective imagination. There’s a moment during Solo (2015), a short film that features in a new installation by Eloise Hawser at the ICA, Lives on Wire, that plugs in to this tradition. As the camera focuses on an old cinema organ, still embedded in the structure of Burberry’s Regents Street store, it’s lit by a flickering promotional video, a model’s gleaming teeth surreally reflected back by the organ’s dormant keys.
It’s an anatomical parallel which seems to please Hawser. When she joins me to speak about the installation, her language often returns, if only sidelong, to the body as we talk. She considers the skin of the ceiling, the bowels of the instrument, the fistful of cables running through it, and the moving arms of a machine that now comprises a standalone piece in the show, Resistance (2015). Taken from an actual organ, this mechanism whirrs continuously, a kind of living being, “autonomous” as Hawser suggests, “these wires are live I think.”
Installation view of Eloise Hawser: Lives on Wire, Institute of Contemporary Arts London (ICA), photo by Mark Blower
The machine has been extracted from another cinema organ, part of the larger body which controlled the lighting of its outer casing. “Historically it’s quite interesting,” Hawser observes, “you have this moment where, at the beginning of silent films, they would have been accompanied by an orchestra. Then at one moment Robert Hope Jones invented this machine to do away with the orchestra in its entirety and replace it with this single keyboard and these remote automated instruments… It’s almost as if to compensate for the sort of lack of orchestra, you get this lavish machine with its illuminated outer shell.”
If it burst onto the scene in all this camp, colour-changing glory, its moment of fame was short-lived. Rendered obsolete pretty quickly by the invention of synchronized sound, what drew Hawser to the instrument and its story was its peculiar timing in history, coming, as she puts it, at a kind of confluence and then fading from view.
In the exhibition, this outer shell, which made it a star of the show in its own right, has been, in Hawser’s words, “flattened… empyting out the containment of the machine itself.” The instrument itself is only present in its absence; you glimpse it in the film, shot on location in the Burberry store, an odd anachronism amongst leather, lace and rotating mannequins.
Installation view of Eloise Hawser: Lives on Wire, Institute of Contemporary Arts London (ICA), photo by Mark Blower
Disembodiment seems to be a thread which runs throughout. It’s there in the lifeless mannequins and spectral models that loop on screens in the empty store. It’s there too in the empty metal frame that houses the mechanism, drawing the eye from floor to ceiling. But it’s expressed perhaps most strikingly through sound, or the space it vacates. “I did think about sound… with this instrument that’s sort of absent, I thought ultimately the sound would be absent as well. Looking at some of the mechanisms of the organ and not hearing the sound is quite interesting… When you hear the sound and see the mechanisms together, you have action; it becomes much more illustrative.”
It’s this refusal that makes the overall installation so absorbing. It invites you to process the connections between things at the same time that it confronts you with your inability to do so. “When the guy that owned it explained to me,” notes Hawser, as we watch the moving mechanism, “you could understand it which is kind of beautiful. These panels, for example are red, blue, green… This is the resistor, once upon a time it would have been wired up to filament lamps…”.
As she explains it, she pulls out a kind of poetry from it, translating its form into something new through her understanding of it. In the anatomy of the machine she gives, she obliquely provides one of her own art, too, and the clever alchemy the installation creates. “It’s a really nice equation, this machine. Everything is in relation to each other in quite a taut way.” In dismantling Hope Jones’ superannuated machine, she invents something wholly novel, yet timeless too.
Interview by Imogen Greenhalgh
Eloise Hawser: Lives on Wire is on show at Institute of Contemporary Arts London (ICA) until 6 September 2015
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