On Disaster’s Doorstep: Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen
Essay for Not what I meant but anyway, Columbia University Press monograph, 2022
Serpentine/Goethe-Institut Book Launch, 9 December 2022
Excerpt:
Originally titled Nearly Winning (the gambler never loses, they are always nearly winning), Cohen and Van Balen’s gambling works trace lines across money and blood. Lines traced from a casino in Macau to its owner, one of the world’s biggest conservative political donors. Lines that follow settler-colonial projects unspool through a London cinema designed to look like a Gothic church, now repurposed as a bingo hall; through poker chips cast in Jerusalem clay (The Circuit, 2019). Lines that converge into the artist’s eye, reproduced in glass and resting, as though innocently, in the middle of all of this, not looking away (The Opening, 2019).
You need a kind of paranoia to follow these lines; a habit of mind through which the structure of the real reveals itself as a dense, complex tangle. Cohen and Van Balen’s practice often experiments with the exhibition as a medium in and of itself, and in the gambling works that paranoia is mapped onto their articulation in a gallery space, at the Stanley Picker Gallery in Kingston, which I experienced one sunny afternoon in 2019. So much of the exhibition is intentional, from the near-reflective surface of the floor—"dead light,” I remember thinking—to the smell of the place. Pixel-sized glitches, coded into the media player, are overlaid onto the film, The Odds (part 1), which plays on a large LED screen, so that everything shimmers, slightly. Track lighting dims up and down, but only when you’re told do you realize, uneasily, you’ve seen it happen.
In a casino, a mall, or a theme park, “atmospherics” (light, music, smell) are designed to dull the senses and distort time. Atmospherics perform best when they rest just below the threshold of perception. But when these markers configure themselves in a gallery that threshold is ever-so-softly transgressed. You become a visitor in a place that was not intended for you. That physical pre-perception of something pre-encoded becomes a discomfort, as if someone had just disappeared around the corner.
As weird atmospherics leave clues behind, this slight unease becomes a defamiliarized “not-quite-there”-ness. And there you start to feel—maybe not yet see, but feel—those lines across blood and money, those sense-dulling infrastructures that hold everything together (art, ecology, economy, geopolitics) while hiding themselves from view. These are ecosystems—the man of rehearsal articulates them just so—and if you recognize them as ecosystems, do they then become fragile enough to upset, or break, like ecosystems do? Slowed-down to just over 50 minutes, Abba’s The Winner Takes It All stretches itself under and around the exhibition, carrying chord structures that you nearly recognize. Even at a glacial pace, the song retains the bombastic arrangement of the original, so that pop drama in one threatens catastrophe in the other. And never is this tension more acutely felt as when, on the screen, an entertainer from the Macau casino filmed upside down—a “Sands Siren”—crashes upwards in slow motion onto the shiny floor: feathers, tassels, and all, gravity reversed but no less unavoidable. Sedated horses hang from their legs on a hoist in a room that threatens slaughter but instead dispenses care. You will not see disaster; you’ll just stand there on its doorstep, and you’ll look away, because everything is upside down, and disaster fugues upwards, a mushroom cloud of glitter, blood, and money.