Jane & Louise Wilson, 'Garage'

‘You Dig the Tunnel, I’ll Hide the Soil’ is a group exhibition that pays homage to Edgar Allen Poe’s anticipated 2009 bicentennial. Curated by artist/writer Harland Miller and staged at both the White Cube Hoxton Square and Shoreditch Town Hall, this exhibit features the responses of contemporary artists to the American writer.

Among the works at the White Cube gallery, the most striking is Mike Nelson's installation, Melnais Kakis (The Black Cat) 1999, that consists of decrepit rooms accessed through a set of rusty metal doors featured in the upstairs gallery. Once inside, visitors stumble upon uneven floorboards, a locked door, a wooden stairway leading to an attic door, and a room containing objects arranged on a desk such as rusty tools, faded postcards, and broken statuettes of the Virgin Mary, all of which is at once familiar and foreign. At Shoreditch Town Hall visitors are enveloped in darkness after entering and then wander around the labyrinth of hallways with the ticking sound effects of Christian Marclay's, The Watch, a comment on the fears of the machine age simultaneously reminiscent of Poe’s Tell Tale Heart beating throughout the exhibition.

Miller feels that Poe has become synonymous with what is merely gothic or dark, a misconception that he addresses in his curatorial approach to this exhibition. However, another misconception to address is the notion of the Gothic Revival that has been attached to this and other recent London exhibitions engaging mysterious or bleak subject matter.

In theory, Gothic revivals in art/architecture tend to occur during periods of social and political instability, but when has the world ever experienced a period of social and political stability? The term “Gothic” needs a bit of clarification before any real discussion of revival can formulate.

As an artistic description, the word “Gothic” has a complex history. Although the term is used to describe buildings and objects whose forms are based upon the pointed arch and tracery patterns produced from the middle of the 12th century to the end of the 15th century in some parts of Europe, like most art historical labels, the word was actually unknown during that period. Renaissance humanists first coined the term “Gothic” to describe what they saw as barbaric architecture produced between the decline of Classical Civilisation and its rebirth in their own time.

The word and style came back into fashion during the late 18th century, first among antiquarians who sought to preserve the ruins of the past and later among architects such as A. C. Pugun (1768-1832). Gothic soon came to define not just an artistic style, but also a historical epoch, known as “The Gothic Age”. For French Romantic writer, Victor Hugo (1802-85) it was a great age of faith, for the English critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900) it was a socialist golden age of the craftsman before the onset of industrialization. For German Expressionists and critics at the beginning of the 20th century, the later, tortured forms of Gothic seemed to prefigure their own modern angst. Given the differences of past interpretations, it is hard to define what Gothic means in today’s culture.

When comparing the Gothic of the past with contemporary times, a significant aspect of note is that art in the middle ages was believed to be about truth and purity. Images were more powerful than they are today. Religious art focused on the teachings of Christianity, and manifested itself as a theatrical experience. Even more influential, images recording the visionary experience of mystics, allowed ordinary Christians access to things beyond their own power of sight.

Today’s society is inundated with media images in a vast assortment of forms, thus diminishing their potency. The trend in contemporary art that seems to capture a gothic ‘look’ could just as easily be associated with a revival of modernism with its smooth, sharp lines and/or surrealism with its nightmarish gore. Just as Edgar Allen Poe’s stories encompass more than just the dark and gloomy, the gothic label is as equally far-reaching as the assumption of its revival. “The Gothic” in one form or another has been around since the 12th century.