Serpentine Park Nights: Giles Round and Mark Aerial Waller

John Baldessari's The Hollywood Film (1972 – 1973) reflected in SANAA's Serpentine Pavilion

by Oliver Basciano

One does not quite know what to expect from an event that “uses Barbet Schroeder’s counter-cultural film More as a framework for a psychedelic presentation of music, sculpture and performance”. Call me closed-minded, but I certainly did not envisage making my way home clutching a mass of SpongeBob SquarePants helium balloons.

I get ahead of myself. As part of the Serpentine’s events programming for the summer temporary pavilion, designed by architects SANAA (designers of New York’s New Museum); artists Giles Round and Mark Aerial Waller have taken More as the base structure around which to curate a selection of interwoven short artist films that deal with psychosis and the narcotic-inspired surreal. The original 1969 film, mostly remembered for its soundtrack by Pink Floyd, sees a young German man Stefan (Klaus Grünberg), consumed with a sense of youthful freedom, traveling the continent. In Paris he meets American Estelle (Mimsy Farmer), who he follows to Ibiza. There, they spiral together into a well of heroin addiction, their inability to communicate the problems of the situation manifesting itself in bouts of idealistic sex. The film has all the clichéd hallmarks of a cult classic: drugs, sex and rock n roll. It is however a rather fun watch. The cinematography - owing a lot to the blinding beauty of the Balearic island - is mesmerising.

As first there is very little in the way of apparent intervention by Round and Waller, and the film is screened for some time without interruption. In fact it is left intact for so long that, when Stefan downs a Purple Heart upper and Norman McLaren’s Dots (1940) appears, overlaid, multi-coloured and hand painted onto the film frames, it comes as a shock. From thereon in the art comes pretty thick and fast, John Baldessari’s Time Temperature (1972-1973) and The Hollywood Film (1972 – 1973), Robert Breer’s Recreation (1956 – 1957) are spliced in, acting almost as a visual Greek chorus, commenting on the young couple’s tragedy. As Stefan progresses to his first hit of heroin, John Latham’s 11-minute, Speak (1962) comes across as a full frontal assault to the audience’s senses, not least because it’s the first time the base film is completely halted by an art counterpart. The fast-paced intercutting by Latham of geometric collages coupled with its industrial soundtrack, took on a life beyond the screen as they became reflected, refracted and warped though the rounded glass walls and mirrored ceiling of SANAA’s pavilion.

Whilst some of the choices were perhaps a little too obvious as companion pieces to the character’s drug pursuits, and the context oversimplifies the works to just the strand of the ‘psychedelic’ (ignoring other facets such as formalism and material and artistic fallacy); Round and Waller’s experiment traced the history of the fusion of the visually surreal with psychosis succinctly. The film was given a new visual trajectory with the artists being able to express the mindset of the characters in a manner that Schroeder was not. Towards the end of the film, this point was made physical as an amassed army of looming helium SpongeBobs began to appear outside the glass sanctum of the pavilion. Round and Waller seemingly indicating that this particular visual aesthetic was a historic anachronism to art now, commodified and merchandised beyond the artist’s interest. Yet that commodification - the balloon aesthetic picking up on the Serpentine’s current Jeff Koons exhibition - completes a circle, and takes contemporary significance again.

The Serpentine Park Nights series continues every Friday night until 25 September at the Serpentine Gallery.