Obsolescence and Extinction in Mike Nelson’s Installation Artworks
Fig 1: Artwork by the author Prologue_The Sole I was arrested by a sole (Fig. 2). The rubber had been worn smooth where the ball of a foot would rub against the ground. Were it not for the smooth surface that seemed to repel sand, the pale brown sandal may not have even drawn my gaze. Its ability to solicit my attention had to do with its past usage. It must have been well-worn to be so smooth—perhaps it once belonged to a favorite pair of shoes; perhaps it was second-hand. The remaining grooves, which may have originally fostered information about the make or brand, were clogged with sand. After turning it over, the sole revealed itself to be just that: it was not a sandal anymore, save for a broken strap. When something breaks or becomes outmoded, the tendency habituated in us as consumers is to throw the thing out. J.K. Gibson-Graham describes how hyper-separation from the nonhuman has caused humans to treat nature as “our dominion, our servant, our resource and receptacle.” [1] Although we create and engage with trash every day, waste is more often than not treated as out of sight and out of mind once it has been discarded. Timothy Morton theorizes that anthropogenic attitudes have caused the environment to be treated as a type of unconscious. While critically expanding what is meant by ‘nature’ in Ecology Without Nature, Morton very deliberately summarizes the book’s message using the narrowing metaphor of waste disposal: “When you think about where your waste goes, your world starts to shrink.” [2] Put otherwise, when waste flashes up from the background of our attention, the discomforting interconnections between human and nonhuman bodies become legible, and the illusion of hyper-separation shatters. Fig. 2: ‘Sandal,’ East Sands St. Andrews, April 2023, © Polly Bodgener Industry is eating away at the tolerance margins of nature, the nonhuman-as-receptacle is overflowing, and trash is becoming harder to ignore. As Tim Edensor notes, obsolete objects “draw attention to the unprecedented material destruction wrought by an accelerating capitalism.” [3] No longer a sandal, the sole was ontologically unpredictable. It challenged rather than affirmed how I walked on the beach. Noticing it located me inside rather than outside of the receptacle. It forced me to notice the connections between myself, the nonhuman environment, waste production, and other humans. Babette Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman suggest that obsolescence makes a…
