Rod Dickinson & Tom McCarthy
Greenwich Degree ZeroInstallation,
including film footage (reconstruction: Royal Observatory, Greenwich
Park, London, approx. 4 pm, February 15th, 1894). 15 tables, 15 lamps,
30 chairs, archival materials, photographs, video (interviews with Dr.
Ruth Kinna, Lecturer in Political Theory, Loughborough University, and
Dr. Sidney Alford, Explosives Engineer, 2005/06), 2006
Greenwich Degree Zero
(2006), the first collaboration between artist Rod Dickinson and
artist/novelist Tom McCarthy, is an exhibition that interrogates the
role of media and technology in the construction of public experience
and memory.
The artists’ starting point is a strange late nineteenth-century event:
on the afternoon of February 15th, 1894, a French anarchist named
Martial Bourdin was killed when the bomb he was carrying detonated. The
explosion took place on the slope beneath the Royal Observatory in
London’s Greenwich Park, and it was generally assumed that his
intention had been to blow up this building – the place from which all
time throughout the British Empire and the world was measured, and a
prime symbol of science – “the sacrosanct fetish of the day”, as Joseph
Conrad wrote in
The Secret Agent in 1907.
Using the mechanisms
of historical representation Dickinson and McCarthy re-imagine the
event as a successful attack on the Observatory. They do so by
infiltrating and twisting the media of Bourdin’s time: creating a film
shot on a hand-cranked Victorian cinematic camera depicting the burning
Observatory, reprinting existing 1894 newspaper reports and anarchist
literature edited to fit their version of events, as well as video
interviews with contemporary explosives experts and political
historians. The installation reports an event that did not quite
happen, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction and
relocating the genuine public outrage and hysteria about the threat of
anarchist terror that prevailed in the 1890s in the ambiguous space of
non-event.
Bourdin’s death brought on a plethora of
speculative stories in both the mainstream and underground media.
Rather than try to establish the ‘truth’, Dickinson and McCarthy use a
form of repetition to reach back to the degree zero of time, mediation
and terror.
Beaconsfield
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