Word in the Desert I, 2000/2008 - Mark Wallinger
about this work
For Word in the Desert I (2000/2008), Mark Wallinger has reissued a work from 2000 in a smaller version. The picture shows his alter-ego "Blind Faith" ( always with a white shirt, black trousers, black tie and sunglasses) at the grave of the drowned writer Percy Bysshe Shelley in Rome. By rotating the image 180°, Wallinger hangs upside down from the gravestone – like a bat waiting for the coming of the night (Shelley was married to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein). The inscription on the stone, Ariel’s song from Shakespeare’s Tempest, is made legible by the rotation of the image: “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange”. The work thus recalls various ideas of life and death, transience and transformation and by simple means opens up multi-layered levels of meaning.
Word in the Desert I was published by GAK - Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen in 2008.
