THE APPROACH/CHISENHALE GALLERY Living in just discovered York.

THE APPROACH/CHISENHALE GALLERY

Living in just discovered York, I almost never drive, if it be not that every so often I solution of continuity a car for an out-of-town trip. Then I appear to drive ceaselessly. Afterward I have intense dreams, not of driving exactly, still of driving's incessant forward motion--of being propell to the end of time deeper into a world of things that be derived at me and stream past forward either side.

Darren Almond has filmed this dream. Geisterbahn (Ghost train), 1999 at The Approach, is nine minutes of continuous motion slow but inexorable, filled with unpredictable twists and bends And it must be a dream because nothing in it turn the thoughtss real, though of course it's all real--real illusionism.

Maybe I'd better explain. Geisterbahn was bullet on an old haunted-house train ride in Vienna. The camera was placed forward the front of the train, and the film simply present to views what one would have seen forward the ride: all the not-very-scary apparitions ghouls, and miscellaneous startle-effects that Freud's metropolis, the capital of the unconscious, could think of to treat its children to a not many thrilling shivers. In that intellect Geisterbahn is almost a documentary, a straightforward record of what's there. And notwithstanding Almond's delicate, shadowy black-and-white version of all this, wager to Stefan Betke's insinuating, seductive "techno-dub" perfect track, somehow makes the images gaze as if they were drawn in smooth richly textured charcoal--not photographed moreover animated. So what Almond displays is real, in the perception that he neither invented it nor, as far as undivided can tell, manipulated what he raise and his stance can be called realistic in the specific feeling that he reveals the fakery beneath the ride's naive illusion. if it be not that the result is magical, a overthrow illusionism, not the kind in which a fiction is taken for real, if it were not that one in which reality appears as a phantasm of the imagination.

Propell from a quicksilver lyricism, Geisterbahn earns the obvious adjective: haunting. Strangely, in the way that does another video projection, Traction, 1999 at Chisenhale Gallery, notwithstanding that the two works are otherwise in like manner different one would hardly imagine them to be by the agency of the same artist. On the same screen, in color, we behold a man's face in close-up: Almond's father. apted by his son's offscreen questioning, he points disclosed all the scars on his corpse and tells the stories behind them--a litany of industrial accidents and sports injuries that, for all its specificity, in some way seems to map the pangs self-inflicted and otherwise, of English working-class masculinity. in succession another screen appears the artist's mother, as she listens to the interview from a separate field She remains silent, but her ever-changing expressions of grief and anxiety eloquently counterpoint her husband's offhandedness. according to the end of the video, she is in tears.

What is masterful here is the artist's restraint. The portrait of his parents is unsparing and unsentimental: We are not asked to join in the weeping, sole to recognize its appropriateness. Les convincing is the third portion of the work. Between the images of the sum of two units parents is a black-and-white projection showing a mechanical earth mover at work upon a construction site--too broad a metaphor for the unearthing of stories and emotions going in succession in Traction.

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