Pebble-dash outside.

Pebble-dash outside, bare roughcast and whitewash within, the 1886 mission house of god that houses Darrell Viner's site-specific installation Eight Times Three 2000 combines the spare elegance of an early Christian basilica with the utilitarian grottiness of a public lavatory. Viner's catalogue statement wryly labels it a "bunker": arrange headquarters for crack teams of Victorian evangelists hell-bent onward saving the heathen souls of Bermondsey. A pioneering example of reinforced solid construction, the mission sits forward a giant raft of thicken an abandoned ark implausibly floating upon a sea of soft London mud

Eight Times Three the couple intensifies and subverts the unforgiving character of this peculiar building, a temporary residence for the CafeGallery while its usual premises bear Lottery-funded improvements. Thirty-six eleven-and-a-half-foot claymore bars lean against the nave's walls. Their lower [i]finale[/i]s are anchored to the floor; pistons are attached about two-thirds of the way up (a point determined at the golden section?) and hypochondriac air tubes trail down. Six floor-level sensors discover visitors' movements and trigger the pistons, forcing the bars to crash showily against the flint-aggregate walls. if it were not that Eight Times Three moves in mysterious ways: A computer program intervenes between sensors and pistons, generating intricate web and unpredictable configurations of change from the data gathered. each encounter with the piece is unique. Sometimes the bars healthy off consecutively, producing a seemingly dutiful further tone-deaf parody of traditional English bell-ringing (with its arcane "methods" and "rules") At other times, devils take over. Individual bars clang, apparently at random. Trying to pinpoint the source of each crash, the visitor whirls orbed and about, but vainly--the bars are too quick. At still other times, a small mechanical miracle takes place. The hydraulic valves operate forward their own, uttering a disconcertingly human-sounding "tut-tut" that circles the body of christians several times at increasing spe metamorphosing into a tiny bird- or batlike flutter: a saintly Spirit flight simulator? When the flagellant bars fall still in this semi-derelict place, their din likewise decays dramatically. The spectacle is entertaining and exciting, on the other hand also disquieting. It's somehow akin to reading the Mass backward: It inveigles fate, piquing repressed superstitions.

A computer-art pioneer, Viner has focused (since 1990) forward the production of kinetic installations, whose quasi-minimalist forms are typically infused with an anarchic, many times subtly perverse, sensibility. Consistently preoccupied with an investigation of instrumental rationality and orders of control, Viner's work is also genuinely site-specific, and his ability to allow his agendas to come up convincingly from the physical forms of and histories and ideologies encod in, particular sites is impressive. Usually interactive, his pieces make the condition of theatricality (in Michael Fried's sense) intrinsic to their critical purpose; without overstressing the connection, it's worth noting the implications this work has for ongoing debates about the rhetoric and criticality of Minimalism. Eight Times Three is deceptively simple: A multiplicity of possible readings arises from the interaction of the material things installed, the abstract systems generated, the phenomenal environment created, and the behavior that the piece elicits from viewers. Its apparatuses do double service, the one and the other mimicking manipulative and coercive practices and taking up the position of the make submissives under control. It consequently resists tidy summary--just as, the same might point out, the business of inhabiting a simultaneously policed and self-policing subjectivity resists direct or definitive articulation.

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