Is not real water a dull choice here? Water, perhaps the most overused substance of our time. And so much of it. Actual water even at the greatest of depths, surrounding the island, running under it. It is not clear who is meant to appreciate such effects, or why, more importantly, a valuable resource is made so glaringly inaccessible. One senses a kind of hostility in the gesture. A taunt.
Even after we have gotten the point, the point keeps getting made.
The hospital staged a series of exhibits, punctuated by intervals called the workday, evening time, the shadow, and a fourth category of time that would seem to have never been named. Night and day occurred on schedule, but something felt wrong, as if the whole notion of time had simply been given too little attention in the first place, unless its very design was meant to cause deep ambivalence and dismay.
At the hospital, for instance, the day might feel too long, the night too short, or the night was too long, followed by a series of short, secondary nights and then a sudden flash of day, which seemed to never end. People expired at a steady rate, regardless of the time, but for some reason, one could not hear little popping noises each time someone died. It would have been so easy to implement such an effect, a little popping noise when someone died, so that to live and to sleep and walk the earth would be to listen to a steady stream of popping noises, marking death in the vicinity.
Sometimes at the hospital, just when night would seem to have expired, night continued to deepen instead, achieving levels of darkness heretofore thought impossible, with the hospital presumably hidden inside this purely dark fold, operating as usual, even while night kept bursting deeper, with people now expiring at an accelerated rate, faster than they were being born. An accurate measurement of the true passage of time could not be obtained. The fourth interval was determined to go unnamed. The people, too, if that’s what they really were—a definitive test was impossible—would be unnamed. That whole part of the world could feel likewise unnamed. On a map the area would be blurry, never quite coming into focus.
It is hard to escape the feeling that this is a weakness of the project, no matter how profoundly ambitious it is to create a world, build things in it, and then allow life to bloom. It is a clear weakness to create an erratic, confusing experience out of time, to give each creature an apparently unique perception of time, and then to make time itself inconsistent, poorly designed, and finally simply too hard to believe. An unfortunate weakness in an otherwise intriguing project.
Moving inside, the hospital featured people bent over each other in postures of carnage. These exhibits did not expire, which makes it awkward to comment on them now. One must believe that nothing of interest will ever happen again in order to declare anything of substance now. The trick behind work like this is how foolish it makes you feel for trying to observe anything about it. To be invited to the exhibit, you had first to fall ill, then be carried there in an ambulance. Or you needed to apply for a job and then actually perform it, which guaranteed a bias that prevented lucid reflection on the hospital itself. To join the exhibit was to recuse yourself from a rational state. This would explain the long lines, the carefully constructed illness narratives, the displays of frailty. It is perhaps no accident that leaving one’s home is also called “joining the exhibit.”
Attention to detail on the island was staggering. An actual landscaping firm had been hired to produce what was probably considered actual landscaping. Grass and pavers, shrubbery patterned after a shield. From high above, the topography achieved a devastating insignia, most awful to behold, but no one was privileged to this view. As with many buildings, something unbearable was inferred. You didn’t need to see or even know about it. It was inferred, and that was certain.
The streets surrounding the hospital, themselves authentic in materials, were given actual names, and the names were ratified through constant use. Advanced surveillance revealed significant adoption of the streets, with a troubling degree of realism. Pedestrians questioned there showed no sign that they were aware of being part of the exhibit. In some ways, these pedestrians were perhaps the exhibit’s most striking feature, a clear sign of the new kind of work being done today. Certainly a trend can be observed in which the civilian members of an exhibit insist that they have arrived under their own power, pursuing tasks they are sure they thought of themselves. Very few of these civilians seem aware of their true purpose. Dissection revealed otherwise, of course. Dissection revealed a clear program carried out at what can only be called the cellular level.
Testing revealed that the inhabitants of the island came from all over the world. They had been born into different families, grown with food, sometimes managed by handlers, other times left alone. Some of them actually existed. No real pattern in their origins could be detected.
The doors to the hospital operate just as one imagines real doors should. Inside, a series of smaller exhibits takes shape as you approach them, then vanishes from view when you turn your back. This effect—objects vanishing if you are not looking at them—is ingenuous, and so easy to take for granted.
In one piece, set inside an authentic-looking room, a man in a doctor’s costume approaches the sickbed. This is not a painting. The man seems made of a soft, fleshy substance. You have this feeling, looking at him, of wanting to touch him, but not romantically. Actual vocal noises emerge from this piece. Heaps of cloth surround the sickbed, faces buried inside. These are ostensibly the loved ones of the patient, collapsed in postures, one must guess, of grief. The cloth would appear to be real cloth. It’s uncanny. Even the bed seems fabricated of actual materiaclass="underline" steel, plastic, and cotton. One is impressed by the trouble such fealty must have taken. The hospital makes a mockery of convincingness. The hospital achieves believability so easily, with such facility, it seems to suggest that believability is a terrible criterion for our daily lives, one we would do well discarding, and yet everywhere throughout the hospital believability seems to be what matters most. Perhaps the hospital satirizes the idea of being alive. Certainly there is a critique, in this piece, of waking up, of bothering to live.
So much of the piece is well made, not in the classical sense, but in the brutal, violent sense. It looks as if it was made by skilled craftspeople at gunpoint. The hospital looks like it was built at gunpoint. The people inside the hospital look as if they were born at gunpoint. The hospital looks as though it was positioned on the island at gunpoint. Even the island, when one examines its undercarriage, when one swims its circumference, seems to have been assembled, piece by piece, at gunpoint, dropped from the sky at gunpoint, made to decay just as real things decay, at gunpoint. One looks at such a hospital at gunpoint, then one walks away at gunpoint, travels home and goes to bed at gunpoint, only to wake up years later with the same awful gun held to one’s head.