The Elephants

Robert Bingham: 1st April 2010 (2010), courtesy the artist

‘Deception has been my guiding light, the means by which I negotiate the postponement of my presence in the world, circumnavigating my way around a series of refracted absences.’
- Robert Bingham (1964 - )

‘To be absent is to be present in another form.’
- Roger Beaten (1964 - 2011)

They were resurfacing the road outside the counsellor’s office. Drawn to its bituminous cavity, Robert stopped and took a picture of the paver hopper. When his mother arrived, he was leaning awkwardly against the railings. On seeing Robert Mrs Bingham feigned surprise, shock almost, as if her son had just risen from the dead. For his part, it was as if Robert was being confronted by someone who he only vaguely recollected. What childhood memories he had of his mother were buried deep beneath the surface.

As they entered the building, Mrs Bingham said she hoped the ensuing session would be of help to Robert. In reply, Robert said he hoped his mother was feeling better, and that the upcoming session would not take too much out of her. She had been ill the previous week, the recurrence of an old complaint. Emboldened by Robert’s cowed demeanour, Mrs Bingham replied that she wanted to do whatever she could to help, adding, as an inspired afterthought, that it was her Christian duty. It was only with great difficulty that Robert refrained from punching his mother in the face, and telling her to fuck off. He found his own deference, so early in the proceedings, disorientating, and struggled to contain his feelings of rage. Needless to say, it was not the opening gambit he had hoped for.

The counsellor began by telling Robert that although she had not personally met his parents, she knew them by reputation, and the fine missionary work they had done over the years in the city. She was sorry, she said, to hear of the death of his father.

As she spoke, and the vessels, empires in embryo, rose and fell, Robert fed her words into the paver hopper, and watched as they were subsumed in the black pitch.

What did he hope to gain from the encounter? Was he anxious to get the bridge-building process underway?

They’d been at it for years, low level hostilities, locked in perpetual conflict.

His mother was an extremely caring individual who loved her children deeply.

He wanted to break her down, clear away the wreckage, start anew. He wanted to extract from her an admission of guilt, and see her suffer the consequences of such an admission. Spitefulness, neglect, emotional detachment, he had brought a basket of accusations to the table.

The counsellor told Robert that she admired his articulacy, his way with words, but she wanted him to go beyond words, for him to meet his mother half way, and if needs be go the extra mile for the sake of reconciliation.

Robert replied that he was hostile to the extra mile. He resented acutely the extra mile, and preferred not to think about it in any way, shape, or form. He would have trouble enough going an extra inch, especially when his mother harboured towards him a murderous and unjustified rage.

What was the evidence for this murderous rage? Could he give any concrete examples?

Robert said he would get back to her on the matter of concrete examples.

They would meet again in a week’s time. In the meantime, they should continue working at their relationship. As part of the bridge-building process, the counsellor suggested that they meet up for a coffee, to get to know each other better.

They met in the basement café of the Municipal Gallery. Their opening gambits were cautious. They discussed their likes and dislikes, the quality of their respective cappuccinos (strength, temperature, depth of froth), a recent televisual drama enjoyed by one, avoided like the plague by the other, and the poet William Butler Yeats, a postcard portrait of whom Mrs Bingham had just purchased in the gallery’s bookshop.

Informed by various interconnected disciplines—astrology, mysticism, the occult—Yeats had a rich and complicated relationship with the afterlife. He had been a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, giving himself the magical name, Daemon est Deus Inversus (the Devil is God inverted). The meaning of this, Robert explained, was that in order for the Godhead to manifest and become conscious of itself, it had to spilt itself in two, and it was from these two observable parts that everything stemmed, so that spirit and matter, good and evil, existed only in so far as they contrasted mutually with each other. There was no evil per se, but the human notion of evil derived from an inability to observe the whole in its totality.

One of the people that The Order of the Golden Dawn attracted was the English author, mystic, and wickedest man in the world, Aleister Crowley, who called himself among other things, The Great Beast 666. Robert described Crowley as a misogynist, racist, spoilt upper-class brat. By way of mitigating this simplistic depiction, he added that Crowley had also been an accomplished mountaineer.

This all came as news to Mrs Bingham, who doubted a Nobel Prize winning poet of Yeats’ calibre would have had anything to do with such a beast. To her, Yeats represented the sort of genteel Anglo-Irish poverty in which she had been raised. When she pictured him it was playing cribbage in the parlour, not hunched over an Ouija board, trying to contact the dead. This world was epitomised for her by Lissadell House, which Mrs Bingham had been most impressed by when the family took a guided tour around it, whilst on holidays one summer in County Sligo. Yeats’ poetry spoke to Mrs Bingham, not as Robert did, by shouting, or using convoluted arguments peppered with profanities, but in the language of the soul. It was at this juncture that Mrs Bingham raised her eyes to heaven and quoted in hushed tones, ‘two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle’. In the twilit moments of the rendezvous, Mrs Bingham touched briefly on the religious beliefs that had sustained her through the sacrificial matriarchal role God has assigned to her. When they finally parted company, it was on what could only be described as good terms.

As Robert makes his way home, his thoughts turn to the series of photomontages that he is working on, called Lock Step. As he walks, he reflects upon the two visual components that will make up the first composition. The left-hand panel consists of an image of refracted sunlight, interspersed with a mixture of hard- and soft-edged shadows. The shadows form a sort of splint or brace, which connects this image to an image of the concrete floor of a basement, across which are scattered various objects. These objects, which include a blue paper-bag, a double-torsion spring, a rag, and a cantilever tool box containing spanners, appear as if they are being sucked or pulled magnetically out of the frame. In combination with the inky blue shadows cast across the concrete paving, the bright-blue bag and small steel-grey double-torsion spring, at opposing ends of the left-hand pane, create a feeling of mystical transmutation.

This balancing of divergent forces is evident in the looped handles of the paper bag, which, like the chambers of the tool box, pull in opposite directions. Echoing these dualities, two cylindrical holes can be seen, resting on the cusp of the image, in the bevelled end of a small piece of rusty metal. In the left-hand panel, a slew of wasted butts, in post-conflagratory repose, the whites of their eyes still visible, eschew the zone of demarcation. Their stubbed-out orange filter-tips parody the centrally-located gold-tipped battery on the other side. Beyond the disingenuous veils of smoky blue light, cellular vitality stands foursquare against the spent forces of narcotic stimulation.

Robert Bingham: Lock Step 1 (2010), courtesy the artist

Three weeks after the first counselling session, on the afternoon of Thursday, 1st of April 2010, Dorothy Bingham had a stroke. She was with her eldest daughter, Petra, and Petra’s eldest daughter, Electra, both of whom had travelled from England to spend a week with Dorothy in the West of Ireland. Robert was in Dublin at the time, and at 14.21 (the time logged by his mobile phone) he took a photograph of some horse-chestnut leaves, which had been torn down the previous evening when the tail end of a continental storm hit southern Ireland. Up to fifty people had been killed when blizzards, heavy rain and high winds battered France, Spain, Portugal, and Germany.

Mrs Bingham had complained the previous evening of feeling unwell. It had rained non-stop since their arrival and tensions were running high. The relationship between Mrs Bingham and her eldest daughter had failed to recover from the religiosity imposed upon Petra during her childhood. With her heart set on wrecking vengeance for what she perceived as past wrongs, Petra impressed herself with grim determination upon her aged mother’s time.

The following day, Mrs Bingham said she felt weak and that her vision was blurred. She had a lie down. When she got up from her lie down, she said she did not know where she was, or recognise with whom she was with. The culmination of a long process of disavowal, the stroke finally choked off her blood supply, and negated Petra’s war of attrition.

When Mrs Bingham regained enough strength, she phoned Robert from her hospital bed. As he wasn’t home, she left a message on his answering machine. Her voice, straining under the weight of indignant accusation, sounded muffled and hollow. She had to change her lifestyle, she said, to eliminate stress. There’d be no more counselling, she said, so he could forget about all that.

After extensive tests, Mrs Bingham was diagnosed as having had a cryptogenic infarction, a stroke without obvious explanation, of ‘unknown, uncertain, or undetermined cause’.

The hospital to which Mrs Bingham was taken was newly built, its walls and ceilings awash with muted greys and greens, the corridors littered with galls of polished steel. Her bed, crowned by a half-closed curtain, was located by a window overlooking a footpath and grass verge, beyond which a car park stretched down to a busy motorway. The footpath snaked across the road into a patchwork of variously-coloured vehicles, the bonnets of which glinted in the cold spring sun.

When Robert went to see his mother, she told him that his older brother, William Graham Bingham, had visited her that morning, and had a run-in with one of the doctors. When Mrs Bingham told her youngest son this, she seemed conflicted, torn between her pride in her eldest son’s superiority, and her respect for the doctor’s position of authority. Although William had talked down to the doctor, his demanding to know why his mother had not been provided with a private room was a legitimate concern, which Mrs Bingham shared. A partner at Goldman Sachs, William Bingham had told the doctor that if it was a matter of money he would pay whatever it cost. The doctor had replied that it wasn’t a matter of money; there were no private rooms available, and besides, his mother was going to be transferred to another hospital, which catered specifically for stroke victims. Mrs Bingham’s eldest son told the doctor that he resented his use of the word ‘catered’. His mother, he said, raising his voice, did not need to be, nor was she accustomed to being, catered to. When the doctor tried to reply, William Bingham raised his hand, abruptly, and cut him off.

While entertaining guests, Mrs Bingham would perform a similar act of impediment, recalling how Robert, in the process of being born, had badly torn her vagina. And in recounting the various altercations she had had with him over the years, how he had degraded and humiliated her, she would raise her hand and say, as she brought it down swiftly, that he had ‘lacerated’ her. Angered by what he saw as a blatant conflagration of the truth, Robert would lash out, indiscriminately, his words spiralling, as his brother’s income had done, out of control.

Beyond the fact of his having photographed the horse-chestnut leaves, Robert could not remember what he was doing on April 1st 2010. With the advent of the stroke, the details surrounding this historical record had been obviated, its contents saturated with various medical and familial connotations. Reaching across the midlands, his mother had slapped Robert in the face, supplanting whatever it was he had been doing that day with a demand that an unprecedented assault on her vitality should take precedence over his selfish and destructive need to engage in covert acts of recrimination.

When Robert looked at the photograph now he saw the entrails of his unhappy family, its modus operandi laid bare: emotional constriction, circulatory impediment, post-traumatic exfoliation. There was his father’s sunlit presence, obliging as ever, illuminating their pain from on high. Branches, reaching for the light, were trying to envelope him in shadow. A cankered feeding tube curved diagonally between two bands of tangled leaves, the lank parchments of which were splayed under the anguished glare, like aberrant wings. On a raft of sedatives and anticoagulants, lacklustre limbs draped themselves, in vigilant solemnity, over the topsoil.

When he looked at the photograph, he became part of an elusive vitality. If he looked at it long enough, he became part of his father’s absence.

The most damaged leaf was the big one in the bottom right-hand corner. Surrounded by the burnt-out stalks of seismic invigilation, its wrenched petiole rested, like the needle of a polygraph machine, against the arterial root. This was Mrs Bingham’s first-born son, her pride and joy, who upon entry into the world neither tore, lacerated, nor otherwise damaged his mother’s vagina. From an early age, William Graham Bingham had displayed a prodigious capacity to exploit his mother’s weakness, and to utilise, for the purposes of ritually humiliating his younger siblings, his father’s extended absences from the family home. Overwhelmed by the severe proximity of such self-evident inferiority, which he deemed beyond the bounds of any recognisable social classification, embodying a form of malignant predisposition, William Bingham maintained a dignified distance. He refrained, whenever possible, from engaging his siblings in conversation. The damage inflicted upon William by his embittered siblings can be seen in the slew of apertures on his palmate fringes, which Robert erroneously thought showed the early stages of leaf-miner moth infestation.

The horse-chestnut leaf-mining moth (Cameraria ohridella) was discovered in 1984, on planted trees bordering Lake Ohrid in Macedonia. In 1986 it was classified as a new European genus. Since 1989 it has moved relentlessly northwards and westwards across Europe, finally reaching Ireland in 2011. From April onwards, adults awaken from pupae that have over-wintered among the fallen leaves. Eggs are laid from May to August, along the lateral veins on the upper side of the leaflet. Each female lays twenty to forty eggs. Between two hundred and three hundred eggs per leaflet, and seven hundred per compound leaf, have been recorded. Eggs hatch in two to three weeks, the larvae feeding inside the leaf tissue, leaving only the upper and lower epidermises intact. In heavy infestations, competition for space and food can be so great that many larvae fail to survive. Pupae develop in a silken cocoon in the mine, and generally complete development in about two weeks. In Western Europe the moth on average goes through up to three generations per year, the last generation pupating for six to seven months to survive the winter.

While the conspicuous pattern of feeding tunnels can be disfiguring, even severe attacks are not regarded as affecting the overall health of the host in a significant way. Indirect damage occurs when fungi or bacteria enter the feeding areas, specifically a bacterium called bleeding canker, which causes the trunk or infected limbs to ooze a dark, tarry gum. To avoid sudden fractures, major branches showing dieback are forcibly removed. If the infection spreads, and the lesions become so extensive that the entire trunk is girdled, the tree will eventually expire, the crown dying back as the foliage turns brown and the organism collapses under its own weight. In towns and cities across Europe, deceased organisms are being replaced with more robust species, or effected areas paved by way of creating new public amenities. As part of an integrated transport system, the opportunity in some locations is being availed of to widen strategic thoroughfares. In circumstances where such enhancements have not been undertaken, the irregular circular spaces, which the organisms once occupied, are being filled in with concrete or tarmac.

He stood on Newcomen Bridge, looking into the lock. The day his son was born, he felt it bearing down on him. In a last effort towards kinship, he printed out an image of his son, torn it into pieces, and threw it off the bridge. As the fragments landed on the water he took another photograph, in the hopes of capturing something of what he had discarded. His wife and son had moved on. They were living in a flat in Rathmines. The bridge remained. He remained. The water beneath them remained, rising and falling, the ghosts of the living passing over its imperial threshold.

She was angry with him, but could not say why. She had hid it from herself for so long, deceived herself into thinking that sacrificing her other children was, in God’s eyes, the right thing to do, denying them things, which under different, less complicated circumstances, she might have given them, what she wanted in her heart of hearts to give them, the emotional basis of a secure foundation, morning hugs and goodnight kisses. But she hadn’t, least of all with her eldest daughter and youngest son, who in all honesty she sometimes, frequently, felt like throttling, so that her eldest son could be provided with such things as were befitting someone of his potential and ability. Heaven knows she had prayed for a less-gifted firstborn child, someone like her youngest daughter, upon whom she could lavish praise without her turning into some sort of a beast. But God would forgive her. He had it in his remit to do so. She demanded of him that he forgive her so that the sacrifice of his only Son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, would not have been in vain. The fact that her eldest son, a partner at Goldman Sachs, was a multi-millionaire added to her supplications, which were beginning to bear fruit, an air of moral trepidation. Raising the banner of creative fulfilment, her youngest daughter had begun, with characteristic theatrical effervescence, the arduous task of lifting from the shoulders of a city mired in spiritual disintegration the yoke of oppression, allowing it to taste, however briefly, the healing power of God’s love.

The idea had been planted inside her. It had hatched in her extremities, from where it tunnelled insidiously towards the core. Countenances of awakened semblances, among them the fluttering blades of God’s everlasting Word, had matured into feelings of rage, in the heartwood of which cankers of shame festered. Her revulsion at such feelings served to harden her heart, and made him appear to her as a demonic creature, rising unbidden from the bowels of the earth. It appeared that she had been cut in two, and those two pieces had been cut in two, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. This division of labour took the form of a throng of incessant voices, stretching from the world’s chambers of parliament and stock exchanges to its ghettos, shantytowns and slums, from boardrooms and penthouses, nestling in the tops of skyscrapers, to warrens of interlocking bunkers in the darkness of which life, as it had been in that upper room, was reborn, saved from consuming itself through guilt, from feeding off its own spiritual starvation, and creating out of an unwarranted defiance a world in which to wage war and exploit the weak and vulnerable.

She would lose herself, following these voices, night after night, but however hard she tried to see that the Word had been spread evenly, to reconcile in her mind’s eye the cries of the damned with the gifts of salvation, battering the message flat, sealing it hermetically against bifurcation, there would emerge from within the darkness of pupation an entity capable of hatching its plans and separating what had been collapsed to nothing, of creating out of the abraded ground panoplies of glistening domes, vaulted ceilings rising over fields in which empty mouths and sunken eyes gaped like licentious flowers, all manner of openings and orifices, whose depths reached into a labyrinth of subterranean chambers over which was stretched a caul of inhuman voices.

It all started when she was pregnant with her third child, the one that was meant to be her last, when she felt him first within her, whispering to her that God was dead. But then she had known it earlier, intimations, when it slithered on its belly between the sheets, burrowing into her from an ungodly height. And when he first began to lacerate her, when that blunt shell emerged, screaming from the slime, tunnelling its way into the world, pressing against her flesh its cold, wet dawn, nothing could set her mind at rest. Amid a storm of murderous thoughts, she pushed him to her extremities, as far away from her as possible, but that only made things worse. He was part of her. Her insides had been turned out. Under her skin vestiges, mummers, rumours, discarded debris of cocoons and crowns, changed hands for multiples of the industrial wage. Handcrafted packaging, gleaming gold wrappers, hampers and gift baskets, crawled under her skin. Emerging through the wheals, blunted claws dragged themselves across her back. A great sheet of tarmac batted its wings, flapping and screeching, above the clouds. Shattered souls, harried towards judgement, threw themselves into the flames, wilfully casting aside hope. Damnation’s justification, for the sake of redemption. A down payment on wickedness. Swiss bank accounts. Bunkers full of bullion. Vengeance on a fallen world. God’s wrath. Murderous righteousness cut back to the quick of a malignant world. Cankers of blood lust. Cut back to his beneficence in a state of eradication. Screed of salvation. Drowning in debt. Shallow water. Bare branches of a corrugated dawn. Down the steps. Down he goes. Down the steps. Deep down. All the way down. Knick-knack paddywhack. Turning his back on love.

In the second photomontage, Lock Step 2, an image of a wooden ladder, into the basement featured in Lock Step 1, is combined with an image of a piece of white corrugated roofing that rests across a shallow pool of water filled with twigs and sticks. The base of the pool consists of a sheet of rusted metal. Beside the ladder, there is a small wooden pallet against which rests a black strap with a brass buckle on the end of it. Beside the black strap, there are two pointed green fence-posts that look like oversized pencils. In the bottom right-hand corner, from the pockets of a dusty shroud, the metal ends of four spanners enter the frame. With most of the pockets empty, the spanners that are visible form two pairs of roughly symmetrical opposites, with the large open-ended spanners lying at an oblique angle to the smaller closed-ended spanners.

The way the images meet, the wooden frame and the black strap appear joined to the half-submerged twigs and the corrugated roofing, the end of which looks splintered. The mismatch between the various sized spanners and the ends of the objects resting against the pallet—two rings and two U-shapes, and two points and a buckle, respectively—deepen the paradoxical incongruity of this convergence, eschewing any quick fix solutions, or rash descent into facile binary introspection. So although Lock Step 2’s relationship to the basement of Lock Step 1 remains one of temporary utility, of downward or upward thrust, the hierarchical structural position posited remains one of escalation, of an ascent marked by chains of viability, viability caught, as it were, mid-location, on the rungs of a dissonant corrugation.

Robert Bingham: Lock Step 2 (2010), courtesy the artist

As he dwelt on the image, Robert heard a voice, which he called Bingham. Representing a form of deferred arrival, this distancing of himself from himself mirrored Robert’s journeying to meet his mother for the counselling sessions, a deferral which had diminished progressively the closer he had got to her. The premature termination of the mediation had scuppered these diminishing returns.

Having broken free, Bingham descended of his own volition into an illuminated underworld where, to his mind at least, opposing utilities found peace and reconciliation. From the safety and security of this sunken vantage point, he proceeded to lecture Robert on childrearing, convoluted arguments, peppered with profanities, and delivered at the top of his voice, about the benefits of the sleep technique known as ‘crying down’.

As Robert saw it, Bingham was exploiting his (Robert’s) compassionate nature, utilising his prodigious abilities for the purpose of provoking, with a view to ritually humiliating, his more conscientious counterpart. Robert’s frequent lapses of memory, which Bingham characterised as the result of an unfortunate predisposition, went some way to mitigating these subterranean mortifications. There were times, nonetheless, when the lacuna between them becomes an arena of exhaustive refutation, which on Robert’s part all too frequently lapsed into belligerence.

Cowering in the corner with his eyes closed, Bingham would wait for the storm to subside. As he did so, an array of images, each floundering under the weight of indoctrination, swept through his mind. A crowd has gathered. They were watching as pairs of symmetrical opposites (one open, the other closed) had their heads twisted free by pairs of spanners (one open-ended, the other closed-ended). Lying at an oblique angle to these freshly liberated—Robert’s words, not Bingham’s—heads, Bingham longed for a return to form, but at the same time worried that such a return would constitute nothing more than a series of fruitless interactions around the negotiating table, a form of discourse that would require from Robert a renunciation of all forms of representation, and to which, steeped as he was in the gracelessness of stoic corporeality, he was highly antagonistic.

Far from being simply about the memory, experience, or fact of an illuminated basement, Robert asserted that the right-hand panel stood as a testament to impeded aspiration. It was not so much about there not being a hair’s breadth between internal and external reality, as about something far greater, that intangible essence which, in all its debased glory, dedicated itself unreservedly to the present, and in doing so committed itself in an unswerving fashion to collective accountability. Perhaps so, replied Bingham, but the intervention of the opposing panel nullified such a defence. By privileging an unbalanced reserve, its diluted provenance belied a hidden psychosis. Constrictive debasement does not a productive aspirant make. Only, Robert shouted back, if the opposing panel fails to enter into the spirit of its own terminally-fragile autocratic inclinations. Robert proceeded to demand of Bingham that he stop resisting, which Bingham countered with a demand for Robert to stop shouting, to which Robert screamed that he wasn’t shouting and that Bingham’s intransigence was really fucking rich. When Bingham tried to respond, Robert raised his hand, abruptly, and said the conversation was at an end.

The long winter months, through which they had been sleeping, delivered him up. There were walls on either side. Up ahead, a curtain of water fell against the trough in which he had found himself floating. There were rich veins to be mined, synthetic compounds in which silver spoons weaved and bobbed, their gleaming handles rising like steeples into the cold light of day. Some lay in stillness as if buried beneath the rippling tide, flattened against the surface. He wormed along the tunnel, and kept his head down, pushing towards the open lock. Along the way he met others, thousands of them, struggling to survive. He did his best to help them, but as the trough snaked inland from the city basin, an odour of death rose from the clots of bodies deposited or dumped, or that of their own volition had interned themselves on its fetid banks. In search of absolution, those still living inhaled the passing parade. From time to time, they bathed their canker sores in the consecrated vapours of victory.

As he moved through the city, he thought of his wife, and the son who, to stifle his incessant cries, he had locked in an airing cupboard—as cruel as this may seem, his only wish was to initiate him in the ways of the world. Though raised along biblical lines, the boy’s father had not been baptised, and so knew his son’s future lay deep beneath the surface, where cries go unheeded and, even to the initiated ear, sound shorn and short-lived. The banks of the lock were uniformly hard, made up of individual blocks against which he would hear late at night the bodies of the damned being pulled into the depths. His son recovered from his early airings. He learned to walk and talk. He learned to sit on the lock gate, and dangle his feet over the edge. One day he too would fall, or be pushed, or jump, willingly, from his precarious vantage into its petrified clutches.

Mother is lying like a dusty root and we are scattered around her. We come and go at intervals, our paths chosen carefully to ensure they never cross. Her skin is dull and hard, like the skin of something dead. Nutrients are funnelling through a tube into her crown. Spring leaves are wilting in the sun. They are detached and withered and lifeless. Soon they will be dry and brown as excrement. In a vain attempt to anchor her rotting canopy, her fingers clutch the earth. Our roots do not stir, or stir, imperceptibly. Hidden from sight, the water they convey courses through the bed of fallen leaves.

Our palsied mouths are stuffed with fallen leaves. We are gathered around the grave, across our father’s lifeless body, evading, or attempting to evade, communication. Through furtive glances, muttered words rebound from eye to downcast eye. We are frozen in the dead arms of the clock’s disjointed turn.

The great root lies like a snake, split open, fragments of an ancient staff revealed, swallowed when she was young and tended to in a damp Victorian parlour by a scullery maid with knock knees and catatonic eyes. Dislodged leaves no longer compete for light. They no longer try to touch, or become part of, the canopy’s vitality. Her roots have thinned to points. Left on the surface of things, we are torn between knowing and unknowing.

Mother’s skull is covered in tarmac. Her bones have been crushed under the hot screed.

In the final photomontage in the series, Lock Step 3, a moss-filled pool of water is juxtaposed with the cropped metal frame of bus shelter in the form of a crucifix. Bordering the frame there is a dirty white strip with a raised seam, like scar tissue, running down its middle. Bingham refers to this seam, which he describes as ‘stretched longitudinally below the linea nigra like a ribbon across a finishing line’, as the Director’s cut. In a version of events that Robert hotly disputes, Bingham claims the seam marks the spot where his abdomen was cut open and Lock Step pulled fully-formed from his bowels. Flush with the white strip there is the mottled grey tarmac of a cycle lane. The dappled yellows, greens, and reflected blue sky of the left-hand panel, both contrast and harmonise with the shadowy browns, yellows and metallic greys, of the image on the right.

At the top of the crucifix, where the occupant’s head, more specifically their right ear, would have been, there is a small cylindrical object, which, if we look closely, we recognise as being a can of pear cider, with a familiar, or not so familiar, black and yellow-green logo. The can wears a constellated crown of bottle tops, the corrugated whites of their eyes clearly visible.

Robert lives close by this shelter, and has engaged with it, repeatedly. In the course of this engagement, he frequently comes across similar alcoholic containers, lying languidly around the shelter. In what Bingham refers to as covert acts of recrimination, the underlying violence of the interaction between Robert and the containers is reflected in the process whereby the canned beverage in Lock Step 3 was created. Notwithstanding modern commercial practices involving imported concentrates, artificial carbonation, and the addition of large quantities of cereal adjuncts, such as corn syrup, or invert sugar, the traditional process still requires the harvesting, and crushing to the point of disintegration, of vast quantities of succulent flesh. Bingham deems this equivalent to processing the language of the soul through the socially cohesive utilities of a convoluted argument peppered with profanities. And although the can’s horizontality mimics this release from hierarchical authorial custody, any judicious discharge of clemency should not be taken as a concrete outcome, but rather as a skewering of clemency towards temporary amnesia, an inoculation against the daily grind in which Bingham as Bingham—working tirelessly to revoke Robert as Robert—is personally implicated, sipping from the same can of fermented precedent, cogent and refreshingly ethical acts of artistic liquefaction.

In the other half of the image, like the corresponding half of a home-made walkie-talkie, a verdant pubic tuft abuts the discarded can. Echoing a similar shade of green, it thrusts through the clouds to cross-examine its commercial interlocutor, its multi-bladed cacophony proclaiming the imperatives of altruistic trans-national global cross-pollination. With congruent self-possession, the evergreen shoots assert the pre-eminence of mutually-assured production, a state of vegetative non-violence through which decommissioned acts of laceration reverberate across the biosphere, to plumb the depths of peaceful cohabitation.

The right-hand panel of Lock Step 3 correlates geographically to the left-hand panel of Lock Step 1. Although these two panels came from separate images, evident in the discrepancies in alignment and tonality, the images were taken from the same vantage point, at the same location. This being the case, that the first left-hand panel corresponds to the last right-hand panel, Bingham concludes that Robert must have conceived of the whole as being enclosed in a single fleeting instance, the time it takes to crack open an egg, or for a blood clot to lodge in the brain. By bracketing the work in this way, the frame of the shelter and its shadow are sundered.

Bingham, who suspects Robert of having been unaware of this fact in the splicing phase, confesses that it is a constant struggle to come to terms with this fact. As for the gleaming metal crucifix, Bingham himself did not notice it until it was too late, that is to say, until a unity had been created that could not be reasonably reversed, the halves separated surgically without the possibility of their ever being successfully reunited. Something had been surrendered and, in the course of its surrendering, its character had been irrevocably altered. In order for this act of surrender to manifest, to become conscious of itself, an image had to be spilt in two, and the two halves made part of a separate image, so that within the auspices of that fleeting instant, parasite and host, parent and progeny, existed only in so far as they contrasted mutually with each other.

The aerial aspect, facing the unintended crucifix, suggests, but on closer inspection fails to deliver: lagoons, swamps, marshlands, wetlands, mudflats, coastal erosion, marine pollution, estuarine silts, algae contamination, urban runoff, toxic waste, flash floods, global warming, climate change, peak oil, environmental catastrophe, aerial reconnaissance, aerial bombardment, drone strikes, and the war on terror (Director’s cut). Bingham is struck by the unusual cleanliness and clarity of the glass opposite this aerial view, but for the briefest of reflections, like a message whispered from beyond the grave, it would not be there. He notes the unusual angle of observation. When Bingham looks at it, he feels as if he is adjacent to the crucifix, occupying a similar executory vantage, a thief’s eye view, as it were, two of which were executed, one on either side of Christ. Having repented, one of the thieves entered paradise, while the other, unrepentant, went to hell. The angle of observation suggests release, either ascent or descent, Bingham cannot decide which; while the surface texture of the vertical backdrop suggests necrotic decomposition, internal or external, Bingham cannot decide which. In spite of these setbacks, Bingham presses on, amending his diagnosis to that of cryptogenic infarction.

Robert Bingham: Lock Step 3 (2010), courtesy the artist

When it was finally empty, they entered the chamber and closed the tailgates. When they lowered the racks, there was some turbulence as the first breast was raised, and the vessel tried to surge forward. By raising the breast rack on the same side as the vessel was tied, the surge of water did not push them from the wall. Only when the turbulence had eased off was the second breast rack raised. As no other vessel was waiting to enter the lock, they left it empty, with the racks as they had found them.