Visitors are guided through the library via a headset. As you settle on a suggested page of Maud Sulter’s As a Black Woman (1985), a voice reads one of her poems along with you.

Sep 01 2017

Meeting Stuart Hall’s Eyes: Ting-Ting Cheng’s “On the Desert Island”

by Ned Carter Miles

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Relax. Let the world around you
fade. . .” So begins Calvino’s post-modern marvel, an immersive narrative written entirely in the second person that takes its reader on an enthralling tour of the possibilities of literary fiction. On the Desert Island (2017), Taiwanese artist Ting-Ting Cheng’s sound installation at Iniva’s Stuart Hall Library, begins similarly with an invitation into an unfamiliar world. It is no less of an intellectual and intertextual tour de force than the novel it recalls, but its subject is far from fiction.

The visitor begins by standing on a green mat in the middle of the library when the recognizable theme song from Desert Island Disks plays and a voice suggests in Calvino’s same hypnotic, declarative second-person that you are no longer in the library, but on an island. It proceeds to narrate your actions, suggesting that you look around for a pair of eyes before—suddenly—you catch them across the room. They belong to Hall himself, printed on the cover of a biography by Chris Rojek published in 2002. The conclusion of those few bewildering moments spent searching for a real person brings home how masterfully the piece has been designed, filling every inch of the quotidian space with potential. During the next 40 minutes, it’s impossible to be anything but ensconced in Cheng’s work.

You walk to a set of shelves where you are told a certain volume catches your attention—a red hardback—and there is a thrill when it appears before you: a copy of Eddie Chambers’ Black People and the British Flag (1993).

In Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti’s The Post-Colonial Question (1996), a whole page is blacked out but for the words “you thrive on mistaken identity,” and “they cannot offer a complete identity to people in search of their roots.”

Interweaved with Hall’s interview and musical choices, the voice doesn’t guide, but narrates your exploration of the library. You walk to a set of shelves where you are told a certain volume catches your attention—a red hardback—and there is a thrill when it appears before you: a copy of Eddie Chambers’ Black People and the British Flag (1993). The narrator describes your leafing through the text, suggesting pages and quotes that fit seamlessly and thoughtfully with Hall’s own commentary. As you explore the rest of the library—following clues like the reader-detective in Calvino’s novel—many more texts come off the shelves, and in them passages are highlighted or items left on pages of significance. In Claire E. Alexander’s The Art of Being Black (1992) are documents related to Stephen Lawrence, a black British man murdered in a racially motivated attack in 1993. In Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti’s The Post-Colonial Question (1996), a whole page is blacked out but for the words “you thrive on mistaken identity,” and “they cannot offer a complete identity to people in search of their roots.” As you settle on a suggested page of Maud Sulter’s As a Black Woman (1985), a voice reads one of her poems along with you. Everywhere are fragments relating to the existence and aftermath of colonialism, everywhere they are contextualized by Hall’s insights. The narrator’s poetic interventions invite you—or rather impel you—to try and understand as best you can by a combination of study and empathy.

Remember—you are no longer in the library, but on an island. The books are merely guides as the journey unfolds.

Art magazines from around the globe had dedicated spots on the shelves within the Stuart Hall Library.

On the Desert Island achieves an enormous amount with just an mp3 player and some library shelves. It introduces a profound and challenging subject in an involving, immersive way, but is also deeply moving. Each bookshelf becomes an island to seek or escape as you, the visitor, search with Hall for a home to which you cannot return. As you come to look him in the eyes once more toward the end, you hear Miles Davis’s I Waited for You. “Some of the nostalgia for what cannot be can be heard in Miles Davis’s trumpet,” Hall states. Then the narrator says, “It seems like you’ve also fallen into the mood of Miles Davis.” Indeed a hint of melancholy has set in, and the sentiment is strengthened by Hall’s final choice of music for Desert Island Disks, Giacomo Puccini’s aria Un Bel dì Vedremo.

The clarity of On the Desert Island defies its density. The simplicity of its set-up defies the ease with which it immerses, teaches and touches. Handing my headphones back to the librarian after the Desert Island Discs theme had once again swelled and faded, I whispered that at one stage during the piece I had been profoundly moved, almost to tears. She told me I was not the first to be so effected by the work, which is as erudite, precise, warm, engaging and fiercely intelligent as the man whose eyes meet you at its beginning and end.

Ting-Ting Cheng’s “On the Desert Island” is on view at the Stuart Hall Library at Iniva, London, until December 1, 2017.

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