Chambers

Alex Allingham-MacLaren

Today I am going to the gallery. When I woke, I did not know what I was going to see. The piece is called Stock Exchange. I have not heard of it, or the artist and I did not know it would be there. It was waiting for me to see it. It has been waiting for years.

I walk my daughter to school through cool sunny air. She suggests we play a game, that we race to the end of the street, that we take the long way round. When I decline, she sulks and walks ahead of me. By the time we arrive at school, she has forgotten or decided not to mind and she slips out of her shoes and goes into the classroom happy.

At home, my wife is working in the study, the door is tightly closed. I wave goodbye through the window. She is in a meeting, speaking through a frown to someone on the screen.

I ask my phone to pick the route to St Kilda, then I change it. It wants me to ride along Hoddle Street, which is too loud and risky. Instead, I cross into Collingwood and go against a one-way street past the Bunnings and the bathhouse. A driver coming towards me glares. I try not to clip the curb.

Across Victoria Parade, the streets are broad and gentle. East Melbourne feels quiet and moneyed. The houses are enormous. It is always Spring or Autumn here—the air moves. I join a string of cyclists climbing Clarendon Street who all peel away. I cross the bridge over the railway alone. Through Yarra Park, I pass statues of dead men and Dennis Lillee. The plaza around the Rod Laver is empty. A group of high-school kids on the south side oval are kicking a basketball. A teacher is trying to line them up to show them how to hire e-scooters. Two kids are already riding them over the green turf, swearing loudly.

The sun is out above the river. My path unrolls behind me. If someone were watching, they would see only a fraction of my time and the most superficial glimpse of my life. What I am wearing. My sweat when I cycle uphill. The gear slipping on my bike. They would see these things and that would be the totality of their knowledge about me forever. I see people passing and wonder if I’ve seen them before and think that I would never remember and not properly know. Part of me wants them to be of the past. When the bike travels quickly, they reel and sway past me.

When I reach the gallery, I lock my bike at the front. I slow my limbs and enjoy the heavy slick operation of the lock. I am early enough for coffee. I look on my phone, feeling silly and feeble peering at the screen. It tells me there is a café 100 meters away. I wonder how long it would have taken me to find it.

“The projection on the wall, made of light, square, so flat it is ghostly. Flat to the point of disappearance. Held in that flatness, chambers within chambers.”

I order black coffee and an escargot. It makes me feel pure and sophisticated. I eat near some art students. Construction workers are laying concrete slabs over the street nearby. The site branding declares it will be a linear garden. I wonder about a non-linear garden or a palindromic garden. I look at my phone. I look at the edifice of the conservatory. I look at the students and remember how it feels to be eighteen. It is not an unbidden memory, I have to look for it.

There are people gathered at the entry to the gallery. A man shoots me an anxious look. I enter, hesitantly. The gallery is very white and I think at first that it is quite small. Later I realise that it goes on and on in black upper chambers. The exhibition is called nightshifts, but the downstairs is white-walled and open. I have been working night shifts for nearly ten years. I don’t know what this signifies. I am a friend of the long night, I suppose, and the early morning. I wonder how these works will speak to the night shift, which is not the same as a long night awake. It is work. It is nightly labour. On a night shift, you are an animal out of place, out of rhythm, persevering against the dark. It weighs on you.

I try to look at each piece for more than a minute. In a gallery, I am gripped by the need to be good at being in the gallery. I don’t want to stand too close. I don’t want to rush. I never take a photo of the art. I notice myself obeying these rules and try to break them, self-consciously. I tie myself in knots.

Stock Exchange is playing at the back of the first floor. It is projected on a white wall at the back of the ground floor, behind a matte white model of the Farnsworth House. The blurb tells me this model has an audio component, a recording of a party growing increasingly raucous, culminating in gunshots and chaos. I don’t hear this recording; I wonder if it is broken. The gallery is filled only with gallery noises: shuffling footsteps and murmured conversations.

The film is very bright, in black and white. It is looping. Each loop goes for about two minutes, but I don’t time it. It’s a feeling of two minutes. Stock Exchange is silent. When I watch a silent film, I hear the faint ghostly click of a projector in my head. I don’t think I have ever seen a genuine old film projector. I only know the noise from movies and TV. The silence of Stock Exchange is imaginary. It exists between the gallery sounds and this imaginary projector sound in my head. It exists in the confines of the frame and in the space between me and the image that plays across the wall.

Stock Exchange is a series of sweeping super-8 camera shots, taken from a glass elevator inside the Australian Stock Exchange. The shots start in the lobby, or high above the ground and look out across the void in the centre of the building at the panes of glass opposite. As the elevator rises or descends, the camera slides over the glass. Some are blacked out—I can’t tell if there are blinds drawn over them or if they are segments of wall instead of glass. Some glass portions are brightly lit inside and show people at work, while others are empty. Long corridors extend further back into the building. On the right, there are galleries. A lot of the surfaces are reflective. Glass and stone. The bannisters and railings look ornate, strong and heavy. The lobby is full of tall plants with broad fronds. As the camera scans with the rolling weighted motion of the elevator it is possible to see the elevator itself reflected in the glass on the other side of the void. The super-8 film, pointillistic and grainy, makes it impossible to see the person inside the elevator or the lens looking back at itself.

The camera drops a few meters onto a tight zoom of a brightly lit office. Two women are speaking over an office divider. One appears a lot taller than the other. I can’t tell if one is very tall or the other very short. She barely reaches the top of the divider. The taller woman has her back to the window. Behind them, a man sits at a desk speaking into a heavy, white landline phone. Stock Exchange was filmed in 1998. On every desk there is a large CRT monitor.

The camera pauses on this scene for a moment and then the elevator moves on. When I watch it later at home, I am struck by how quickly the elevator moves and how swift its pauses are. People must be getting in and out of the lift behind the artist, or she is pushing the buttons herself to pause in certain spots. It hardly seems enough time for people to get off. When the elevator continues to descend, the camera stays still, tightly zoomed on the glass opposite. The fronds of the lobby plants are alarmingly close and threatening. In my mind, this is where the loop ends and the film departs.

When I see the monitors and the curly, white cord of the landline phone, my heart aches with nostalgia. I was eleven when this was filmed. The people in their offices, blurred and indistinct. The past is in there, contained in those chambers on the other side of that void. Behind the silence, I am imagining the burr of the ringing phones. The click of buttons. An image then was a thing contained, like fish in an aquarium. Stock Exchange is full of planes and extensions. Flatnesses, I want to call them, that extend into chambers and spaces. The projection on the wall, made of light, square, so flat it is ghostly. Flat to the point of disappearance. Held in that flatness, chambers within chambers. The film inside the camera, the camera in the elevator. The elevator inside the building points across a gulf to more cells full of humans, of monitors that are more chambers, full of doors and hallways. Planes and chambers that frame and reflect and are reservoirs of colourless, silent history.

I hold my hand out and let the image drift over it. I don’t know the word for the sensation of light on the skin. The sun on our faces. This is similar, but cool and soothing. A bit like looking at a new tattoo. The pleasure of your own written skin. The image bends and rolls over my knuckles and fingers.

The exhibition extends beyond Stock Exchange, through nocturnal rooms. Lots of little silent moments, the contained pockets of soundlessness. A tower under a red sun. The moon, slipping across the polished concrete floor. A torch flailing above the water. I have worked a lot of night shifts. Four or five hundred. I have worked under the fluorescent lights in near-silent rooms of a hundred people or more. The way the body gathers tension and weight. Your breath gets heavier as the night wears on.

I stand looking at Stock Exchange for ten minutes. Long enough to see the loop a few times through. I see the past in it. Or I see something that has passed. It is not like looking backward. It is like looking at something that is behind layers of time. Childhood. The unremembered time, before I was born, of super-8 film and black and white. The square, pre-HD framing. Half a thousand night shifts, the slippage of hours past midnight, the solitude and silence you gather inside you. The camera scans and slides across these layers, obstructions, interstices. Behind them something true resides, some place or time I have chosen as the end of the loop. Where life begins again. Where it departs.