Simon Faithfull’s underwater work is a complexity of himself plus a lot of underwater equipment, cameras and gps technologies.
Going nowhere 2
Faithfull’s immersion completely underwater is him creating situations where the boundary between the land and the water becomes unstable.
Going nowhere 2 sounded like a simple task but as we all know our behaviour on land is very different to our behaviour in water. Faithfull’s draws attention to the absurdity of carrying out A simple human activity such as walking and he highlights how strange that becomes when transferred into an environment where humans dont naturally belong.
He is wearing ordinary clothes, jeans and a shirt, and is cleverly filmed with his breathing apparatus hidden from the viewer. HE successfully looks and is walking on the seabed. He must have had some ankle weights on to keep him firmly on the bottom, as that wouldn’t have happened naturally.
Faithfull’s frequently takes something ordinary and puts it somewhere where it doesn’t belong. We take walking on the land for granted, but by transferring to the sea bed, Faithfull is making an ordinary human action into something quite odd and strange.
The figure of him looks small and vulnerable compared to what is surrounding him, the ocean looks and is enormous, the seabed stretching all around him with the fish moving freely.
The way he walks is incredibly purposeful and serious, dressed as someone who could be going for a walk anywhere, the countryside, in a city, not 10 metres below the surface of the ocean.
The video is so effective as us as the viewer’s see things that don’t quite belong, and don’t quite make sense and this makes it unfamiliar. We mostly imagine viewing the seabed form above.
Is this journey more important than the actual destination? The scale and proportion of the work is this tiny figure in the vast ocean.
References:
hhtthttps://animalnewyork.com/2013/04/17/the-art-of-
walking/ttps://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/people/academic/sfait47/
https://ikonotv.art/Arts/2272/simon-faithfull-going-nowhere-2
