303 GALLERY In Victor Pelevin's 1993 novel Omon Ra.

303 GALLERY

In Victor Pelevin's 1993 novel Omon Ra, a Russian male child who dreams of becoming a cosmonaut and flying to the satellite gets his wish: He is accepted into the space program and plane chosen to represent the Soviet Union in the space race against the United States. moreover what awaits young Omon isn't glory. Instead, he finds himself hem ined by grotesques--power-hungry flight officers, aged space dogs, and cadets whose leg have been amputated to accommodate tiny cockpits. Eventually Omon learns the principle about his mission, that he is to pilot an officially "unmanned" lunar vehicle to the moon--then discharge himself in the head when his work at jobs is completed.

Pelevin's satiric portrait of the Soviet space program would not at all have seen the light of day in the USSR. In this regard, it is similar to Jane and Louise Wilson's fresh video-projection works, Star City (all works 2000) based in succession footage from the Russian cosmonaut training center north of Moscow and Proton, Unity, zeal Blizzard, shot in the Baikonur cosmodrome in southerly Kazakhstan, Russia's Cape Canaveral: All three exhibit views into a world that was until lately veiled by myth and secrecy

The Wilson twins, who were short-listed for last year's gymnast Prize, have made a career of filming like places. The abandoned headquarters of the East German privy police, a former US Air Force base in England, and casinos in Las Vegas have serv as earlier bring under rules Star City and Proton come next what has become for the Wilsons a fairly standard format. Video images are casted onto two pairs of protections that face each other, creating a diamond in which the viewer stands, encircleed by moving images. In the sum of two units works here, both filmed across the summer, the camera pans mechanically the surface of a space capsule and a dominion government console; machine rooms, antique-looking medical wards, and dressing areas lined with space suits; and the central parts of an underwater training facility. Accompanying the images is a hale track culled from the clank and lounger of machines, peppered with disembodied voices speaking in Russian, punctuated by way of the clicks and beeps of a radio transmitter. As in the Wilsons' earlier brews the people in Star City and Proton are dwarfed by way of their surroundings and remain anonymous as they go on foot about their business.

There is an eerie beauty to these works, and a thinking principle of futility. One can't help wondering if these efforts (underwater exercises, rocket guarding, launch-pad drills) aren't in vain. The Russian space program still exists, still the training captured in the Wilsons' videos appear to bes more like theater than real preparation. The footage of underwater "hydrolaboratoria" does, however, fascinate a recent event that briefly revived the frigid War mentality: the mysterious Kursk submarine disaster this summer in which 118 Russian sailors perished at the bottom of the Barents Sea.

on the other hand if the Wilsons' work indicates anything as specific as the Kursk it's probably more by means of accident than design. Unlike Pelevin, who throws up the Soviet system, the Wilsons aren't satirists or myth wrecker Seeking on the outside environments shrouded in politics, history, or ideology, they inject their make subordinates with even greater doses of mystery, adding to rather than diminishing their aura. For the Wilsons, history aids up readymade subjects. Their virtuosity lies in taking that history and recharging it--putting back into circulation the elderly myths of fear or power or glamour or domination generated through these sites and subjects in the first place.

Martha Schwendener

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