Mark Wallinger: Prometheus

The book Prometheus is about a two-minute video that plays on a continuous loop. It was produced in an edition of ten. Although it is intended to be displayed as a large projection, so that the image fills the gallery wall, it has also been shown on both a monitor and as a projection, as part of a larger installation of the same name. In Prometheus Wallinger explores the paradoxes of creativity and the contradictory role of the artist. Prometheus is the creative artist who gave life to clay and Wallinger describes him as both 'creator' and 'destroyer' who is 'condemned for playing God. Wallinger's Prometheus creates a disturbing image of torture, of life repeatedly destroyed by contemporary methods of execution and punishment. Yet by using Ariel's song from The Tempest, which includes the words 'Nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange', Wallinger poses the question of what might happen after death. He thus relates the work to the human desire for 'transformation and redemption' (quoted in Vischer, p.26) that he explored in the earlier videos of the Talking in Tongues trilogy, most notably in Hymn where the character of Blind Faith sang the words of a sentimental, Victorian children's hymn about eternal life.