“I sat in shock, with tears in my eyes, at the sight of the flames ripping through the roof, and thick black smoke engulfing that so familiar building. How could this be happening?” The text that accompanies the Glaswegian artist Nathan Coley’s new exhibition, which opens at Parafin gallery in London today (until 18 March) could easily have evoked the shock of seeing Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, where Coley studied, ablaze in 2015. But in fact it’s a fictional response to a fire at another much loved but more recently built artistic venue: Tate Modern, of which Coley has created a scale model, with flames and black smoke billowing from its Switch House.
It’s not the first time an artist has imagined and pictured a fire at a major building: Coley’s work is a nod in the direction of Ed Ruscha’s painting The Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965-68). And while Coley’s work is characteristically ambiguous, loaded with many meanings, it also has a troubling prescience: a press release speaks of living in a time “when cultural institutions are deemed viable targets by terrorist groups such as IS”. Within a couple of weeks of its issue, a man had attacked a patrolling soldier outside the Louvre. “The image of a prominent public building on fire carries a host of troubling associations,” the press release continued. Coley—no stranger to analysing terrorism, having created work based on the trials of the bombers of the Pan Am aeroplane that came down in Lockerbie Scotland in 1988—couldn’t have predicted just how troubling, and how much more resonant, his work would become.