The Last Supper

On entering the dimly-lit gallery my first impression was the sound of a voice reading out a list of meals. Straightforward food: steak, or chicken, or hamburger and trimmings and apple pie. After each meal the voice called out a name, and a date, and a place. The places were US prisons, and I realised that these were details of the last meals of men before their execution. Real Last Suppers. The roll call of comforting meals was chilling and brought to mind news stories about a bias in the US towards executing black men, and other stories I had read of the mentally handicapped being given the lethal injection: one man with so little understanding that he hid his pudding under the bed to have when he came back. The terrible list, and the echoes it brought forth, were the first and still most significant impressions of Giles Walker’s Last Supper.

This impressive animated sculpture was a year in the making. It is dense with imagery and symbolism and suggestion, layered with possible meanings, at once entertaining and chilling. It is difficult to do the work justice in a few hundred words and I have contented myself here with setting out some impressions and a few pictures taken in the Stygian gloom of Black Rat Gallery. (I had hoped to make a film but it was really too dark for that to be possible – for those to whom this means anything, the average setting for these pictures is ISO 6400 at f/4.)
The sculpture is a remarkable construction of 13 mechanised figures who interact around a table. Twelve figures sit at the table and a white childlike figure stands in the centre, holding scissors in one hand and a strange half-bird half-human creature in the other. There is a cross behind the figure and when you get close his eyes flicker in a disturbingly unexpected and slightly too human way. There are clear echoes the Biblical Last Supper, with the twelve apostles around the table and the gleaming white Christ figure in the centre. As I walked round the sound of ropes creaking could be heard – the hangman’s noose? A ship’s rigging? I realised that the table does duty as a ship also – a ghastly figure head at its prow shining his torch into the darkness and a pilot at the back steering.

The soundtrack changes. One robot figures sing a haunting counter-tenor elegy. Other voices emerge enacting scenes of guilt and retribution. Dry ice creates a fog and a bell tolls. The ship and its ghostly crew move and groan but go nowhere. Like the Ancient Mariner’s doomed ship cast adrift on the wide Sargasso Sea – are this ship’s crew condemned because they killed a fellow creature and could not ask forgiveness? Will they be saved by compassion, or doomed forever to stay as they are? Who is the Mariner in this story? Is he perhaps the artist, compelled to tell his tale over and over again to anyone who will listen? This link will take you to a short film showing another of Giles Walker’s projects using a robot creature (and his dog) to explore the role of art and artifice in consciousness-raising, and to question how our society treats some of its people.

The table is covered with evidence of a grisly meal, and with small bird-like creatures whose shapes and antics echo the imaginative excesses of Hieronymous Bosch. There are pools of blood and bones among the chargers and wine bottles. As you look closer you see that some of the creatures hold ropes and seem to be controlling or restraining the larger puppets like the citizens of Lilliput – are these our unconscious desires and drives, at once driving us and being repressed? Who is in charge of this ghostly meal? And who are we, the watchers? What is our role in all of this? Do we hear stories of people being put to death and then change the channel and think of something else?

This is a fascinating and challenging piece. If you are in London in the next two weeks, make time to experience it for yourself.
Giles Walker’s The Last Supper is at the Black Rat Gallery until Thursday 5 April