Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The steep green roof of the National Institute for Medical Research, a fearsome complex (known to its inmates as ‘the benzene ring’), catches the midday sun. It dominates the summit of Mill Hill. Coming on it, from the north, the Folly Farm side, we experience the difficulties that made the planners hesitate when they decided to move the Institute (as an out-station) from the Hampstead Laboratories in 1937.

The ground was boggy, the gradient severe. But Mill Hill was obscure, sensitive research could be conducted without attracting unwelcome attention. Government scientists would enjoy the benefits of country life — tennis, cricket, bracing walks — while staying within an easy commute (underground, mainline, Great North Road) of civilisation. The Hampstead Labs were known for their experiments on animals.

The design of the building, a broad Y frontage, masking an hexagonal spread, was by Maxwell Ayrton. The man responsible for the now defunct Wembley Stadium. Monsters of the imperium lording it over North London’s gentle slopes. The twin-towered arena with its energy-sapping turf (democratic spectacle) and the forbidding cliff (brick-and-glass) of the Research Institute with its bright copper roof.

From the Ridgeway, the Institute offered its public face; dark bricks weathered to a muddy red, narrow windows. The Institute was definitively institutional, government approved, government sponsored. From the rear, the fields: the Big House, the asylum of popular imagination. Where ugly things happen unseen.

The sensitive nature of the research undertaken in the soft corridors, the cells of this building, explained the level of security. ALF, video libertarians, subversives: armies of unreason at the gates. Art is the palliative. Pick up the MRC brochure, Research Opportunities , and it promises: ‘visits to the theatre, ballet and concerts’. Pick up the Millennium Edition of MRC essays and the booklet concludes with a nightshot, a snoop-snap: gold windows, a deep blue sky worthy of Erne Paleologou.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. Brainmash on a glass slide. Up on the hill, gazing out of the restaurant over the fields and small farms — John Constable heathland floating to margin — you wonder if this is the site of incubation, foot-and-mouth, or the place where the virus will be snuffed. Hot cubicles, rooms with double-doors and security locks. Meshed windows. Browse the official literature and you fall into a J.G. Ballard reverie. Pieter Nieuwkoop ‘elegantly demonstrated that sandwiches of cells of two poles recreated equatorial-like tissue’. A Ballardian tropic, jungle flies fat with meat, housed in a secure compound. Infected quacks, pushing the limits of theory, experimenting on themselves. Tennis courts, easily available narcotics. An island of greenery, secluded mansions, cult centres, business parks, surrounded by fast-flowing arterial traffic.

‘It was the hippy era. Young men in the US forces, and students throughout the universities of the world were experimenting with drugs that changed their perceptions of the world. And in the rather splendidly placed new laboratories under the high roof of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, (Mike) Gaze used electrical recording to show that if impressions coming from the outer world become too disturbing, the brain can respond by modifying itself So wrote Geoff Raisman in his essay ‘Unravelling the Workings of the Brain’.

The scientists Gaze and Keating established that ‘nerve fibres arising from the back of the eye form a pathway that sends an image of the world to the brain. The image fits with what we expect.’ But what happens if expectations are confounded? Gaze showed that the brain is capable of configuring chaos, re-establishing order. The community of scholars playing dice with reality can, with proper adjustment, reconvene that reality. The ratty trio out there, scuttling and jogging and sweating up the slope, can be made to appear as standard citizens; interested parties on their way to a lecture by a German artist.

James Lovelock worked in Mill Hill for twenty years before writing The Gaia Hypothesis . Zhores Medvedev, exiled from the Soviet Union in 1973, studied the mechanism of ageing. ‘He was,’ according to a brief biographical sketch in one of the Institute’s publications, ‘the first to report a major nuclear disaster, and its cover up, that occurred in the Urals in 1957. Later he recorded the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident.’ Mill Hill absorbs traumatised intelligence, shock waves of what-if; solo artists and team players chasing endgame consequences.

I sense X-ray spectres and affronted animal entities breaking away from Mill Hill’s determinist gravity. There’s too much stuff in the literature about dog distemper, pig farm viruses, snail vectors, ‘minced tissue of infected animals’, in vivo research, ‘transgenic’ experimentation. Too many flashbacks, memory shards: King George VI and his munificently hatted consort performing the official opening ceremony in 1950. George, the chainsmoker, was not by then much of a photo opportunity for things medical. Wasted, death-printed; white knuckles on a well-polished black top hat. Funeral wear. Queen Elizabeth, gracious, glacier-slow, accepts the flowers.

Mill Hill is a memory device. Tom Bliss, the current head of the Division of Neuropathology, worked on methods of demonstrating how the brain’s network of nerve cells (the road map) stores memories. The building becomes a brain, nervous activity in the hippocampus, boosting the efficiency of our chemical transmitters. Using thesis research, drugs will be developed to enhance memory, to hold time.

But there are other methods, walks, landscape meditations, looped journeys. We were there on the morning of 28 April, in a lather, panting through the formalities, reaching the lecture hall — where Erne is sitting one row behind us — in time for Gerz’s talk. Drummond’s account, should he give it, would sheer away from mine. Marc’s considered prints would contradict my snapshots. The memory of the memory slips. We invent. New memories, unaccountable to mundane documentation, are shaped. The dream anticipates the neurotic narrative.

Gerz is relaxed. He’s done this before. Being foreign is a good scam. An English conceptualist couldn’t manage the gravitas, the heavyweight back story. Foreign lets you play for time in the Q & A session: Gerz answers questions, asked by another German, in English. He translates, retranslates. Like W.G. Sebald, he exploits the melancholy of not-belonging, making fabulous. White spaces, broad margins, grey photographs of empty libraries. He can do smooth English or indifferent English, claiming the benefit of a certain ambiguity of expression. He disagrees, so he says, with all polemic statements about public art. Discussion of practical issues — the wheeze, how you pull off a project — brings him to life.

Antifascist monuments spearing the karma have given Gerz his fame. Names signed on a column in Harburg, which sank slowly into the earth. Doctored war memorials in France. Cobblestones lifted and inscribed with the names of vanished synagogues. Unappeased memories. Civic corruption exposed or ridiculed. There is always, if you concentrate, a solution. Something to be done. Gerz lives a long way from Hoxton (domestic trivia, personal distress, reconfigured trash). If you can sell it, if a sharp suit can sell it for you, it’s no good. Simple rule. The best of the English conceptualists aren’t conceptualists, they work with memory; work on memory, infection. The sculptor Brian Catling got it right: leave your show in a skip, let the audience walk away with whatever they want, the unfranchised version.

Drummond is engaged by this performance. Gerz has got the look right: blue, buttoned to the neck, with (Beuys-copyright) poacher’s waistcoat, pockets for pens. He’s scholarly and fiercely quiet: ‘I’m not normally giving lectures. I’m not alone to talk.’ Thin spectacles. ‘The contemporary only is contemporary.’ He speaks of the object, the painting that qualifies for museum residence, as ‘baroque’. Mill Hill is imperialist baroque. It is fixed in time. Alongside Wembley Stadium. Prewar optimism. Post-war austerity. Football, science: the New Elizabethan World. Eagle comic, helmed by an ex-Revd, with its sliced-through sections of technological wonders. The hippie researcher blasting in the attic. Beagles in the basement. Off-duty technicians getting their culture hit in the lecture hall.