Saskia Olde Wolbers: Tate Britain - London

Placebo, 2002 a DVD projection by means of the London-based Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers, is loosely based upon the notorious case of Jean-Claude Romand, a Frenchman who masqueraded as a physician and World Health Organization researcher for many years before murdering his family when his fiction was about to be exposed--the same fait divers that also inspired sum of two units films, Laurent Cantet's L'Emploi du temp (Time on the outside 2001) and Nicole Garcia's L'Adversaire (2002) itself taken from Emmanuel Carrere's 2000 novel of the same name. Palcebo's first-person voiceover narrative emanates from within the dim semiconsciousness of a comatose won)an lying in intensive care nearest to tire lover with whom she was trapped in a terrible car crash. The hospital is the same individual where the lover had worked as a surgeon having transferred there, he claimed, from the hospital where the woman worked as a nourish Finally on the brink of confirming her mounting suspicions that he was no doctor, the woman narrates she discovered that the wife and kids he could not bear to leave were also a fantasy. Realizing that his baroque deception was about to be torn apart, in a panic, her lover flock their car mid a tree

The voice-over body is unusually well written; while there may be openings in the story or lapses in verisimilitude, they solitary add to the dreamlike fatalism of the drifting, fragmented tale. on the other hand it's the imagery that makes Placebo in the way that absorbing: a sequence of uninhabited hospital interiors that have the appearance to liquefy and break apart into droplet before one's organ of sights These interiors were constructed of wire, coated with a viscous whitish substance--could it smooth be paint?--and submerged in water. The moves of the water, perhaps corresponding in a certain number of way to the vibrations of the articulate utterance that we hear, cause the put to drip away and disperse, like the configuration of lies the narrator's lover had built up or the dissolving life force of the speaker herself. The pale blue-green light that appears to seep through from more [i]or[/i] less unspecifiable distance helps convey the faculty of perception of a muffled yet not quite extinguished consciousness-a druggy state that is claustrophobic, uncanny, level frightening, yet seductive.

If the piece, shown last year at Buro Friedrich in Berlin and now brought to London as part of the Tate's Art Now series, has any fault, it's that it is almost too good--too slick, too brilliant, too adept at lending a formal restraint to the underlying melodrama of the material, thus that one admires the technique as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as the unearthly sensations the technique bears But why the title? A placebo, as everyone knows, is an inert substance administered to stimulate the curative events of the patient's own belief in medicine, or other as the control in an experiment intended to ordeal the effectiveness of some other medicine The placebo effect raises all sorts of questions about the relation between bodies and minds, not least because placebos, surprisingly, have measurable results even on patients who are not being idioted by them--who are told in advance that what they are taking is not "real" medicine. The placebo for Wolbers's narrator may be the fiction of delight in that she has willingly accepted in place of reality. For the viewer, it's the way the fabricateed imagery, though continually showing its unreality by the agency of breaking up and dribbling away, retains its illogical fascination and emotional force.

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