men June 1972, Scottish farmer Dougal Robertson was sailing the Pacific with his family when a pod of killer whales attacked his schooner Lucette. Robertson was about to drink his morning coffee when the hull beneath his feet suddenly split open to reveal the unfathomable ocean. The family had about two minutes to gather everything they could and board the lifeboat before the ship sank into the blue. And it was on this flimsy boat that four adults and two children managed to survive without maps or compass, against 20-foot waves, circling sharks, thirst, heat stroke and hunger for a staggering 38 days.
A cup of coffee appears at the beginning of the work of the American artist. The fascinating show of Nina Katchadourian, raised on a pedestal like a modernist sculpture. The original is lost under the waves, of course, somewhere in the Galapagos Islands. But Katchadourian has worked hard to find an exact replica, constantly checking to see if he got it right with Douglas, the eldest of Robertson’s children, 18 at the time of this trauma. Precision is vital. Because this is nothing less than an attempt at imaginative recreation.
Katchadourian first encountered the story at the age of seven in Dougal’s international bestseller. Survive the Wild Sea, and has read the book almost every year since. Now 54, she is greatly admired for her curious and playful inquiries about our place in the world, constructed in all media, from sculpture, painting and film to sound and performance. Among his best-known works are the photographs Flamenco style sink self-portraitsall done on a single long-haul flight using paper towels and other plane wreckage, and his endless The genealogy of the supermarket, which interrelates all the people who appear in common food products as if they were a large family. Think taxonomy, anthropology, comedy: Susan Hiller with a sense of humor.
How to convey the incredible experience that the Robertsons underwent, if you were not there? Katchadourian starts with the whale and scales it. On the wall he hangs a life-size painting of an orca, which runs the length of the first gallery. It carries no threat, until he notices the outline of the boat on the ground. The Robertsons started out with two boats, but the raft soon deflated and they were confined to a boat just 9 feet long. Katchadourian draws paradoxically elegant diagrams showing how the body intertwines with the body, awake and asleep, packed together like human sardines.
Dougal Robertson was heroic, inventive and incredibly tough. Recordings of his book are heard on headphones during the show. The moment they saw a ship, that he didn’t see them (it fills with “the bitter aggression of a predator”). The nightmare plan drifts toward stagnation, because there is at least a chance to calm down temporarily. The systematic hunting and disemboweling of sea creatures, and the rage when someone lets such a creature escape.
But these are interspersed with the words of Douglas, whose story differs from his father’s in the most poignant ways. He remembers the terrible fights between his parents, the strange diminution of hunger with the passage of time, the beauty of the wide sky above the ship. He also speaks with extraordinary eloquence of the moment when a Japanese trawler finally showed up, saw them and saved them. A fisherman passed a rescue rope and Douglas took it. “Feeling something that wasn’t us, that wasn’t from our world, that was so good.”
Downstairs is a spiral of blonde rope formed into a disk, like a large yellow moon. Katchadourian enters the test with well-formed humility. He has made the most beautiful wire sculptures of the creatures they capture: sea turtles, flying fish and goldfish, which seem to float against the blue of the gallery walls as if submerged, halfway between skeleton and memory.
She interviews Douglas by phone, text and WhatsApp from her studio in New York and her home in Barnet, her messages often printed to add to the growing narrative on the wall. The Robertsons had to catch turtles, drink their blood for fluid, and eat their eggs for protein. What did the eggs taste like? Douglas, her evergreen memories of her, describes the slight crunch followed by a burst of soft sweetness. Katchadourian stacks a pile of Lindt’s Lindor truffles on a pedestal.
Although this program is deeply committed to knowledge: how to navigate and survive in the wild ocean, how to catch a flying fish without capsizing a boat, how to do a turtle oil enema, its main concern is human empathy. What Dougal, Douglas, his mother and his nine-year-old twin brothers felt, not only eating raw, bloody fish, but being so close to death and somehow keeping hope.
The exhibition is densely packed in the basement of Pace London’s imposing headquarters when it could have been spread over several floors. You have to bend down to see news clippings of the Robertson bailout along with the Elvis divorce, and the outline of the boat would have been better left in some ocean-top gallery. But Katchadourian has made the most of his space and his ideas. Art he is always asking what he was like, how he looked, how he felt, and seeking to show the answers. This show, which includes his own attempts to contain an ocean in a small watercolor, achieves this in the most novel and inventive way. He ends with breakfast on the Japanese trawler: a narrative strung between two cups of coffee.