McQueen’s art can be intense or light, but it deserves the rare attention he receives here. On the day of my departure, dozens of visitors stayed to watch Mr. McQueen’s works for two hours or more.
Most of the videos in this show are shown on a loop, which you can watch freely, but two are shown at fixed times and can only be viewed from the start. (Guards are stationed at the entrances; both are approximately 25 minutes long and operate for half an hour.)
One of them is the obscure, claustrophobic and absolutely relentless “Western Deep” (2002), Mr. McQueen’s greatest work of art or film. Commissioned for the now legendary Documenta 11 exhibit by Okwui Enwezor in 2002, “Western Deep” takes us into the underground world of the world economy, descending to the deepest mine in the world, the TauTona gold mine near Johannesburg.
His first shot takes place in the near dark, as we descend with the miners in an almost infinite elevator, only seeing their faces with lightning, listening for minutes to the screeching and clicking of the machinery. (The long takes are a McQueen signature, kept in “Hunger” and “12 Years a Slave”.)
It is the heart of darkness, preserved in the South African apartheid state. Under the ground, the miners are dangerously losing gold from the walls of the mine, but we only see their work by lightning, whatever their headlamps allow. Mr. McQueen’s cuts are clunky and disjunctive, plunging us in and out of the mine; the sound oscillates between the clicking of mining equipment and an even more disturbing silence.
Finally, on the surface, we see a terrifying (and unexplained) sequence of dozens of minors stripped naked in their boxers, performing gymnastics as the doctors advance alongside, interspersed with a flashing red light and a horribly loud buzzer. We learn nothing from the lives of these men, nor from the profits of the mining company.