Paradiso

I refuse to spend more time writing this review than I spent in the actual "intimate walk-up installation experience" that is "Paradiso". That strikes me as difficult considering the five minutes (tops) I spent in the darkness of this "experience". To be brutally honest, the only thing I gained from standing in this darkened space looking at a man half buried in a wall whilst water cascaded down from the same wall was wet shoes.

The picture at the top is pretty much everything in this installation (you enter through a really bright room in order that you are initially blind in the darkened one) and by looking at it you can save yourself a fiver. Yes, you heard right, five whole British pounds, this was the most expensive waste of five minutes I've had in awhile. Just think of the coffees I could have drunk to keep me awake in "Purgatorio", or the ear plugs I could have bought to save me grief in "Inferno".

One element I did enjoy was the essay I was given on the way out. To give an example of the hysterically funny but terrible pretence included, here's a quote. "The anxiety produced during the spectator's passage between the two rooms is not created by limited vision but rather by a growing sense of solitude". Balls it was. Firstly, the "anxiety" was pretty limited; secondly, what anxiety I did feel was purely caused by my bending over to fit through the small hole and walking into a pitch black room. Where the hell did "solitude" come into it? Apparently I should have felt "Eschatological anxiety" as well, but I didn't think a self-important art installation had much to do with the end of the world, let alone some sort of tribulation. I could rip to shreds this entire pointless essay, riddled with comments that cause me more "timeless agony" than the installation itself, but I've got better things to do and you have better things to read.

Like the rest of this trilogy, this is an exercise in mind-numbing theatrical self-indulgence. Save your cash and your soul. Avoid at all costs.