Tom Beck – The Mute Shall Speak
The first time I visited artist Tom Beck at his home and studio, the former Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital on Gray’s Inn Road in London, I didn’t know what to expect of the space. If you’ve lived long enough in London, you know that any building can be turned into a home – factories and warehouses, electrical substations, water towers. However, this hospital hasn’t undergone a conversion per se; instead, since 2019, it has been under the largest property guardianship scheme in Europe, with more than 140 guardians living on site until some of the component buildings are redeveloped into office, hotel and residential spaces.
In The Mute Shall Speak, Beck meditates on the medium of photography just as much as he reflects on the hospital’s slow ruination.
Beck invited people to come and contribute to a series of frottages back in 2023. He met me at the entrance and swiftly guided me to the hallway where he had laid rolls of canvas on the walls, which we rubbed over with charcoal in order to capture the brickwork underneath. To get there, I remember traversing various poorly lit hallways, I recall stairs, but I’m unsure if we climbed up or down, and I can clearly see a large reception area, dark and eerie. It is in this room that The Mute Shall Speak, which echoes the hospital’s motto, Audient surdi mutique loquentur (the deaf shall hear and the mute shall speak), brings together works that Beck had made since relocating here from a boat in 2020.
Being here feels as if I shouldn’t be here. The energy-efficient and long-lifespan fluorescent lighting, the durable, hygienic linoleum, the cost-effective melamine faced chipboard desk signal illness, or at least unwellness. My whole body is in a state of alarm, uneasy as if I’m standing close to someone coughing, yet a part of me is curious and excited. In one thought, I’m wondering how long viruses live on surfaces for, but also how long it takes for this space to start feeling like home. I assume that significant research has gone into designing hospitals to improve the patients’ experience and recovery, so why don’t I feel more welcome here? But later on, I discover, in a 1999 report by the Nuffield Trust, that studies have generally focused on improving workflow in hospitals, and not on the impact of architectural design on the patients’ wellbeing. This hospital was built in 1874 and its last renovation took place in 1998, which points to a century of progress in technology and efficiency, but not necessarily in comfort and compassion.
It is in the reception area, under the round ceiling that makes the room resemble a stage and which Beck calls the heart of the building, that he chose to hang three recent frottages. There is something soothing about the sinuous lines, which guide my inner pace away from apprehension and dread. Made by rubbing graphite onto canvases laid over various surfaces to capture an assortment of textures, these works are montages of architectural details and spots around the building that the artist felt drawn to. Walls, floors and windows all coalesce on long, vertical sheets where space becomes abstract image. On one of them, an elongated oval shape resembling an eye – an index of a floor detail in the same room, seems to open a portal into the psychoarchitecture of the hospital, while the woven fabric of the canvases recalls the knit of gauze dressings.
Being here feels as if I shouldn’t be here. The energy-efficient and long-lifespan fluorescent lighting, the durable, hygienic linoleum, the cost-effective melamine faced chipboard desk signal illness, or at least unwellness.
We encounter a similar shape in a photograph presented in a separate room, a former café, adjacent to the reception area, where Beck uses a carefully lit red paper backdrop suspended in front of a white wall to create the trompe-l’œil effect of an incision in the body of the building. In this series of earlier photographic works, made in 2022-2024, there is a more pronounced interest in the tension between the real and the illusion, between the truth of the photographic record and the medium’s potential to deceive. The photographed objects are collected from the premises of the hospital or reclaimed from commercial shoots that Beck assisted with. Slowly choreographed into fragile arrangements, manipulated by the artist’s hand and eye, they are now, in turn, manipulating the viewer’s perception of space, begging the question whether they haven’t been in fact computer-generated or enhanced. At a closer or more prolonged look, the artifice comes into light, somewhat settling the tension. Once, in front of the camera, everything stood just like that, at least for as long as the shutter was open. Photography is an apt medium to trigger reflections on our relationship with time – the artificial permanence of Beck’s setups echoes our tendency to assume that the built world will endure indefinitely.
In contrast to these strictly staged photographs, for his most recent works, Beck has been gradually relinquishing control, which has allowed his connection to the hospital to emerge visually – on the one hand, in a series of intimate self-portraits, and on the other, in a collection of snapshot polaroids. Ruins and dilapidated buildings have always fascinated photographers, from Daguerre, (who is remembered as one of the inventors of the medium, and not as a Romantic painter who produced works such as the 1826 painting The Effect of Fog and Snow Seen through a Ruined Gothic Colonnade), to the more contemporary photographic genre known as urbex, which documents decaying structures. Beck’s photography draws from this tradition of documentation and reflection on the passage of time, but also seeks to reveal a personal connection to the space rather than an intention to hold on to it. If the polaroids, especially as shown in a grid, show a more fluid perspective of the artist walking around and pointing the camera at things with laxity, the self-portraits on the staircase acknowledge his lived, embodied experience of the hospital, imbuing Beck’s practice with a sensorial aspect that was until now only hinted at.
Beck’s photography draws from the tradition of documentation and reflection on the passage of time, but also seeks to reveal a personal connection to the space rather than an intention to hold on to it.
The staircase as an architectural feature is an ambiguous, in-between space, a continuation of the corridor, whose main purpose is to connect all other areas and to guide us around the labyrinthic building. In The visitor and hospital corridor design, professors Julie Zook and Sonit Bafna see the hospital as an institution which, similar to prisons and schools, requires consistency in human activity. Their view is that, if architectural decisions help to reinforce and perpetuate institutional norms, then the corridor acts as a space where a person can pause the role they assume when inside the institution. While navigating the hospital corridors in order to get to the reception area, I felt, on the contrary, gradually pressed into the role of the patient – an uneasy mismatch with my actual role of artwork spectator. The staircase, however, did feel like a pause, encouraging the observation of light, of the cracks in the wall, of the textured glass panels. It is unsurprising, then, that Beck chose this space to photograph himself within the building, to observe the ways in which his own body is contained or encouraged to move by the environment.
This observation, facilitated by the camera, brings to mind Michel Foucault’s concept of the clinical gaze, as described in The Birth of the Clinic – ‘the observing gaze refrains from intervening: it is silent and gestureless’, while observation is ‘the art of being in relation with relevant circumstances, of receiving impressions from objects as they are offered to us, and of deriving inductions from them that are their correct consequences’. Seemingly objective and logical, the medical gaze reconstructs meaning from what is seen, not from what is said – the doctor reads the body as a surface and filters the patient’s narrative, deciding what counts as truth and what is worthy of being visible in the process. Photographers, especially those interested in documenting and revealing truths, should be wary of falling into the trap of diagnosing their subject.
In The Mute Shall Speak, Beck meditates on the medium of photography just as much as he reflects on the hospital’s slow ruination. What begins as an active act of construction within the degrading building gradually gives way to mapping affective residues as the space unravels. Inside the hospital, we are invited to observe the terminally ill structure concomitantly with the artist’s developing relationship with it. If, however, one day, this entire archive of works is shown on the white wall of a gallery, I wonder whether our senses will be just as heightened, or the hospital’s image will be hopelessly categorised as just a case study of London gentrification.
