I go to Cabinet with a friend to look at at Kobby Adi’s show. There is no title, there is no press release, just a map of the space locating THE MACHINE and FALSE DOOR.

THE MACHINE is on a trolley in the middle of the space. It is a big metal box with one side open. There is a camera lens wired into the top. My friend sticks his hand in. It flashes greyscale on wall-mounted screens behind the box. I stick my hand in, I wave. I lower my head to get a look at the camera. The man behind the desk tells us we are obviously not meant to stick things in the box. It is some kind of medical imaging device and it is monitoring the light in the space. I look at the back wall where there’s a long thin window, like in castles. It casts a creased shadow inside the box. We watch the shadows shift inside the box and on the screen as we walk around.

The FALSE DOOR is a large piece of paper, probably a theatrical set backdrop with a cutout door. The paper is thick, old, painted with pink stripes like whacky wallpaper. There are smears of glue up top. It hangs on hooks on the wall. It leads nowhere.

We contemplate the work for a while.

Photographers check light levels with a clicky handheld device. They need objective measurements because human eyes adjust to fluctuating levels of light. Our eyes are relative, clicky devices are absolute. Measuring in order to establish absolute truth normally involves some kind of output. This is measuring without measurement; it is monitoring as an ongoing act in the extended present tense, not a process towards an outcome, the same way a thermometer measures room temperature.

Maybe this is a benevolent act of noticing, machine meditation — a kind of object-oriented-ontology x mindful yogic flow — object posesses hidden inner life that is calm, present and non-judgementally aware of the current moment. Maybe this is a conceptual architecture of surveillance — testing the space of the gallery itself — oblivious or unconcerned with the movements and actions of the visitors that come and go. The space is the work’s one true viewer! The space is the perfect audience! The space, under the scrutinising eye of THE MACHINE.

Ok okok, but then what’s the false door? Simulations, staged realities, Abbas Zahedi’s altered exit signs? A refusal to remain within? It’s a FALSE DOOR though, so maybe it’s trapping you within? Maybe it is making a mockery of the space, its strange architecture, the flimsy farce of galleries and exhibitions? This is wishful thinking, surely. I am projecting my repressed desires.

My friend and I, we talk about conceptual ways to say FUCK YOU! Absconding or withdrawing or refusing or vacating, concealments and sublimation.

When I sleep that night, I dream of the metal box. I dream that the gallery is on fire, destroying the exhibition. The artist crowdfunds a new medical imaging device, the artist climbs on stage to accept the funds and the audience claps politely, the artist bows, makes his acceptance speech. These funds are so necessary! So urgent! With this money we will be able to retrofit new medical equipment to monitor all spaces, new spaces, space as a concept in and of itself. Thank you for your generosity. The artist is holding a trophy that is actually my microwave. The artist is inserting a camera into the back of my microwave. I am heating up my leftovers, observed. I am missing the point, but I am dreaming paranoid dreams.

I wonder about the way we (art-people) talk about conceptual art. It is a medium that moves in a subliminal register. The language we use to describe it matches: this is a semiotic conjuring of that, this stands as an emblematic representative of that, this refers to and finds an affinity with and conceals/reveals that.

It is a frustrated and avoidant way of speaking, never saying it all straight up. It assumes the existence of a scrutiny that might not even exist; it creates a secret that might not even exist. I can read a whole press release 4 times and come away none the wiser about what’s going on and what’s actually being said. This frustrated avoidant language preserves distance, mystery and a secrecy, making it all feel bigger than us and our human scale.

I don’t half feel like a brute, writing about art sometimes. The art feels like this delicate and improbable thing that has landed on earth by pure chance. The art is absconding or withdrawing or refusing or vacating, and here I am, assigning words to it all like a caveman. Shrinking it so I can get a thuggish handle on it. This show exists in a void of language: no press release, no reviews yet that I can find. If I’m the brute breaking the seal, bad luck.

You cannot stick your hands or anything into the box, or you can but you shouldn’t. That isn’t the point. It isn’t a microwave. There isn’t a sense of passing things through, transfer, production, transformation or exchange. The box is a box. It is a kind of banal para-architectural device, similar to thermometers and weathervanes. It monitors the light in the space. That’s all.

I crossed London to watch a device performing a banal spatial function that doesn’t involve or implicate (me) the viewer in any way at all. I want to be the kind of refined person that would be satisfied by that. I want to be enlightened and sensitive and totally a-ok with a conceptual work that presents a light monitoring machine, a show that does not need, register or address the human viewers that come to see it.

My paranoid dream says I am not that person, I am a caveman brute. My paranoid dream expresses my repressed desire: I am the centre of the exhibition’s attention, to a toxic level, to the point of paranoia. I am more interested in surveillance than I am in meditation, because at least surveillance stars ME.

I didn’t like this show. It was like standing in a group and asking a question that goes ignored. Why would I want to have a chat with those people?? Obviously, humanly, I would rather have a chat elsewhere. That isn’t the point — the show doesn’t care or know that I didn’t get on with it. It is measuring the light and I, caveman that I am, have no idea why.