Caveman Bill: Free

Caveman Bill film still.

Do you like caves? Into the Wild? Robinson Crusoe? Grizzly Man? Rousseau? If you’ve answered yes then perhaps, like me, you have a slight perversion towards solitude, hermits; the dream of shutting yourself out somewhere. Running away or running back to where it all began.

Caveman Bill is currently on exhibition at the Hackney Recreational Ground in Shoreditch- I know, I didn’t know it had a ‘recreational ground’ either. Bill lives in a cave in the freezing Yukon district in Canada. He’s lived there for 15 years and isn’t talking about leaving. Tom Wolseley is an artist who met Bill, visited his cave and left his camera. If you head down to Hackney Road, just opposite where it meets Columbia Road, you’ll see a disused shipping container. Step inside and you enter Wolseley’s cave. On the wall of his cave is a video projection of Bill’s cave.

So far so what? Was my initial reaction when I first arrived. It took me a minute to get it. The projected footage is a 360 degree pan shot that endlessly circles Bill’s cave whilst Bill narrates its contents.

You don’t see Bill, instead you see the minutiae of his day to day -his caveman existence- which in many ways isn’t that far off ours. His gentle voice is hypnotising, slowly you are drawn into his life as he chats about his nephews (who made him the calendar), his electronic bug zapper, his bleaching toothpaste, his stove, inherited from 2by4 Bob, his chisel which he uses when the snow fall is so great he can’t get out.

The more you watch the more you want to know, the more you want to visit, the more you want to meet Bill, or at the very least see Bill. But you never do see him.

Wolseley’s work is about debunking myths; how you tell stories and how you add stories to objects. Listening to Bill identify his objects the illusions behind them fall apart. Bill’s stuff is just another guy’s stuff. Bill is just another guy.

My dad lived in a cave once and sadly it is one of the things I never asked enough about. Similarly with Bill, you can’t really get enough, perhaps because the enough isn’t really there- because he’s too similar to us? I’m not sure. Perhaps the dreams left to us by people, books and films are just dreams? (I almost went mad reading Robinson Crusoe, it is that boring, I couldn’t find the dream.)

But Bill is an enigma who has captivated me completely and I’ve started fantasising again about running off to a cave somewhere.

So the dream then is very much alive. Go see for yourself and go see alone.