Volume 4 No.1 - 2000
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Tate International - Another Monet/Theism? Nedira Yakir |
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In contrast to the doomed Dome project on the Eastern side of London, the new Tate Modern, housed now in the refurbished former Bankside Power Station, has proved to be an instant success. Most reviews were ecstatic about the architecture and the exhibits alike. Indeed, the figure of one million visitors during the first six weeks after its opening to the public on May 12 2000 has exceeded all estimates. One of the key issues to take pride in was the fact that the architects Herzog and de Meuron, who have converted the building, retained as much as possible of the edifice's original industrial features. The exterior - a shoe-box shaped brick construction, some of its walls pierced by long aluminium framed windows, and with an emission chimney rising from the centre of its north entrance - has been restored to retain its appearance as designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1947, with a few minimal functional alterations such as a vast glass roof to let natural light in; a glass structure, lightbeam on the seventh floor and shining on the chimney top; and landscape gardening for the surrounding area. Bankside, in its recycled function as a museum, like the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, has itself been made an exhibit, a monument to industrial modernism, to an era of certainty and positivism. Located on the South bank of the Thames, it enjoys a spectacular urban view and its chimney rising to some 325 feet falls short by a mere 50 feet of the height of St Paul's Cathedral, its neighbour just across the river. The Tate, Millbank, now renamed Tate Britain, is a relatively small building for a museum that needed to house the largest collection of British Art since 1500. As matters stood in the early 1990s, The Tate could neither display its large collection, nor accommodate the pressure of visitor numbers that grew from one million in 1985 to 2.6 million in 1999. Therefore, in 1992, the Tate trustees announced their intention of finding an additional site and to divide displays. Nick Serota, the Director of the Tate, in 1994, decided after visiting the decommissioned power station in Southwark, that the conversion of Bankside was the best option of all that had been considered and this decision fitted with the current trend for urban regeneration. The project was founded from grants made available by the National Lottery (£56.2 million), the Millennium Commission (£50 million) and the Arts Council Lottery Fund (£6.3 million). The building was finally acquired from Magnox Electric plc in 1996 and a tight redesigning schedule started with the clearing of the building. It has been transformed into a mise-en-scène for the museum, into a postmodern expression of urban sublime. |
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Four main aims have been put forward for the Tate Modern project: providing a new functional space for the collection (of which a large proportion is a private one), providing London with a museum of modern and contemporary art (to become as spectacular as the d'Orsay in Paris and MoMa of New York), continuing with the policy of free entrance to the collection and the urban regeneration of Southwark and urban regeneration. Other, additional implicit signifiers and conceits accompany the declared intentions. Vastness looms everywhere. It permeates all aspects, the building's size, the museum's finances, and its audience; gone are the days when small was believed to be beautiful. Big is the new beauty. It speaks loud and clear of transformation of power, for the Tate Modern still retains the symbolic remnants of the building's previous function coupled with its being a surrogate Cathedral for the 21st century. I, for one, however, do not find beauty in a megalomanic industrial building, be it original or redesigned. And while undoubtedly Bankside does provide ample space for a spectacular collection, it comes with the price tag of conspicuous exhibitionism - mostly that of empty space.
In terms of spatial magnificence, the Turbine Hall, the main entrance hall, is the pièce de résistance of the Tate Modern. Its size and use of materials are a historical tribute to and a redefinition of earlier architectural models, such as the Milanese Galleria, Otto Wagner's Viennese Post Office Saving Bank, and the Parisian Arcades - all milestones of modern urbanism erected to accommodate commerce. Leisure and commerce are most explicitly manifested in the large and busy shop located alongside the western entrance (covering 500sq.m compared with 390 sq.m for educational space) that is significantly being promoted as providing the 'art of shopping'. Baudelaire identified modernity with the spectacle of the then new Parisian boulevards of the 19th century; at the Tate Modern voyeurism and exhibitionism take on a new dimension as the inverted street of the Turbine Hall becomes a platform where drama can unfold. The superimposed internal light box widows, in addition to their functional role of providing artificial lighting for the Turbine Hall, serve also as expansive operatic viewing balconies. From these glass-walled platforms the audience is keenly engaged in 'people-watching' an activity second only to the views from the northern galleries towards the river and St Paul's Cathedral. Even Naum Gabo's 1916 seminal sculpture Head no 2 on the 5th floor does not seem to attract as much attention as the viewing ramps. Exhibition and exhibitionism, commerce and art are in a constant flux and blur in a contemporary art museum whose new, implicit, role oscillates between being a shopping mall, a replacement for a cathedral or an opera.
Ceaseless milling about and crowd
processing is everywhere. On a bridge spanning the width
of the Turbine Hall Louise Bourgeois's giant spider
sculpture, Maman, is exhibited. In a true spirit
of audience participation people climb up the bridge,
walk around the spider's legs or watch others. At the far
end of the Hall, beyond the bridge, are the three metal
towers, I do, I undo, and I redo, the
Unilever Series, specially commissioned from Louise
Bourgeois for the opening of the museum. Each structure
is unique but each contains a spiralling staircase,
leading up to the top of each tower, where on its small
platform the visitor can sit or walk finally to leave and
join the next queue. In front of the sculptures are long
queues of those awaiting their turn while watching others
ascend and descend. Legs and walking are a recurrent
theme in Louise Bourgeois's work. In 1949, after the FBI
investigated her, she made The Blind leading the
Blind, as an ironic commentary about needless walks,
while Maman also obviously defines itself by its
leggy fecundity. With this in mind, I do, I undo,
and I redo gained an additional meaning for me,
most probably unintended by the artist, of relating to
people 'doing', undoing, and redoing the queue, as the
expression goes in the French Language.
A continuous buzz, interrupted by occasional thuds, is audible
throughout: these noises are emitted from the sub-station
switching mechanism that is still functioning on the site and
supplies energy to a large part of South London. An ironic
relationship is at work here between the work of art and the work
of generating energy. In her installation Homebound at the
Duveen Gallery in Tate Britain, Mona Hatoum uses electric current
and its constant buzz as an artistic device denoting a hidden
menace contained in domesticity. Thus, the buzzing sound of
electricity is audible in each of the entrance halls, in Millbank
and in Bankside: in one it is intentionally symbolic and explicit,
in the other it is functional but contains inadvertently indexical
meaning.
The ascent by escalators to the upper floors
and the galleries is familiar and mundane: It replicates a
shopping mall experience with the difference that the dark grey
walls that surround one might signal the fact that consuming Art
is a serious business. To alleviate the gloom, I indulged in
fantasies about the walls being covered with some information, or
even animated by some projected digital art works. But it is
surprising that the Tate Modern has not installed any facilities
for individual open selection of video and digital art to be
viewed, in contrast with the refurbished Pompidou Centre in Paris
where such facilities exist.[1]
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Architecturally, most of the galleries are surprisingly small and their function as passages to other galleries makes viewing difficult, especially so at busy times. Only one third of the available floor space is being used as exhibiting space, and, of the total of seven floors inserted at the Tate Modern only three contain exhibition[2] galleries; floors 3 and 5 for the display of the collection, and floor 4 for temporary exhibitions, where currently Between Cinema and a Hard Place, is showing, in some 25 galleries, contemporary art, film, installations and video. It is here that to my mind the Tate Modern is at its best as there is a positive rapport between the contemporary architecture and the art. In addition both the selection and display of the works of the exhibition are thought provoking, and at times moving and usually engaging. By contrast, the display of the permanent collection has, despite its innovative attempts, some inconsistencies in its declared intention and execution. The curatorial policy has undertaken a brave decision and claims to have replaced the old formula of chronological sequences of either modernist avant-gardes or the 'one-person' exhibits. The formula of artistic genealogies has been replaced with four-ahistorical, themes. |
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The thematic display is located in four suites of the 3rd and 5th
floors and essentially each theme is based on a textual,
theoretical issue taken from aspects that have become recently
staple diet in the literature of the New Art History. Thus, the
exhibition indicates the curatorial attention to the new modes of
thinking and, at one and the same time, shares these with the
viewer. However, as noble the intention, the transposition of a
written argument does not translate successfully in the current
formula of exhibition. It is not informative for the novice to
these ideas and seems facile to the aficionados, as much of the
subtlety of the arguments is lost in a curatorial context The
elaborate reasoning becomes reduced to few paintings, and as far
as autonomy and power go, the formula simply replaces artistic
autonomy with a curatorial one (as Patricia Bickers has rightly
argued in Arts Monthly no 238).
If, indeed the four larger suites offer a different framing for the consideration of the art of the last 100 years, the same is not true in the display in the individual galleries. A quick calculation indicates that of the total sum of 80 galleries and exhibiting spaces, only 27 were dedicated to themes, with 3 galleries still dedicated to artistic movements; but by far the largest number of galleries is dedicated to the solo, 'monograph' formula. And despite the Tate Modern's self proclaiming new attitude towards women artists with the name of Louise Bourgeoise written large on its outer walls and her privileged display, when calculating the proportion of galleries allocated to postmodern women artists in the 37 galleries dedicated to solo artists only 8 are dedicated to women.
The names of Monet, alongside that of
Picasso still remain as synonymous with great art. In
addition, many of the themes are based on theoretical
art-historical texts, that as a single gallery exhibition
(except for 'ways of seeing' which is located in two
galleries) render complex arguments in an over-simplified
way, and present the works as illustrations to these
ideas. Whether the new display is more informative and
more accessible to the public is an open question. My
impression is that the new museology, despite its claim,
has not changed things significantly where they matter.
Modernism is still portrayed as a Euro-USA cultural
phenomenon, within which the veneration of saint-like
individual master artists is being reinforced without
disturbing the old, well-established canon.
But by way of considering the question of thematic
display, Mieke Bal's semiotic reading of 'museum
talk'[3]
offers an astute analysis in her book Double Exposure. She
points out that both the old and the new models of display rely on
two literary devices, personification and emplotment. They simply
replace one emphasis with another. What we see and what we get in
Tate Modern is essentially still good old Monet-theism, even if it
is in a new and very photogenic guise.
There are positive aspects to the Tate Modern. It makes a large collection available free of entrance fee, it is a first attempt at redefining exhibiting models, which I am sure will be endlessly revisited, it indeed does regenerate a most interesting part of London, it has enticed new audiences to come and consider the scene of contemporary art, and it has, inadvertently, made Tate Britain an extremely pleasant place to visit. It could be that congestion is the price of success as is evident when comparing the cramped exhibit of Rebecca Horn, in the thematic section Nude/Action/Body, to the spaciousness of Mona Hatoum's exhibition at Tate Britain. But the most welcome innovation at Bankside is the new opening hours. Being able to visit on Fridays and Saturdays till 10 pm makes the museum accessible to working people as well as providing the possibility of a visit to the museum as an evening leisure activity. As for the claim of a public free entrance to the museum, by my estimates this is true only for non-British visitors (who according to previous estimates make up a third of the total visitors) as most of the cost was ultimately paid by the British taxpayer: £124.4 million of the total cost of £134.5 million was paid by various national funds, and Magnox plc, from which the site was bought had also been, prior to its privatisation, a nationalised company. The gallery dedicated to showing the theme 'space and matter' evoked memories of physics lessons, of the law of conservation of matter where it is proved that nothing really disappears but undergoes transformation. I could not help thinking that the same principle also operates in the ways that energy and power are transposed from a power station to the art world.
Copyright © 2000 Intellect Ltd, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, United Kingdom