On Saturday after a brief walk west along the north Thames with my kind cousin host, Ben, and a friend (Ben’s friend Claire), we crossed the silver Millennium Bridge towards the Tate Modern. Housed in the former Bankside Power Station, the gallery is strangely unremarkable from the outside: a mass of boring brown brick with a tall central chimney.
I remember reading about and wanting to see a previous Tate exhibition by Olafur Eliasson called the ‘weather project’ in which he installed a massive sun like glowing globe in the Turbine Hall. The exhibition space was filled with fine mist. Upon entering the stunning turbine hall, I wished even more to have been able to see that particular exhibition: the space commands an awe fitting to London itself and would have provided a perfect scale for such a work.
The current exhibition in the hall was one of Bruce Nauman’s: an audio installation with directional bands of vocal sounds. With no visual object to focus on, the sound quickly provides a structural series of humorous stops along the grand space.
At last I can walk around Duchamp’s urinal, bask in front of otherworldly Rothkos, recall a textbook Barbara Kruger in person and suffocate awkwardly under countless cubist Picassos and Braques. More and more easily, I slip into a tongue-in-cheek appreciation of contemporary art. I find it increasingly humorous, from Jeff Koons’s three submerged basketballs to Gilbert and George’s outrageousness. It’s funny because it assumes an aura of seriousness that any cultural institution requires to maintain funding. I don’t mean to imply that a lack of seriousness indicates a lack of sincerity or value. I find that I can appreciate contemporary works more, from such an unburdened approach. The verbal mediation of the didactic panel offers no such self-awareness but heightens the silence of self-asserted importance that gallery goers so willingly accept as the norm. In the end, that assumed importance manifests as a lock on the door of contemporary art appreciation and a sleepy wait that limits individual viewing time to the cliche five seconds. I see so many people who have forgotten how fun visiting a contemporary gallery is – they are either intimidated or confused!
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
Ironically, strangely and perhaps arrogantly, I feel the same smirk when I ride the Underground. It’s like being in on an inside joke that you know nobody gets because no one smiles. Everyone is too scared to make eye contact and if you do, you look away quickly…big city mentality. It’s a shame because it appears to be a self-perpetuating symptom of a false assumption of isolation. It’s strange because I can’t imagine the alternative, and perhaps arrogant because the appearance of other’s alienation might be a projection of my own and something that I think I’m above because I can laugh at it. Maybe others don’t laugh because they don’t know, as a fish asking for water, or maybe they don’t laugh because it isn’t funny, as a fish asking for water, (poor little guy!). In any event, the underground, like contemporary art seems to be a structured chaos. It’s an every day ridiculousness that has value, purpose and meaning but is lost among the limitless foam of foreign faces, deadlines and the desire to be somewhere else!
While buying groceries I inquired about the whereabouts of tofu…which aisle etc.? After receiving two blank stares, explaining what tofu was and waiting five minutes or so, I eventually found some…
Tags: travel