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Monthly column on the artsDavid Porter describes the good, the bad and the ugly at Tate ModernTATE MODERN Tate Modern is linked to St. Paul's by a ravishingly beautiful (and currently rather too wobbly) footbridge across the Thames. The bridge is a wonderful millennial gesture, a far better gift to the nation than the hopelessly blighted Dome with its underlying assumption that you have to come to London if you want to have fun. Tate Modern, by contrast, is one of several collections dispersed around the country, such as the National Photographic Museum in Bradford, the Armoury in Leeds and the Liverpool Tate. London's Tate Modern (holding the Tate's collection of international modern art from 1900 onwards) inhabits the magnificent spaces of the old Bankside power station, combining the qualities of past industrial architecture with the kind of trendy modernism that likes to omit 'the' from the name of art galleries. (You get to Tate Modern by taking train or car to capital and walking along embankment down Thames.) MixThere's a frustrating mix of the trendy and the superb in Tate Modern. The good is very, very good. Nothing, not even photos, can prepare you for the experience of the vast space of the Turbine Hall, currently holding a huge exhibition by Louise Bourgeois: three tall towers presided over by a nine-metre tall spider. Visitors (one or two at a time) can climb the towers and sit watching people on the other towers or looking down on them from balconies far above. And that's one of the glories of the place: objects change and are changed as you move around; the spider that loomed above you when you entered is a smaller, different object when looking down upon from the vertiginous balconies. This is how sculpture is meant to work; some sculpture can only be executed in large scale; and for such sculptures, a converted power station is a splendid place in which to see them. Yet space causes problems too. Much has been made of the abandoning of chronological display in favour of grouping the exhibits under four themes. I was impressed (though not very convinced) by the case the gallery makes for this, but the bigger problem, and a constant frustration, is that in an attempt to preserve the space around exhibits the caption panels are often a long way from them. It's easy to discover that you have been reading the caption for a quite different exhibit to the one you were looking at. Considering how well most other London galleries caption exhibits, it's a shame that more help has not been provided in what for many is a bewildering art field. Help!Help in general is noticeably lacking. I asked several attendants for the kind of simple leaflet you find in most galleries to give you the lie of the land. Such may exist but they didn't know about them. Later I discovered in the Tate bookshop a very good £3.50 book that gives you exactly what you need, but I had to hunt for it myself. The quality of the captions is wildly inconsistent too: very helpful in the room devoted to Tony Cragg, for example, ten minutes in which will explain to you what much of modern art is about, and give you some memorable art experiences into the bargain. Inadequate, on the other hand, when trying to put back some context into paintings that have often been made very strange bedfellows. The conjunctions of styles and contents is unpredictable too. Duchamp and Picabia, for example, make a very illuminating combination, but others are joined by very tenuous links. You lose the sense of a century's art developing within history and as part of the history of ideas. It's an existential view of art, where you come across a Picasso every ten minutes but leave without understanding much more what Picasso was really about. Works are placed together by reducing their content down to single elements, and as a result you are compelled to look at them how the curator wants you to look at them, rather than encounter them on your own terms as, by and large, you could in the old Tate. I would hate to be a teacher organising a school trip to Tate Modern - unless I just wanted to throw my pupils at modern art (and vice versa) and see what stuck. A little homework?You really need to do some advance reading in art history to get the best out of Tate Modern. On the other hand, going unprepared is an experience of its own and one with surprising rewards. I went with my 16 year-old daughter, who plans to go to art school: watching her reaction to an extraordinarily beautiful sand-blasted glass construct by Tony Cragg was very moving. Although the concept of Tate Modern is undeniably post-modern, the art itself is mostly modern, and like all modern art, is capable (when it chooses) of communicating meanings and values of its own. Finding such islands of meaning in a bewildering mass of images and forms is perhaps not a bad metaphor for the century this superb structure commemorates. David Porter© Evangelicals Now - August 2000 |