The Tate Modern

This marks my 13th and longest blog to date and I was all ready to impress my readers with a photo-packed entry showing off everything I saw at the Tate Modern art museum yesterday until I realized my photos hadn't been saved. They're all gone. There's little need to describe the depth of my anger. I'm sure we've all made stupid mistakes that are so infuriating we could drive ourselves to madness if we thought on them to any great length. So instead of beating myself up about it I will instead put to use my incredible vocabulary and my gift with words to describe, in glittering detail, all I wanted to show pictorially. And then steal others' photos instead.

So without further ado, I present to you the promised blog entry, the continuation of the tale beginning at the famed Monmouth Coffee Company yesterday.

The Tate Modern is an incredibly popular tourist attraction and not just because it's free. Seven floors of contemporary and modern art, three of which are on rotating display, showcase all the major movements and some of the most renowned artists of the century. I was particularly interested in visiting the Tate this month because this stretch of time marks a very special exhibit in London, one that crosses the entire urban center, invading over 100 galleries and overwhelming the city with photos. The artist in me couldn't resist.

These are my two favorite examples, both from high school art projects. The figure is done in pencil and the flower is oil on wood.

Personally, I am more of a traditionalist when it comes to the creation of art. My own style falls somewhere between realism in my pencil drawings and impressionism in my paintings, a smattering of photography here and there, too. But, like personal tastes in music, it's possible to appreciate the craft for what it is. That's half the fun of visiting art museums, going to concerts, watching live theater, when you possess the ability to comment on the art with a critical eye. I am by no standards and art critic but I do feel like I have enough background to talk about art with a certain intelligence. I've studied art history at the collegiate level (don't forget I started out as an art major), from the first examples of art in Africa, to the ancient Greeks and Romans and Egyptians, to Gothic and Renaissance architecture, with a focus on Michelangelo's and Da Vinci's works, and of course the more modern Impressionists. I've studied art in the philosophical sense at Cambridge, discussing what makes something art and the aesthetics of art. Finally, I have experience creating my own art, like I said; painting, drawing, ceramics, photography (though I admit only the first two I do with any real talent). So with that background, though limited, I think I can discuss my Tate Modern experience reasonably and describe what I saw with a thoughtful, if not critical, eye.

I breezed through the permanent collections for a few reasons. One, I've already seen them on my first Tate visit two years ago; Two, they'll still be there when I visit again; Three, I was more interested in the new photo exhibits. So I snapped a few pics in the permanent displays:

Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, Four Figurines on a Base

 At the time, I thought this sculpture was charming. The four little women on top seemed to cute...until I realized, by reading the caption, they represented four hookers the artist saw from afar in Paris one day. Go figure.

The 7^th Room on the third level was one of my favorites. It held only 4 paintings but each one, to me, was a beautiful representation of a light atmosphere. The paintings were all quite large, each one big enough and grand enough to deserve its own wall.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/explore/work.do?id=21993&action=1

"The water-lily pond at Monet’s home in Giverny, north-west of Paris, became the principal motif of his later paintings. Filling the canvas, the surface of the pond becomes a world in itself, inspiring a sense of immersion in nature. Monet’s observations of the changing patterns of light on the surface of the water become almost abstract." 

http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/T/T04/T04148_9.jpg

 "In his mature work, Rothko abandoned specific reference to nature in order to paint images with universal associations. By the late 1940s, he had developed a style in which hazy, pulsating rectangles float within a vertical format." (Right)

"Pollock’s aim to work directly from his unconscious led to a radical process of dripping and pouring paint over large canvases placed flat on the ground. The rhythms in Summertime reflect his belief that ‘The modern artist ... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces’". (Below)

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/explore/work.do?id=12149&action=1

I know some people refuse to like the Water Lilies and other famous impressionistic paintings on principle because of all the hype and commercialism associated with them, but when you DO look closely there is a lot to appreciate there beyond what Impressionists are best known for, namely, their deviation from tradition. These were artists who saw light and color and explored it in a new way. An artist can approach one of these paintings an see the layers of thick paint as something more than a picture; there are layers of color there, brushwork and handstrokes more unreserved than was common. An artist can look at one of these paintings and see movements of the hands and eyes at work, taking a minute of life and working it onto a canvas in a freer way.

I also snapped a shot of this Picasso. Now, I know I just spent time justifying artistic experimentation, but Picasso never did much for me. He may have been a revolutionary as well but I have to admit I prefer a different aesthetic. I suppose I can appreciate the mechanical structure of his works and the deconstruction of the traditional seated figure pose in this painting, but this is not a painting I'd hang in my house...even if it's worth a million dollars. I just don't like it.

Two sculpture/installation pieces caught my attention, mainly because they hung from the ceiling. Both were said to “invite us to explore the relationship between material and space”. Ok. I found them more surprising than inviting, though the contrast of light and dark played nicely on both, particularly the aluminum sculpture.

The 'stairs hanging from the ceiling' is one of only two photos I was able to recover. Yes, that is one of my own photographs. The stairs are actually bright red and made of a mesh fabric. They are also meant to be a replication of the artist's apartment stairs in New York. I'm not sure why these are different than any other set of stairs; I always read the curator's captions but this one was non-specific.

Rooms and rooms later I finally reach some of the photography exhibit. Each room, or set of rooms, is dedicated to a single artist or a single theme. One that caught my particular attention was a series by Mitch Epstein called American Power.

Epstein started his work in Ohio on an assignment from the New York Times, so I have a certain appreciation for his work, anyway. But, as it happened, this photo was my favorite in the whole museum. Not all his photos were shot in Ohio, but this one was. It was taken at the Gavin Coal Power Plant in Cheshire, Ohio, the starting point of a 5-year photojournalist project documenting the environmental implications of industrialization in the US. For such a simple subject, I liked that Epstein used a giant print, about 3 feet tall. But I thinks its the angle of this photo that's most striking; it almost feels as if it's intentionally upside down. This unusual perspective gives the viewer a sense that there's a whole lot more the photo doesn't show, which of course is true. The line of sight is 'up the smokestack' but, as you can see, neither stack is fully in view; it's as if it's going behind the viewer, into space, while the viewer looks up at the sky. There's also this false sense of symmetry, not just in the "parallelism" of the smoke but also in the smokestacks that can't be fully seen. Again, it's partly what can't be seen that balances this photo. Also, this is a color photograph, but you can't tell that unless you look closely at the smokestacks, so in a way this photo is like and optical illusion.

The other artist I really wanted to see was Taryn Simon, an artist I'd read about while I was searching for free things to do in London. She is a world-renowned photographer and it's not hard to see why. In this exhibit she's done a photographic genealogical study over a 4-year period, one that took her all over the world and into some of the most hidden and dangerous locations I can imagine, some so secret the location couldn't be revealed.

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is a giant display of a concept unlike anything I'd ever seen. Simon traveled around the world and dug into family histories, linking people of the same bloodline through stories and photos. But this exhibit is more than just a family tree in pictures.

In each of the 18 'chapters' that make up the project, Simon demonstrates how "the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, and the living dead in India." Others include children from an overcrowded orphanage in the Ukraine where 99% of children are never adopted so they're released, on their own, at age 16 and are often sold into slavery because they haven't the knowledge or experience to care for themselves and live on their own; a line of ablinos in Tanzania, literally white black people, so rare they're hunted for their skin and body parts as if they were animals; the descendant's of Hitler's right-hand man during the Nazi regime, many members of this family refused to be photographed because of the threat to their safety it posed; even a set of rabbits used for testing in Australia to determine the best way of exterminating the mammal after its population explosion. Each rabbit was injected with a disease; none survived the testing.

A video of her talking about this installation piece can be found on the Tate Channel site:

http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/974388916001 

If you don't want to watch, here are some highlights:

"The works are attempting to map the relationships among chance, blood and other components of fate; trying to see or struggling to find some sort of code or pattern embedded within that."

"The chapters are constructed through three parts, the first being a portrait panel which systematically orders the members of a specific bloodline. Then a text panel, which provides corresponding information in list form, and then there is a third panel which I call the Footnote Panel, and it includes images that represent fragments of the overall story, sometimes documents or personal effects, and the beginnings of other stories."

"The portraits themselves are always photographed on this background of the non-place, this neutral cream background that eliminates any races, any environment or context." 

That exhibit alone was worth the trek to the Tate. Fantastic. Simply fantastic.

For those of you unable to make the international trek to London, you can talk a virtual walk through this museum here:
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/explore/

Tate has done a fabulous job archiving its collection virtually so you can see almost all of the permanent collection room by room, just like I did. Each art piece was photographed and fully labeled with the curator's comments and all! Then you can explore all the special collections around the other pages on the Tate website on your own. Really well put together. A really great site.