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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Cruel and Tender at the Tate Modern

12:21 / 03.07.03

Has anyone else been to Cruel and Tender yet? I went last night and it left me feeling like I'd been wacked on the back of the head. Blew me away totally.

There are some incredibly harsh and at the same time moving photographs there, I'd previously only known about Walker Evans but this introduced me to Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Robert Adams and Andreas Gursky among others.

My highlights were the Robert Frank pictures from The Americans, sort of the photograhpic equivalent of On The Road. Fazal Sheikh's portraits of Somalian Refugee's were also very moving, a whole wall of pictures of mothers and their children, children without mothers, brothers and sisters without parents, all with their names and some of their stories near them, you just had to stand and stare.

It's a harsh exhibition and there are some pictures
here that aren't easy viewing, William Eggleston has a few pictures there that are just violent, especially with his focus on colour, his picture of his dentist friend was impressive though.

A definate thumbs up from me for this exhibition, best thing I've seen at the Tate so far.

15:05 / 03.07.03

Have only seen half the show, Al, but will be back to see the rest. Some great stuff there. The legendary Walker Evans stuff of the sharecropper families but also those great snaps he took with a disguised camera of 1930's travellers on the New York subway, which nobody then saw until 40 years later. Kinky, voyeuristic appeal to those.

Too many other goodies to mention (and I didn't buy a programme so have forgotten many names - but not the images), much of it architectural and landscape to invigorate the palate before more poignant, loaded portraiture, such as August Sandler's.

I've read a few snarky reviews of this but my only complaint would be that I couldn't really see the thematic link between rooms. When I stopped caring about that, I was lapping it up.

Looking forward to the stuff in the other half of the space some time soon. Admission there gets you free admission to Wolfgang Tillmans' exhibit at Tate Britain too. Yummy. 'Course potus could show them all a thing or two.

11:36 / 04.07.03

I second that Wow and raise it a Woah.

So much to see, so much to absorb. I really liked a large photo of the NY Stockexchange by Andreas Gursky (I think). He really played with colour well and the sheer size and scope of the image was mind blowing. I just couldn't take it all in. The thousands of individual stories being played out across the picture were just too much to take in.

Also the work by Bernd and Hilla Becher was excellent. They thump around the countryside of various continents in their VW campervan documenting industrial sites such as cooling towers and mineheads and gas towers. Their work is fantastic particularly if you look at the objects as functional sculpture. Wow! Plus the concept of them trundling about in their campervan just tops it off.

As invisible_al says the Somalian pictures are very affecting. You just don't get to hear about their stories nearly enough in the wider world. It makes me quite a bit ashamed to be human in the "first world".

You have to see the picture of the dentist to believe it. Very scarey. In fact I think my view of dentists has been changed forever! Yikes!

Go and see it!!!!!

Tryphena Absent

20:52 / 23.08.03

I went to see this today and was very impressed with the photo's and particularly adored Gursky's 99 cent but I thought the blurb on the photographers was consistently wrong. The curators (Emma Dexter and Thomas Weski) seemed to misinterpret a lot of the work or perhaps simply word the introduction to each artist badly, often making mistakes like deeming a collection as exhibiting isolation rather than separation, small things that didn't perhaps ring true about the pictures. So many of them were such positive images and it felt like the explanation was dragging the positivity away to appear very much more down on the world than it was. Gursky was clearly trying to emphasise the fantasy in everyday reality. He says that his work helps him to keep track and mantain his grip on the world yet the introduction really focused on his representation of the contemporary capitalist environment. I felt more like he was trying to give us a childlike excitement back, hyper colours and that big Toys R Us sign just hit me with that joy that only kids seem to really feel!

After a while I stopped reading the spiel and focused entirely on the work because it is utterly beautiful and to reiterate others before me- Wow!

Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless

16:53 / 24.08.03

I really liked some of the older stuff there, August Sander's in particular. His pictures divide into those whose titles fit instantly (the official with the insane facial hair & the three rich young men) and those that require some contribution from the imagination. ('The Revolutionary'- that apparently ultra-conformist old woman dressed in black & also 'The Magician'- a slight, bearded man with a battered suitcase. Occultist or children's entertainer? I couldn't decide and suspect I wasn't meant to.)
Did anyone else watch the video they were showing in the cafe? In it, one of the modern photographers (Rineke Dijkstra) said that documentary photography was much easier for people like Sander, just because most people were not used to photography, and so less self conscious when posing. The truth of this is shown by her own pictures of bloodstained bullfighters &mothers after labour- they alone among the recent pictures there have the same quiet unselfconsciousness as the pictures Sander took under quite ordinary conditions. And the juxtaposition is amazing too.

Walker Evan's secret subway shots were great too- particularly the hopeless way they all stare into space & all the 40s adverts and safety signs crowding into the edges of the shots, giving them that amazing air of dated mundanity- amazing just because the sense of ordinary life in the past is usually so thoroughly erased by date-and-place history that any reminder of it comes as a shock.

Lilly Nowhere Late

07:05 / 26.08.03

Thanks for the alert- I shall run not walk to this on Thursday.
Anyone around?

10:02 / 26.08.03

Not here this week but might be interested one evening next week - having read Sontag on Photography and a pile of other texts for my degree, the chance to see this (especially some more Diane Arbus) is not one I'm going to miss.