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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Tate Modern

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Ganesh

18:52 / 09.07.01

Okay, easily-impressed provincial Country Mouse here, but I whisked round the Tate Modern during my weekend in London, and loved it.

High points: the dimly-lit Rothko Room, with its claustrophobic 'boarded-up windows' ambience; the 'ooh'ing videoed head beneath the settee in the 'Body' area; the 'Staging Discord' room with its dreamlike crows-on-arrows and sinisterly-discordant suspended piano.

Shame I missed the Louise Bourgeous giant spiders, though.

22:59 / 09.07.01

Oh, I didn't think too much of them - the space is (paradoxically) too overwhelming for large works, I think... or perhaps I just didn't like them very much.

The Rothko room is the best bit, I think. Tha Tate suffers more than a little from having a fantastic building and a less-than-fantastic collection - there's some real grot there. The same goes for Tate Britain - all those nasty ochre landscapes from the 1930s, urgh.

Ganesh

23:10 / 09.07.01

You Londoners, you're sooo spoiled...

Regrettable Juvenilia

07:48 / 10.07.01

Well, I like it.

What's the new big installation like, the thing that's replaced the spider/towers?

Goodness Gracious Meme

08:16 / 10.07.01

Agree with Mac on this one, broadly, the space is fantastic, possibly a little too strong for alot of the work in it... But good to see a space with international scale/ambition in london, finally

And personally I find the curatorial set-up a bit arbitary.... I think the attempt to get away from the traditional chronological set-up was a great decision and some of the juxtapositions it throws up are nice, but sometimes it seems stuff has been squeezed into categories that don't suit it... feels uneven overall.

What did you think of the Juan Munoz thingy?

[dole scum]I'd be interested as I'm going today...[/dole scum]

Pin

08:16 / 10.07.01

Don't eat in the resteraunt. Never, ever eat there. That's about all I can say on the matter, I didn't pay much attention when I was there. More impressed with the novelty of meeting my sis for the first time in a while. I want to go back.

The Return Of Rothkoid

08:16 / 10.07.01

I agree with Plums about the arrangement of artworks - it seems to be fairly haphazard at best, and not conducive to a sense of flow. But, that said, I do like the space; it's pretty neat. But then, I've got a thing for Battersea Power Station, too, so that could just be an industrial design fetish. Hmm. Haven't been for a while, though; should make the trek.

Ganesh: the spider was OK. The slamming door at the top of one of the towers was what it was all about.

For some reason - I think it's the fluorescent tubing - I always end up with a headache whenever I visit the gallery. It's really goddamn annoying.

And the Rothko room rocks. Natch.

10:48 / 10.07.01

The spiders have invaded Rockefeller center in NYC now, replacing a giant Jeff Koons flower-puppy. An improvement, methinks.

I agree with Macavity that while the Tate Modern is an incredible building, the sheer amount of stuff they need to fill the building lends itself to the display of things like really annoying video art and large useless installation pieces.

06:35 / 11.07.01

does it make me a bad person if one of my favorite parts of the TATE was the gift shops comic related merchandise?

07:23 / 11.07.01

I think the curation was brilliant- a really refreshing way of bringing together work thematically which gets away from the oh so dull chronological or 'isms' way of presenting art. At least you can have some kind of response to the interreationship betweej works.

I also think the building is fantastic. Worthy of a visit in its own right.

Fave thing I say there was the first temporary exhibition they had - between cinema and a hard place? it was SOOO good. Bringin together really innovative ways different arts use film - even if you hated some there were some great things there.

Thought Century City was a bit too large though... didnt really work.. .

deletia

07:23 / 11.07.01

quote:Originally posted by todd:
....the display of things like really annoying video art and large useless installation pieces.

I agree. My seven-year old could do better.

Ganesh

10:02 / 11.07.01

ARTNONCEPATROLALERT!

11:01 / 11.07.01

quote:Originally posted by The Haus of Thorns:

I agree. My seven-year old could do better.

Oh come now. What a silly reductionist parody of my silly reductionist statement. It 's amazing that one is automatically branded a philistine when one throws even the slightest bit of criticism towards contemporary art. There are plenty of examples of video art and installations I absolutely adore, but the Tate Modern has a fair amount of crap in it. Or, to be a tad more specific, but not too much, there was one video installation that was a repeated loop of these guys painted green and orange hopping on pogo sticks making this horrible, horrible bleating noise that just killed the whole atmosphere for me. I don't remember the name of the artist, but if I can find it you can tell me how great it is and how I'm totally missing the conceptual point.

deletia

11:12 / 11.07.01

Sounds like Bruce Naumann. In which case you are wrong. It's great.

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:22 / 11.07.01

quote:Originally posted by Frantastic:
Fave thing I say there was the first temporary exhibition they had - between cinema and a hard place? it was SOOO good.

It was indeed. It rocked my tiny mind. I think my favourites were the mini-cinema piece... 'Incident at something something'?... and the one with the guys arguing about a bet in a small flat that's different every time ('Win, Place or Draw'?). Funnily enough, both were by Canadians.

[ 11-07-2001: Message edited by: De La Zenith is dead ]

12:03 / 11.07.01

quote:Originally posted by The Haus of Thorns:
Sounds like Bruce Naumann. In which case you are wrong. It's great.

It was indeed!

Not knowing anything about Mr. Naumann and his work, could you perhaps give me a thumbnail sketch of his accomplishments, context, and artistic goals (as such). Or would that be wasted on me if I don't automatically "get it".

deletia

13:17 / 11.07.01

The latter. Two-time loser.

yawn - thing's buddy

10:39 / 17.07.01

Tate Modern:

great building by Gilbert Scott

good re-interpretation by Swiss morons

lots of snatch and muscle to stare at

but in the end it's got a

SHITE name.

14:03 / 17.07.01

TM a true palace of the people. Fuck the art, it is after all only art, some of it moved me to my bowels some of it only moved my bowels. What really excited me when I visited on Mothering Sunday was the number and diversity of people, watching as the crowds ebbed and flowed through the rooms, choking and then dispersing. Peoples reactions to stuff and each other.

Where is there that you can congregate these days, without owning a season ticket or being subjected to a police horse charge, for nothing. Lambanana.

Regrettable Juvenilia

14:19 / 17.07.01

Exactly! There's nothing like being outside Tate Modern on a sunny bank holiday afternoon to make you realise that our assumptions about who appreciates art are just a load of old prejudiced tripe.

Every city should have one.

deletia

14:31 / 17.07.01

Anyone fancy nipping over to the thread on Modern Art? I'm having some trouble convincing people of this...

wembley can change in 28 days

14:49 / 17.07.01

quote:Ganesh: the spider was OK. The slamming door at the top of one of the towers was what it was all about.

I was totally arsed when I visited the final time, and they'd removed the slamming door! I quite liked the Bourgeois stuff, even if I couldn't quite wrap my head around some of it.

And I'm basically of the quit-yer-whining ilk, I think it's a great little gallery, and whoever does all the write-ups has done a nice job of supplying visitors with a little learning. But then again, I don't pretend to 'know' a single thing about art. I even like the Brontosaurus piece.

15:29 / 17.07.01

quote:Originally posted by wembley:

But then again, I don't pretend to 'know' a single thing about art. I even like the Brontosaurus piece.

Few things are quite as mesmerizing as a floppy penis.

15:39 / 17.07.01

'kay, here's a question that may deserve it's own thread. Or maybe not.

At the Tate Modern, I was surprised to see Duchamp's "Large Glass." Upon reading the label, I discovered it was a replica. For some reason, this decreased enjoyment of the piece for me. Now I know Duchamp made lots of replicas of many of his pieces, but to me anyway, as soon the knowledge that this thing was not the original it suddenly was a completely different object.

So, my question to you is, is the "aura" of an original important? What makes it important?

A way to think about this is, how would you feel visiting a museum where you could see all of the world's famous artworks in person, but they were all precise replicas.

Bonus points for mentioning Walter Benjamin, Andy Warhol, or "F is for fake" in your answer.

10:09 / 18.07.01

What Benjamin sees as the politicisation of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction misses the point a bit and is very much tied up in notions of the author that date back to the enlightenment.

The work of art has *always* been politicised and the age of mechanical reproduction (in itself a prejudicial term that implies machinery re-producing an art object that pre-existed it rather than producing an original art object) is not as much the end of 'authenticity' than proof that it never really existed in the first place.

08:48 / 06.08.01

quote:High points: the dimly-lit Rothko Room, with its claustrophobic 'boarded-up windows' ambience; the 'ooh'ing videoed head beneath the settee in the 'Body' area;

Interesting. I went last week, and I too liked the Rothko room, but the oohing head was strange. I didn't really understand what it was trying to achieve. It gave the kids a great laugh, but most of the adults around were slightly unsettled by it.

Lots of cool stuff though - The Great Bear (tube map with lines of journalists, musicians, planets etc.), the map of britain which had been cut out and put back together again, swopping england and wales with scotland. Also loved the Waterfall in the second room. I was pretty impressed overall.

11:28 / 23.08.01

The most interesting thing is the space. I was rather disappointed by the work, which was the less important work from most of the artists -- like things you'd see in peoples personal collections. I was however excited by the Fluxus room.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

11:00 / 16.10.05

So the latest Turbine Hall installation opened last week, Embankment by Rachel Whiteread. I popped down for a look yesterday. Seeing and walking through it is definitely better than TV or photos can make it seem, however, it still isn't very good. Mostly I think this is a problem of the dimensions Whiteread has to work with, namely a tall thin space. The leaflets the Tate are giving away on this mumble about a maze, which this collection of piles of boxes most certainly does not resemble, then it talks about Whiteread taking a plastercast of an empty cardboard box, then refabricating it in 'translucent polyethylene'. Thousands of copies of one box quickly lose their interest.

My other quibble? Plastercasts of the insides of spaces? One-trick pony much? Also, I don't know if anyone has pointed this out to the person who writes the leaflets for the Tate, but these 'ghosts of interior spaces' that Whiteread has filled the lower end of the Turbine Hall with, they look suspiciously like... boxes. They don't look like the interior of anything, more like the exterior. Room 101 or the house did look different.

Now the Jan De Cock stuff on the other hand was much more interesting...

Tryphena Absent

11:27 / 17.10.05

I haven't been to see Rachel Whiteread's boxes yet but I can't help but feel that if this exhibition was really about interior space they would be transparent.

On the TV I thought it looked quite fun but only if you went with a lot of people and played hide and seek. The boxes themselves seem to be about hiding, surely the only way to get into that kind of art is to hide yourself?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

13:39 / 17.10.05

It's not really spread out enough for hide and seek and many of the piles are snug against the wall. Walking around I thought "If only I could break into the Tate one night with half a dozen pots of paint, these would make cracking Lego bricks!"

10:25 / 18.10.05

Looking at it I'm filled with an enormous urge to pile into them and send the bricks flying (not as criticism, but cos it would be fun). Are they loosely stacked or fixed together?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

13:02 / 18.10.05

I think they're fixed, I imagine the potential lawsuit fodder if someone got hurt by falling boxes would make the Tate careful on that score. With people walking around and in between they're not having much luck with their 'dont touch' policy...

13:58 / 18.10.05

that's a good critique of it Lady, it just seems like a project an undergrad would do if they had a lot of money. in fact i've seen undergrads take molds of boxes so there's really no novelty there. and i really don't buy the notion that it's about interior mysterious places, seeing as there are no interior spaces to speak of. i think she definitely missed it with this one. sometimes more is not better.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:11 / 19.10.05

Well, someone liked it... In reality the boxes inhabit the space of the Turbine Hall like something seething and out of control, beyond our need to identify, to empathise, to vocabulate... What Whiteread has created... is a psycho-semantic subspace in which what you think you think you know becomes what you actually are; a meta-space where positive and negative copulate in a spiral of ineffable beauty, and the beholder simply is.

Dear Private Eye...

14:21 / 19.10.05

sounds like it was written by a stalker

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