Space and content - Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall
di // pubblicato il 09 Novembre, 2011
The first time I set foot in London, eleven years ago, I remember being struck by the air of novelty I could breathe, which did not abandon me. It was the biggest city I had ever visited and, back then, it had just been polished for the year 2000. New colossal structures, such as the Millennium Dome (now O2 Arena) and the London Eye ferris wheel had just opened their doors; the Docklands requalification carried on with the (thoroughly romantic) DLR line extensions; at the other end of the Millennium Bridge, Tate Modern's collection had found a new home.
Walking in the museum, I was confronted by a vast and deep space, overlooked by three towers and a massive spider. I walked between the latter's legs, climbed on top of one of the structures and had a look around: it felt as if I'd been taken to another dimension, to an impossible place like the ones I visited – with the mind of a child – in Escher's astonishing prints, the ones I sought in my confused memories of each visit paid to Bologna's Modern Art Gallery. I'd always guessed the possibility for art to alter the perceptions of our surroundings, but I originally verified it that same afternoon in Tate Modern's doorway, between Louise Bourgeois's Maman (1999) and I do, I undo and I redo (1999-2000).
At 155 metres of length, and standing 35 metres tall, the Turbine Hall is the exhibition area obtained precisely from the turbine hall of what once was Bankside power station. It constitutes the middle section of the schematic building designed by architect Gilbert Giles Scott, author of another fine specimen of industrial archaeology: the coal-powered Battersea station, of which the “ionian” chimneys were immortalised on the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals (1977). Both plants were decommissioned in the early '80s; but, if Battersea's fate is still uncertain (listed as a historical building, but far too expensive to restore), Bankside was handed over to the architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron which, between 1995 and 2000, took care of its remodeling, thus readying the floors for the world's most visited gallery of modern and contemporary art.
Ever since its opening, which featured the abovementioned works by Bourgeois, the Turbine Hall presented itself as an original space for the most daring installations, within the frame of the Unilever Series: an annual commission, funded by the multinational, generally on display from October to April and expressly conceived for the spacious hall. Initially planned to run until 2005, this undertaking's great success led it on – so far – into 2012, although everything suggests it might become a yearly regular; informally, it already is. The room, with its dimensions, becomes at once a test and a playground for the artists' creativity, who at times exploited, occupied, challenged, even injured it, with works that never missed an opportunity to interact with the unique sourrounding space (and that are hardly describable without size-related superlatives). Anish Kapoor horizontally invaded the room with his sculpture Marsyas (2002), made out of three enormous rings joined together by flesh-like fabric. In 2006, Carsten Höller installed several tall slides for her visitors' delight, and to experiment with the states of consciousness induced by sliding. The following year, with Shibboleth (2007), Doris Salcedo portrayed racial divisions as a counterpart to and a “fracture in” modernity through a deep crack running across the hall's floor, the mark of which can still be spotted. Ai Weiwei, for Sunflower seeds (2010), scattered millions of handmade porcelain, hand-painted seeds in the room; as a reaction to his arrest by the Chinese authorities in April 2011, a “RELEASE AI WEIWEI” sign appeared on Tate Modern's north façade.
Young British Artist Tacita Dean (born 1965) is the one taking up the eleventh Unilever commission. Her FILM (2011) pays homage to 35mm film, with a vertical projection on a screen at the end of the hall. Among surreal shots of the wall behind it, enveloped in white clouds, are interspersed depictions of waves, and other long-winded natural processes, which metaphorically liken the rolling of film to the passing of time. Even more interesting, explicit manipulations – such as shards of glass or holes on the pictures – and the constant presence of the filmstrip edge, disclose the medium before the content. This way, the artist does with video (a long time away from the Renaissance, our own “window on the world”) what Foucault holds Manet did with painting: by revealing the material, she creates a “film-object”. Hopefully Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, with its thought-provoking size and wide-ranging scope, will long stay – in turn – a precious window on contemporary art, space being constantly reshaped into medium, matter and content.
