Historians fight curators on the Tate Modern battlefield
rabhegmarlen
View on the ARTS
by William Westwell
PEOPLE in droves are visiting the Tate Modern in the weeks following its
opening, and even including it as part of a Saturday night out on the town.
For one thing it is free, and for another it presents a magnificent
architectural space for artworks which also welcomes visitors with quiet
spaces to look over the Thames, shops and coffee bars.
Louise Bourgeois' three fairytale towers, I DO, I UNDO, I REDO in the
Turbine Hall are spectacular exercises in gigantism invited by the scale of
the setting.
There are permanent queues of people waiting to climb them to engage with
the strange mirror complexes on their summits and the subtle aesthetic which
demands a physical commitment from them.
In the galleries, there are some triumphant moments, particularly where the
displays concentrate on the presentation of individual artists.
A key figure is Joseph Beuys whose End of the Twentieth Century and
Lightning/Stag piece are given an immaculate presentation in a double-height
gallery.
Beuys (1921-1986) became a 'benign' leader figure in German art (to distance
himself from Hitler), drawing out political associations of art and
collaborating in the creation of his own museum, a fact which endears him to
the curator community.
The spacious installation which juxtaposes a mere handful of large works by
sculptors Carl André and Donald Judd at last gives their airy ideals some
room to breathe in, so that visitors can take in a variety of perspectives
on them.
This was part of the artists' intention, that the viewer was part of the
experience.
The Rothko Seagram Murals have a home in a medium-size gallery painted grey
to complement the solemnity of Rothko's maroon-and-brown monuments, and the
wooden benches provided by the museum present an opportunity to absorb their
warm sobriety.
The small space given over to Subversive Objects is filled with intriguing,
ridiculous and disturbing oddities from the golden age of Dada to the
present. Dali's Lobster Telephone of 1936 sits impeccably in a glass case on
a column so that you can walk right round it.
Bridget Riley, who used to be sidelined as a 60s throwback, has been given a
room to herself and her optical experiments attract a fascinated audience.
Rebecca Horn's strangely fetishistic masks and feather compositions, though
not her mechanical fantasies, have an ideal space allotted to them.
But suppose you wanted to find Matisse's The Snail? Where would you look?
Formerly, you would have gone to 20th century French art and found it
clustered with other works by him including the bronze relief's Back I-IV.
The works on show (still only a fraction of the Tate's collection) are now
themed into groups: History/Memory/ Society; Nude/Action/Body;
Landscape/Matter/Environment; Still Life/ Object/ Real Life.
Matisse's Snail, one of the really popular pieces that visitors come to see
is... well, it's in Landscape/ Matter/Environment in a room called Structure
and Form. Would you have guessed?
Wandering through the galleries is a constant journey of discovery and
surprises where established masterworks are juxtaposed with pieces by
artists whose works can barely be evaluated because they are so recent.
So, despite the overwhelmingly positive response to it, Tate Modern is the
focus of an ideological battle whose repercussions are wider than the
privileged world of artists, curators, patrons and critics who are waging
it.
The battle lines are drawn between the art historians already scandalised by
the 'catastrophe' of the Tate Britain, and the curators who want to present
their collections as 'experiences' for the visiting public.
What this has led to is the dissolution of objective ways of presenting art
works by chronology, national school, historical movement or style and the
introduction of subjective themes, where each room in a museum is an
installation containing a mixture of works hung for effect.
This uses the gallery as a kind of mantelpiece.
The Tate Modern has been led into this fray by Nicholas Serota, the overall
Director of the Tate.
His 1996 lecture on the Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art, called Experience
or Interpretation, has been printed in paperback for the museum shops as a
poke in the eye to the fulminating art historians who regard his approach to
hanging galleries as a betrayal of their analytical methods.
He concludes, 'In the new museum, each of us, curators and visitors alike,
will have to become
more willing to chart our own path, redrawing the map of modern art, rather
than following a single path laid down by a curator...
'Our aim must be to generate a condition in which visitors can experience a
sense of discovery in looking at particular paintings, sculptures or
installations in a particular room at a particular moment, rather than
finding themselves standing on the conveyor belt of history.' (Our italics)
He argues that from Matisse onwards, artists have become increasingly
involved with museums as sites for their works to the point where 'the
curator is a collaborator, often engaging with the artist to accomplish the
work'.
Examples are legion, Richard Serra and Carl André in the Tate and Joseph
Beuys 'controlling the experience' in his own block at the Hessiches
Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, here even parodying the methods of museums.
Private museums in Europe and the USA have given a lead in presenting
private collections or the
works of individuals in various idiosyncratic ways.
They have rejected the consensus of the art historians on the development of
art in the 20th century as reflected in the layout of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, the most authoritative museum in the world.
Serota's lecture includes a diagram of its layout, where visitors have to
walk through an 'unbroken labyrinth' of Post-impressionism, Cubism,
Expressionism, Mondrian and Kandinsky, Matisse and Picasso, through to
Surrealism.
This is the museum as historical record, interpretative guide and
encyclopaedia of art.
It embraces the art historical hierarchy, which classifies Modernism as the
tendency toward abstraction from Cezanne through Cubism to Kandinsky and
beyond to the Abstract Expressionists of the 40s onwards.
The hugely influential American critic, Clement Greenberg, would not
countenance anything outside this lineage.
There are big name artists to reckon with, Picasso and Matisse.
Since the 70s however, big names have been thin on the ground and movements
turned into individuals who have rejected the Modernist hierarchy and the
values that represents.
The lineage has become confused. Hence Serota's 'Dilemma'.
It mirrors exactly the progress of bourgeois ideology: the promotion of the
individual, the experience of the individual, all experiences are equally
valid, all connections are dissolved, all development is an artificial
construction of historians.
It promotes the curator to the rank of artistic collaborator arranging
'experiences' for individuals in the broken labyrinth of many equally valid
paths through the Tate Modern.
It disengages the mind from evaluating the individual works, making them all
equal in the non-hierarchical democracy of masters and epigones.
The art historians have a point in taking Serota up!
The real validation of the world's biggest modern art museum is that the
works speak for themselves and find an ideal environment, which is pulling
in crowds.
There will be many hangs to come and the fads of curators will come and go.
Art as an invigorating reflection of human development will continue to
unfold but its materialist interpretation has yet to be written in all its
richness by any art historian.
The historians are right to expect an educational function from a public
museum, and right to insist on the relative importance of some artists over
others.
Where are the Picassos? Was Picasso really a marginal figure? What possible
real connection is there between a Richard Long floorpiece and one of
Monet's Waterlily series?
The new Tate sets out to provoke anger and delight in equal measure and is
something worth fighting over, reflecting the bourgeois outlook on its
cultural products perhaps better than Serota realised.