LONDON’S TATE MUSEUM OFFERS
STRANGE MODERN-ART EXPERIENCE
In looking over my notes about our month in London several summers ago, it surprised me that my wife, Carla, and I spent more time in the Tate Modern than in any other museum. After all, the museum showcases modern art, and much of it strikes me as nonsense, but I found it fascinating.
How strange are the artistic works? In one display, the artist took a shack full of old junk and had an army demolition expert blow it up twice. Then she put a light bulb in the middle of a room and suspended the blown-up pieces from the ceiling in the order in which they had been piled in the shack.
All the junk is distributed evenly around the bulb, and if you stare at the bulb in the center, it looks as if the explosion was just taking place. Despite the amount of destruction of the objects, only 13 people are allowed in the room at one time so the guard can see that no one damages anything.
A DERELICT POWER STATION
So what do you do with a derelict power station on the south bank of the Thames in the middle of London? Well, if you can find enough money from the lottery and other sources, you turn it into the one of the world’s major art galleries. Opened in 2000, the Tate Modern is part of the government-supported millennium projects, and it has become one of London’s most popular attractions.
Two Swiss architects removed the turbines from the massive brick building and divided it into two sections. One, almost the length of two football fields and the height of the whole building, became Turbine Hall, featuring modern sculptures. The other half was windowed off and houses five floors of galleries.
We took all four of the guided tours, enlightening but also amusing. One of the guides believed the greatest artist of the 20th century is a man who paints big canvases of two dark colors in a rectangular shape. Even after his explanation of the depth of emotion shown by the placement of the dark blue and almost-black red, I was less than awed.
I had to laugh when one of the other guides, talking about a picture of dogs turned loose on a protest group and chewing up people, said, "Those dogs are behaving rudely" - an excellent example of British understatement.
London’s Tate Modern is a rebuilt derelict power station.
Picture from Wikimedia Commons
The two permanent floors are divided into four parts: "History/Memory/Society," "Nude/Action/Body," "Landscape/Matter/Environment" and "Still Life/Object/Real Life." "Nude/Action/Body" includes some of the most unattractive paintings and photos of nudes we have seen in the world of art.
PHOTOGRAPHY WITH A KICK
What most impressed us was the photography exhibition, "Cruel and Tender," the work of 23 of the most influential photographers of the 20th century in 23 rooms. Michael Nixon took a picture of his wife and her three sisters at the same time every year for 32 years. It was fascinating to see how the sisters changed at different rates. It made me wish I would have captured our four daughters on film together more regularly.
In several rooms, the power of the work almost reduced me to tears. Walker Evans did it by capturing a past with which I was personally familiar. He worked during the Depression on a series of photos of a sharecropper and his family called, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." It captures the feel of poverty and the hopelessness that goes with it. Like my dad, the sharecropper had one pair of overalls for the week and one for Sunday. Actually, my dad was much richer - he had several other pairs of pants but mostly just wore the overalls.
Carla thought the saddest photos were taken by a photographer called Sheikh of Somalian refugees who fled to Kenya during the war. They crossed a desert with little food and water, some children becoming so dehydrated and starved their mothers killed them.
Sheikh went back eight years later and again photographed some of the children who had survived by being put on a special feeding program by one of the nongovernmental organizations. The change was remarkable. The saddest note was by one mother who had killed one of her children in pity and realized the child might have been saved.
The only woman photographer in the group displayed large photos of women who, shortly after giving birth, stood nude with their babes in their arms. In contrast to this were her pictures of Portuguese bullfighters, who don’t kill the bulls but instead leap on them and wrestle them to the ground. As a result, they are more likely to come out of the arena with torn, bloody clothes and obviously bruised faces.
Even if you are not a modern-art enthusiast, the Tate Modern is a stimulating experience with something to educate, amuse and offend anyone.
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