Laura Freeman in the Times – Has Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall had its day?
An item for the agenda of the incoming Tate director Jessica Morgan: sort out the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Take the commissioning committee by the scruff of the neck and remind them that here is one of the great public art spaces of the world. It calls for scale, spectacle, something to make you say “Cor!” as you come through the doors.
Enough with mimsy mobiles hanging from gantries, enough with remote communities and climate anxiety. Give us something to remember. We do still recall Anish Kapoor’s trumpet (Marsyas), Olafur Eliasson’s sun (The Weather Project), Carsten Höller’s slides (Test Site) and Doris Salcedo’s crack (Shibboleth), but they were 24, 23, 20 and 19 years ago respectively. Get across the message: go big or go back to the drawing board.
Yes, absolutely. Though I’d strongly disagree with the inclusion of Doris Salcedo’s ridiculous Shibboleth as one of the efforts worth recalling. [I wrote about it at the time – though due to factors beyond my control the layout now makes it impossible to distinguish what I wrote from what Tate Modern had to say. Anyway, I didn’t like it.]
On the latest effort:
The latest Turbine Hall commission was unveiled on Monday morning. Tarek Atoui’s Hold, a “multisensory installation”, is the 25th Turbine Hall commission and the 11th under the sponsorship of Hyundai. It is not a success. Atoui, born in Lebanon and based in Paris, has produced a work that is visually fiddly and portentously orchestrated. The aesthetic is steampunk meets gong bath. Instruments, some complete, some makeshift, are suspended on wires alongside various unappealing vents and grates….
It is a thin, mannered, cluttered commission and a waste of a magnificent space. But then so was the last one (Maret Anne Sara’s pick-up-sticks palisade Goavve-Geabbil) and the one before that (Mire Lee’s stomach-churning Open Wound). El Anatsui’s mighty sails and shoals were better, but it has been a long time since there was a “whoa!” moment, still less a Höller “whee!” one.
It’s perhaps less of a comment on the Tate Modern commissioners and more of an issue with the lack of ambition or vision in the current art world, where ideological concerns – and the requirement for paragraphs of explicatory text – so often seem to dominate over talent. If ever there was a site where visual power and immediate impact was required it would be the cavernous Turbine Hall – but they just can’t do it.
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