Funfairism

The latest in the long line of artworks attempting to do something with the huge space of the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern is Miroslav Bolka's How It Is.

Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the Times gives it a 5-star review:

The latest crowd-puller, by the Polish artist Miroslaw Balka and due to be unveiled today, is quite simply the best Turbine Hall installation yet.

An enormous shipping container appears to have been plonked down at the end of the building. You can pace its perimeters or walk underneath it: it’s just high enough. “So what?” you might wonder until you remember that, to the vivid imagination, boxes have far more potential than the presents inside. This is certainly true of this new work by the Polish artist Miroslaw Balka. How It Is may be the most sternly understated art work to occupy the Tate’s Turbine Hall to date. But imaginatively it is the most profoundly resonant.

At the farthest end of the vast steel box is a ramp. The visitor walks up it and into a blackness so thick that you can almost feel it brushing against your face. The walls must be reached for with outstretched fingertips. They feel slightly fuzzy. A light absorbent flock coating has been sprayed over the surfaces, apparently, although by this point it’s probably not the materials that the spectator is wondering about as he stands abandoned in the dark.

The experience is sombre, discombobulating and perhaps a bit sinister. But it is beautiful too — and not least when, as your eyes slowly adjust, you begin to discern the infinite subtle shades of grey or turn back to face the entrance and see other visitors vacillating nervously on the brink before, stepping into the engulfing shadows, they are transformed into stalking silhouettes.

Well...it's certainly an improvement on the ridiculous crack-in-the-floor - "a fracture in modernity itself" - from a couple of years back. It fits in well with the Turbine Hall space. It's big. And yes, there is a frisson as you go in: it's dark, and everyone looks pale and ghostly. You think it gets much darker further in, and then you find yourself bumping into the back wall, which is somehow closer than you'd realised....

Here's what they say about it in the hand-outs and on the wall at the side before you go in:

"How shall I move forward?" you might ask yourself, as you stand at the threshold, confronted by the darkness ahead. Many of us learn from an early age to fear the unfamiliar or unknown. If the unknown is also without light, it can become unjustifiably terrifying. How you approach the unknown is unique, as your first encounter with anything can only be as an individual. Staring ahead into the black void of How It Is may make you wonder whether to move ahead at all. How It Is simultaneously embodies the unknown and the familiar; the darkness is contained in a structure mimicking both the architecture of the Turbine Hall and a contemporary shipping container, luring you inwards through its recognisable form.

"It's fine", you reassure yourself, "what can actually be inside?"

How It Is is only complete when you, the viewer, enter. Yet rather than forming a stage or spectacle, the container focuses you inwards, both physically and psychologically, as you enter into the darkness. In choosing how to move ahead - to march in fearlessly, or to skirt along the walls, probably surprised by their soft furry touch - you create your own journey. But, as you bump into others, or mistakenly grab a stranger's shoulder, your trepidation eases and you collectively navigate the void.

Miroslaw Balka is one of the most significant contemporary artists of his generation. Comprising sculpture and video, his works explore themes of personal experience, often set within the context of the history of his native Poland. His work may often appear minimal in its aesthetic, pared-down forms are created from simple materials ranging from concrete and steel to soap, ash and human hair - yet these choices are steeped in both personal and, most crucially, universal meanings.

In conceiving How It Is Balka has drawn upon innumerable personal, collective, historical and fictional experiences and references. These include the uncompromising prose of Samuel Beckett's novel How It Is, which chronicles an unnamed narrator's journey as he crawls through mud; and the philosophical and psychological allegory of Plato's Cave, in which prisoners sit chained, facing a blank wall, where their only link to reality is to watch shadows of figures moving past a fire behind them. "You can shape this yourself. The shape you create is not just about your body, it's about your mind", Balka has said of his sculpture. The myriad of complex ideas conjured by the relative simplicity and form of How It Is combine to create a monumental and poetic work.

What strikes me about this is how absurdly over-written it is, from the vacuous phrases like "your first encounter with anything can only be as an individual", to the Beckett and Plato references, and how it desperately tries to force a significance out of the work which really can't justify it on its own. 

You will not have missed the Holocaust references - "the history of his native Poland", plus the "soap, ash and human hair" that Balka's used in his earlier work. And of course the dark cattle-truck feel of the container echoes the transportation to the camps. Rachel C-J brings this up:

In the context of Balka’s past works, who can walk up the ramp into his sinister black box without remembering how the Jews were once loaded into cattle trucks? Such references are implicit, Balka admits. He grew up in a town in which 75 per cent of the population had been exterminated in the death camps. And yet he found this out only after the 1989 collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. “When I did I felt guilty,” he says, “guilty of not knowing.”

Thankfully this is left largely unspoken in the gallery itself. I was fearing that we might have a case here of an artist trying to add gravitas and a spurious legitimacy to his work by referencing the Holocaust, but having seen it I don't believe that would be a fair accusation. It might go some way to explaining the critical enthusiasm, mind.

There seems to be something of a vogue now for this kind of art installation, where the audience are disorientated and otherwise confused. Antony Gormley's Blind Light at the Hayward in 2007 had a smoke-filled room where you couldn't see more than a foot or two in front of you. It's easy to understand  the appeal: it's another step up in the attempt to get people to react somehow. If art is judged by how it affects people, then, once you've given up trying to shock them, the next logical step is to confuse them, scare them, disorient them....hell, anything as long as it gets some kind of reaction. 

And where do people go to get their kicks nowadays? Where do they go to spend their leisure time and their leisure money? They head to places like Alton Towers or Chessington World of Adventure - big glossy modern-day fun-fairs. That's where you see people reacting - with screams and laughter and joy and tears. Most artists would kill to get that kind of response. So that's what we're getting now: funfair art.....funfairism. 

We've been here before in Tate Modern, with Carsten Höller's slides. Now we've got this big black box, like a haunted castle, perhaps, or a ghost train without the ghosts or the train. And instead of the fairground patter - "How long can you take it? - the black box!! Dark as night and twice as scary! Are those ghosts, or other people? Be terrified out of your wits, or your money back!" - we have stuff about exploring themes of personal freedom, navigating the void, and references to Beckett. It's a fairground for the intellectual classes, who'd never dream of...*shudder*...going to Alton Towers.  

It won't be long, surely, before the Turbine Hall is filled with all the fun of the fair. Dodgems: explore questions of personal interaction and social deviance with reference to Althusser's epistemological break....the Big Dipper: ponder the cyclical nature of human experience while questioning the shallow "spectacularism" of modern consumerist culture and licking one of our special Walter Benjamin-flavoured reproduction ice-creams....the Water Shute: scream with existential glee as you assess the way our modern obsession with speed helps to destroy the environment while validating our notions of progress and futurity...

I'm looking forward to the Funfairism retrospective already.

Comments

[DaninVan]

Too bad you guys don't do Halloween over there; sorry, Guy Fawks just doesn't cut it ;) Oct.31st is almost upon us.
http://www.nychalloweenhauntedhouse.com/
Heh...no kids 'trick or treating' on our street...pitch black, and bears wandering about.

[TDK]

Cattle trucks are not totally dark like this. They have spaced slats to allow for ventilation.