The runaway hit of this summer's art scene has been the Hayward Gallery's ground-breaking exhibition Invisible. It may seem surprising on the surface, perhaps, that it's taken so long for art to break the last taboo and escape the tyranny of the visible. In music, after all, it's now over 50 years since John Cage's infamous 4'33", which finally liberated "the purest form of art" from the straitjacket of auditory fascism. Yet people tend to forget that Cage was in fact inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's 1951 series of white paintings. So what we're seeing now is not the first invisible art, but its acceptance, finally, as a suitable subject for a mainstream gallery exhibition.
Where the Hayward leads, Tate Modern follows - but, unsurprisingly for those familiar with that gallery's history of convention-defying iconoclasm, they've taken it a step further. Unlike Rauschenberg's white paintings, or the invisible ink drawings by Italian artist Gianni Motti which grace the Hayward show, here we have no frames and no canvasses to restrain the imagination. Moreover, in a move characteristic of the integrity and daring of the Tate vision, we have no "exhibition" as such either. Situated in the vast space of the Turbine Hall after the closure of the last of the Unilever series, Tacita Dean's FILM, this remarkable show isn't featured in the Tate's list of exhibitons, nor has it been advertised or reviewed by the usual critics. In that sense this truly is ground-breaking; far beyond the Hayward show. We may, indeed, be witnessing the birth of a new way of looking at, and thinking about, art.
Here is the Turbine Hall, now:
You can just make out the lines down on the right where Doris Salcedo's crack, Shibboleth, was asking questions a few years back about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built. If the presence of the crack in 2007 was a powerful way of addressing the long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world, how much more powerful is its absence now in 2012, when current efforts to paper over the cracks in modernity and cover-up the fissures opened up by colonialism need more than ever to be challenged.
But though the shadows of the old exhibits here - Ai Weiwei's seeds, Miroslav Bolka's How It Is, the grand piano - may echo in our imaginations, that's not really what this show is about. It's about the new works.
The obvious place to start is conceptual artist Lavinia Prees-Jones's breath-taking "Dream Submarine Cloud #7", which now - in a virtual sense - dominates the Turbine Hall. It's a full-size nuclear submarine, suspended from the roof and drifting in a numinous sea where its non-existence only adds to our sense of radical unease: a stark and brutal interrogation of the hegemonic world of military hardware in our post-colonial age, with the huge shark-like shape of the craft radiating a sinister male power which is contained - but only just - within the reflective female capture of the art space. But what made Prees-Jones take the radical step of making the work invisible? "I originally wrote to the Ministry of Defence about the possibility of them loaning out a nuclear submarine," she says, "but received no reply. After the initial disappointment, it struck me that, rather than being a problem, this was in fact an amazing opportunity. I'd read about invisible art without really grasping the full potential, but suddenly it all made sense. This way, not only was I interrogating the capitalist-military system that we live under, but was also asking serious questions about presence and absence, reality and imagination, truth and fiction. I could deconstruct that solitary moment of precision which characterises our usual "seeing" of the real, to allow a more ambiguous and richer vein of possibility where the actual perceptual act becomes freed from a normative linear and contextualised construct. It developed into a far more resonant art-work than the one I'd originally envisioned. As an added bonus there was now no need to sort out the enormously time-consuming and frankly rather tedious business of getting an actual nuclear submarine into Tate Modern and suspending it from the ceiling. And, perhaps most importantly for me as an artist, it frees the observer from the tyranny of the actual. They can imagine their own submarine. For me it's a metallic kind of dark grey colour, but I've had many people tell me they see it as yellow. Which is absolutely fine."
The lower regions of the Turbine Hall, meanwhile, are dominated by Polish artist Czeclow Milozewski's extraordinary Elements of Beauty, in which full-size replicas of Michelangelo's David, constructed from each of the elements in the periodic table, are arranged for visitors to wander amongst and admire. Initially daunted by the problems presented by the fact that some of the elements are in fact gases or liquids, as well as the extreme rarity of others, yet unwilling to give up on what he describes as "the purity of my vision, my homage to beauty, a unique meeting of art and science", Milozewski, like Prees-Jones, saw that invisibility gave him the tools that he needed. "The age of great artistic statements in the real world is over", he says. "We can no longer afford to rape Mother Nature in our search for beauty. We are no longer kings and emperors, to build palaces of gold and silver. Yet the search for such splendour continues - so we must find the beauty within our minds, within our souls. Interiority is the way of the future." This radical approach also, happily, allows Milozewski to include the transuranium elements. He plans to keep the work updated by adding a new David whenever a new element is discovered.
The curators haven't had it all their own way. Pedro Salvadore's Undiscovered Animals couldn't make it past Customs and Excise, and a proposed virtual colony of vampire bats in the roof of the Turbine Hall by the art world's perennial bad boys the Smithers Twins was vetoed for health and safety reasons. It's a tribute to the quality and depth of the show that in the end these gaps are barely noticed. This radical vision of invisibilty marks yet another triumph for Tate Modern.
Could it be the future of art? Watch this space.
Another classic...
Posted by: StarDasher | July 17, 2012 at 09:26 AM
No comment.
Posted by: Brian Micklethwait | July 18, 2012 at 04:32 PM