It's no surprise at all that the latest Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern is a glorified playground. In between the extraordinarily tedious art installations, the Hall's vast space has been used for years now as a place for toddlers to run around, and kids to roll down the incline by the entrance. So, they've decided to go with the flow:
An orange line of swings weaves through the Turbine Hall. It then crosses the gallery and emerges in the landscape to the south of the building.
Each swing has been designed for three people by Danish artists’ collective SUPERFLEX. Swinging with two other people has greater potential than swinging alone and One Two Three Swing! invites us to realise this potential together. Swinging as three, our collective energy resists gravity and challenges the laws of nature.
Swing into action on the count of three – One Two Three Swing!
Danish artists’ collective SUPERFLEX is best known for its playfully subversive installations...
I suggested before, after Carsten Höller's slides, that funfairism was going to be the next thing:
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....
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.
Well, we're not quite there yet - this is more of a playground than a funfair - but it's moving in the right direction.
It's all there, as anyone who's spent any time recently in playgrounds will recognise: the bored parent staring at their i-phone, absent-mindedly pushing the sullen offspring: the loud shouty kids monopolising all the best spots. The only difference is, you get the occasional adult having a slightly self-conscious go on one of the swings - people who would never consider actually going to a playground. But, hey, let's get in touch with our inner child.
A romper room for the over-civilised. Sous les pavés la plage. In the art gallery, the playground.
The two quotes on the website give an idea of the level of desperation:
"I've spent a lot of time in the Turbine Hall… but I’ve never felt as exhilarated as I did on a swing installed here by Superflex" - Evening Standard.
"When you get on that swing – and I haven’t been on one for more years than I’d care to mention – you immediately reboot" - Donald Hyslop, exhibition curator.
These people need to get out more.
Inevitably some attempt is made to provide artistic justification. From the on site description:
Each swing has been designed for three people by Danish art collective SUPERFLEX. Swinging with two other people has greater potential than swinging alone, and One Two Three Swing! invites us to realise this potential together. Swinging as three, our collective energy resists gravity and challenges the laws of nature. Count, hold, let go of the floor and soar. SUPERFLEX asks if we all swing at the same time, can we change the way the earth spins?
Suspended above a carpet made in the colours of british banknotes, a pendulum swings hypnotically with the movement of the earth. SUPERFLEX thinks of this as a space to contemplate the forces at work in our everyday lives. They imagine people might want to gather here to think about whether it is the weight of gravity or the economy that pulls us down.
Hmm.
Not that I object. It's refreshing in a way to see so many happy faces in an art gallery - even if most of them are children. The tomb-like space of the Turbine Hall, which has defeated just about every installation, from the cracked line to the absurd soil containers, has at last found some sort of role.
I have no idea what it has to do with art, mind...
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