The latest Hyundai Commission effort to fill the vast Turbine Hall at Tate Modern is by Cuban artist - sorry, Cuban artist and activist - Tania Bruguera.
There's something fascinating, for me, about the continued failure of these Hyundai Commission works. There's the huge space of the Turbine Hall, just waiting to be used for some spectacular, exciting piece of art and, again and again, the end results are somewhere between embarrassing and pathetic. The worst two, by my reckoning, have been Doris Salcedo's crack in the floor, from 2007, and Empty Lot, Abraham Cruzvillegas' fatuous plant boxes, from 2015, where you could watch weeds grow over a period of some six months. Lots of competition, though.
How does this latest effort rank? Well, somewhere near the bottom, I'd say.
First, some details:
The acclaimed Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera has created a series of subtle interventions in and around Tate Modern. The work’s title is an ever-increasing figure: the number of people who migrated from one country to another last year added to the number of migrant deaths recorded so far this year – to indicate the sheer scale of mass migration and the risks involved.
Bruguera has brought together a group of 21 people who live or work in the same postcode as Tate Modern. Called Tate Neighbours, they will explore how the museum can learn from and adapt to its local community. They have decided to rename Tate Modern’s Boiler House for a year in honour of local activist Natalie Bell. The Tate Neighbours have also written a manifesto which appears when you sign in to the free WiFi.
In the Turbine Hall is a large heat-sensitive floor. By using your body heat and working together with other visitors, you can reveal a hidden portrait of Yousef, a young man who left Syria to come to London. Meanwhile, a low-frequency sound fills the space with an unsettling energy. In a small room nearby, an organic compound in the air induces tears and provokes what the artist describes as ‘forced empathy’.
Tania Bruguera engages with 'the role of emotions in politics'. Her main concerns are institutional power, borders and migration. Her work spans performance, events, action, film, installation, sculpture, writing and teaching alongside site-specific works. Often, she sets out to cause change through her work. She calls this approach Arte Útil (useful art), in which people engage as users rather than spectators.
When I was there the interaction from the visitors was that they either stood around, or, if they were younger, tried to slide on the shiny grey surface.
You can, just, make out an image of a face underneath, but no one was making any effort to combine together to get their heat to reveal the picture. According to the Times critic (£), the heat sensitive paint doesn't even work very well anyway:
Unfortunately, to reveal his face you’d need an enormous number of people working together to lie on the floor and warm it up. This is certainly part of the point. Probably not part of the point is that not everyone is warm enough. My entire body made almost no impression after several minutes; a male colleague nearby managed a handprint in seconds. I don’t know ladies, maybe try jogging there?
You might not want to stay for long anyway. Another of Bruguera’s “stealth interventions” is a loud and unpleasant low frequency soundtrack, emitting from speakers on the back wall. It’s meant to be unsettling. It is.
The point, for me, is that the art in no way relates to the subject matter. There's nothing to make you feel in any way moved by the plight of these migrants. There are no stories; no pictures; no evocative images. It could be a protest about political repression in Kazakhstan, or about global warming. The people I saw milling around will have had no idea what it was supposed to be all about unless they'd gone and read the description on the wall. The show, in effect, is all about what the artist/activist has to say about it. The art that goes with it - that fills the Turbine Hall - is pure self-indulgence and gimmick.
Certainly communication isn't high on Bruguera's list of priorities. Apart from all the heat-sensitive nonsense, last week there was another display. The other side of the hall is painted shiny black and brown, and there were some nondescript pictures stuck to the floor:
The associated text (untranslated) was in Bengali.
There was no indication what these were, or what was being said. One was just text. It was only when I got home that I expanded my photo and spotted some writing I could read:
That shahidulnews.com/crossfire takes you to this article, where you can - at last - work out what's going on:
Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has staged an impromptu protest at the Tate Modern in support of Shahidul Alam, the Bangladeshi photographer who was jailed on August 5th after posts to social media and an interview with Al Jazeera expressing criticism of his government’s brutal handling of recent student protests.
For her action, Bruguera spread a selection of Alam’s photographs along the floor of the museum’s famous Turbine Hall, and topped each with a small flashlight. While unplanned, the protest accompanied the artist’s current exhibition “10,143,210,” which opened at the museum Tuesday.
Well OK. That's fine. That's something worth publicising. Except she's not really publicising it, is she? How many of the bemused visitors staring at those pictures will have spotted that detail in the script, and bothered to follow it up? One in a thousand? Probably not even that. There were no translations, no explanation. A man looking at the pictures next to me shared his frustration, and I could only agree...wtf??
So....no desire to communicate, but plenty of self-indulgence and virtue-signalling. Much of modern art in a nutshell, you might think.
And the room with a chemical to make you cry? I didn't bother to try it out, but really..."forced empathy"? Unable to come up with any kind of art which might even come close to producing some emotion towards these migrants, could the artist have come up with a more absurd and insensitive admission of failure?
I thought the floor picture looked a bit like early Elvis pre-sideburns. Difficult to tell with all the bodies in the way.
Posted by: Michael van der Riet | October 07, 2018 at 11:26 AM