Art in focus: The Tate Modern

The international art in one of London’s most famous galleries is playful, surprising and challenging. Its content is ever-changing, so Mr Londoner explores the latest offerings …

London’s Tate Modern occupies the former Bankside Power Station. Its striking architecture looks like it’s from the 1930s. It actually dates from the early 1960s. Its creator was Giles Gilbert Scott. Part of a renowned architectural dynasty, Gilbert Scott is better remembered as the man who designed the red telephone box. Bankside power station stopped generating electricity in 1981. It remained a forgotten and forlorn-looking shell for two decades. Demolition beckoned. But it received a surprise reprieve and was re-born as the nation’s cutting-edge collection of contemporary art. Today, Tate Modern hosts painting, sculpture, video and digital art from across the globe. London’s most experimental gallery has helped re-define what we think of as art. It blurs the distinction between the artist, the performer and the participant.

Tate Modern comprises two huge buildings connected by a bridge. @meetmrlondoner

Queen Elizabeth launched the new gallery in the Year 2000. Her Late Majesty had previously opened the same building thirty six years earlier – as a power station. The Millennium Bridge, linking the Tate to St Paul’s Cathedral, on the other side of the river, was another Millennium project. This created a new connecting corridor from Bankside to the Capital’s central business district, the City of London.

Cultural hub
Today, Tate Modern forms part of a diverse cultural hub, including Shakespeare’s Globe, Borough Market, the historic Golden Hinde Tudor warship and several performance spaces. There are unusual shops selling everything from organic tee-shirts, to Japanese kitchen knives and artisan cheeses. And the neighbourhood is famous for great pubs and restaurants. Collectively, these diverse attractions have helped put historic Bankside more conspicuously onto London’s contemporary map.

Today, Tate Modern displays work by established artists like Diego Riviera, Pablo Picasso and Roy Lichtenstein. However, it’s better known for promoting those with a notable body of creative work, but who aren’t necessarily regular household names. Currently, there’s the immersive world of Pipilloti Rist to explore. The Swiss artist and videographer has created a highly-saturated film featuring the adventures of a flame- haired young woman, Pepperminta. She journeys through the natural world, through wood and water, celebrating her own sexual awakening. The viewer is invited to be part of the meditative scene. We kick off our shoes and get comfy among scatter cushions and bean bags on the gallery floor. An ambient sound track washes over us.

Immersive art
This is immersive content that demands our attention. It requires time and patience and the right mind-set for sure. The artist requires that we relax to take it all in. This is most definitely not art for the tick-box tourist, for those with a limited span of attention – or for visitors of a more conservative inclination.

In A Tax Haven Run By Women, we explore a witty installation of sculptures and costumes. The work is by Turner Prize-nominated British performance artist, Monster Chetwynd (born Alalia Chetwynd). Its centre piece is the cat bus, from Studio Ghibli’s 1988 animated fantasy film My Neighbour Totoro. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, the film celebrates the joys of rural life and the supernatural symbolism and beliefs of the Shinto religion. Chetwynd presents the cat bus, with its grinning feline features, 12 legs and bushy tail. It’s a joyfully chaotic synthesis of recycled textiles and child-like art. If you don’t understand the context, then no matter. This is playful art guaranteed to raise a smile.

Minoru Onoda, Work62-W 1962, Gutai Art Association. @meetmrlondoner

The Gutai Art Organisation was a radical response to post-war life in Japan. Based in Ashiya, in western Japan, the Gutai artists rejected the collectivism and conservatism of a hierarchical society, in which personal expression had been suppressed for generations. The power of the kick-back is palpable. This prevailing marshal culture had led the nation into a devastating war, claiming the lives of over three million Japanese people. The colourful work of Gutai artists, like Onoda Minoru, uses everyday materials and adds a new and playful element into the previous formality of Japanese expression. Gutai’s young artists pushed against all that had gone before. Their radical approach applied equally to technique. Artists painted with their feet, used mechanical devices to distribute paint and incorporated found objects. The art is colourful, beautiful, surprising and sometimes rendered in three dimensions.

Sun-Man-Face II 1976, Imre Bak, Tate Modern @meetmrlondoner

Just for the record
The work of Columbian artist Raimond Chavez makes for an arresting and compelling narrative. In El Toque Criollo, Chavez displays album covers of record sleeves purchased in north and south America. During this obsessive search for vinyl, the artist revealed he was “more interested in what appears on the covers than the music they contain.” The fetching sleeve designs from the 1960s and 70s are arranged in 19 groupings. On the face of it they are pleasingly retro. In actual fact, they are full of inferred and challenging messages, about race, immigration, gender politics, narcotics, crime, poverty and social inequality.

Hindu God Ganesh features in the Religion Room, by Meschac Gaba. @meetmrlondoner

An entire gallery has become The Religion Room. Benin-born artist Meschac Gaba brings together 75 objects from various religions and cultures, displaying them on vast wooden shelves. Gaba’s museum within a museum challenges our assumptions of what objects are seen as art or, alternatively (or perhaps simultaneously), perceived as sacred religious artefacts.

Radio On. Tower of Babel, 2002, by Cildo Meireles. Tate Modern. @meetmrlondoner

Chilean artist Cildo Meireles created an immense Tower of Babel in 2001. This massive steeple of found sound references the biblical story from the Book of Genesis. It broadcasts the confused babble from old valve radios, radiograms and Walkmans, dating from the 1920s to the 1980s. The work explores the overload of information in the pre-dawn of the age of social media. Visitors generally get Meireles’s message from the outset. If they don’t, then again no matter. We don’t have to understand art – we just need to stand underneath it.

 

About the Author

Antony Robbins is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a former director of the
Museum of London. @meetmrlondoner on Instagram and Mr Londoner Presents on YouTube