It is all very remarkable. The Millennium Dome has been rubbished by just about everyone, though a few have emerged to say that it is a great feat of architecture. (It isn’t. From the ground it is formless, with no point of focus or interest, and nowhere to see it from. Inside, though called a dome and, we are told, the biggest structure of its type in the world, it has none of the grandeur or sense of space of the (presumably much smaller) domes of St Peter’s or St Paul’s.) As if by some symmetry of contrast, Tate Modern has received near universal approval, the only whiffs of criticism being a few reservations about the art being exhibited.
I dissent. Tate Modern is a waste of space, quite literally; and wholly unsuited to the display of worthwhile art, modern or otherwise.
You enter Tate Modern from an entrance below ground level; not much of an entrance, it has to be said, nothing like the portico of the old Tate, no sense of occasion there. But leave that aside, when you go in, what you see is a vast and empty rectangular space. Well, it is not quite empty. On a floor halfway up the building and occupying about half the space of the ground floor, there is Louise Bourgeois’s great spider. But the building is so big, that even a gigantic sculpture, such as the spider, is quite lost in it, not the brooding presence the sculptress presumably intended.
The sense one has is simply that of a huge space, once occupied no doubt by turbines and other vast machinery, but now quite empty and visually redundant. It is as if this cathedral of industry and electricity has had its heart, its real presence torn out, as in some kind of puritanical cleansing, and nothing put back to fill the aching void. All the works now are off to the left, up a series of escalators, all pushed into a side chamber to the main thing.
The works, of course, are the shop and restaurants, followed at some distance by the side-show, the galleries of art. I don’t know whether Tate Modern is an ace shop and café, with galleries attached, but the galleries certainly feel like an appendage to the commercial bits. I don’t think that is just because of the dreariness of the content of many of the galleries. It has as much to do with the structure and feel of the spaces, as you walk round them.
As already suggested, things have been said about the quality of the collection in Tate Modern, and also about the deliberately a-historical nature of the displays. I do not want to add to these comments, except to remark that there are some Cubist paintings and a couple of Matisses on show. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to see them. The lighting is terrible –which presumably could be remedied – but, worse, the scale is all wrong.
Tate Modern is designed on the assumption that modern art, or the important stuff anyway, is BIG. So anything that is not BIG just gets lost. Well, here is another suggestion. On the whole the best art is either small or medium sized. It is not just that size encourages empty and unsustainable rhetoric, though it does. It is also that most of the best art is not designed for industrial or commercial spaces, or to compete with the noise and hub-bub of the mass media. It is designed for small or medium sized spaces, spaces on a human scale. It is intended to provoke and repay concentration and contemplation.
So it is hardly surprising that commercial and industrial spaces encourage art of empty and unsustainable rhetoric, exemplifying the values of advertising and the mass media. And there is plenty of that in Tate Modern, the ultimate in commercial and industrial hubris, the perfect container for works exemplifying the values of commerce and the gigantism of the mass media, as new as New Labour, and signifying as much. But it is completely wrong for art of a humane scale, exemplifying humane virtues and demanding real focus or concentration.
Having said all that, however, Tate Modern is worth going to. From its upper floors you get absolutely ravishing views of the dome of St Paul’s opposite.
Cover Drawing ROSE WYLIE
