Tate Modern — Intersection Of Art And Comic Relief
When I last visited Tate Modern in London, on the floor in the middle of one gallery was a stack of plain sheets of paper, each sheet about three feet long and eighteen inches wide. People were taking from the top of the pile as they passed, folding the sheets in two and popping them into their bag, or holding onto them as they continued through the museum.
Tate Modern is London’s pre-eminent art museum, the most-visited modern art museum anywhere, and the fourth most-visited, outstripping New York’s MOMA by some one and a half million people.
From the outside it looks like a brewery. In fact, it’s what used to be the old Bankside Power Station on the south bank of the Thames, and just a cherry pit’s toss from the Millenium Bridge, the iconic landmark perhaps best known now for its destruction at the wands of Death Eaters in the sixth Harry Potter film.
The neighborhood is prime real estate, within easy reach of the Globe Theater, and home to liberals in woollies and cords who are drawn to London’s re-imagined art spaces.
Those who weren’t taking souvenirs from the paper stack were tripping over it. A conundrum of modern art museums is that you don’t always know if what you’ve stepped on is priceless art, or whether the person in front of you dropped something.
If you have difficulty separating a Picasso from a Quentin Blake, surviving these galleries with a straight face is a challenge. Half the time you’re wondering if this isn’t some elaborate joke, that what’s on display is here for no other reason than to set you off.
When I was in fourth grade, during a class on John Logie Baird (usually credited with inventing the television) Paul Trendall leaned into my ear and whispered, “John Yogi Bear.” At nine years old I couldn’t control my laughter, and despite a number of warnings from our teacher, Mrs. Grumwell — not without a sense of humor herself — I was eventually asked to leave the room.
This is Tate Modern. You’re just trying to get through it all without being thrown out for giggling.
Hanging from the wall in another room was a bathroom cabinet. The kind of bathroom cabinet you’d find in any home bathroom, except the door was nailed shut.
People walked up to it, peered into the mirror, read the description and moved on. You could almost imagine the artist, having forgotten the Tate was dropping by that morning to pick up a piece of artwork, looked out the window to see the van outside, and with no time for a poo in a can (I’ll explain later), pulled the cabinet off the wall and tossed that into the back of the truck instead.
High on a wall in another room hangs “Untitled” by Glenn Ligon. America in neon, except the sign’s not lit up. Perhaps someone forgot to plug it in. It’s the sort of thing you used to see in Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, before the digital age. Maybe it fell off a building when someone opened an upstairs window.
I’ve heard it said that success is a matter of being in the right place at the right time. In the case of neon America, that would be Home Depot, 4am, the inside of a dumpster.
Not wanting to be outdone, Tate Britain, Tate Modern’s older sibling, further upstream and on the other side of the river, has on loan Tracey Emin’s “My Bed.” Emin is a leading member of a group of artists known as Britartists. During the 1990s she spent a couple of weeks in her bed suffering from a bout of relationship-breakup depression.
Instead of cleaning up afterwards and hawking it all off to the laundromat, Emin took her bed, along with the unsavory detritus that had gathered around it, down to the Tate, where it was displayed as one of the shortlisted works of the Turner Prize.
That was in 1999 when, it was said, “My Bed” marked a seminal moment in art history. If you look closely, you can still see the stains.
In July of 2014 a German businessman, Count Christian Duerckheim, bought “My Bed” at auction for around $4 million. It is, he said at the time, “a metaphor for life.” The Count is currently loaning “My Bed” to the Tate for ten years.
Considering the can of artist’s poo the Tate spent $35,000 on in 2002, buying an unmade bed for a few million is a comparatively lucid moment.
The poo artist, Piero Manzoni, seems to have been making the same point I think I’m trying to make here.
I’ll be the first to admit, I’m a Neanderthal when it comes to any notion of what makes modern art tick. Still, I can’t help wondering what half this stuff is doing in here.
I’m not alone. There are so many of us, in fact, that Susie Hodges felt compelled to write a book about it. Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That is on sale in the bookstore in the foyer at Tate Modern.
“Bathroom Cabinet with Mirror” might prompt a companion: My Husband Could Have Put That Up.
Hodges’ title is an odd choice when you consider Manzoni’s offering, as clearly your five-year-old could have done that. Although getting it into a can may be beyond him or her.
It’s been said of modern art that it’s less about art, and more about being first. This suggests we could all be artists, we just have to be quick about it. I can’t and don’t want to believe that, which puts me more in line with Susie Hodges.
Emin didn’t begin with an unmade bed, and Manzoni didn’t poo in a can on his first day at art school. Art is less about an idea then, and more about collateral.
I’m reminded of an old Bob Dylan line: “They asked for some collateral and I pulled down my pants.” Although Manzoni had already taken this idea far further than Dylan likely ever intended.
On my last visit to Tate Modern I saw our lives displayed as some kind of naff reality. Emin couldn’t muster up enough interest to get out of bed, the cabinet door didn’t open, and America wasn’t lit up.
