Saturday 30 August 2014

Father Ted would just tell you they're big and close by.


Hours and hours in the Duveen Galleries. Hours and years from the age of thirteen, walking around soaking up the materials, skills, stories and execution of artists' ideas through the ages. For most of those years the works exhibited were only as human-sized as me. Animate and inanimate, we all rattled around together, mute and humbled, hanging in the vast universe that was the Tate Gallery.

Of course Henry Moore's rounded and grounded figures stood as comparative giants, but even if they'd yearned, and reached, for the stars, their arms wouldn't have bothered anything like the ceiling. Despite their substantial presence and cool, comforting polish, the most prolific element in the building was still air. The Tate Gallery was stiff with air, stuffed with air. Art had its work cut out trying to compete with the monumental, hanging, space.

Henry Moore said 'Monumentality doesn't have to do with scale, its the vision behind the work'. The vision behind air is undeniably monumental, given its integral part in our lives, but nevertheless I have been incredibly inspired by its diminishing presence in the Duveens over the past five years. 

Eva Rothschild began the encroachment with 26 triangles of aluminium tubing which brushed the height of the stone walls, and nodded at an ambition to venture beyond. Fiona Banner fulfilled that ambition by suspending from the ceiling, a whole Harrier fighter plane, and reclining a highly polished, Jaguar aircraft on its back as though it had just skidded through the door. I spent ages looking up and down in wonderment at the installation of Banner's works, much as I many years before in front of a big fairground wheel. 

Martin Creed thinks its good to look at museums at high speed because it leaves time for other things. I agree with him, I don't expect to be stopped in my tracks often, but on the occasions when my jaw drops and my breath is taken away, it makes me grin and feel excited.

This summer Phyllida Barlow's 'dock' in the Duveen, and 'Gig' at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, provoked my wonder and delight. It made me feel generally mischievous, and specifically like I was playing chicken by standing directly under enormous, precarious structures which could fall on me at any moment. If you've ever reached up to pull a half forgotten item off an overstuffed high shelf you'll know the feeling. 

Barlow's managed to displace a lot of air in the reverential Tate Britain, and connect to my senses and memories by turning carpentry inside out, and rolling a nostalgic wheel of Monet colour over my brain. For me, the artist has achieved a monumental vision with monumental forms, and she knows what she's talking about: 'Things aren't just visual. They are sensations of physicality'. 







1 comment:

  1. That slight sense of danger that the spinning neon blades of Martin Creed's 'Mother' only just fit...

    ReplyDelete

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