LONDON — The Tate Modern is a cathedral of contemporary art, an
old power plant set on the Thames across from St. Paul’s in London.
The power plant had a single tower rising far above the rest of the
building. On the footbridge over the Thames, the tower makes it
seem that the museum is making an obscene gesture toward the
church. But it could not be. At St. Paul’s, Kofi Annan will soon be
lecturing on African poverty. The cultural left has no reason to
offend the religious left. Sometimes a tower is just a tower.
On July 6, I wandered into the Tate Modern to engage once again
the maddening puzzle of contemporary art. Finding puzzles was no
problem: glasses of water said to be oak trees, piles of brick, and
other intimidations posing as art. They all carried the label “this
is so cool and if you don’t get it, something is wrong with you,
stupid.” But the museum also had Mark Rothko’s “The Seagram Murals”
displayed with sensitivity and intelligence. Rothko’s murals hold
their own with anything in the pantheon of Western art.
I had come to see a new exhibition Open Systems: Rethinking
Art c. 1970 which is on view until September 18, 2005. (Some
of the exhibition may be viewed here.) According to the curator, the show
examines “how art was reconceived in the late 1960s and early
1970s.”
Hence we are dealing with artists who make a “radical move”
toward “wide-ranging experiments” and seek “the development of a
more culturally, socially and politically responsive art.” After
all, “virtually every mode of authority and order was under
attack.” Those experiments thus led to “open systems” or
“propositions that open themselves to the chances and imperfections
of the world and its events.”
I can’t explain how I felt. The doors had exploded open and
a few of us managed to crawl out and down the tracks to
Aldgate.
It is safe to conclude that none of the objects in Open
Systems will join the pantheon, but one should be wary of
dismissing the whole. Robert Smithson’s slide show and lecture
Hotel Palenque from 1969 engaged me completely. Smithson
took photographs of a Mexican hotel that was being torn down and
rebuilt. Somewhere in that combination his eye found a strange
beauty and intriguing forms. Judging by the lecture accompanying
the photos, Smithson does not take himself all that seriously. I
wish I could say that about the others in the show.
Early in the exhibit one comes across Meteor 18, B-331:
Homage to Cara de Cavalo by Helio Oiticica, done in 1967. De
Cavalo, we are told, was “a notorious gangster in Rio” and a
personal friend of the artist. You might wonder why an artist would
be friends with a gangster and pay him homage after he was gunned
down. De Cavalo, Oiticica says, implied that “violent rebellion can
be the only way out” of a military dictatorship.
There were bodies everywhere. There were heads and arms in
different places, all separated from the bodies. There was a
woman’s body with no arms, legs or head, just
the torso…There were quite a few kids lying around as well as
adults. There were intestines and bits from inside of bodies stuck
to the wall.
The next room is more amusing. Two videos by the artist Martha
Rosler are playing at the same time. The first Semiotics of the
Kitchen (1975) features more than twenty minutes of Rosler
picking up and saying the names of kitchen tools. The second
entitled Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained
(1977) features a woman being measured while Rosler offers a
Marxist rant. The room fills with an unlikely cacophony: “meat
tenderizer,” “capitalism,” “rolling pin,” “the working class,”
“spatula,” “the revolution.”
I was on the corner and heard the noise. I went over and
there were at least seven people obviously dead. There was a lot of
body parts and human debris….At first there was an eerie quiet
and a very profuse smell of blood. One man began
screaming.
Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate
Holdings, a Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 gestures
toward the future of art, the present we inhabit. Haacke took
photos of 142 buildings apparently owned directly or indirectly by
the Shapolsky family along with his “research” about the buildings.
Haacke’s not much of an economist if he believed, as the exhibit
implies, that owning 142 buildings constituted a monopoly on
Manhattan rental property. Yet Haacke’s project is in this room
largely because it raised a commotion in 1971 when the Guggenheim
refused to display the work. It was so radical, so
transgressive, man. Thereafter Shapolsky et al.
“became one of the most talked about works of the early 1970s.”
Haacke introduced us, in other words, to art as we know it, to art
as a publicity stunt.
O nation of Islam and nation of Arabism: Rejoice….The
heroic mujahidin have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain
is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern,
southern, eastern, and western quarters.
The art of the 1970s, like the decade itself, has nothing to
offer our present. Measured against the experience of terror, it
seems empty, another expensive waste in a society that could afford
to be foolish. Somewhere in a room three thousand miles from my
desk, Martha Kosler’s dull voice continues to say “proletariat” and
“rolling pin.” She sounds very tired and very far away. She sounds
like she is already dead.
