Hitchin’ on the back of the Crunch: Tate Triennial 4

10 February 2009

Bob and Roberta Smith, Off Voice Fly Tip, 2009
Courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery
Photo Credit: Tate Photography

It’s a plucky gesture – to attempt to pull the itinerant paths of contemporary art production together with one descriptive ribbon, given their worldwide reach and wonky wend through a seemingly endless postmodern territory. Nicholas Bourriaud, the French theorist who proposed the idea of relational aesthetics in 1996 (the evolution of art practices out of a social context as opposed to an internal directive) has done just that with his umbrella term “altermodern”. The fourth Tate Triennial of British art makes for a very suitable curatorial test ground for his “ in-progress redefinition of modernity” revolving as it does around the issue of globalisation. For Britain as a multicultural centre (to which the exhibition roll call is testament) is home to a dearth of international makers.

While I like the sound of ‘altermodern’, with its on-the-button evocation of pimped ideas and critical customisation, as an exhibition, the concept struggles to stay upright on the radically shifting ground beneath art and economic production. The credit crisis appears to have veered into the middle of the proceedings like a juggernaut off road. It would be unrealistic perhaps given the swift acceleration of this global development to expect a radical reassessment of the way things are being made – post-commission, pre-installation. But rather than simply acknowledge the ungainly presence of this entity still skidding through the room, Bourriaud has chosen (one might presume from the accompanying text) to hang the art like trucker caps off its wing mirrors as if in denial of the fact that certain works here already function as evidence of a political moment now passed.

Subodh Gupta, Line of Control, 2008
Courtesy of the the artist, Arario Gallery and Hauser & Wirth Zurich London
Photo Credit: Tate Photography

Bourriaud has created quite a spectacle, though. Both entrances into Tate Britain’s Duveen galleries have become delivery routes into an elaborate, yet dystopic, funfair. This section of the exhibition is free, which might account, in part, for the roll-up, roll-up sensibility of the display. There are many facades and staged situations to goggle at but actually very little to get involved with. One is kept at bay as a result of various structural devices: the outsized scale of Ruth Ewan’s giant accordion makes it a thing of sculpture rather than an operational performance prop (until activated by volunteers who play a selection of protest songs); while Mike Nelson’s recreation of his studio can only be accessed by two ‘windows’ cut from the Victorian-style structure that contains a fascinating but ultimately out-of-reach array of cultural artefacts. Where Spartacus Chetwynd’s bank of TV’s (spewing out a spoof private-dick drama) appears playfully retrospecific, Subodh Gupta’s monumental mushroom cloud of shiny steel consumerables feels out of step with the current make-do-and-mend climate.

The Coney Island boardwalk shuffle concludes, or rather folds in on itself at the entry point to the main galleries with Matthew Darbyshire’s ‘Palac’. This conversely impenetrable architectural dread zone takes it cues from the surrounding neo-classical architecture and the socialist realist Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw – a hotch-potch embodiment of the worst kind of corporate and institutional urban developments. I start to feel a bit depressed – like reaching urban civilisation after a long stretch in the desert only to discover ‘Hotel California’.

Walead Beshty, Installation of FedEx Large Kraft Boxes 330508, International
Priority, Los Angeles-Tijuana, Tijuana-Los Angeles, Los Angeles-London, October 28, 2008–January 16, 2009
Courtesy of Tate Photography

The travel theme continues inside with journeys that range in conceptual scope from the trippy visual dioramas of Gustav Metzger’s liquid crystal screens and Joachim Koester’s film-animated hash plants to the Fedex philosophisation of Walead Beshty. The LA-based artist’s installation of glass boxes variably ‘traumatised’ during transit between LA and London provides a poetic exhibition motif. The open-booth/gangway presentation of this and other rooms (not to mention the vast scale of the exhibition) brings a waft of the art fair at odds with the sideshow theatricality of the Duveens – as if one has accidentally wormholed between separate exhibitions or sites.

There is certainly a peculiar energy propelling one between rooms and components – half rattrap need to escape, half dream-like desire to find out what happens next. With the exception of the room featuring Simon Starling, Katie Paterson, Seth Price and Darren Almond, which could be a gallery storage facility. Starling’s knock-off Francis Bacon desks become a designer obstacle course in the middle of a space that’s simply too small to house the epic play with scale linking the others’ wall-based works. By contrast, the installation of Lindsay Seer’s mini cinema (a recreation of Thomas Edison’s first film production studio Black Maria) creates a sublime bit of curatorial disruption. The big cardboard structure appears like a bug/craft that has recently landed and sent the surrounding works scuttling into furthest reaches of the room. The real treat, though, is inside: Seers’ docufictional-style film exploring her childhood traumas and their possible effects on her relationship to photography (as both human camera and projector) is utterly compelling.

There is little doubt that this enormous exhibition has caught some of the flavours wafting out of studio and exhibition spaces around Britain, but from the abundance of heat, light and political issues radiating from many other global destinations you’d be hard pushed to peg it as British. Interesting then that one should be passed back out into the institution’s gift shop via Nathaniel Mellor’s scatologically focused video performance tunnel. Woody Allen meets Rabelais in an absurdist theatrical production about some medieval explorers lost inside a giant’s body. As the actors question whether or not they might be bungling around God’s bowels, their world defined by the “ploppen” that prevent them from being excreted out of all existence, I find myself relieved that globalisation appears to have not yet wiped out all culturally specific euphemisms for the unspeakable processes that define us as one and the same.