Tate modern is a fraud. I know of no other way to describe the yawning chasm which separates this impersonal hulk of a building and its embarrassingly spotty collections from the grandiose claims of Nicholas Serota, the Tate director, who has said that Tate Modern-dedicated to art since 1900-will "change the experience of living in one of the great metropolises of the western world." The only thing that Tate Modern is going to change are property values on the south bank of the Thames, where Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have transformed the vast old Bankside power station (designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in the 1940s) into a gargantuan catch-all for work by artists ranging from Monet to Nauman.
People tell me that they love Tate Modern. When I ask for specifics, they don't seem able to say why. The public has such a hunger for the best things in life-which include museum visits-that they would rather suspend judgment than go away disappointed. There are no more than 50 paintings or sculptures of consequence, dribbled through Tate Modern's endless galleries, yet somehow this does not matter. Museums have become funhouses enclosed in a giant site-specific sculpture. This one is a brick structure with a single tower; this gives it a distinctive, marketable profile that the museum has stamped on a gift shop full of knick-knacks. And if the inside of Tate Modern is a rather dispiriting, black-and-grey minimalist art amusement park, tourists may just accept it as a particularly London kind of experience: the Bleak House of funhouses.
A funhouse needs a look, a theme. Tate Modern, with its mix of functionalist chic and retro-industrial grit, is meant as a kind of urban fantasy-something out of a German Expressionist film. But this time Herzog and de Meuron, who are widely admired for revitalising the powerfully rectilinear forms of classic International Style architecture, come across as modernist poseurs. The vast entrance that they have made out of the power station's turbine hall may look great in photo spreads, but when I walked into the space, which has the numbingly overscaled and underdeveloped proportions of a fascist nightmare, I felt like a speck of dust. Finding your way into the museum's galleries is no small task; the architects seem uninterested in guiding visitors upstairs, perhaps because they are so busy with their entrance-hall ego trip. And, once I got upstairs, the collection had so little 20th century art of real importance that I feared for any museum-goer who might take Tate Modern for the modern story. They would leave scarcely knowing that Matisse or Kandinsky had lived-even as their heads were spinning with the most bizarre ideas, such as that Morandi and Braque are conceptual artists, or that Mondrian's real significance is that he inspired the gridded photo works of Gilbert and George.
tate modern may give a creepily distorted view of 20th century art, but nobody will have any trouble locating its position on the flow charts which track the latest power plays in the global art game. At the beginning you will find the Pompidou Centre in Paris, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, which opened in 1977 and was hailed for its panoramic views of Paris, much as Tate Modern is hailed for its views of London. On the 20th anniversary of Pompidou's creation, the funhouse mentality produced its first great building, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao-Frank Gehry's invention in titanium, glass and stone. This amazing design succeeds precisely because Gehry has had the wit to take as his subject the annihilation of the museum as we know it.
Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation and Gehry's partner in crime, has perfected a kind of megalomaniacal populism which makes a hash of the modern museum as a centre for the collection, study, care, and exhibition of the best of 20th century art. In this regard, Krens is a descendant of Pontus Hulten, the dominant figure in the early years of the Pompidou Centre who organised a triumvirate of exhibitions there-Paris-New York, Paris-Berlin, Paris-Moscow-which pioneered the art show as multimedia extravaganza, and set the stage for globalism and all the other buzz words of the 1990s. As for Serota, he does not have quite the flair of Krens and Hulten; but if Tate Modern generates the sky-high attendance figures that museum directors used to dream about, it will hardly matter that the galleries are a mishmash.
A few weeks ago, after seeing Tate Modern, I went to Bilbao to see the Gehry building, and then on to Paris to revisit the Pompidou. I was experiencing an era of museum history in reverse. The museums are so anxious to upstage one another, or to collaborate with one another, that almost everything you see reminds you of something else. That a lot of the new video work comes in editions contributes to the dèja vu effect: at Pompidou I saw what I believe was the same Bruce Nauman which I had seen two days earlier at Tate Modern. The non-chronological organisation of the galleries at Tate Modern has reminded many people of the non-chronological arrangement of Making Choices, currently on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art (Moma). This is the new curatorial thing to do-with the difference that while the curators in Manhattan are scrambling the chronology because they do not know what to do with all their masterpieces, the scrambling at Tate Modern is meant to disguise the fact that they have almost no classic modern work worth a visit.
Chronology, the backbone of the historical sense, has been collapsed into a postmodern time warp. Out of that time warp comes the new funhouse museum, where art past and art present are no more than raw materials to be bifurcated and cloned in order to produce bigger museums or smaller museums or more museums-whatever the market will bear. But, as David Sylvester observed in the London Review of Books, "chronology is not a tool of art-historical interpretation which can be used at one moment, discarded at another. It's an objective reality, built into the fabric of the work. And into the artist's awareness." The artist's awareness is no longer much on the minds of curators and dealers.
London needed an institution dedicated to 20th century art. But the bifurcation of the Tate-the old building at Millbank is now Tate Britain, devoted to British art-also fits into an international trend toward satellite museums and museum franchises which are promoted with pious talk of increased public access but generally result in ill-focused, slapped-together presentations.
Krens is the master when it comes to knowing that the package is what counts. Nobody goes to Guggenheim Bilbao to see the art. Looking at art is just something you must remember to do while you are there, like going to the bathroom or taking your vitamins. If Krens has his way in New York and manages to build another Gehry building at the end of Wall Street, it will not be because anybody was so overwhelmed by what they saw at the Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue that they wanted to see more. (No matter that the SoHo Guggenheim-like Tate Modern, a renovation of an old space-was a fiasco which has effectively closed its doors. The Krens philosophy is: if you fail, try bigger. No doubt it is partly the Guggenheim's expansionist plans in New York which have lit a fire beneath Moma; it has entered into a collaboration with PS1 Contemporary Art Centre in Queens, even as the ur-modern museum prepares to expand its West 53rd Street headquarters.)
The subject of the museum is no longer the fantasy lives of individual artists, but a kind of collective fantasy spawned by arts administrators and the architects who serve them. There is a new generation of curators who have a theme or a thesis to fit any occasion; they select the art of the present and the past 30 or 40 years mostly on the basis of how closely it resembles what people are seeing in the multiplex or on cable television. You do not go to the museum to look at things; you go to be enveloped by a mood, an ambience, a scene. (The curators responsible for the clearest presentations of classic 20th century art that we are seeing at the moment-William Lieberman at the Met in New York, and Werner Spies, modern art curator at the Pompidou Centre-are working against this grain.)
At its best, the new museum is a kind of dramatic gesture. The men and women who can pull off this kind of thing almost invariably invoke the most spectacularly fantastical architecture of earlier periods-the work of early 20th century masters such as Erich Mendelsohn and Vladimir Tatlin, or of Neoclassicists such as Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Friedrich Gilly. (A lot of this work never got off the drawing boards, so the new museum can seem like a kind of historical wish-fulfillment.) Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao is about fantasy becoming reality: even as he knits his building into the surrounding cityscape, he is creating a structure which is deliciously self-involved. Private fantasy also takes on an amusing form in the strongest new work to be seen at Tate Modern: a group of three enormous towers by Louise Bourgeois which dominate the far end of the turbine hall (together with Bourgeois's equally oversized but less impressive spider, entitled Maman). Like Gehry's organic architecture, Bourgeois's towers give old modern dreams a late modern reality.
I have not much liked the work that Bourgeois has done in recent years, but at Tate Modern, working in a vein halfway between sculpture and architecture, she returns to the Surrealist fantasy kingdoms of her youth and emerges as a cunning old sybil who has an entire museum at her feet. It is not great art, but it is a grand, mocking, beckoning vision. In her own way, Bourgeois has understood what Gehry understands, which is that the new mood in the museum world gives an artist or an architect permission to celebrate personal idiosyncratic vision on a monumental scale-which is nice for them, even if it does not leave much room for the rest of the art in the museum.
An eccentricity of the proportions of Guggenheim Bilbao is in danger of feeling ponderous and self-important; but Gehry brings to the building a humanising sense of absurdity. A humorous intelligence animates every juxtaposition. The building doesn't just stand there, gloating. It engages us, inch by inch. Gehry has a magnificent feeling for detail, for the human scale. He is one of the very few architects alive who knows how to compose in space. At Bilbao he composes while the museum as we have known it dies. A polite way to describe what Herzog and de Meuron have done with their endless boxy spaces at Tate Modern is to say that they have constructed a mausoleum for modernism.
every museum devoted to 20th century art has been a work in progress. If you are serious about getting the job done, you are always going to be struggling to make judgments about the recent and the not-too-recent past, even as you grapple with the present and wonder about the future. New York's Moma (the institution to which anybody who is interested in the art of the past 125 years will look for guidance) has itself been subject to dramatic shifts in direction. The collection which is by universal consent the greatest in the world was not even regarded as permanent until around the middle of the 20th century. Before that, there had been an idea that when works "passed from the category of modern to that of 'classic'" they might go elsewhere. Indeed, there was an agreement to that effect with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and certain works did travel from Moma to the Met.
There have been times-perhaps in the 1970s and 1980s-when Moma seemed a grandly austere institution in the middle of an exploding art world, but the truth was always that the user-friendly museum had been invented there on West 53rd Street. The current emphasis-at Tate Modern, at the Pompidou Centre, at Guggenheim Bilbao-on design, architecture, film, and their interaction, are venerable modern concerns which were, in fact, first given prominence in the museum on West 53rd Street.
These new museums may be seen as Moma's children. They imagine that they are matching Moma's triumphs, but there is a fundamental difference. Nowadays, it is not art but the culture's fascination with art-and with the art business-which fuels the museums. The museum curator who was once interested in how artists were responding to the world around them has been replaced by a curator who is more interested in the environment than in the artist.
Alfred H Barr Jr, founding director of Moma, wanted to show people how artists-the de Stijl group, the Russian Constructivists, the teachers of the Bauhaus-shaped the 20th century environment. Moma had a role in sharpening Madison Avenue's sensibilities. Admirers of Krens's show The Art of the Motorcycle-currently at the Guggenheim Bilbao-argue that the exhibit is in the tradition of Moma's design shows; but there is a difference between Moma presenting a few cars or a helicopter and Krens bringing together 100 bikes. It is the difference between describing what designers have done and turning the museum into a showroom. Tate Modern and Guggenheim Bilbao are not making taste; they are validating whatever taste currently prevails. They are not presenting ideas that graphic designers or MTV producers might later bring to a broader public; they are mirroring what the culture already knows, and congratulating the public for knowing it. Figures such as Hulten and Krens have turned the museum inside out, while pretending that they are just shifting the emphasis.
There had always been two versions of 20th century art: one which celebrated the individual, and one which celebrated the group. The idea of transforming the look and feel of the world, advanced in Russia, Germany, and Holland in the 1910s and 1920s, was a dream that Stalin and Hitler stopped in its tracks, and it never got going again. One of Barr's achievements at Moma was that he recognised both the public side and the private side of modern art. He understood Matisse and the Bauhaus. But in the configuration of his museum, where the collection of painting and sculpture held centre stage, Barr affirmed the individualism of modern art as its essence.
That judgment has for a long time been under attack. When Hulten, early in his career at Pompidou, mounted his triumvirate of shows devoted to the encounters between New York, Berlin, Moscow and Paris, he was asserting that the individual was less important than the synergy between groups, and this prepared the way for the current wave of global multimedia postmodernism. The Pompidou Centre was a multi-use cultural institution in a funhouse package with a plaza which became a permanent carnival. At the time, this was felt to be a utopian project. The reopening of the Pompidou this January provoked some regret that the centre is not what it was. The famous ride up the escalators, with its unparalleled views of Paris, can no longer be taken for free. Now you have to have a ticket for the museum before you take the ride. This change is designed to reduce wear and tear on the escalators and upper level walkways, where people used to go to hang out, picnic, or take a leak. Some people now see those off-bounds escalators as a sign that the union of art and society symbolised by Pompidou's transparent walls is no more. But if the Pompidou's utopian aspirations now strike some people as compromised, the real reason may be that its elegantly packaged cultural populism has been institutionalised at countless other museums, including the Guggenheim Bilbao and, now, Tate Modern.
the pompidou was designed as the anti-Louvre-a freer, friendlier, multi-use museum for a freer, friendlier, multi-use Paris. Tate Modern is the anti-Tate-a hipper, more open kind of museum for a hipper, more open kind of London. Tate Modern is related to new century London (to the Sensation show, to Charles Saatchi's buying sprees, to Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde) in the same zeitgeisty way that the Pompidou was related to the students in the streets in 1968. London is swinging again, and its art scene, which is much smaller than New York's, can seem like a place where all the international art world's contentious excitement is most easily observed. London has its painterly traditionalists-Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud-and its Neo-Dadaists-Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin-and its crossover cases, such as Jenny Saville. As Tate Modern opened, the Saatchi Gallery, a breeding ground for English outrageousness since the 1980s, was presenting a show called Ant Noises (an anagram of Sensation) which included Saville, Hirst and Co.
There is not very much work by the young British artists at Tate Modern. Not that more Hirst or Emin would have altered my impressions. The organisation of the galleries is so provisional, so tendentious, and so arbitrary, that I was left wondering if the people in charge had the slightest suspicion that a vast installation of labyrinthine hallways by Ilya Kabakov might require a different kind of presentation from a tiny still life by Morandi. Aside from Bourgeois's towers, the only thing that really engaged me were the views of London from the gallery windows.
At Tate Modern there are three enormous floors of exhibition space containing some 80 galleries, but only enough classic modern work to fill three or four rooms. Given that the two floors of permanent collection contain many loans (and are thus less than permanent), and that the floor devoted to a temporary show of video and installation is up for seven months (which is long, for a temporary installation), there is reason to believe that this is an institution where all distinctions are in decline. The temporary show is called Between Cinema and a Hard Place (taken from the title of a Gary Hill video), and if you do not know what to think of that phrase, you can just go right ahead and take it as a metaphor for Tate Modern as a whole. Everything seems caught in a place where it has no business to be.
The curators will try anything. If they have enough Minimalist sculpture to fill a room, they do it, and call it "The Perceiving Body." Why, you might ask, is Minimalist sculpture part of the category Nude/Action/Body rather than the category Still Life/Real Life/Object? On the other hand, why not? Who knows? Who cares? Every old clich? is trotted out. Naked and Nude runs from middle period Bonnard to late Picasso and recent Lucian Freud. I have seen many anthology shows at commercial galleries which were better selected than the rooms at Tate Modern. Some of Richard Long's rocks are on the floor in front of some of Monet's waterlilies. Morandi is in a room called "The Intelligent Object" with a computer designed by Richard Hamilton.
But at least so far as the art of the first half of the 20th century is concerned, the situation at Tate Modern is not beyond hope. True, the scarcity of great modern works-as well as the prices they fetch when they come on the market-make it very hard to build a collection. But in London it is possible that a solution might be found. Thus, the opening installation at Tate Modern contains a number of paintings from the National Gallery, including a Monet and a C?zanne. As time goes by, more late 19th and early 20th century paintings might end up at Tate Modern. And if the collection began to cohere, collectors might consider bequeathing classic works to the new museum. Something like this process has taken place at Pompidou. A collection which was fascinating but scrappy in 1980 has become substantial. The display of Cubist Braque is riveting-far superior to what we see of Braque at Moma.
nobody can doubt that the contemporary galleries at Tate Modern reflect an international consensus of some sort. Moving images, electronics, wrap-around drama are the order of the day. And some of the artists have been growing more skillful at inventing effects which can hold the attention of an audience which grew up with the multiplex, computers, cable television. The best video installation that I have seen is Sam Taylor-Wood's Third Party, not in a museum, but at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York earlier this year. In a huge, darkened room, a range of images playing on four walls gave you different views of a party in an upmarket London flat.
There was nothing among the contemporary video work at Tate Modern as engrossing as Third Party. (Taylor-Wood's own Brontosaurus, a naked guy dancing feverishly, was silly.) But the mentality at Tate Modern seems much more keyed to movies or popular entertainment than to painting or sculpture. Part of the reason that video is so big now may be that the audience has little feeling for the history of painting and sculpture; but if some of the dutifully experimental videos on show strike museum-goers as worthy of their attention, you have to wonder how much Tate Modern visitors know about the history of film, too. Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych-a three-part video shown at Tate Modern, birth on the left, death on the right, and something outer-spacey in between-could only be exciting to somebody unfamiliar with the experiments which movie people were doing with split screens and collage 70 years ago.
Scepticism about the place of movie images or television monitors or electronic noise in the museum is often attacked for targeting pop culture. But surely it is the museum directors and curators who are making pop culture the issue. The new museum is not opening up art to new media so much as closing art off from the wellsprings of tradition which have nourished artists forever. To be sure, paintings are not excluded from these institutions; but the intricate internal structures of a powerful painting cannot compete with their overheated mood. Most of the strong work done in recent years would have little impact at Tate Modern or Guggenheim Bilbao. The people in charge might say that this tells you something about the work. I say that it tells you something about their indifference to what the finest painters and sculptors are doing.
It is in the very up-to-the-minuteness of these institutions that you detect the beginning of their undoing. Tate Modern and Guggenheim Bilbao are celebrations of a booming global economy. These museums are the toys of corporate wizards who expect curators to whip up a cultural centre which mirrors the accelerated world that the wheeler-dealers already know. If the art of the present, as seen in these museums, seems utterly unrelated to the art of 50 or 75 years ago, it is because the people in charge could not care less how today connects with yesterday.
The anti-chronological installations which you see at Moma and Tate Modern suggest how badly the foundations of these museums have been shaken. Particularly at Moma, where the collection really is transcendent, the breakup can be fascinating to watch. I am reminded of descriptions of London during the Blitz, when you could walk familiar streets and discover, amid the chaos of shattered façades, beautiful rooms that you had not known were there.
What we are seeing at Moma and Tate Modern is like nothing we have seen before. This is a new kind of curatorial mayhem. I believe that sophisticated museum-goers are still a little stunned-by what they are seeing and by the thought that the men and women in charge can be so insistently obtuse. Then again, a funhouse is designed to be disorienting, and if you expect something other than a funhouse, you are bound to feel doubly disoriented when you go. But for the people who are running the museums, this can only add to the experience. The directors and curators at these museums are having their way with us, and so far they are getting off scot-free. n
