The Tate Modern’s new thing in the Turbine Hall and that surrealist film
As a well-respect art critic, I feel I owe you all a short review of the new thing in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and some of the other stuff I saw there the other day. I’ve just looked it up, and it’s called “Bodyspacemotionthings” by Robert Morris (click the link for a video), and is literally just a bunch of wooden play equipment that - and I guess this is where it goes from being a playground to being art - is in an art gallery.
Now, I know that someone who knows about art would probably say something about it recontextualising the objects or changing the way we interact with the art or something - but I’m only willing to take this as an explanation if you can find someone who can explain this to me sincerely with a straight face, who I won’t want to punch in the face afterwards.
It’s literally a climbing rope, a cylinder you can stand in and roll from side to side, a sheet of wood that pivots on a point and some ropes where you climb up a slope. There’s some video footage of some people using the “art” whilst nude running on a screen - though rather than suggesting any greater artistic meaning, it just suggests that the people in the video are not taking any practical health and safety considations into account, and are presumably uninsurable.
It is quite fun though… maybe that’s the point? I don’t mean the point, artistically, I just mean that footfall probably went up a bit when they installed some slides a couple of years ago so they thought that they’d try the same thing again?
On the same trip, I also saw the surrealist film Meshes of the Afternoon, which is shown on a loop in one of the galleries. Someone has helpfully put it on YouTube here. I’m not sure what to make of it, other than that compared to the last film I saw before it - Wolverine - it had a much better script, but made much less sense, to the extent that I have absolutely no idea what any of it is about. It suffered the problem that nearly all films made before, er, probably Back to the Future, suffers from though, in that the pacing is appalling. Like Metropolis before it, I’m guessing that in the olden days film makers were so over-awed at the moving images, they didn’t dare stop the cameras rolling just in case the world stopped moving too, or something. I’d love to hear the DVD commentary.
