Wandering Through a Power Plant

To my mind, the Tate Modern is one of the most interesting spaces for an art museum.  It's inside the old Bankside power station.  Yeah.  Today, I wandered into room 3 of the Energy and Process gallery and the special exhibition called "No Lone Zone".  Of course I wandered into a lot more, but those are the two rooms I'm going to talk about today.


Room 3 of looked specifically at the Arte Povera and Anti-Form movements.  The Italian artists of Arte Povera produced work that explored changing physical states instead of representing things in the world, while in Japan and the United State the Mono Ha and Post-Minimalism movements looked for alternatives to a sleek technological aesthetic. In the late 1960s, many sculptors emphasised the process of making, and explored ideas of energy in their work.  Artists began to use a diverse range of everyday materials - sometimes industrial, sometimes organic - rather than those associated with fine art. These substances were often malleable, volatile or elastic, allowing natural forces and energies such as gravity, electricity, and magnetism to manifest themselves. The process of making was often evident in finished works.  I was specifically interested in five or so works.  First was "8th Paper Octagonal" by Richard Tuttle...

This was admittedly kind of an odd work.  It consists of an octagonal piece of bond paper glued to the wall by wheat paste.  Tuttle intends that the octagon should disappear into the wall as much as possible. Nonetheless, once noticed, the work becomes strangely present. As an object, it is ultra-thin; but it still takes up an awkward place between painting and sculpture.  To me it is interesting, and ultimately slightly unsettling, to make art that is meant to disappear into the wall.  I found that I kept being drawn back to this piece after I had noticed it.  This is of course the kind of art I love to mock, it is a piece of paper stuck to the wall; but I found it strangely compelling, which I think is what art is meant to be.  Strangely compelling.


I was also fascinated by Gilberto Zorio's "Teracotta Circle":

Terracotta Circle looks back to classical ideas about human proportion. The diameter is based on the artist’s arm-span and the circle was moulded as he moved around at floor level. The work also marks out the height of the body, as a glass platform with a thin layer of lead hangs at head height.  To me, this is an interestingly stripped down version of Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man".  I googled this guy and I found out that many of Zorio’s early sculptures explored energy and change: crystals grew up metallic structures, substances altered colour when damp, live electric elements draped from the wall, and painted surfaces fluoresced under ultra-violet lights, which is pretty cool.  


Third, Kishio Suga's "Ren-Shiki-Tai":

This work is an example of the Mono Ha movement.  For the artist, this work represents the fragile boundary between the interior and exterior world.  For me, I think this work is particularly interesting because, while the work seems to represent a fragile boundary, that fragile boundary seems to defy gravity.  Admittedly gravity is not a particularly strong fundamental force, but it is probably the most popular.  These artists seemed to combine art and science relatively often, which I think adds a really interesting extra dimension to the experience.

Fourth, Grenville Davey's "Ce & Ce":

This rather surprised looking man is the artist himself.  He's rather surprised about the fact that I can't (after a cursory google search) find this particular work.  Oh well; you'll have to imagine.  Although abstract, the informal positioning and steel lips of the circles suggest the lids of vats, or giant paint pots, momentarily set to one side. By subtly altering the geometry of the circle Davey subverts notions of ideal beauty and uniformity. The streaked surface of the two parts of "Ce & Ce", with its traces of poured acid, underscores this subversion of purity. The title suggests a visual pun about looking at a work in which one element partially eclipses the other behind it.  But from you're perspective it might not.  You'll have to trust me on that one.

Last from this room, Direction by Giovani Anselmo:

In the late 1960s, Anselmo began to make sculptures exploring forces such as torsion, gravity, and magnetism. His "Direction" series incorporate compasses that point to the magnetic north pole. This work is made by pushing a glass beaker with a needle inside it against a dampened cloth. "I formed a sort of trail that the energy of the magnetic fields, continuing to orient the needle, kept alive", Anselmo said. Inside the gallery, the work serves as a reminder of the space outside it, and the invisible forces that structure the world.  I nerded out on this one.  Not only did it represent small scale physical forces, but to me it represented earth carving its way through the universe.  So that was awesome.

"No Lone Zone" is a military term designating an area where the presence of just one person is not allowed.  Determined by reasons of both safety and security, this two-person rule - which implies mutual observation - is often applied on nuclear sites, but also in laboratories, banks, and casinos.  However, the phrase can also be used metaphorically to describe a highly sensitive or unstable place, such as those vulnerable environments that proliferate in the context of postcolonial globalization.  This exhibit featured Latin American artists whose works engage with how a particular site and his local history are mediated by the networks of global communication.  Specifically, I want to talk about Teresa Margolles.  Her part of the installation was called "Score Settling" and it incorporated glass fragments from the shot-out windshields left on the asphalt after revenge motivated, drug killings.  She commissions the jewelry they are set in to resemble that worn by the narcos, who shoot their victims in their cars.  I thought this was a really interesting way to memorialize the victims of a war that continues just south of our own borders.  That we, as Americans, know little about.  It's pretty crazy.  It really makes you think.  As art should do.