My last night in London I met up with Paul at Tate Britain for “Late at the Tate” and dinner before the rest of the gang arrived.
We used his membership ID to go into the exhibits in pairs and avoid paying for tickets (very clever) and I got to see the Turner Prize finalists and the Francis Bacon retrospective. There was a casino room going on in the one gallery and an interactive checkpoint in the main hall where you could sit on a throne and have a series of cameras take a sequence of shots of you screaming ala Francis Bacon’s Cardinal/Pope paintings.
The four Turner Prize finalists this year are:
Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga, and Cathy Wilkes. And I have the buttons to prove it.
I particularly liked Runa Islam’s work which consisted of three separate video installations. The first, Be the First to see What You see As You see It, had her teasing fine china, using it, then toying with it on the brink of the table before finally letting it drop and smash:
The second CINEMATOGRAPHY, had the camera on some sort of electronic or hydraulic jack that did what felt like a 360 degree rotation panning up then falling down in jagged intervals, then shifting to the right a bit more and panning up again, then back down as it mapped the interior of a room. It again was an act of teasing the viewer though this time in only displaying partial images in the camera viewer frame as it rotated in its jagged up and down motion to the right. The sound effect/sound track of the machine doing the lifting and lowering of the camera worked its way into your head in such a way that you felt like a machine or robot gaining consciousness, trying to see and document the room around you but lacking any peripheral vision, stuck with just the narrow box in front of you.
The last video, First Day of Spring, took place in what looked like Green Park. It panned the newly budded tree canopy and then a grouping of Indian? Pakistani? men at rest in their bicycle-buggies on a sunny day. The camera panned them in silent strips so you would see just their feet and the wheels of the bicycle, then their hands, then their faces. One time through with no sound and everything still and silent then sound kicks in with the wind blowing and they all rise and pedal away, bells dinging, the leaves scratching across the path and against each other in the canopy.
Mark Leckey had one interesting moment in his room. It was a slide carousel that projected an image of a room’s interior and then rotated through the slides to zero in closer and closer, past the sculpture at the far end of the room (one time through a cat, the other time through a dog), past the painting/mirror on the back wall that reflects the room’s interior in reverse, through a back side door and onto an image hanging on the back wall of a room just visible through that back doorway. Each time through it zeroes in on a different image. The rest of his exhibit seemed a bit self-involved as it seems to be an evolving installation of self-referential bits, posters on the walls from previous exhibits, etc. with some long video lecture.
Goshka Macuga also had some interesting pieces, her room entirely hatch-marked with carefully plotted and measured pencil lines that conjured rain. Her Haus der Frau sculptures reminded me of gymnyst bars, but her photocollages were delightful in that you couldn’t always tell the images were collaged together, and so there were those brief initial moments of pleasure in such odd imagery before the trick revealed itself.
I wasn’t sure what to do with Cathy Wilkes’s room. It consisted of two long checkout counters and two mannequins decked out in detritus. The one thing I do remember were lots of dirty bowls and emptied jars, batteries standing on end inside the empty jars. Food is energy I suppose. I know this is in the vein of readymades and there was some high level of personal symbolism going on but I found it hard to find something to say about it.
Seeing the finalists made me think of a program I had seen on one of the BBC channels a couple nights before. It was an interview called “The Dark Side of Fame” between the British bad girl artist Tracy Emin and Piers Morgan, former tabloid editor of the Mirror. There was something about her pieces and readymades that spoke to me (and I tried to bring her points and arguments about contemporary British Art to bear on what I saw here in 2008), from her Everyone I Have Ever Slept With tent to her Turner nominated piece My Bed:
The other big experience of the night was the Francis Bacon retrospective. I was hoping his famous painting Two Men on a Bed would be represented as I have written an ekphrastic piece in response to it, but no such luck. The exhibit was divided into 10 rooms: Animal, Zone, Apprehension, Crucifixion, Crisis, Archive, Portrait, Memorial, Epic, and Late. It was a bit overwhelming the sheer volume of his work represented and the number of people they allowed in at a time to see it (which made it very difficult to see anything in the end). I did get a good sense of his major periods, from the cage-like boxes or “space-frames” to the obsessive series of variants on Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope innocent X to his van Gogh obsession in Tangier and The Painter on the Road to Tarascon.
It was nice to see many of Muybridge’s photographic strips and T. S. Eliot’s poems put in context alongside the paintings given how both were major influences on Bacon’s work.
Stay tuned for Hyde Park and my last day in London…