Tate Modern: a century of modern art.

Btihaj Ajana 2002

Tate Modern is one of the most prominent modern art galleries in the world, which since its opening in the year 2000 has received millions of visitors.

 While most conventional art galleries tend to present artworks within a historical/chronological paradigm, Tate modern instead challenges this fashion and breaks the boundaries of time taking a more thematic approach and displaying artefacts together regardless their historical periods, which in turn establishes an interaction and interrelation between items giving the impression that they share and express many features in common.

In terms of its thematic approach, the gallery has been divided into four sections: History/Memory/Society, Nude/Action/Body, Landscape/Matter/Environment, and Still life/Object/Real life. The History/Memory/Society can be conceived as the most historical section of the gallery given its devotion to a considerable amount of materials which present the radical modernist avant-garde movement in the early twentieth century, ancient myths and literature as well as some political activities and manifestos that give some insights into the relationships between art and politics. Although the latter belongs to completely divergent movements such as Surrealism, Bauhaus, Dada and the Futurists/Utopian, which differ in both objectives and techniques, these manifestos are being displayed together in one room in an attempt to portray their historical belonging while also creating a kind of disorder regarding the past. This in turn gives the visitor the opportunity to enjoy, appreciate and probe deeper into the intertextuality of the content of this section of the gallery.

Interesting pieces are displayed in the Nude/Action/Body section, all of which expose how views of the body and perceptions of nudity, have been changing throughout the century. Although the notion of nudity is often bound with the objectification/subjugation of the female body, there are also pieces that do not aim to satisfy the male gaze but present the male body in different ways beyond the conventional social conceptions. John Coplans, for instance, strikingly turns the camera on his own nude body in an attempt to include his own identity within the shared human experience. Christian Schad's Agosta and Rasha (1929) is a very interesting painting since it deals with the body voyeurism, objectification and social alienation, notions, which are associated with the New Objectivity movement that combines both social criticism and Near-photographic realism. Admired by the French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre, the art of Alberto Giacometti reflects the suffering, isolation and instability of life in the post war-scared Europe. Whereas the artist Gina Pane explores through her work the relationship between pain and creativity (Sentimental Action, 1973) death and art (Posthumous action on the death control action, 1969). 

In a room dedicated to her work, Sarah Lucas adopts "in-your-face" approach as an apparatus for examining the gendered stereotyped social representations of gender and sexuality. In her self-portrait, she challenges the historical-traditional aspects of femininity and seductiveness by deliberately posing in androgynous and sometimes mannish manners.  

The Still life/Object/Real life wing provides examples of some of the modern art's obsessions with brining art closer to reality. For instance, Marcel Duchamp's "readymade" objects such as the "Fountain" takes reality to its bitter end by representing a urinal as a piece of art. Added to that the painting of Pablo Picasso (Bowel of Fruit, Violin and Bottle, 1914) as well as Fernand Leger's "still life with a beer mug" both of which display "a celebration of the material pleasures of life food, drink, possessions". Outstanding amid this is 'The Pharmacy' by Damien Hurst in which an entire room was converted to a pharmacy in order to raise questions about the role of medicine as a 'system of belief' and how the pharmacy with its white-boxed medicines appears to be a paradigm for a 'minimalist order' through which people seek the belief in the impossible immortality. 

In the 1960s, New Realism gave resurgence to still life and objects. Artists started incorporating things rather than depicting them. In 'Condition of Woman', Arman Fernandez brings private life into the public realm by precisely selecting and displaying various intimate objects from his wife's bathroom bin in order to elevate them to become art despite their 'abject quality'. However one can argue that not only realism that can depict the 'real' as closely as possible but also the cartoon-like style and the anti-realist composition of Andre Fougeron's 'Atlantic Civilization' (1953) which provides an exceptional example of the cold war reality and its rhetoric as well as the social criticism regarding the Americanisation of Europe.  

Alongside the growing urbanization and industrialization of the West in the nineteenth century, artists started to engage more with nature and environment and by the end of the century; landscape became a dominant genre through the impressionist movement. With the beginning of the twentieth century, this genre was already experiencing a fundamental renovation, mainly through the works of Cezanne and Monet, two of the original expressionist artists. But whether it is surrealist (Jean Arp, Joan Miro) or abstract expressionist, artists began to heighten the social and political awareness of environmental matters, and in Landscape/Matter/Environment section, the curator managed to provide interesting examples, which despite their dissimilarities, display a shared concern about nature and the advent of the progressive city. 

Finally, it seems that because of its thematic displays, Tate Modern offers an amalgamation of interesting, overwhelming and yet confusing cultural and intellectual experiences, which will certainly continue to challenge and enrich the visitors' understanding of the realm of Modern Art and implicitly articulate the interrelations of its different artists. 

For more information visit: http://www.tate.org.uk/