(Poelker) My Morning at the Tate Modern, London

A recent article in The New Yorker about Nicholas Serota, the man responsible for making London's Tate Modern what it is today, points out that the museum “draws about five million visitors a year, making it the world’s most heavily attended modern-art museum.” The museum, started in 1992, is the newest of the four Tate locations but is now on par with New York City’s MoMA as one of the most important spaces for modern visual art in the world. The building itself, alongside the river Thames between London Bridge and Big Ben, is impressive but not abrasive in its sleek modern architecture, having once been the site of a power station. 

Outside the Tate Modern, courtesy of Google Images

During my visit last Saturday, the gallery featured an exhibit by Edward Munch (famous for The Scream) and another by the current poster-boy for conceptual art Damien Hirst, who gained notoriety by bedazzling a human skull and putting a dead shark in a fish tank. Reductive descriptions aside, I was sad to miss both of these as a result of the brevity of my time in London and the inconvenient exchange rate of the Biritsh Pound. The combined entrance fees would’ve cost me the equivalent of almost 45 US Dollars and it took a few hours just to experience the permanent exhibits. Luckily most of the museum is free so I got to the Surrealist exhibit as quickly as the crowded escalator would take me. 

'For the Love of God', Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst press photo

Level 2 of features a display called Poetry and Dream which, according to the Tate website is set up to use art from the original Surrealist movement of the early 20^th century to show “how contemporary art grows from, reconnects with, and can provide fresh insights into the art of the past.” Such definite conclusions don’t come easily from a quick visit, but I found myself in awe when I noticed Metamorphosis of Narcissus by Salvador Dali, a name any student should recognize. Also of note was the room dedicated to reclining nudes, which was set up to contrast a small scale Matisse sculpture with Pablo Picasso’s 1968 cubist portrait, Nude Woman with Necklace. As I wandered the altered perspective presented by each artist resonated with the sureality of my experience in Europe and wondered if I was actually experiencing, as the exhibit’s title suggests, some poetic dream.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus', Salvidor Dali

'Reclining Nude II', Henri Matisse

'Nude Woman With Necklace', Pablo Picasso

Rising slowly toward Level 3 of the Tate Modern, I noticed a huge, sketchy drawing coming into view on the wall to my right. I soon realized this was a timeline of Modern Art history, stretching from 1900 into the 21^st century. “The handwriting, by Sara Fanelli, is designed to reflect the dynamic nature of twentieth-century art history, rather than something set in stone,” according to the much smaller copy I couldn’t help but spend £7 on at the museum shop on my way out. (After all, I can’t count the times I’ve needed a quickly way to roughly gauge the time between Jackson Pollock and John Cage or casually site the relationship between Graffiti Art and Neo-Expressionism.)

photo credit: Stijn Nieuwendijk on Flickr

If you’re the type of person that would say, “A four-year-old could do that” about a painting, you might not like what’s currently housed on Level 4. There’s a few by Piet Mondrian, that’s the Dutch guy who painted all the blue, red, and yellow squares with the black lines in the 30’s and called it De Stjil. You’ll also find a black square by Ad Reinhardt, called Abstract Painting No. 5, which one of my comrades found particularly offensive: “Just because some rich famous artist calls it art, somebody buys it for millions of dollars.” I admit that some things, like Michael Baldwin’s Untitled Painting which is just a mirror on the wall, come off more like a cheap jokes than important statements, but I think that’s the type of risk that creates such a meaningful space for post-modernism to thrive. Because if no one tries to pass off a mirror as a painting, how can Nelson Leirner make a “painting” out of red fabric that unzips to reveal a three-tiered gradient of reddish fabric with even more zippers? He challenged our understanding of colour in 1967, long before computer screens had us thinking 8-bit versus 24-bit and six-digit HTML codes were all the colours in the universe.

'Homage to Fontana II', Nelson Leiner

 It’s impossible to see everything in one visit to the Tate Modern, and even more difficult if you take your time with anything. I left feeling mentally drained and spiritually overwhelmed but with a strange sense of clarity. Though I could never transcribe the spirit of each artist whose work has ended up in an old power plant by the Thames, I couldn’t help but respond to the challenging beauty housed there. But I had a lot more of London to see that day, so I found my friends just outside the museum and wandered off to deal with more a more corporal dilemma, satisfying my hunger with a £3 Nutella crepe at a nearby café. 

Tourist view one of my favorites by Cy Twombly, courtesy of Google Images