by Ten days before Tate Modern opened in a disused power plant on the south bank of the Thames, a trustee of the gallery was concerned that nobody would find it. “He was really worried,” recalls Nicholas Serota, the director of the crime from 1988 to 2017.
You did it. Despite “slight feeling of unbelief because it had happened relatively quickly”, Serota had a clue that Tate Modern would be a success, because he remembers: “The queen did not miss when she opened it. The first work to greet Elizabeth II was Maman (1999), a gigantic bronze spider by the French American Bourgeois, the 25th birthday of Tate Modern returns to the same place, in addition to a pedestrian bridge, a weekend of the events in the next month. [abstract] Painting, “says Serota.” Then she said: ‘It was pretty dazzling.’ “
However, nobody predicted the scope of the success of the gallery. Tate Modern had prepared for two million visitors, but in the first year alone, five million people came to check it. I was one of them, fascinated, like all others, from the huge, impressive emptiness of the 500 -foot turbine hall, which, according to Serota, “challenged artists to make suggestions on a scale and with a bold that they could not reach elsewhere”. It became the backdrop for some of the most spectacular art installations that have ever been carried out in this country-an unforgettable Weather Project (2003) by the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.
This gigantic, illusory sun, which was driven by 200 mono frequency lights, seemed under a mirrored ceiling-and Eliasson tells me that he “transformed” his career. He remembers that he was woken up after the press preview to find his work on each front page on a news state near his hotel: “It was a big deal.”
Material, he tells me, the installation was “very simple: only half a pane, smoke and mirror”. But the concept das, which is underlying the “uniform and integrative” on which it puts it, “a living environment” in the manner of a Piazza-creates itself as enormously popular and “attracted a museum visitor to the ground for the first time”. What did you get from this work of art when you chose your reflections high up? “Seen Feeling,” replies Eliasson, who says that the public reaction made modernity “more confident” and helped them to see that a museum’s activities could have a “social dimension”.
Today it seems absurd that London only had an institution in the 1990s to compete with the Pompidou Center in Paris or the New York Museum of Modern Art. Before Serota took over at Tate, his trustees planned to build several pavilions, including an “Art Museum of Art of the 20th Century”, next to the House of the Gallery (now Tate Britain) in Millbank of the 19th century gallery. “I had the feeling that the museum defined in this plan was far too small and insignificant,” recalls Serota. The trustees agreed until 1992: a new, larger location for the modern art museum of the crime had to be found.
Six places were seriously considered, including London’s Docklands, anniversary gardens at South Bank, King’s Cross, Vauxhall and Battersea Power Station -which, as Serota says, “was considered too remote”. In the end, Tate came up for Giles Gilbert Scott’s power plant Banks, which was closed in 1981.
Nevertheless, he continues, his “Rohrum [was] Appealing because artists have increasingly colonized these types of rooms in the past 30 years to show and do their work. “He had also successfully converted elsewhere with regard to the industrial building, such as a former police arrage in Los Angeles, which the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry had transformed into 40,000 square meters of exhibition space that was opened in 1983.
“I can remember that I was on the other side of the Thames, from St. Pauls,” says Serota, “look through this room slit, which is now occupied by the Millennium Bridge, and think if this building was in Dusseldorf or Amsterdam, it would already be a museum.”
However, the full potential was not obvious until Tate Modern’s Swiss architect Herzog & de Meuron were involved. They were held in 1995 after a quick competition (so that the project could have a chance to win the financing of the Millennium Commission, which delivered £ 50 million), because Serota expresses them to express their proposal: achieving a wrong floor at the ground level and so “open the full height of the turbine to reach for a single gallery” to get into a single and uninfected,, to open up on a single gallery and a single gallery.
While he collected the £ 135 million, which was finally hired to create Tate Modern, Serota was supported by the Succès de Scandals of the young British artists who fascinated the media in the 1990s and enabled an apathetic public to be happy about contemporary art. According to Chris Smith, who became secretary for culture, media and sport in 1997 after the landslide of New Labor in 1997 in 1997: but they were very firm in the minority. “
Nevertheless, Serota reminds that the presentation of the permanent collection of “much controversy” gave a thematic, transnational approach. (Traditionally, museums prefer chronological exhibitions or exhibitions that are organized by various “schools” of art, as they help to give the complexity of art history coherence.) Serota admits that this was a “tactical” decision.
In order to present a series of displays on a completely chronological basis from 1900 and in 2000, we would have faced the museum of modern art and the pompidou, and there was no competition in relation to the quality of the collection, “he explains. Adjust these two other institutions to tell a very standard [i.e., European and North American] Story.”
Since the beginning, Tate Modern has tried to expand the canon (although Henri Matisse: the excerpts that Serota 2014 curated co-curated, attracted more than 562,000 visitors and was the most popular exhibition for many years). Later this year, the gallery will staged an exhibition of the work of the Australian Aboriginal artist Emily KNGwarray and an installation within the Turbine Hall by Máret Ánne Sara, an indigenous artist from the Northern European region of Sápmi.
“This year is quite strong when it comes to indigenous art,” said Tate Modern director Karin Hindsbo, who tells me that she “works” on Tate of modernly marking audiences (the number of visitors to the gallery is still around five times than before the pandemic). “If you have a deficit budget, it is of course not a sustainable situation,” says Hindsbo, who agrees that the number of staff in the gallery has recently given a “reduction” of personnel numbers, even though it indicates that the process was “voluntary”.
For Serota, he and the work of his team on Tate Modern remains his “proudest performance”. He still remembers a time in Great Britain when, as he puts it: “Modern and contemporary art has never been shown with real conviction, but always with a slight feeling of apology or an attempt to connect them to tradition instead of seeing them in his own terms.
However, he believes that Tate Modern “forged a new way of thinking about the museums” and “made it more ready to deal with uncertainty, so there was confidence that people are less frightened by contemporary art.
This was certainly the effect that it had on me when I was still a student and learned about the art of ancient Greece and Rome. In 2002 I met Marsyas, an extruded, 500-foot red PVC membrane trumpet by the British sculptor Anish Kapoor, who filled the turbine hall like pulsating muscles and organs in the chest basket of a huge. Almost for the first time I was really thrilled by an installation that was created by a living artist.
The opening of Tate Modern also had a galvanizing influence on the broader sector – than for the first time in London (which now offers many hundreds of galleries) for the first time) an important center for contemporary art. Just as you cannot imagine the capital today, for example, without the National Theater, it is impossible to think of a London without modernity.
The 25th birthday of Tate Modern will run from May 9th to 12th. Information: tate.org.uk
