Fourth Plinth Empty, Regents Park Full, Turbine Hall Occupied by Nothing.

by Ruth Barker, 19 Oct 2009

Hello,

Miserable rain today, and those perfect Autumn days we had last week seem to have been washed away, reminding me that it’s mid October already. On my mind today are the Frieze Art Fair (just finished), the fourth plinth (empty again), and Tate’s Turbine Hall (interestingly full, it seems, of Nothing).

There’ve been good reports this year from Freize, so perhaps the credit crunch hasn’t bitten as sharply as we may have feared. I haven’t had the detail yet (I didn’t go down to London last week) but I was reassured to hear on the grapevine that galleries hadn’t pulled their punches. Any readers have highlights they’d like to share? Let us know if so.

The most recent offering at the Tate’s Turbine Hall intrigues because again (like Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, Carsten Höller’s Test Site and even Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth) Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is is largely being discussed in relation to the reactions of the public. There has been a trend toward the experiential in the annual Unilever commissions, which has in some sense set the series apart, and has perhaps emphasised its ‘public’-ness. this is a contentious suggestion perhaps – the Unilever commissions are not after all public artworks as they are clearly contextualsed by an art gallery – but they are artworks commissioned for a public building and attended by many thousands of members of the public every year. I’m not sure that the visceral or experiential nature of work necessarily renders it ‘accessible’, though this may be put forward as an explanation for this trend towards the shared language of the bodily. Rather it seems that the shift away from the purely visual, the painterly, or an emphasis on craft leads predictabley to the grumpy question But is it art? to be asked by media pundits again and, unsuprisingly again (final paragraph, though check out also the comments, with particular reference to the first one, which opens with “I haven’t seen the work, but…”)

The dreaded question arose again as the fourth plinth in Trafalgar square reclaimed its emptiness after 2400 people have occupied it for 1 hour each over the last 100 days. I’m never sure whether it is only jounalists who are so tied to the question. I suspect so, though I have had to field it myself, most often when I worked for SPIN:, taking groups of interested people round contemporary art shows in the Glasgow.

Often when someone did ask me ‘But is it Art?’, I suspected that the question had already been answered in their own minds with a resounding No. Interestingly, people only seemed to ask the question about work they didn’t like. Also interestingly, people sometimes seemed to be suprised that asking this question did not stop the conversation but could, instead, actually start it. But after all, didn’t Joseph Kosuth himself ask “What is it that is not art that might be art?” Something I’ll leave you with, I think,

More later,
R