The Serpentine Pavilion

The Serpentine Gallery’s so-called ‘summer pavilion’ can be seen for a mere three months; from July 20th until October 19th in London’s Kensington Gardens. The contrast between the gallery’s sleek classicist building and the chaotic form of the neighbouring temporary structure is so striking that it gives the impression that this new construction in front of the Serpentine Gallery is the latest victim of a sweeping Hurricane, that has left only a heap of wood, glass, and a few massive beams in its wake. In jest, this is how the most recent, and in fact the only project realized in England by famous architect Frank Gehry might be described.

Gehry, working together with his son Samuel for the first time on this project, described the design of the pavilion as being inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of siege engines. Gehry has transformed Leonardo’s giant catapult into a structure of massive wooden blocks, seemingly randomly inclined, which connect to other wooden supports. Together with the glass panels, these create rectangular planes, reminiscent of stylized butterflies’ wings that form the roof of this dramatic space. The open plan structure complete with elevated auditorium remotely resembles an amphitheatre, perfectly fulfilling its function as a site for lectures, projections and performances of all kinds.

Even before the opening of the pavilion itself, the British media had expressed surprise that this world-renowned architect and designer of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the ‘Dancing House’ in Prague had not yet built anything in England. Previously, the only example of his work in Britain was the somewhat atypical ‘Maggie’s Centre’ building in Dundee, Scotland. Could it be that in certain cases, the United Kingdom is unwilling to be open to new and inventive architecture? British conservatism is indeed a worthy topic of debate; several recent contemporary buildings might be classed as illustrations of Vitruvius’ ‘Ten Books on Architecture’. This is exemplified by John Simpson’s Queen’s Gallery (2002) built in a Doric, or more precisely Neo-Doric, style.

This could be one of the reasons why the Serpentine Gallery, having beforehand only exhibited contemporary art, came up with the idea in 2000 to embark upon a series of annual commissions by world famous architects to build temporary pavilions in front of the gallery, presenting the public with ongoing examples of contemporary architecture. One interesting condition still governs the selection: the author of the project should not have previously realized any building in England. In recent years, architects chosen have included Rem Koolhaas, Oscar Niemeyer, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid. The prestigious commission takes place every year in cooperation with the engineering firm ARUP.

Photo: Martin Horáček
Published in Art & Antiques, September 2008 (http://www.artantiques.cz/)

Visitors Tripping in the Tate

A Colombian artist, a seemingly immeasurably deep abyss in the floor, 15 injured visitors and 4 complaints about the Tate Gallery; all in the first seven weeks of the most recent installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.

Every year, the prestigious London art gallery chooses an artist to create an installation in the vast space of its ground floor Turbine Hall. In recent years giant spiders, a mystical rising sun and giant slides have astonished visitors. This year, it’s a hole! Or rather a chasm in the floor, 550 feet long, a foot wide in places and of unknown depth.

It all starts very innocently on the eastern side of the hall with a tiny hairline fissure in the floor which, at first winding and threadlike, soon increases dramatically in size and depth, at times branching off into lightning-like offshoots, before disappearing again on the other side of the hall; like a crevasse gaping dangerously in the earth’s surface. Everything appears perfectly organic and naturally, and the illusion that only moments ago an immense tremor shook the structure of the mighty building and split open the floor is perfect, as the contours of the right hand side of the crack closely follow those on the left, in essence creating two complementary ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ areas; a convex side and a concave side respectively. The longer this perfectly formed fissure is observed, the more questions come to mind, inevitably leading to the impression that it would have been impossible to create something like this artificially, and to the illusory belief that one has in fact, just been witness to the effects of real and devastating passing seismic activity in the interior of the Tate gallery. How the artwork was actually created remains shrouded in secrecy.

The exhibited artwork carries the unusual name ‘Shibboleth’ and its creator is sculptor Doris Salcedo from Bogotá (born ibid. in 1958). Salcedo is not only the first non-European or North American artist to be invited to exhibit an installation at the Tate, but as opposed to previous installations, her work also carries a strong political message. The name ‘Shibboleth’ (or password) alludes to the Old Testament story from the book of Judges, where enemies were revealed by their inability to pronounce the word ‘shibboleth’. Those unable to articulate the term correctly due to differences in dialect were executed.

Therefore Salcedo brings to our attention that similar discriminatory practices continue in today’s society. The West is eager to present its period of racism and colonisation as ancient history, yet in our nominally ‘post-colonial’ age, those who are not of the ‘chosen people’ still experience this as a harsh reality. If you don’t speak the required ‘passwords’ with the correct pronunciation, some doors will remain forever closed to you, and naïve attempts to cross to the other side will leave you in a bottomless crevasse.

London is Europe’s most cosmopolitan metropolis, and this immediately begs the question as to whether the artist’s message is well placed here. Indeed it doesn’t seem to be at first sight, yet as with the barely visible hairline crack with which the artwork begins, the more one investigates and the longer one tarries in London and gets acquainted with the rhythms of the city, the more this gap widens and the deeper it seems to grow. The divide no longer merely consists of nationality or accent; factors such as where one lives, goes shopping, or spends one’s leisure time, all play a subtle but fundamentally divisive role. People living in the wealthy areas of West London rarely venture to the East End and vice versa. These are in many ways distinct communities, small islands separated by a great chasm.

Salcedo’s work is very visually powerful, and carries a strong social message. I remain a little concerned however as to whether the visitors’ attentions are not overly occupied with discovering the origin of the apparent seismological wonder or with the anxiety of avoiding damage to their expensive footwear to give much thought to any questions of class inequalities in their society. Perhaps at least those who were injured gave the work some thought, enough at any rate to have got themselves lodged in it. Paradoxically though this does not seem to have brought them to any greater altruism, but rather to lodging complaints about the gallery.

Turbine Hall, Tate Modern; 9 October 2007 - 6 April 2008

Published in Art & Antiques, January 2008 (http://www.artantiques.cz/)
Photo: Tomas Rabl, Veronika Wolf