I remember its massive volume as a big blank in the fabric of London. The kind of vast and dense abandonment where purpose or possibility seemed to have been entirely forgotten. In the shadow of the sheer brick walls of Gilbert Scotts power station you could feel as if part of the city itself had been erased. You don’t see that kind of thing any more, at least not in contemporary supercharged, cosmopolitan London.
But that was before the radical transformation of Giles Gilbert Scott’s old Bankside power station into Tate Modern, the example ne pas ultra of millennial post-industrial regeneration.
Tate Modern remains the paradigm for a particular vision of how cities would be developed. Where culture, media and sport reinvent landscapes abandoned by industry repurpose heavy industry for the knowledge economy and anchoring new ways of living in liquid modernity. That could anchor new ways of living, act as a conduit for government stimulus, create new economies and yes, catalyse luxury development too.
Yet, back in 1994, it was gigantic leap of faith that something as esoteric as art could become so powerful not only fill to the old power station but to transform the public life of London.
And if one space characterises the post-industrial transformation it’s the Turbine Hall. Its a space that speaks so directly to its own moment as precisely as the Pantheon still embodies Roman ideals millennia later.
Here, we find first a space that leans heavily on recent avant-guard art practice. On Warhol’s Factory and artists lofts across New York in the 60’s, on the squats in London’s Docklands in London in the 70’s that played host to so much creative practice in the ruins of old industry. By the 1980’s the figure of the loft-dwelling cultural worker had become mainstream enough to be centre stage for an advert in introducing the concept of ATM’s. And Docklands had become a laissez faire investment zone resembling a North American business district. By the Millennium, brownfield regeneration had become a central New Labour policy. The Turbine Hall then was the perfect millennial combination. A heady cocktail mixing a tradition of radical art space with politics and economics.
And at what scale. The already vast space was made even bigger by Herzog & de Meuron’s move of adding the basement level into the void. The absence of industry – the turbine-less Turbine Hall – was so exaggerated, then dramatically revealed by slicing under the outer wall of the power station as if cutting through paper. Apparently little in the way of architectural gesture, but the effect was to create a space of vast and monumental emptiness.
This cavernous space perhaps more than any other has transformed the idea of art since 2000. Its sheer size has demanded – invented even – a new form of Cyclopean art. Art at the scale of atmospheres (Olafur Eliasson), geology (Doris Salcedo), civil engineering(Anish Kappor) and (at least an attempt at) ecology (Abraham Cruzvillegas). Art made in register with the scale of the industry it replaced.
Art performs to context, and while ever more refined white cube gallery spaces (full of their own idea of what art is) proliferated as the art world boomed, Tate Modern provided the perfect space to hot house a different strand of Millennial art. Turbine Hall art is art performing as populist spectacle, as a gesture that is part of the city, as tourist attraction and media extravaganza.
We read the concerns of a culture as much from the museum as from the content of the museum, the armature of display as much as the thing displayed. Think of the British Museum, whose grand neo-Grecian portico ushered visitors into a physical manifestation of enlightenment. Or the grand edifice of the National Gallery, whose classical motifs stretch across one flank of the great imperial space of Trafalgar Square.
Tate Modern though, well that’s different thing altogether. The clearest manifestation of an idea of culture in the year 2000. A new kind culture palace born of the heroic institutionalisation of radical art space, multiplied by power of government policy and stoked by the heady liquidity of property speculation.
The Guggenheim Bilbao, Tate Modern’s close cousin and completed just three years before, is a place where the architecture itself was the signature of a new glittering, hyper technical, acrobatic, cultural Xanadu. At Tate Modern it was the emptiness of the volume – the void itself – that was the genius architectural stroke. The huge nothingness at its heart that catalysed the potential of the project.
And perhaps this remains the strength of Herzog & de Meuron’s work with the old power station. That it somehow not only embodies the millennial forces of culture and power, but also exposes them. When we walk into the Turbine Hall, we walk not only into the most significant art space of the 21st century, but also into something that still remains a ruin of the 20th. Even amongst the inevitable (and intended) hubris is a sense of doubt and loss. contained in an architectural register of echoing emptiness.
First published in ArtReview