Frieze Art Fair starts on Wednesday, but the first of dozens of barnacle events in London this week (stay on artreview.com for rolling coverage) went down early this morning at Tate Modern: the unveiling of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's sci-fi inspired installation TH.2058. Artreview.com was there to shoot a video and interview Gonzalez-Foerster – sit tight, we'll get it edited and uploaded as soon as we can! In the meantime, here are a few initial impressions...
It's the ninth annual project in the ginormous Turbine Hall, and the most instantly accessible – Gonzalez-Foerster provides us with an introductory text on the front of the bridge, readable as you walk down the ramp, which, like the intro to a film, sets the scene and tells you pretty much everything you need to know: (imagine) it's 2058, it has been raining in London relentlessly for years, outdoor public sculptures have been strangely growing larger as a result, 'like tropical plants', and have been brought inside for preservation among the hundreds of bunk beds that provide public shelter.
You pass through coloured curtains, through a dark area with rain sound effects, and into a kind of city-block grid of bunk beds, each one with a book on it (like Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and J.G. Ballard's Drowned World). Looming high above this mass dormitory are giant (25 percent bigger) replicas of Lousie Bourgeois' spider, Maman (1999; which was part of the first Turbine Hall project in 2000) and Alexander Calder's Flamingo (1973). Other salvaged sculptures include Henry Moore's Sheep Piece (1971-72), a Claes Oldenberg, a Bruce Nauman. The only real (as in original, not replica) piece there is by Gonzalez-Foerster's good friend Maurizio Catelan. This last piece, though an abberration, is the only one with any clear logic behind it, since none of the sculptures are London landmarks, likely to be rescued from the rain.
Hanging at the back is a huge LCD screen showing (without sound), a 32-minute video called The Last Film – a cut-up compendium of various apocalyptic movies, and one of Gonzalez-Foerster's own. It brings to mind that part of the Scientology creation myth in which early humans were made to watch, en masse, a movie lasting 36 days.
The art press corp kept asking if Gonzalez-Foerster was channeling the dark mood of the times: economic collapse, global warming. To her credit, she parried these literalist interpretations (read a feature on Gonzalez-Foerster in the October ArtReview). The mood of the installation isn't at all dark anyway: you imagine the comradery of bunkbeds, reading books together, sheltering together, watching late night movies. If anything, this apocalypse looks like fun.
But maybe too much fun: the injection of fairy tale fantasy – sculptures that grow in the rain – is a frustrating, inane change of register. It would have been much more interesting to think about how we'd really treat works of art in the midst of apocalypse, to see the Turbine Hall like a crowded sepulchre of rusting, rotting treasures. And in such dark future times, we'll probably be watching classic, comforting movies rather than artful excerpts (like Wall-E does in his trailer). Why not show, as part of the installation, Indiana Jones or Star Wars? In other words, why not go further with the concept and merge it with reality, rather than sticking so rigidly to the brittle sci-fi concept?
The enormity of the Turbine Hall, and the apparent desire here to touch on current anxieties about dark events larger than ourselves, cries out for Christoph Büchel's brutal hand. His insanely dense, dirty, detailed and psychically punishing life-installations, featuring monstrous accumulations of junk and repulsive living and work spaces (watch a video here), show us an already-unfolding apocalypse of wars, slave labour and consumer-trash overload. No need to wait until 2058. Tate probably wouldn't touch Büchel with a bargepole after his conflict with Mass MoCA, a similarly massive museum space. But that's my plea for next year's commission: get seriously dark, get seriously immersive.