Your own collection

Tate Britain displays British art from 1500 to today. Yes, it’s a big museum, but it’s also like a big living room. All those works of art are yours.

Create your own collection.

(Printed Gallery Guide, Tate Britain, 2006)

The above text, along with Big Brother, t-shirts embroidered with the word TOSSER, and Derby city centre, marks the end of palatable human civilisation for me. It is partially on account of these 33 words that my body will be found in woodland in the early hours of tomorrow morning, my face largely unrecognisable due to repeated attempts to cave in my own brain with the sole of my shoe. I would like to extend my sympathies to the elderly dog walker who will stumble upon my still gibbering corpse, and also to the rest of you who will not have escaped this fiery decent into the burning hell of mediocrity and half-witted spoon-feeding of slurry that will gradually encroach upon your waking days.

In my left hand, crumpled into a fist and partially stained with leaf mulch, will be a leaflet from Tate Britain’s Your Collection series. Ironically it will be The Calming Collection; a guide to the gallery, which aims to introduce the visitor to calming works of art. It won’t have worked.

The Your Collection series of leaflets are currently the main guides used to direct visitors around Tate Britain. There are racks of them everywhere. The idea is that visitors can select works of art suited to their current moods. Art as therapy, is clearly a large part of the idea and so whatever your personality or ailment you can select from the I’m Hungover Collection, the I’ve Just Split Up Collection, the I Have a Big Meeting Collection or the I Like Yellow Collection.

I know I am supposed to laugh. I know that I am supposed to find these leaflets whimsical and light-hearted. I know, I know, I know.

But it isn’t just the leaflets; it is the whole Tate experience. Tate. Not The Tate. Tate. Not The Tate Gallery. Tate. Tät. T.

Without doubt, Tate holds one of the most significant collections of art in the country. It will be for many their first experience of art, especially of modern art. It has a massive responsibility to get things right, and I don’t envy them their position one bit. They have four galleries across the country and each of these upholds the same values, the same standards of presentation. The same Tate ethos, identity, branding.

And this is where things start going wrong, because on the face of it, it all seems to work. There is a deep philosophical thought behind the identity of Tate. The dropping of the definite article in the gallery’s name, an act which is upheld within the organisation with almost religious fervour, does on an immediate level serve an important function: Tate is not just Tate Britain, nor Tate Modern, nor St. Ives, nor Liverpool. It is something bigger, an experience that transcends all these geographical locations, so that whichever Tate you enter, you receive the same kind of experience. It’s a bit like God in this respect. Or Sony Erickson.

Which is fine, which is good. We all like to buy Sony products because we like the reassuring click we get from pressing their buttons. We like their sound quality and the unashamed use of square corners in their design. In a way Tate is good in this respect. We know what we are getting. We aren’t going to wander into a room and find the kind of painting that hangs in our local Chinese takeaway. Thank you Tate, for allowing us not to mistake that kind of thing for Art.

In a way it does much the same thing as Edward Young’s designs for Penguin Books did in the 1930s. (A brief mention is here required of Phil Baines’ excellent book Penguin By Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005, a lovely and informative work, which I would recommend you all go out and buy.) Young’s designs for Penguin were intentionally blank canvases; colour denoted the different subject areas but other than that, the content of the book was not hinted at from the outside. There is a great value in this; the reader is able to approach the book with more or less a clear mind. The book cannot be judged by its cover, so the reader’s responses to it are drawn entirely from the words on the page and from their own experiences. They do not pick it up thinking ‘this is a book that will make me happy’ or ‘this is a book that will help me get over my divorce’ or any such tosh as that. They read because they want exposing to things beyond themselves, and the anonymity of the Young designs allows this to happen.

And to a certain extent it looks as if Tate achieves this too. It certainly plunders much from the Penguin style of branding, the adoption of a sans serif typeface, the application of the identity in different colours to denote locality (Tate Britain, orange; Tate Modern, plumby-cerise; Liverpool, purple; St. Ives blue) but it debases it. It shares very little of the same democratic ideology. The identity of Tate intrudes into every aspect of the gallery visit; you are made to see things Tate’s way. In the galleries information labels veer towards the interpretive nugget, rather than giving biographical or historical information. In fact the historical approach to art is deemed so unfashionable, that such methods of usurping its direction, such as the Your Collection leaflets at Tate Britain and the recent re-hanging of the permanent collections at Tate Modern have been brought about in the hope that no one will have to think too hard at any given moment.

The always excellent Peter Campbell in the current London Review of Books, considers this re-hanging:

[Christian Marclay’s piece Video Quartet] offers little for you to go on thinking about.
Which doesn’t mean that you want to be told what to think. Nothing makes clearer Tate Modern’s particular problems and failures in relation to the new displays than a sentence to be found on the map of the collection you pick up from the information desk. It reads: ‘The gallery’s displays have recently been changed, which means you can view works from the Tate collection in exciting new ways.’ New ways? Blue spectacles? Upside down? The notion that curatorial skill in rearranging the stamp album will alter your view of the Cubist painting you have always known and want to see again, that it will take on a new life because it has been allocated new neighbours, implies that it has somehow become stale through too-long exposure. Once you start believing it is the curator’s job to liven up what they curate, explanations follow. No joke survives an explanation and no work of art can be vivified by one. There are things you may want to know, but that desire follows on a response, a reaction of some kind generated by the work itself. This applies particularly to what is ‘difficult’. (The word itself is a confusion.)

Let not anyone enter a Tate gallery and be made to find their own way. It is the experience of Tate that is on sale; the Bankside site, more a shopping mall where customers talk on mobile phones on the escalators and take photographs though being encouraged not to. They do. Just type Tate into an image-hosting site such as Flickr and you will find hundreds of images breaking countless copyright regulations. Campbell notes in his piece that with the exception of the Rothko room, that none of the building has been specifically designed to display any individual exhibits to their best advantage. I would add to this exception, the room that displayed Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter; an intimate space that allowed a very personal exploration of the piece, though I suspect that this has not been kept in the re-hanging.

The art is the backdrop to the experience. It is virtually impossible to concentrate on the works in these spaces, and this is a terrifying thing. It is the equivalent of attending a performance of the Marriage of Figaro at the English National Opera and having to sit next to someone from the marketing department who talks at you throughout:

“Well this bit’s all about when you find out that someone’s been cheating on you.”
“I’m trying to listen–”
“Yeah, but what it is, is the Countess, right…” etc. etc.

Constantly. We are being treated like idiots by an organization that holds one of the most important assets of our age. We are only permitted to understand these things on their terms; terms which cast us as drooling animals who would be made to smile and gurn contentedly if the gallery was emptied entirely of its art and was turned into a massive outlet of Next instead. The home furnishings department of Next is our only comfortable habitat; browsing, slack-jawed amid the leather covered photo frames and pointless bundles of twigs, this is where Tate imagines we are happiest, and so it attempts to replicate it on a bigger and more meaningless scale.

Just consider for a moment the process of thought that must have occurred to produce those thirty-three offensive, little words:

Tate Britain displays British art from 1500 to today. Yes, it’s a big museum, but it’s also like a big living room. All those works of art are yours.

Create your own collection.

The first sentence I have only minor problems with, it tells us at least what Tate Britain is, just incase it is mistaken for a massage parlour, or a kebab house. There is of course a necessity to do this, as the word Gallery or Museum have been dropped from the title, lest they be thought too old-fashioned. But the wise marketing bod at Tate, realises that we might see through their ruse, realises that we might throw our hands up in horror at the prospect of being tricked into going to a museum, so they confess their crime:

“Yes,” they tell us, “it is a big museum…” You were right all along! There is no fooling you! But it’s okay… you won’t find it too taxing, because: “it’s also like a big living room.” You big simpering dullard. You fat, drooling heathen. It’s okay, here’s the experience in terms that you might possibly understand, you stupid-headed ape… it’s also like a big living room. You understand what they are, for fuck’s sake. You have got one yourself, hung with massive reproductions of Rothko paintings that you bought in Ikea. Its just like Ikea, only you can’t buy these pictures; except in a really wanky, metaphorical way you can, because they kind of belong to you anyway. Now pick your designated category; you’re either a binge-drinker, an adulterer, or a simpleton who is only able to form associations with one colour, and fuck off into the café and buy yourself a coffee, you piss-witted ignoramus.

This is what Tate thinks of us. This is the main means of guided interpretation in Tate Britain at present. Make of it what you will. The Calming Collection which liberally makes light of mental health issues, informs  me that I am to buy camomille tea from the café. It also tells me that I am to find Jacob Epstein’s sculpture of Iris Beerbohm Tree, calming. Whether I interpret it to be calming or not, this is the right answer. This is not hands-free, anonymous curatorship as Tate would like us to believe it is, with its anonymity of design and labelling; this is Tate forcing a banal and in many ways offensive viewpoint into my head.  It is telling me that there is one way to understand art, from this therapeutic, narrative-based stance that might be fine in the throwaway sections of a Sunday newspaper, but is damaging the reception of its collection for its current audience.

And with that I am going to the woods, with my shoe. Imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. Now imagine Tate wearing that boot.

Comments

[Quinn]

I guess I'd better not mention the "Tate" branded emulsion paint they sold in B&Q a couple of years back then...

[JRWB]

Aaaarrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!!

[TC]

This recalls a rant by Andrew and I against the notion of "Smooth Classics at 7":

"the biggest danger facing seriously constucted music - and that is that it's seen as nothing more than audio wallpaper that should be 'relaxing' or make you feel 'good'. Thanks are due to Classic FM (amongst others) for ensuring that frightening, uncomfortable and thought-provoking music is increasingly unheard and marginalised." Andrew Mellor 2005

Tate are doing a similar thing, but for 'playlist', read 'exhibition'. It also recalled something that I read by Milan Kundera recently (I'll see if i can find it...no I can't) It was something about the author being too present in the work, and this could also be true of Tate; it's intrusive. You can't look at 'a painting', but only 'a painting in the Tate' (or 'a painting at Tate'), the fact of it being Tate is always present; omnipresent.
It's interesting that you used an Ernest Hemingway cover, as Ernest Hemingway no longer exists; now it's just 'Hemingway' - the brand. This annoys me. Hemingway the brand is about 'Hard, almost Metallic, glittering' prose, having a beard, shagging Martha Gelhorn, something about war, bulls, fish etc, and I find it becomes intrusive. The guardian recently published a list of author's, first name and surname, except Hemingway. My edition of The Old Man and the Sea doesn't seem to say Ernest anywhere . It's just by Hemingway, Ernest didn't take part. Anyway, I'm forced by this into thinking of this Hemingway brand everytime I read any Ernest, the brand seeks to unify his work, to homogenise it. The same goes for Tate; it's a unifiying strategy, it destroys difference, disparity, dissent. The words of Milan Kundera (at last):

Unity of mankind means: No escape for anyone anywhere.

[Andrew Mellor]

Arts organisations these days are asked by their funders at every juncture, 'how are you engaging with new audiences?', by which they generally mean, 'are you trendy enough?' The former is an important question of course, but one of the side effects of the work that it results in (and it's huge) is the kind of guff you are talking about James. There's an utterly self-defeating belief that it's not the art that's important, it's the way you present it, and this comes from philistines at the top of arts organisations and their communications departments. But - to use a phrase that would be at home in the Tate marketing department - it might be useful to 'think outside the box' for a moment. These things irritate us, but that's because we have an understanding of the artform and why we ourselves engage with it. But we have to be honest and ask ourselves if people are discovering masterpieces because they've gone to the 'I'm hungover' collection that they wouldn't have experienced otherwise. If someone does that, and then has the independence of thought to develop their own relationship with it which disrespects the tripe written on the nicely designed leaflet and the intrusive and ignorant commentary, then the art itself will have triumphed. Amidst all this depression which I share completely with you, the one glimmer of hope is that the art itself is stronger than the guff that people are surrounding it with. And it's the art that will endure - that's the optimistic viewpoint anyway. I fear that the bullshit will become so prevalent that it will quash the art itself - and from what you say James, that's happening at the Tate. Your man talking me through Figaro brings it home somewhat.

Things just have to be trendy these days don't they. Not being trendy is the new paedophilia.

[Andrew Mellor]

I should also say that I'm meeting some friends from the 'arts community' tonight - a senior Tate person amongst them - to watch the Holland Argentina match. I'll print off a couple of copies of this for the half-time patter!

[AJE]

strewth, we're going to end up with The World Cup Collection - i can see it now...