The Tate Modern

Hello,

Well, I just told you that I’m not planning on writing every week anymore, but this weekend was certainly one of those exceptions (I hope you don’t mind). Here is the executive summary: my teeth, swamps, America, modern art, and dad. Curious? Allow me to explain.

I started my weekend early, on Friday, with a trip to the dentist at RAF Mildenhall, the Air Force base in Cambridgeshire (warning: the remainder of this paragraph is an extraneous rabbit trail!). As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a good place for an airbase because there is just not much you can run into… the whole area is table-top flat farmlands, mostly winter wheat right now, but prime land for potatoes, sugar beets, carrots, etc in their seasons. Much of the region is below sea level and is only kept dry by an extensive canal/dyke/drainage system. My taxi driver told me that before the land was drained, the area was all swamps and it was in these swamps that the ancient Britons took refuge from the Roman invaders. A maze of secret paths led through the muddy, eel-infested swamps and the thorny forests to hidden villages. Only treachery was able to finally give the Romans their victory.

Well, back to my story, getting on base was almost like flying back to the US for a day; the airfield is basically a Little-America plopped right into the British countryside. Outside the gate you expect Peter rabbit to jump around the corner (Peter actually doesn’t live anywhere close to Mildenhall, but you get my point), but within the fence, everything is instantly more familiar – they stock Kleenex brand tissues, they have a greasy pizza place, and if you’re lucky you might even hear a y’all from time to time. With a clean bill of dental-health, I spent the night on base and left early the next morning for London.

Dad was flying into Heathrow that afternoon so I had the whole morning to explore. Now London is one of those places where it is almost impossible to run out of things to do and see. This time I decided to check out the Tate Modern Art Gallery. Some friends from Sheffield had recommended the Tate Modern as a ‘must see’ and (the real selling point) it’s free. So by way of taxi, train, tube, and my two feet, I made it to the edge of the Thames were the gallery is housed.

Overall, I have to say that I found the Tate Modern extremely fascinating. The gallery traces several veins of modern art and their underlying philosophies from the 1900’s to the present day.

The exhibit started with the Expressionism of the early 1900’s, where Nietzsche’s influence can be readily seen as with Kandinsky’s work of that era, and included a good section on Abstract Expressionist art, namely, Monet’s Water Lilies. (FYI, all the labels I am using are ver batem from the gallery, since I don’t really know all these art terms yet).

My favourite piece in the gallery was a painting called ‘A Star Shell’ by C.R.W. Nevinson. It is not one of his most famous pieces, but I do think it is profound. Before World War I, Nevinson was a Futurist and a Vorticist, like Braque and early Picasso, who celebrated the coming of the machine age as the means of ‘peace on earth,’ where science and industry could solve humanity’s problems. But what Nevinson saw during his wartime service utterly crushed those dreams for him. The machine age had come, and the result was the machine gun, trench warfare, and mustard gas. The 1916 painting depicts an artillery shell exploding over the bleak landscape of an unnamed World War I battlefield. The interesting thing is that the explosion looks very similar to how the star of Bethlehem is usually depicted. What I find profound is that in this painting, the star effectively announced the death of Modernism – with its vain notion of mankind becoming like God – and it signalled the dawn of the bloodiest century the world has ever known. Contrast that mechanical star with the true star of Bethlehem, which announced the birth of Jesus – where God became man – and signalled the dawn of the reign of the Prince of Peace. http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=10612&searchid=9912&tabview=image

Some post-WWI artists were not dissuaded by the failed experiment of Modernism; enter the Constructivists in Russia, with the likes of Naum Gabo and his architectural projects, trying to usher in utopia through art. For the Constructivists, with their almost cult worship of art (reminiscent of Pythagoras and his number-worshiping followers in ancient Greece), art was a vehicle for discovering and bringing about the perfect society. Oddly enough, utopia often had a rather Marxist tint…

World War II put the nail in the coffin of Modernism, but left the art world in “dislocation and existential unease.” It was an era of violent and dark work. Jean Dubuffet described what he imagined one of his paintings would sound like if it were put to music, “Dark, jagged African Hip-Hop, voices shouting in and out of the mix, and a mosque with a bad PA system wailing in the background.” Jean Fautrier was in the French resistance during WWII and was captured by the Gestapo. In one sculpture, Fautrier had carefully sculpted a head out of clay and then scratched off half the face with his fingernails while the clay was still wet. Some saw the world they lived in as a time when “accidents blend with intentions,” as with Pollock’s dripping-paint. Many of these artists depicted humans as vulnerable, wounded, and isolated, especially Giacometti with his sculptures of armless and emaciated figures. Others, however, like Picasso and Matisse, reverted to colour and nearly-pure abstraction.

What is frustrating is how close some of these artists get to the truth, but they stop just short. It’s as if they’ve pegged sin and fallen human nature, but then get lost in their conclusions; they become absurdists, or slip into hopeless nihilism, or simply check out into surrealism. Like Solomon in Ecclesiastes, they accurately describe life without God as “Meaningless, meaningless… It’s all meaningless,” but they never reach his conclusion of “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” I do wonder sometimes what it must be like for them; is there any beauty in their world, any joy whatsoever?

On the more disturbed side, there was the work of the Viennese Actionism crowd, whose explicit goal was to break societal taboo. Their ‘art’ involved self-mutilation and drinking urine. But wiping razors over your lips is not a cultural issue, that’s a moral issue. I’d say the same about Paul McCarthy’s perverse ‘art.’ In a way, it is post-modernism reductio ad absurdum. McCarthy is a living example of what the Apostle Paul calls “the futility of their thinking” in Ephesians 4:17 – 19. “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.” Or as The Message paraphrase puts it; “They've refused for so long to deal with God that they've lost touch not only with God but with reality itself. They can't think straight anymore. Feeling no pain, they let themselves go in sexual obsession, addicted to every sort of perversion.” There is truly nothing new under the sun.

And there were the minimalists.

To be honest, I thought that the majority of the newest exhibits, those from the ‘90s and onward, were just plain stupid. Maybe the good pieces are still travelling, but I thought the ones in the Tate were brain-dead. To be fair, I’m not an art critic so perhaps I’m being too simplistic, but it is hard to see what, if anything, they were thinking by placing a piece of string on the floor. What is their philosophy? What is their worldview? Whatever it is, it doesn't inspire good art.

So that pretty much sums up my very limited understanding of the past 100 years of art. Certainly it isn’t all bad. I really like Georges Henri Rouault and the way he looks at people on the fringe of society – circus performers and prostitutes. His work reminds me of the line in a Jars of Clay song, “you plead to everyone, ‘see the art in me.’”All art need not be bright and cheerful. We have made a mess of ourselves and this world, that’s the whole reason we need a saviour – someone to literally rescue us.

At church we are studying Deuteronomy, and how God through Moses is telling Israel to be separate – set apart – from the nations around them. One of our elders, Adam (an art teacher), came across a work recently that more or less visually sums up the book. I don’t remember who the original artist is, but a white canvas was laid out on a barnyard floor and a circular feeding trough was placed on the centre of the canvas. Sheep were then allowed to come in to eat from the trough. After a couple days, the canvas was filthy from the mud and manure, but the centre was spotless. Adam pointed out how this is analogous to the way Israel was called to live and the way that even today we are called to live. Israel was a small nation, and the natural progression would have been for the surrounding nations to influence them, but God tells them to do the opposite. They were told not to worship the way the Canaanites worshiped, with their child sacrifices and sensuality. They were to be a people marked by generosity, jubilee, and rest. The result of that separateness was that the people of Israel and the people around Israel would say ‘what other nation has a God like Israel?’ Now, we know that Israel failed miserably in living the good life in the land (as is also foretold in Deuteronomy), but the call extends to New Testament believers. James says “Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.... Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Are we any better than Old Testament Israel – are we spotless? Not by our own strength, I think that’s painfully obvious to all of us, but the beautiful thing is how God washes us individually and collectively, presenting to himself a spotless and radiant bride. I say all that simply to point out another piece of modern art – abstract art – that I really like. There is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but the bathwater is just nasty.

So basically, I found the Tate Modern very a fascinating survey of contemporary society.

Well after that, I still had a couple hours before linking up with Dad, so I made a quick tour of the National Gallery, but two hours is way too little time to cover that amount of history...

When we did meet up, Dad and I went on an excellent ‘man-date’ together for Valentine’s Day at a Polish restaurant near Hyde Park. Our plans to see Slumdog Millionaire were thwarted, but that just meant that we got to spend more time discussing all sorts of important things, which was great.

I left for Sheffield on the first train the next morning. And that’s about it...

Cheers y’all,
Will