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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 27.3 (2005) 93-100



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His Raw Materialsbruce Nauman at Tate Modern

Bruce Nauman, Raw Materials, a sound installation at Tate Modern, London, October 12, 2004–May 2, 2005.

Tate Modern is twenty-first cen-tury London's Crystal Palace. Unlike the doomed Millennium Dome several miles down river at Greenwich, it seems to capture the spirit of the age, and since it opened in 2000, has become one of London's most significant cultural spaces, extending the arts complex of the South Bank further down river. Tate Modern is a place where people gather—to look, to eat, to wander; to watch the river from the high balconied galleries; to see and be seen.

Tate Modern was formerly Bankside power station, a massive piece of 1940s brutalism designed by Gilbert Scott, and redesigned by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron. Reclaimed and post-industrial rather than purpose built, as the South Bank complex was, Tate Modern has similarities in some respects to the new Dia Hudson building in upstate New York, and not only in its riverine aspect. Outside New York, Dia Hudson is the newest and most celebrated East Coast art gallery in the United States and, like Tate Modern, it reinvigorates a former industrial space with a design (by Robert Irwin) that refers to the form and function of the original in reimagining the site as a home for art.

Dia Hudson, isolated on the edge of a small town about an hour north of New York, was a packaging factory, and its redesign has a narrative aspect, as if its former life were present in a kind of ghosting. Visual traces remain—industrial glass in the windows, lines from the small gauge railway track that carried boxes to the river—and their presence in the context of often large, conceptually based works reminds us of the nature of industrial work itself, and of where it happens, how it is structured, and how it has changed. The building has a kind of Protestant austerity, lit as it is almost entirely with natural light, and the work inside, much of it minimalist and conceptual, is set in spaces so big and open that the work acquires a kind of lucidity of scale, a strange visual sumptuousness due merely to the opulence of size. Dia devotes a whole floor to Bruce Nauman, who has [End Page 93] also created the latest installation for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. At Dia the Nauman floor is below ground, eerie, and quiet. Walking through his strangely shaped rooms and marked out floor spaces is an odd, unsettling experience that informs whatever one sees next—almost like a tracing floor above a Gothic cathedral, Nauman's conceptual process-based work lays out the pattern for art practice.

At Tate Modern only the Turbine Hall retains the austerity and gloom of the power station itself. Elsewhere the orchestration of the space is almost hectic. A hive of rooms of varying sizes leads off a stacked bank of hallways reached by tall, centrally located escalators. The galleries themselves face the river and from several floors the visitor can step from the teeming interior (Tate Modern is almost always teeming) onto deep balconies, or smaller viewing platforms, and look out towards St. Paul's. Crossing the river on the Millennium bridge below the building, one can always see flocks of people on any of the open ledges, like passengers on some huge ocean liner about to set off for open water. Tate Modern is both a city space and a place that signifies departure; a space that offers respite from the city and that allows viewers to view the city, as well as the art. In its vistas of London's panorama the building makes sense of the scale of the city, and it refers to leisure and pleasure in its use of space—with closed hanging balconies inside looking into the Turbine Hall, complete with sofas and reading matter.

Over the past...

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