The Unmistakable Feeling of Being “Whelmed”

Tate Modern

The building has long been a favorite of mine as a shining example of adaptive reuse. Overall, I’m disappointed to say that both the building and collection felt entirely adequate but didn’t blow me out of the water as expected. Fortunately both architecture and art were punctuated by enough high points that my overall experience was a good one!

Monument for the Living

The first piece I want to discuss is Marwan Rechmaoui’s Monument for the Living (2001). This is one of the last things I encountered on the old side of the museum for crossing Turbine Hall into the Blavatnik addition. Of course, a scale model of a building immediately caught my attention. The description tells us that it is of the Burj El Murr building in Beirut, Lebanon. It was left in an unfinished moment of stasis when civil war broke out. “Originally an office block, it was only ever used as a sniper outpost. The tower is too tall to knock down and too dense to implode, and so continues to dominate the skyline.” I think the art piece itself does not have much value until one hears its name. “Monument for the Living” is an interesting reversal of general protocol: monuments are generally reserved for the dead. In addition, the form, to me, suggested a frame that was the only thing left standing after an attack. Finding out that the frame was actually a remnant of a building that never totally manifested was another instance of subversion in some sense. I also think that a concrete structural frame standing alone can be an oxymoron, it is evidence of life, but is in itself cold and missing its vital life-giving component: people. Thus, overall, I felt that Rechmaoui’s choice in name is what lends the piece its power and identifies its strength, which is to codify a formal and conceptual dichotomy.

Seamless

As a counterpoint to Monument for the Living, I next want to highlight Sarah Sze’s Seamless. Filling a room between galleries, I was drawn to this piece for its loads of potential energy. I thought it was a Rube Goldberg machine at first sight, and it seemed like it could spring to life if only a switch was flipped, or a ball was pushed. The description tells us that “Seamless connects familiar objects from everyday life into a three-dimensional network.” I had hoped that there would be some underlying logic to Sze’s choices on what to include, beyond the compositional. For instance, I thought perhaps the objects might be assembled in the order they were used: from morning to night as they moved across the room. I was hoping for too much, but I loved the way this piece interacted with the space. Pieces of the museum were cut away to allow the work to interact with the wall plane, affording an interesting view of the in-between space of the museum’s pristine galleries. Overall, I felt that this piece was a different sort of “monument for the living.” Rather than a single giant (in real life) object which holds history and speaks in socio-political undertones, here is a collection of small and insignificant objects in which the assembled whole is greater than the sum of the parts. They are a different type of documentation, or proof, of life as it is lived day-to-day.