Art and Power

I’ve always felt uneasy about Bankside power station’s refunctioning as the Tate Modern museum of 20th century and contemporary art but never come across a critique of it.
In practical terms it was an excellent choice - it offers a huge amount of space to display work and it sits in a great location, especially with the addition of Norman Foster’s bridge connecting it to the city. It also resulted in an impressive industrial building being recycled, revitalised and reused as a major cultural centre.
Although the art in the Tate is the main focus of attention, the context is (and can be argued increasingly) important.  Architecture is a three dimensional visual language and speaks to us in its own terms.

Sir Giles Gilbert Scott designed Bankside as a cathedral of power. Scott came from a family of architects and his grandfather, Sir George Gilbert Scott was a Victorian Gothic revivalist who designed many churches and worked on Westminster Abbey.  In his twenties, Giles Gilbert Scott designed Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, which has a central bell tower; years later he was particular in specifying that the boiler flues for Bankside power station be gathered together in a single central chimney  “more in the nature of a slender tower or campanile” (a church bell tower)

Given the history of the church as the dominant institution in Western Europe, an interpretation of church architecture as an expression of power seems valid, but it is utilitarian and facile and ignores a church’s spiritual purpose to create, through beauty,  a heaven on earth,  a sanctuary for contemplation, prayer, meditation, solace.
Scott’s combination of religious architecture, pared back modernism and symmetry created a very bold, uncompromising expression of power which unfortunately draws visual comparison with Nazi German modernism and in hindsight, seems very out of step with the year of its creation - 1945. Perhaps the urgent need for a power generating utility in a war ravaged London blinded its commissioners to such parallels.


          Nuremberg rally review stand - Albert Speer

Given this visual legacy and the passing of time, it is surprising that Tate Modern’s largest space emulates the nave of a cathedral. The vast, dark Turbine hall could have been divided up to provide more gallery space but instead, depending on which entrance one uses, it serves to provide an entrance to impress - maybe overpower - with scale, steel and concrete. The harsh verticality and machined central skylight continues to echo the comparison with Albert Speer’s architecture - this time the interior of the Reich Chancellery.


              Tate Turbine hall                   Reich Chancellery, Berlin.             York Minster nave.

In a cathedral nave, one’s attention is drawn upwards to a heavenly realm of beauty; in the turbine hall one feels like a small element in a large machine, or circuit board.  The hall can be seen as an expression of the power of art, but it is famously difficult to successfully occupy with art; installations have to be purpose built, are expensive and therefore externally funded.  Above all the hall is the dominant context and the art has to serve the space.
The long, dark escalators accessing higher levels reinforce the feeling of being a small biological unit to be processed, and is reminiscent of scenes in Metropolis.


We are used to escalators in underground stations, but there’s little light here and the colours are dark; it feels as if this functional element has been dramatised purposefully. The great theme of Modernism is essentially of our relationship with the machine and its numerous effects on our lives, so again, one can see the continuation of the Bankside power station’s aesthetic as valid. But that theme does not apply to all Modern and contemporary art (Monet, Matisse, Chagall, Soutine, Pollock, Morandi, Beuys,  Arte Povera, Doig etc).
All that said, the galleries are neutral white cubes and generally serve the work they exhibit very effectively, but the context is established prior to our arrival in these spaces and is reinforced on our departure.  Art theorists and curators deemed Modernism as such to be over long before Tate Modern was commissioned so why does it live on in the fabric of this building which will also serve the future?
Maybe habit and hubris on the part of the architects, or the steely ambition of the commissioners to elevate the position of art in British society, to make art more powerful; not as an element in a cycle of cause and effect but as the dictator of a top down, direct, linear process.
See it proclaimed high on the external wall of the gallery overlooking the river and facing St Pauls.
“Art changes, we change”

Times change too and perhaps Tate Modern is itself an artefact of the past?