Round Table: Tate Modern

Abstract

OCTOBER 98, Fall 2001, pp. 3–25. © 2001 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mignon Nixon: Let me start by offering a question that has preoccupied me since Tate Modern opened a year ago: Just what is it that makes Tate Modern so different, so appealing? The question comes, of course, from Richard Hamilton’s collage of mass-cultural imagery, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, which was used as the poster for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1956. The work of Hamilton and the Independent Group has been analyzed as a model of horizontality, reorienting art toward a broader visual culture. Tate Modern’s account of twentieth-century art plays down the history of the Independent Group. But I wonder if the future-oriented IG, and its involvement with popular culture, new technologies, and public space, might be a useful past to retain in thinking about a museum that exploits techniques of juxtaposition, pastiche, and anachronism to promote the contemporary. A positive reading of Tate Modern’s strategies of display might be that they cut across old hierarchies to make the museum a more popular public place. A more critical reading might be that these ostensibly liberating tactics actually constrain the viewer, in part by dramatizing the role of the curator. Do we need to reach for earlier models of horizontality and contemporaneity to understand what is at stake in Tate Modern’s project?