The Tanks - Live Art, Tate Modern and New Institutionalism

The Tanks - Live Art, Tate Modern and New Institutionalism

13 July, 2012
by: Gloriana Riggioni

Just days before Tate Modern's new Tanks open to the public, Gloriana Riggioni ponders the implications for performance art in a digital age.

After over a decade of experimenting with conventions at the frontline of New Institutionalism, it seems like Tate Modern may have finally struck a magic chord. The opening of The Tanks – a £215 million permanent space dedicated to live art – could well constitute a pivotal step towards the democratisation of the establishment... provided this is indeed the aim it has in mind.

A certain scepticism towards top-down organisation is commonplace in the world of contemporary art, and The Tanks might seem a particular area of concern in terms of the implications for performance, immersive and social engagement art which have so far mostly avoided total objectification by the ‘branded establishment’.

To begin with, a grand opening to coincide with the Olympic Games, so far ahead of the project’s actual completion, seems likely to be problematic. Especially as it's almost certainly designed (like every other entirely non-sports-related ‘2012’ affair popping up around the city) simply to attract the hordes of wandering tourists with a view to inflate numbers for prestige and revenue purposes.

One potential repercussion is a kind of Disneyfication of the art form; the transmutation of live art from a series of practices largely concerned with experimental processes to some kind of controlled and safely defined form of entertainment, conceived to facilitate engagement with an  underestimated version of the intellect of the general public.

This is not to portray performance as some kind of pure form, untarnished by the capitalist establishment. The practices that constitute live art today subscribe in many ways to the mass-media and corporate rendering of the arts; mostly in the form of electronic diffusion and as a tool for self-promotion.

Valentina Fois, Director of La Scatola, an east London gallery that works closely with cutting edge contemporary performance artists, observes that performance is something increasingly used as a means for self-promotion rather than an end in itself: “Many emerging artists are desperate to impress and leave their mark,” she says, “so they see performance as the perfect tool to gain visibility from the press and the general public.”

Art, like fashion, has its trends and bandwagons. As Fois points out: “Our latest trend is undoubtedly digital art and so you see many artists using moving image, all the internet realm and of course performance through digital platforms.”

Yet even as digital platforms such as Youtube and Twitter claim an undeniably progressive role in  live art, the point remains that these are art forms which exist fundamentally as an open and ongoing ‘scramble’. For example, The Live Art Development Agency refers in its website to “a framing device for a catalogue of approaches to the possibilities of liveness by artists who chose to work across, in between, and at the edges of more traditional artistic forms... a broad church of disciplines [which] have crossed each other’s paths, blurred each other’s edges and, in the process, opened up new creative forms.”

Within this kind of conceptual framework, the struggle to remain somewhat undefined and avoid a rigid structure has become thematic in itself. A great example of this in recent years was a one-off event entitled Channel, curated by Fois at La Scatola in 2011.

The work was conceived, she explains, “to address my perplexity on the future of performance.” She continues: “Today performance has become incorporated in corporate notions of mass-production, so rather than providing our audience with a television screen equipped with a programme guide, for just one night we refused to give any description of what was going to happen. In doing so, the performance strips away the comfort that accompanies knowing exactly what is to come.”

In light of the power of this kind of approach, the creation of a permanent space for live art within a corporate institution becomes worrying, as it seems almost inevitably to prefigure the creation of a prescriptive canon. Not only would the introduction of a measure by which to declare an artwork ‘successful’, or even ‘museum quality’ immediately contradict the spirit of the ‘scramble’, there also exists the fear that such a measure would be delivered with the same didacticism,  condescension even, with which Tate has endowed certain previous attempts to engage the general public with the institution and the art (the infamous Tate Trumps App, for instance, springs to mind).

Here we see the paradox of New Institutionalism as practiced within the arts; a culture of elitism which ultimately alienates the public it should be there to oblige. Fois argues that “the main purpose of these large institutions and museums is to serve their community and match its expectations, so Tate's project should reflect the state of our society… What is important is to build new opportunities for the general public and for our artists. My concern is that getting inside an institution is somehow tricky… there are various bureaucratic and political issues and often little room is left for challenging art practices.”

So given all these anxieties, how does it then follow that Tate may have finally struck a magic chord? Well it’s simple: read through the programme of activities planned for The Tanks in the fifteen weeks commencing July 18th, and you too will be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt; Tate seems in actual fact to be letting live art be what it is. They have artists at all career stages participating, from the uber-established to the emerging. There is Sung Hwan Kim and Liz Rhodes exhibiting next to young artists collectives from London’s sub-cultures. There are seminal pieces such as Suzanne Lacy’s 1987 social engagement broadcast ‘Crystal Quilt’, alongside new project commissions, artist-led proposals, residencies, discussions, and even a chance for the public to get hands-on creative with the film project ‘Undercurrent’. The atmosphere seems genuinely to be that of an open house, and the claims are that the outcomes truly do depend on the public’s active input.

In his commentary published on the Tate Blog, Director Chris Dercon emphasizes this point: “Many of the works presented in the Tanks address their audiences directly, emphasising the visitor’s own physical presence... With these complexities and the advent of new recording technologies, the live event takes on new meanings and possibilities. The audience’s experiences can be immediately recorded and disseminated in a way that is unprecedented in historical terms. As such, it is also the audience that forms a central component of what happens in the Tanks. This is why the opening programme is presented as an ‘open manifesto’ – a call to define and shape the programme. Within Tate Modern’s new generator it is the true meeting of artworks and audiences that will establish what the Tanks are and can be.”

The rhetoric certainly seems to be that of democratisation, and the hopes are up for a genuine delivery. Because even when the initiative to offer a permanent home for immersive, social engagement and open platform projects does indeed constitute a move towards a community-centred establishment, if the didactic and elitist structures remain in place then the outcome can have nothing to do with democratisation. Instead, the result would be more of an absorption of the rhetoric of experimental engagement into the unchanged institutional framework. Clare Doherty makes this point in her 2004 essay entitled The institution is dead! Long live the institution!:

“If the conventional gallery or museum is becoming a social space rather than a showroom, do we run the risk of creating a new set of conventions – the convention of role-play or prescribed participation – in a wider socio-political context of impotent democracy? And consequently, do the art institutions of the future risk becoming more frustrating, less potentially contemplative or active spaces for the visual imagination?”

In light of this, it is a matter for the public to get on board and make the most of this new platform on offer; it may well be that the future of live art depends on it.

The Tanks open to the public on Wednesday 18th July.

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Image credit: A previous installation in the oil tanks. Lis Rhodes, Light Music, 1975. Photo Lucy Dawkins © Tate

Gloriana Riggioni