5/10/2019 Tate Modern
Twenty century could be considered unstable and sophisticated in many aspects of human societies and countries being full of conflicts and wars. Different ideologies were enhanced to divide people into groups and confrontations that actually brought horrors and insecurity into social life. During that time, some artists were caring about the universal people, life and cities under the wars or postwar world. They seemed to try to explore the current politics, society, mass mentality and even some sharp issues including races and religions from that period by means of different angles and forms. Their works are collected in the Contemporary Art Exhibition of massive artworks in Tate Modern that I have visited, and are distinguished from other abstract artworks referring to nature and science. So I selected some of them into this review to discuss this serious topic.
Urban World
Monument for the living 2001-8 (2000, Marwan Rechmaoui) This grey sculpture represents a man-made high-rise building that could be found mostly dominant in the twentieth century’s west world. However, will it be timeless? It seems to return people’s thinking of living back to entities that embody life itself.
Demolished A, B and C part (1996, Rachel Whiteread) This is a group of captured photos showing the process of destruction for concrete buildings in the urban area. To some extent, the artist wished to record a kind of failure of the utopian optimism at a time of increasing social inequality.
Civil War
These works were the visual expression for the horror in civil wars world-widely going on last century. The left used fragmented body, mixtures of sharp space filled by cultural symbols and dark cold colours to reveal sense of death and coldness. And the right is full of facial distortions and unreal monsters which might represent horrors and struggled lives in the process of decolonisation. They were the result of exploration for personally and publicly spiritual issues under the war.
Workers
This work is a group of workers’ portraits photographed in black and white during the war time. these photos used mono colour to concentrate on their identities over diverse occupations and genders, and workers’ facial expressions.
Written History
These two works seem to illustrate a deep illusion of historical information written by nonsensical signals. Our written history likes a paper filled by letters or dark digital screen recording simple numbers. Thus, it has brought a question to us: What is the meaning of these human-made records of real time?
This is a hybrid art work using newspaper or magazines into cutting shapes and being stuck upon a surface of overlaid note papers in order to reveal a view from the author that the individuals were always under struggled and easily hurt by the historical information from mass media.
Left Middle Right
This series of works appears to discuss a time for paper media when message or truth could be modified or entertained. The artist used the combination of historical objects or events with newspapers’ images to create a nexus between the grotesque phantasm produced by the mass and the real world.
Movements
Many kinds of movements flourished from that time when political powers were separated into different groups. Since then, some artists started to argue the basic structure of the society by means of comparisons of every single elements from these models provided by thinkers. Like the below one shows, they often used mechanically logical juxtaposition of pictures and words drawn on paper or a discussion recorded in the video. It seems that the artists want to reflect the objective reality, but from my perspective, I think there is a lack of nexus between these things.
World War II: Germany Section
These series of exhibitions below show a rethink of the battle of Germany part in World War Two. The artists adopted different materials and forms to remember such cruel and horrible war such as fabric, oil painting, ink and performing video. They chose different aspects of this war like the dates, images, the bloody flag and even the people’s faces.
The most interesting thing among these works is the colour usage. We could see from the photos that they all put bright red into a monochromatic atmosphere in order to emphasise the bloody facts.
Viewer
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War could be a long-lasting topic during the past. This video recorded a child using body language to describe a battle that he has seen by himself in the Middle East aside from any words. As audiences, we can tell more from a child’s depiction.
Africa
This experimental animation above shows the history in the land of Africa, including the political revolution and racial pogrom. It combines live clips, abstract hand-drawing animation and the stop frames together. But the crucial part in this video is the mass media revealing the process of misleading the people and killing them spiritually and physically by monsters of media machines. In the end, this short film leaves a warning of the media and the controlling power behind them.
This followed video explores the political frustrations and mental distress in the South Africa. The author, Penny Siopis, even asked many questions about the parliament in the regime itself. And does it really help the country? There is no answer given in this video. Or this is also the questions given to the public as well.
Immigration
The British Library, an exhibition of more than 6000 cultural books, aims to highlight the impact of immigration on British culture and invite people to join in the discussion of the hybrid cultures in the west. It is hard to say when is the end of the immigration, but different cultures and customs have been brought to the local. And there are some collisions from their traditional behaviour. So how to make a harmonious society will be the next issue for British people.
Overall, these art works are discussing many issues or problems in the history, though no better answer had been given. While, we need to rethink and restructure the knowledge of the past because these are still relevant to each of us. History is made by people. When we have a dialogue with the past, we could look at the future and figure out the way to the future.
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