Agency and Complicity in ‘A Special Civic Room’: London’s Tate Modern Turbine Hall

Abstract

Since Tate Modern opened in London in May 2000, it has been notoriously publicly successful, attracting 5.2 million visitors in its first year (instead of the 2 million anticipated) and a steady 4 million a year since then.¹ Its visitor figures make it, it claims, ‘the most popular museum of modern art in the world’ (Appendix: 41–2). Its attractions include the displayed collections of art (most of which offer free entry), but also — at least as importantly for many visitors — its space, perspectives on London, and production of a sense of an empowered public identity. There is the awe-inspiring Turbine Hall and its annual specially commissioned installations; the spectacular views of the River Thames, St Paul’s Cathedral, and the City; the feeling that Tate Modern confirms London as one of the most important world centers of modern art, a cosmopolitan city with enormous, deeply embedded cultural capital; and the sense that Tate Modern simply makes visitors feel good, both individually and as members of a public. However, Tate Modern — and its famous Turbine Hall in particular — has also come in for some significant negative criticism, not least the claim that visitors’ experience of the place — however apparently pleasurable — makes us necessarily complicit with hegemonic ideologies of late capitalism, the celebration of empty spectacle over genuine communication, submission to living under surveillance, and the triumph of the cultural industries which remorselessly commoditize art and cultural practices and are imposed on us in our state of distraction rather than being produced by us in any kind of subjective action.

[The Tate Modern is] a new public realm […] the turbine hall […] a special civic room […]. Like a city, [Tate Modern] is much more than a static architectural structure.

(Ryan: 21, 25, 36)