fri 29/03/2024

When will it end? Dust continues to spoil fun for visitors to Tate Modern | reviews, news & interviews

When will it end? Dust continues to spoil fun for visitors to Tate Modern

When will it end? Dust continues to spoil fun for visitors to Tate Modern

Three days after its closure, and just a few days after opening, Tate Modern is still to make an announcement over the future of Ai Weiwei's interactive Turbine Hall installation. Will the closure of the dust-emitting artwork be permanent? Or are the Tate perhaps thinking of issuing dust masks to the public, which may, in fact, add a thrilling "danger zone" dimension to the experience?

It may be remembered that Tate Modern faced similar fears when it opened a decade ago. With the high number of visitors, it was suggested that the untreated wooden floors were creating enough dust to cause long-term damage to the paintings. But health and safety fears have also dogged previous Turbine Hall commissions:  in 2006, injuries were reported from visitors hurtling down Carsten Höller's slide (see below) and the following year people were tripping over Doris Salcedo's 167-metre floor crack.

Contemporary art lovers may like their art to be edgy and dangerous. But just how dangerous?

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Minimalist installation speaks volumes at Tate Modern

One is so used to encountering spectacle in the Turbine Hall that visitors may feel distinctly underwhelmed by Ai Weiwei's minimal installation, the 11th Unilever Commission at Tate Modern. There appears at first to be nothing at all to see: the work, which resembles a huge blanket of ash by the time you reach the stairs to the bridge, is the same colour as the surrounding pale grey walls.

But the installation is in fact made up of one hundred million tiny "pebbles" of porcelain, each individually painted to resemble a sunflower seed - and no two are the same. Made in Jingdezhen, a city known as the porcelain capital of China because it once manufactured high-quality pottery for the imperial court, it took 1,600 workers two-and-a-half years to manufacture the number the artist needed (they were paid above the Chinese minimum wage, and the work apparently saved the city from bankruptcy).

seed_09Ai Weiwei is an overtly political artist. A keen communicator on Twitter in a country where all Western networking sites are banned, Ai's artistic endeavours consistently present a challenge to the state. And this work is no different. During the famine years under Mao, sunflowers were one of the few reliable sources of food. For Ai, they symbolise the Chinese people. But there is an uncomfortable ambivalance in that symbol: sunflowers also respresent loyalty to Mao. The dictator liked to represent himself as the sun, and his followers as sunflowers. Looked at piece by piece, each seed shows its individuality, its sense of uniqueness.

The work is powerfully politically resonant, but one mustn't forget that the installation is also meant to offer a sensory and immersive experience. Crunching the tiny porcelain pebbles underfoot feels like walking unsteadily along a shingle beach, and you can run the cool pebbles through your fingers. Children will surely delight in the installation, though, so far, there have been no health and safety announcements regarding the danger to small children of swallowing the pieces. The Tate, after all, may be nervous after a woman pursued legal action following an injury on Carsten Höller's slide in 2006.


  • The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei can now be viewed only from the viewing gantry at Tate Modern until further notice. The work is due to remain in place until 2 May 2011

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Comments

Why not call in an engineer? There would seem to be plenty of ways of reducing dust - coating the seeds in lacquer, misting the installation to bring down the dust, fans and filtering to absorb it..

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