The new Tate Turbine Hall installation by Ai Weiwei reminds me of another Tate Turbine Hall installation, shown in the photos below.
Like Weiwei’s installation this is a very low-lying piece of work, made out of a very large number of similar elements. This time it’s not artificial sunflower seeds though, it’s flowers.
It’s called Crocus Carpet and it consists (as you can hopefully see in the photo below), of the whole floor of the gallery being turfed over and planted with crocuses (apart from the pleasant pathways between the flowers). Art is often concerned with questioning one’s perceptions, and that’s exactly what this work does.The sensation of strolling through what feels for all the world like an area of parkland while actually being inside a huge cathedral-like industrial building is unsettling and disorientating. At the time of my visit several people were sitting on specially installed benches admiring the flowers – and eating sandwiches. I didn’t realise that you were allowed to do that sort of thing in art galleries.
Tate Modern Turbine Hall installation: Crocus Carpet
Crocus Carpet doesn’t only make you question your perceptions because of the fact that it’s an outdoor space that’s been transported indoors though. It also does so because the crocuses aren’t crocuses at all. Here’s a close-up photo of them.
Some of the crocuses in Tate Modern's Crocus Carpet
That’s right. They’re not crocuses. They’re darts.
Here’s one copied from the catalogue.
A crocus from the Turbine Hall's Crocus Carpet
As the artist says “The installation explores concepts of reality, illusion, perception and deception by utilising the dissonance arising from the similarity in appearance and the contrast in nature between crocus flowers and darts.”It sounds a bit pretentious to be honest, but then that’s artists for you. I think it’s meant to be something about the difference between the soft, warm nature of the flowers and the hard, aggressive nature of darts.The artist goes on to say that the work “is anchored to deeper currents of unreality than are evident simply by observing and interacting with the piece.” I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean. It smacks of obscurantism to me. I’ll try to find out and mention it later.
Apart from the usual caveat about contemporary art’s need to over-intellectualise itself, it’s an excellent piece of thought provoking and engaging conceptual work.
The work also explores areas of reality and unreality because the work actually never existed at all. It was, and still is, a fabrication within the mind of the artist himself. Or so I’m told.
