Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall commission is always a daunting prospect for an artist. Since Louise Bourgeois first occupied the space in 2000, soon after the museum opened, with her towers and a gigantic spider, there have been 22 commissions, some more memorable than others.
We’ve had artificial sunsets and a funfair of slides. We’ve seen piles of ceramic sunflower seeds, a crack in the floor, lots of hanging cloths and knotted ropes, a sound installation, live storytellers, a spatial conundrum, fish floating in the air and a giant femidom-thing. Whatever next? We’ve become familiar with the unfamiliar and expectation now vies with a certain ennui. As well as an invitation, the commission (sponsored by Hyundai since 2015) is also a challenge, as each narrows the formal options for whoever, and whatever, comes next.
How about putting a turbine in the Turbine Hall, and returning the space to its original function as Bankside Power Station? Korean artist Mire Lee’s Open Wound, the 23rd Turbine Hall commission, opens today with a big turbine slung mid-air in the enormous space. It looks like a part disassembled jet engine, rusting and grease-slathered and repurposed, in end-of-the-world Mad Max fashion. Parts of the turbine turn, fitfully, while worryingly biomorphic silicon tubes wind and unwind from its mechanism, swinging lazily in the air and dripping a brownish liquid into a large, canted metal pan on the floor below, where the unnameable liquid collects and slowly solidifies.
As the goo dries around bent-wire armatures, the congealed sheets are taken away to the rear of the space to dry out, before being raised on chains, to hang above our heads and catch the indoor air currents. There are already a few dozen up there. As the commission continues, more and more of these raddled skins will be hoisted up, some higher, some lower, throughout the length of the space. The best thing about Open Wound is the idea of the work as process, Lee’s commission developing as the show continues. But, of course, it’ll just be more of the same.
Various metal barriers and stanchions keep visitors at bay. You want to get a closer look, but the whole assembly at the centre of it all reminds me too much of that terrifying scene in Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien movie when Harry Dean Stanton goes looking for the spaceship’s lost cat in the dripping darkness among the clanking chains and meets the Alien instead. This may or may not be a deliberate reference for Lee, who, two years ago, exhibited her work alongside HR Giger’s Alien Xenomorph in a show in Germany.
Lee’s art aims for the abject and the sorrowful, the frightening and the disgusting. In her installations she has displayed a video of her mother sleeping and, in the same show, appropriated a video, found online, of porn practitioner Veronica Moser, talking about her fixation with excrement. Lee has displayed old cement mixers churning with goo and small, clanking objects, like so many upset stomachs. Now in her mid 30s, she has made sculptures that resemble arrangements of bloody bones and guts, often enlivened by intestinal tubes, leaking lymph and bodily excretions. But, of course, it is all fake. We know this stuff too well. Running into her works at big biennales, it’s the same-old same-old, I’ve often thought. The only thing that worries me is if I’ve got any of her stuff on my clothes or in my hair. Lee’s overcooked abject isn’t abject enough. It is dismal, but not in a good way. It doesn’t even smell.
Lee’s use of everyday and often organic materials harks back to earlier generations of artists who chose to work with similar materials and objects. They did this partly for economic reasons, but also because such materials carry with them a wealth of associations, impermanence not least among them. For instance, there is something forlorn and moving about looking at many of Eva Hesse’s sculptures, 50-odd years after she made them. Hesse’s vessels and stretched latex membranes are now irretrievably rotted, congealed and decaying (and they carry a heavy reek of old rubber). Cigarette-burned and blow-torched, some of Alberto Burri’s diaphanous polythene membranes (also made in the 1960s) have a horrible, damaged quality. You worry about the unseen perpetrator. Joseph Beuys’s congealed lumps of fat, and Gustav Metzger’s nylon sheets destroyed by hydrochloric acid and fire all spoke, indirectly, of the horrors of the second world war.
Artists have frequently turned to the misery of being in the body. Sometimes they have done this to impart some religious lesson or to instruct us in life’s miseries and brevity, and sometimes because, like Francis Bacon, they just like this sort of thing, and even get off on it. But dabbling at the innards and cutting-through-the-skin-to-get-at-the-festering-sores-beneath-that-plague-mankind shtick gets wearying, and it is an artistic gambit of diminishing returns, especially when we have all witnessed so much, by first hand or by proxy, delivered to our homes and on to our devices on an hourly basis. Nowadays it is hard to find Lee’s intimations of mortality much more than kitsch. All that tatterdemalion is like Miss Havisham’s wedding day bunting in Dickens’s Great Expectations, or an army’s faded banners hung in commemoration in a church, or so much Halloween decor, ready to be binned on the first of November.
On a side wall, Tate’s “interpretation panel” tells us that the building is somehow giving birth to these skins, and that the complex histories of industry are awe-inspiring in their violence and scale. “Open Wound invites us to revel in contradictory emotions, from awe and disgust to compassion, fear and love,” the text goes on, for paragraph after paragraph. I don’t mind the comparisons between what Lee has done with miners’ clothes hung up in pithead baths, or that Open Wound raises the ghosts of the building’s past, but being told what to feel always comes across as authoritarian – and somehow a bit desperate.
