Sarah Snider
posted 26 June 2007

Focusing on ten megacities and five interpretive urban frameworks, the Tate’s Global Cities exhibition juxtaposes the simple fact that cities are home to 50% of people, to the actual conditions of the city, as lived by the inhabitants on an everyday basis. Roughly, the exhibition asks whether talking about 'the city' itself is a valid way to understand the lives of half of the world’s population, or whether it is instead a representational space where people express their own needs, desires, identifications and differences.

Using data co-ordinated by Brian Moser at Enterprise LSE Cities, the purpose-built walls of the exhibition are coated in appliqué statistics offering a descriptive understanding of the situation of the city. The categories of size, speed, form, density and diversity are not exhausted (nor exhaustive), but certain pinpointed figures tend to illuminate a whole host of phenomena. Although slightly problematic in its comparisons across vastly differing entities, the representations tend on the comprehensive side. A multiplicity of maps – 3D, topographical, photographic and proportionate – complements the individual statistics to provide an understanding of cities in their social, if not economic and political, realities.

But this is not the only claim to reality. The lived experience of city-zens surely opens the window when the door statistically shuts. Curators Ricky Burdett and Sheena Wagstaff have modified the original exhibition, presented at the Venice Biennale last year, to include video and photographic works that illustrate some of the statistics in human terms. Additionally, six commissioned installations add, with varying degrees of insight, to the site-specificity of London as a venue. Nigel Coates’ 'Mixtacity' obviously reflects London’s obsession with DIY, incorporating spools of thread, sweets, razors, a shoe, cheap souvenirs and digital cameras into his model of the Thames Gateway. Terms like ‘playful’ and ‘eye candy’ come to mind. The piece begs the question of what we are to do while professional architects turn London into an Olympic Candyland. If architects are allowed to be utopian, is this the utopia we really want?

Nils Norman’s 'Bus Shelter 2015', 'Be Creative or Die' and 'ill-Logo' seemed a bit more humble in questions. Bright orange designer bus stops with gardens on top appear to be a way of thinking about improving the quality of life in the city by providing a sense of curious enjoyment. However, the originality of the project is somewhat suspect: as most East London bus riders know, colourful potatoes cleverly positioned on bus shelters have already brought this idea to fruition. This commission could be seen as a sanitised version of previous guerrilla art projects.

The 'Edible Estates' project orchestrated by Fritz Haeg comes as a very practical social project. Many people talk about community gardens, but not many people are doing it. The estate garden set up by him in Southwark, locatable with directions stamped on one’s hand, shows that there is something everyone can do to have a direct impact on, and also enjoy, their immediate environment. In today’s megacities, we can hear the distant echo of Voltaire’s ‘Il faut cultiver votre jardin’.

Throughout the exhibition lurks the inevitable question, ‘But is it art?’ News correspondents and critics alike asked the same of Carsten Holler’s slides recently featured in the Turbine Hall. Indeed, this is a recurrent interrogation of much contemporary art. Answers to this question vary. A few respondents immediately dismiss it. Some say, ‘No, but I like it’. Curators tend to give elusive answers, claiming an artistic value in the object through its use of space, or its emotive and alterative effects. Enthusiasts generalise the piece, exclaiming, ‘Yes! And now all slides are art’.

The distinction between art and non-art highlighted by these responses attests to differing epistemological interpretations of art as either for art’s sake, immediately recognisable and laudable, or as art for social, political or democratic ends. Neither of these interpretations offers an acceptable practical platform for the categorisation and critique of contemporary art. As many contemporary artworks have shown us, the difference between art and life is not a readable through objects themselves. We can’t ask what art is, but we can ask what art does. There is action and intentionality in art: art becomes art only after choices have been made. In terms of a specific work, this is in the hands of the artist; in the case of an exhibition, as the Tate has proclaimed extensively over the years, these choices are in the hands of the curators.

In this case, Burdett and Wagstaff have explicitly chosen to make this a very socially oriented exhibition. At the same time, they have done an impressive job making this exhibition fit into the Tate Modern’s artistic mission. The video work specifically has added artistic currency to an exhibition that was, at the outset, wholly architectural. Francis Alÿs’ video 'Railings' (2004) creates a particularly sonic representation of urban defences, with the rapping of a stick against the borders and boundaries that form our fences and cages. Split across three screens, the protagonist walks through the streets dragging his stick along, and the death rattle of Regency London continuously resynchronises itself, bringing about ever-changing rhythms. In contrast, Eva Koch’s 'NoMad' (1998) shows the traversal of a natural boundary, as people make their daily pilgrimage to the mosque across a thin land bridge only accessible at certain hours of the day. Perched precariously between the waves, they negotiate a passage that is more imagined than practically extant.

The photography as well attempts to provide a direct visual pathway to people’s everyday experiences of and in the city. Kendell Geers’ series 'Suburbia '(1999) captures forms of urban insecurity by depicting forms of security used by the citizens of Johannesburg. An impressive constellation of alarms and CCTVs adorn the multi-coloured dwellings of the megalopolis, not unlike the work of Sweet Dreams Security in London. Interestingly enough, the London-based curators chose to include this piece in the section on diversity, leaving Alÿs’ piece in the section on form. This differential emplacement belies an invisibility of London’s security measures, as arising out of a merely formal consideration rather than as a conscious response to insecurity.

Andreas Gursky’s 'Copan' (2002) also inhabits the diversity section. The view of a massive tower block juxtaposes an external formal unity to an internal functional diversity, demonstrating that people use their space in many different ways. However, unique appropriations of imposed structures does not mean that people should always have to learn to ‘make do’ with faceless dwellings. At best it says their requirements and needs should be better understood, at worst it shoes how difficult this task can be to manage.

Managing the variety of possible uses of space seems to be something that Pentagram, the exhibition designers, grappled with extensively. Unfortunately, the design they developed seems to have little to do with the great hall it inhabits. Perhaps they felt the need to build walls in order to display all of their relevant statistics, perhaps the need is more architectural-existential in nature. Either way, the exhibition feels like it could be anywhere. Shouldn’t architects have a better conception of the use of space than to build up wall after wall in the vast expanse of the Turbine Hall? Maybe this is just one of many underlying tensions between art and architecture. We can only hope that these tensions and their products as seen through exhibitions like Global Cities – creative, clumsy, or outrageous as they may be – will further our understanding of the relation between social and aesthetic concerns.

Till 27 August 2007