Classified
Tate Britain, London
Stuck in the centre of a large wall in Classified is what looks like a perfectly ordinary receipt from Morrisons supermarket. It is one of the art works recently bought by the Tate for its permanent collection and, as such, represents the concerns of artists working today. From the accompanying label you learn more about this absurd-looking artwork – discovering, for example, that the perfectly ordinary goods listed on the receipt were passed through the checkout in a carefully orchestrated order and that the label, mundane as it is, represents a mythical sort of still life in which the buyer selected the objects while leaving the viewer to imagine the image. The work, by super-conceptualist Martin Creed, as usual, expects the visitors to do most of the work, to ponder the possibilities of a trip to buy groceries being part of a voyage of discovery.
Creed is adept at seeing the creative potential in the ordinary and everyday. Another room is filled with metronomes, beautifully made machines used by practicing musicians to mark out time and tempo. Here a sequence has been devised in which each of the pendulums has been adjusted to measure out a different tempo, filling the room with the tick tock of regular beats that, when heard together, create a disturbing and unnerving sound. Clocks were conventionally a device used by artists to indicate the shortness of life, of time passing. In this installation, like the irregular beating of a heart, the instinct is to escape rather than contemplate.
In a different mode is Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig, a vast cupboard, built to resemble an old-fashioned museum cabinet, filled with objects recovered from the banks of the Thames at low tide. Over a period of several months, Dion scoured this rich source for the fragments and detritus of times past and present, assembling them in an order of his own devising in the cabinet. On glass-fronted shelves stand old bottles, rusty containers and such like, while in the drawers, which visitors can open, are rows of objects that may be similar, such as parts of old clay pipes and shards of pottery handles. In addition to such evocative objects are brightly coloured plastic containers, adding a jarring if contemporary note to this seeming wallow in nostalgia.
A concern with the past, it seems, requires tempering with the virtually indestructible rubbish of today.
One of the more surprising gallery rooms, created by the Chapman brothers, is filled with what look like a series of ethnographic heads. At first sight in the darkly lit interior, they look convincingly ancient, their grinning, stylised, mask-like faces taking us literally and metaphorically into another world. A closer look, however, suggests that these are all pastiches of modern society, rendering such icons as McDonalds as part of our ethnic heritage. Ever adept at holding a mirror up to society, the Chapmans’ satire on the desire to collect and classify takes us into murky and unsavoury worlds.
Classified focus on the way artists use ordering systems in their work, exploring how our need to collect, order and arrange affects our perception of the world, highlighting the inherent instability of meaning. With works by Damien Hirst, Rebecca Warren and Simon Starling (who sourced aluminium ore, rendered it into metal from which he built part of a bicycle), Classified is a useful indicator of both what catches the attention of the Tate curators and of some of the highways and byways of artist’s concerns today. Some challenge, some amuse, some enlighten, all provoke.
Emmanuel Cooper
