Is this the worst Turbine Hall commission yet?
Hyundai Commission Superflex: One Two Three Swing!
Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall has been turned into a cubistic playground by Danish artist collective Superflex. A single length of brilliant orange piping twists and turns through the space, forming a kind of huge rectilinear sculpture hung with three-seater swings, on which the public are invited to, well, swing, with friends, random strangers or simply on their own.
It’s the latest incarnation of Britain’s biggest and most prestigious gallery commission, a single work that fills this spectacular space for six months each year. It follows in the wake of previous hits such as The Weather
Project, fellow Dane Olafur Eliasson’s simulation of the sun going down in 2003, and Ai Weiwei’s millions of porcelain sunflower seeds in 2011.
Rather than simply making a pleasant diversion on a tiring gallery visit, One Two Three Swing! is designed, we are told, to challenge “society’s apathy towards the political, environmental and economic crises of our age”. Apathy, indeed. But we’ll come back to that.
On entering, we find a colossal silver sphere swinging, pendulum-like, overhead, the sloping floor covered in striped carpet with a rippling flow of colour that brings to mind walking on some immense Bridget Riley painting. The colours are derived from those on British bank notes, creating a metaphor for the forces that brought the world to its knees in the 2008 crash. The movements of the overbearing pendulum-sphere above represent the workings of the global finance system, which render the great mass of us powerless or, as the exhibition has it, “apathetic”.
If there’s nothing new in the idea of art that tries to make the world a better place – it’s been a guiding theme in modern art going back to William Morris’s Arts & Crafts movement – Superflex (comprising Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen) are part of a new breed of artist that aims to have a practical effect in the here and now. Previous projects include fuel created from human excrement (very popular with North Korean farmers) and a park in Copenhagen that was designed with social regeneration in mind.
From the “apathy zone” of the striped carpet, we move into the “active zone” of the orange-piping playground. Here, it is hoped, we’ll engage in collective action with people we don’t know, in attempting to synchronise our movements with people on other swings. Three is both the number of artists in Superflex and the number of people they believe is required to initiate collective action.
As we swing, we animate the line of orange – a colour representing energy – as it passes through the hall and out into the world beyond (this is the first of the Turbine commissions to venture outside), where further swings will be added, creating a line of collective energy that can be endlessly extended. If enough of us swing together, the work’s logic has it, we might just tilt the pendulum of capital off its axis – though it would, I gather, require the equivalent of the population of China getting involved to make this a reality.
In contrast with Superflex’s practical projects, this is a whimsical exercise in social empowerment that would appear simplistic if it were aimed at primary-school children. The public will, no doubt, have fun messing about on the swings and lounging on the stripy carpet, but far from making us question the contradictions of capitalism, the work presents us with a collection of grandiose but arbitrary and essentially shallow metaphors that we are supposed to accept at face value.
The driving notion of “apathy”, meanwhile, feels misconceived. The fact that people are responding to the world’s problems with solutions that Superflex doubtless disapproves of – such as populism and nationalism – doesn’t make them “apathetic”.
Superflex are well meaning social engineers posing as artists. They aim to empower the gallery-goer, but this large-scale pseudo-experiment, possibly the worst Turbine Hall commission yet, ends up treating us as hapless drones, in much the same way as the capitalism that Supeflex abhors.