Like Tate Modern in the past – with added calm
As Tate reopens, Alastair Smart visits the Bankside gallery and is impressed by what he finds
Today, Tate reopens its doors after more than four months in lockdown. The nation’s museums and galleries have been allowed to do so since July 4, with the National Gallery first off the blocks on July 8. So why the delay?
Well, there have been four galleries to Covid-proof, rather than just one (Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives); plus the fact that – unlike the National, where people just look at paintings on walls – Tate boasts newer art, such as installations that need circumnavigating and videos in dark rooms. Art, in other words, that’s not conducive to social distancing.
“It has certainly been a challenge logistically,” says Frances Morris, the director of Tate Modern, who meets me at the entrance to the vast Turbine Hall. This is where all visitors to the gallery will now enter – after having taken the mandatory step of booking their ticket online for a given time slot, and the probable step of waiting outside for 15 minutes (depending on the number of other visitors).
The first artwork you see is Kara Walker’s faux-victorian fountain,
Fons Americanus. This rebuke to the age of empire – the latest of Tate’s annually commissioned Turbine Hall installations – had been meant to come down in April, but will now stay up until November. Visitors are still allowed to walk around it and take selfies beside it, as often as they please. They can even sit down on its edges.
“We were conscious we didn’t want to limit people’s experience any more than is necessary,” says Morris. “They can go around the whole gallery at their own pace and stay as long as they like. There’s also no directive for them to move around rooms only on the left-hand side, say. We want them to maintain a certain freedom.”
A freedom, for example, to find connections between works exhibited near one another – such as a Jackson Pollock and a Lee Krasner – and be able to go back and forth between them without being told by a guard to “move along”.
From the Turbine Hall, one has the choice of two set routes: to visit the main building before crossing a bridge on Level 4 to the Blavatnik building extension, or vice versa. Signs direct you clearly along both routes, and most of the collection remains displayed as it was when Tate Modern closed its doors 131 days ago. Only a handful of small rooms are closed.
Unlike the National, which feels very different in a post-lockdown world, I thought Tate Modern was remarkably similar to how I’ve always found it, albeit with added hand-sanitiser stations and improved lighting. Many areas have recently been relamped.
With fewer visitors, there’s also unprecedented space and calm in which to enjoy art works such as Mark Rothko’s abstract masterpieces, the Seagram Murals. (One can also have a pleasantly quiet look around the big Andy Warhol exhibition, which has had its run extended to November 15.)
A former power station, Tate Modern has the advantage of being bigger than most galleries
– which, broadly speaking, makes social distancing easier and visitor restrictions less necessary. Masks are recommended, rather than compulsory. That said, footfall will only be about 30 per cent of its usual level. There will also be a reduced schedule of (paid-entry) exhibitions for the foreseeable future and only one espresso bar selling refreshments to the whole building. Times are financially going to be tough. Some 300 Tate jobs are said to be at risk, and around a dozen employees were protesting outside the premises as I left. Their argument is that senior management should all take pay cuts before a single low-paid worker is made redundant.
It was a sad note on which to end an otherwise positive visit. Old friends such as Dalí’s Lobster Telephone and Matisse’s The Snail were duly reunited with, and a host of other works – such as Doris Salcedo’s sculptures made from hospital beds – take on new resonance in the Covid-19 era.
Credit to those at Tate Modern for the best reopening job they could have achieved under difficult circumstances. It was like returning to an old haunt, and I am sure will allow visitors to re-engage with art with a renewed enthusiasm.