Ray Davies
Why I’m easy to love, but impossible to live with
Gazing into the Duveen Galleries at this year’s Tate Britain Commission, your first impression is that the first part of this long and majestic hall has been left completely empty, while the far end is filled with a blizzard of dazzling white neon that irradiates the entire space.
These commissions, which for six months fill the most prominent part of our leading gallery of British art with a single installation by a leading contemporary artist, regularly excite controversy. Last year there was a rather prissy exercise in baroque architecture and dance by Pablo Bronstein, while the 2015 incumbent, Christina Mackie, left far too much of this valuable space utterly empty.
This year’s work, Cerith Wyn Evans’s Forms in Space… by Light (in
Time), is created entirely from neon tubing, a medium which – far from being novel in art, as the Tate claims – has become grossly overused in recent art, from Dan Flavin’s light sculptures to Tracey Emin’s wittering, faux-handwritten pronouncements. Wyn Evans’s installation, however, must be among the most ambitious uses of the galleries to date, involving two kilometres of white neon suspended from the ceiling in apparently random explosions of curves, loops and straight lines. The impression is of walking through and beneath some vast, fizzing neon painting in space. And, while it may appear, at a glance, haphazard, the piece is organised in bursts, lulls and flurries that must, you suspect, have some quasi-musical structure behind them.
Born in 1958, Wyn Evans grew up in Camarthenshire with Welsh as his first language, which might help explain his preoccupation with translation, transcription and encoding – often conceived in terms of light. His 2006 work Astrophotography consisted of flashing chandeliers transmitting Morse code versions of texts by William Blake and the Marquis de Sade, while for the 2003 Venice Biennale, he projected an 18th-century Welsh text over the city in a sevenmile light beam, again in Morse code.
Here, the suspended shapes in Tate Britain’s rotunda – two circles and a 12-point star – will be instantly identifiable to modern art buffs as derived from The Large Glass, the seminal 1916-1923 work by the father of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp. Other visitors my recognise them from opticians’ test panels. Either way, these relatively small flat images have been “translated” into dynamic, monumentally scaled, 3D forms.
The ordered chaos in the third space is, we learn from the accompanying booklet, a transcription of a traditional Japanese Noh theatre performance, with the movements of the dancer’s body rendered in loops and curves, with what look like fragments of the British Rail logo representing stamps of the feet. If Noh’s arcane, ritualised structures make it an endurance test for Western viewers, these are precisely the qualities that would make it compelling to an artist interested in language and comprehension, such as Wyn Evans.
Abstract works are often described by curators as having been “choreographed”, but what we have here is an actual piece of choreography translated into a dazzling piece of aerial light sculpture. What the viewer gains from this knowledge is hard to say. But even without that background element, simply as a purely abstract, physical experience, this is one of the most dynamic and coherent installations seen in this space for some years.