Pop Life @ The Tate Modern

If there is one thing in this world that I truly HATE it is going to art exhibitions when they are busy. You get jostled and poked and you feel like an idiot for saying sorry all the time. You just can't concentrate on the art. That's why I try to go on Monday mornings, when it's quiet. Not always possible as with the recent Pop life exhibition at the Tate Modern. Now I'm sure it's easy to find reviews for this exhibition all over. I'm going to briefly review it and then get on with the two points I want to make, or as has been suggested to me one point and one vendetta. Oh, and here's the URL to the exhibition site if your interested as well as the guardian review:

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/poplife/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/oct/04/pop-life-tate-modern-cumming *

I enjoyed it (apart from the poking/shoving/£11 pounds to get in with student discount). There, at first seemed to be great clarity and then it all went to pot (enjoyable pot, but it may have been clearer with fewer people). Part of the aim of the exhibition seemed to be to shock you. So every time you got to a new horror you were slightly more desensitized to it. The Koons room was quite an eye popper. Enter room, become confronted with a five feet high vagina with (and I have spent some time doing the maths here) a fourteen feet penis tucked snugly inside. The following corridor of rather more intimate images of hairy lesbians masturbating was quite palatable after that. Then there was a room of hodge-podge stuff, which may have made some sense had it not all been busy. Then a room with a small tv showing a hooker fuck some one. Then a room with a stuffed dead horse in the middle. Lastly there was....Kirstin Dunst on a large screen singing I'm turning Japanese.



This was then stuck in my head...well up until New years eve when it was replaced by 'We will all go together' by (I want to say Leonard Nimoy for reasons not known to man nor beast) Tom Leher. But this is beside the point. The word RANDOM!!! flashed in front of my eyes quite a lot.

Now the back ground is over, to the point. It all makes better sense when you take into account that the exhibition was supposed to be called 'sold out' until Damien Hirst kicked up a stink (his works are in the confused room) as he felt it slanderous. So the whole exhibition which is about artists who have sold their souls and their principal to money and fame has tried to re-brand it's self to be about popular art figures and art as commerse. Hurst isn't popular he's hated, mostly for selling principals for money (so go figure). As a result the way he's represented in the exhibition is as a Worhol wanna be. The lay out of his works mirrors the lay out of some of Worhols work earlier on (the pieces taken from his massive Sotheby's auction, which is possibly the only time I've admired his audacity). Now Worhol reveled in the fact that he sold out, he used it to take the piss out of the people he sold himself to. His legacy is still here today in advertising and to a lesser extent in hated production artist Hurst (I really don't like him, I have met the smarmy son of a bitch so have more than a media influenced view, and his coffee for the record was not cold it was at 88C, 3C hotter than it should have been grrrr [I get petty when I'm cross and use thermometers]). So point one (aka vendetta) is I hate Damien Hurst and I loved the way a curator has managed to take the piss out of him. Fairly long way to go about it I know. Sorry.

The other point is to do with the merchandise and how cunning some of it was and how annoying it was in other ways. They had a pop up shop in the middle that sold internal exclusives, so cunning and glam a Keith Harring room with every thing angled round slightly to draw your eye to period reproduction T's and to the booth where you could buy them along with a wide collection of pins. Now while the pop up shop has become a common feature in the modern art exhibition. This one made you want stuff and due to the nature of the exhibition hate your self for it. Now that is marketing! The second issue again makes more sense with a little insider knowledge. The Tate was bullied into doing the exhibition, and I mean really didn't want it. This was shown in the relatively low amount of merchandise for such large exhibition. What is even more sad is that the week before the exhibition was due to start The Tate Modern received delivery of a very large number of hello kitty vibrators. Which were sent back. They bottled, it would have made the exhibition notorious, legendary. But they decided to be politically correct with merchandise where the exhibition was not. It remains a fantastic and comedic farce of it's self held back by the blundering nature of corporation, mass market and government funding.


They Sold Out.



*Please note that the observer was a supporting partner in the exhibition and I feel that their reveiw while comprehensive is strongly biased. Also be aware that comments I have made in regard to lay out ect are based on my observation notes at the time and that I didn't note everything, I had other peoples elbows in my ears, I thought the whole point of timed tickets was to prevent twenty odd people from being in the same room of the exhibition. As a result they may not have been interpreted as intended by the curator and associated bodies. Knowledge of the curatorial process comes from a lecturer at St Martins; Emanuele she rocks by the way and her visual culture lecture series.