The Ghost in the Machine: Tate Britain, London

The Ghost in the Machine

Tate Britain

26 Feb – 26 April

"And more than echoes talk along the walls." (Alexander Pope)

The Ghost in the Machine presents new interpretations of works of art in the Collections Displays and the Triennial developed by young people aged 16-21 years across London, sculptor Nick Hornby and MOBO winning jazz musician and MC, Soweto Kinch.  If in the traditional academy the Artist makes copies of the master, these interpretations act as fictions, raising questions about authorship and translation. The resulting gallery interventions and audio trail invite visitors to engage with works of art in new ways: an audio guide layered with rifts and beats, the line of a painting extended across an entire gallery, graffitied sketches around a Francis Bacon, and a large white plaster sculpture that you can touch and sit in. 

“To me, interpretation is a keyword. There is an old Hebraic rule, that says: a text only has a value if it is commentated upon, and I consider it as a highly valuable ethical statement: we, as exhibition visitors, artists, curators, writers, citizens even, we have to keep culture alive. Our duty is to react to it. We all have to be actors, somehow, and not those passive customers required by the mechanics of ‘hyper-capitalism’. That is what a show like Altermodern is about: telling you a story, different from what you have been told before. This story starts with a provocative idea: postmodern times are over, let’s invent the new period to come. A curator is someone who, like the African storyteller used to do under his sacred tree, will reinvent the narrative of his village, again and again. Greek tragedy was doing the same. And if I had to sum up the idea behind the Altermodern in a few words, I would only say this: maybe where you come from is not that important. Maybe your identity is still to be found – do your own travel.” 

– Nicolas Bourriaud, Gulbenkain Curator of Contemporary Art, Tate Britain, Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009

“The project name Visual Dialogues is well chosen. It involves a series of exchanges between works of art and audiences. The paintings ‘speak’ to the young participants in the project; they, in turn, produce a form of ‘interpretation’ to help other viewers to ‘hear’ what those works might be saying. The intervention here - the extension of several paintings beyond their frames - plays with ideas of what a modern painting should be or can do. An ambition of modern painters was to resist narrative, to make works of art that were self- contained and autonomous (detached from the real world), to resist creating an illusion, or telling a story. This autonomous work of art is a kind of visual machine, activating through its form and colour the space in which it hangs. The way in which Matthew Smith’s enigmatic, green nude animates the entire room is emphasised by the extension of its horizon line across the expanse of the wall. On the other hand, Francis Bacon’s melancholic painting of his fellow-artist Van Gogh has its self-containedness removed. No longer is the subject a static, enclosed embodiment of solitary artistic identity. The road that was only implied has been imagined and extended, turning his metaphorical journey into something more literal. It is, without doubt, not something Bacon would have done but it shows how works of art can generate ideas well beyond those intended by their makers.”

– Chris Stephens, Curator (Modern British Art) & Head of Displays, Tate Britain

“It is all too easy to look at a painting and start imposing limitations. It feels normal. After all, the artist has already had to make limiting choices: this colour not that, this scene not that, this idea not that. A frame both literal and figurative has gone up and separated what the painting is from what it isn’t. That frame is necessary, of course, or art would be the whole world and you could never fit it inside a gallery. The frame is a good thing, providing focus for artist and viewer. But it can have the worrying effect of making us think there is a “right” and “wrong” way to look at art – the right way being to try to figure out what the artist intended or, even worse, what the art historian or gallery curator has decided for us. I like to think outside the frame, to ask the “wrong” questions, which are often “what if” scenarios. Looking at the Bacon painting Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh IV, I think: What if this painting was part of a cartoon? What if there were bombs going off in the background? What if a cat/a cow/a woman was following the man? What if you made all of the red bits green? What if you could see the guy’s face? These questions draw me right into the picture. What if I stopped asking such questions? That’s one “what if” I never want to have to contemplate.”  

– Tracy Chevalier, Historic Novelist

“The “ghost in the machine” was the dismissive phrase that philosopher Gilbert Ryle used to describe Descartes’ separation of mind and body. How absurd, he thought, to build a theory of reality where the two exist in separate planes but with no explanation of how they interact. Transition from Thinking to Dreaming (2009) raises the same question – what links the abstract with the material? Is it just a bench that you could touch, sit on, possibly even slide along, or a physical manifestation of an abstract shape? That shape is derived from a painting by Edward Wadsworth called Dux et Comes (1932). For Nick Hornby and the Visual Dialogues group, it becomes functional  sculpture, but to me it resembles two pound signs floating in space opposite one another.  Maybe that’s why I’m an economist and not an artist. Money is the ultimate ghost in the machine, a confidence trick that keeps the physical economy moving. If banks can create money out of thin air when they lend it, and the result is new factories, offices and jobs, they can just as easily destroy it by calling in those loans. Sadly our economy is suffering the very tangible consequences of this apparently abstract process. The link between the abstract and the material in this case is our psychology, our confidence – or lack of it – as consumers, investors and savers. The collective result of our individual hopes and fears is enough to transform our whole economy from boom to bust. So we may think our society is obsessed with the material, but it is built on a fragile abstraction. In our globalised economy this destructive cycle is happening around the world. If the postmodern was born out of a loss of faith in the modernist dream, I wonder what the last year means for the ‘altermodern’. It has certainly put an end to any hopes (or fears) that the world is rushing towards a single model of market capitalism. Equally it would be a tragedy if the result was a reversal of globalisation and a withdrawal behind national boundaries. Maybe a more ethical capitalism can emerge from the wreckage. That’s something to think, or dream, about.”

– Rupert Harrison, economic advisor to George Osborne

“If the artist steps back from the painting (to see it clearer) and sees the room, his shirt on the floor, what he’s eaten, the photos of his grand parents, his Starbucks, his politics, his carbon footprint... by spilling out of the frame and onto the walls, I want the viewer to think about how they embody meaning and politics and what they take into a frame.” 

– Nick Hornby, Artist 

Downloads

Original Tate Exhibition Booklet [pdf]

Ghost in the Machine, All quotes [pdf]

Altermodern Manifesto, Nicholas Bourriad [pdf]

Beyond the Pale, Brooke Lynn McGowan [pdf]