Tate Modern

    On Wednesday January fifth we visited the Tate Modern after taking a beautiful ride on the London Eye.  You enter the Turbine Hall right when you walk into the museum which has a totally different atmosphere than any museum or gallery I have ever been in.  The huge industrial hall echos with banging hammers as a new exhibit or renovation was taking place.  At the end of the ramp, The Unilever Series featured Ai Weiwei's huge installation Sunflower Seeds stretched across the rest of the length of the floor.  This exhibition was excellent on both a visual and conceptual level.  Since I already viewed the video of this project before the trip, I knew when I saw the piece for the first time that it was made of millions of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds by thousands of workers in Jingdezhen where the project was produced. The mass of seeds is truly overwhelming to see in person, and to think that each one was hand-painting is astonishing.  This was a piece that was designed to take large amounts of people to mass produce the seeds but at the same time individualize them in a way that contrasted industrialization and the very space itself in which they were displayed.  I loved the idea that each piece was part of a whole just like individuals in a society where Chairman Mao controlled China.  Looking at the seeds in the Tate Modern, I almost felt small, for I am just a single person among the masses like the seeds, but strong at the same time that I am unique in my own way.
    We also went to the Paul Gauguin show in the Tate Modern titled the Maker of Myth.  I personally did not love the show.  I find that when I sometimes look at paintings they need to instantly grab my attention purely for their visual attraction for me to love the piece, and I did not feel that most of Gauguin's work was visual appealing.  I really enjoyed his smaller, intricate woodcuts on paper that was in the last room of the exhibit.  I found these simple black and orange prints to be much more interesting that his larger paintings because of their intimate size and framing.  My favorite painting of Gauguin's was actually a tiny one named Tahitian Youth (1890/1903) consisting of watercolor, pencil and ink on paper.  Its subtle color shifts and line design were very fluid and beautiful, and I loved how the piece was cut loosely into a circle and framed as such.  I also thought that his unfinished paintings and sketches were more visually interesting, such as Tahitians (1891) and Tahitian Faces.  The fact that the viewer can still see Gauguin's sketches underneath the painting reveals part of the process, which I have always found appealing.  I enjoy seeing the sketches and studies of artists alongside their finished pieces to see something not always available to the public.
    One of my favorite exhibit throughout the rest of the Tate Modern was Materials on the second floor.  This included large series pieces by artists such as Gerhard Richter and Cy Twombly that created the atmosphere for the entire room through the pieces that hung on the walls.  Gerhard Ritcher's room had six huge canvases that had been scraped down and painted over again that eventually allowing the paint to gather or rub off to reveal new levels.  Cy Twombly's piece included three huge pieces of paper with giant red spirals painted loosely across them, allowing the thin pigment to drip down as well.  Both rooms enclosed the viewer with either a calming or energizing mood because of the size of the work involved.
   I also enjoyed the exhibit Energy and Process that was on the fifth floor.  There were several Earthworks artists displayed in this exhibit, such as Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim.  Smithson had several glass panes placed in nature so that it reflected back on itself and then he photographed this reflection in Ithaca Mirror Trail.  Oppenheim directed a project where a tractor made lines in a seeded field that was photographed from the sky above.  I enjoy viewing Earthworks art because I feel it is so different from a traditional style.