LONDON — When the Tate Modern opened its sleek glass doors in May 2000, its directors and curators expected around two million people in the first year — an ambitious number for a contemporary art museum.

Five million came.

To date, more than 56 million visitors have passed through the massive industrial spaces of the Tate Modern, transformed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron from a disused power station into a cultural center that has altered the nature and expectation of the museum-going experience, making it as much a tourist attraction as an art destination.

On Wednesday, the Tate Modern will open a new set of doors. They lead off the Turbine Hall into three enormous underground concrete cylinders, former oil tanks that once powered the refinery and held a million gallons of the viscous black gold. Known as the Tanks, they will become the first exhibition spaces in a major museum permanently dedicated to exhibiting performance, installation and experimental film.

The Tanks’ opening, heralded by a 15-week festival of performance and installation art that is part of the London 2012 festival, is phase one of a larger extension that should be completed by 2016. Also by Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron, it will include what Mr. Herzog described in a telephone interview as “a pyramidal shaped building” set on top of the tanks, adding further education and gallery spaces.

The Tanks, said Mr. Herzog, are something quite different.

“They have something archaeological about them; it’s like discovering something in nature and you step aside and look at it, recognize its beauty,” he said. “We felt very aware that this aspect of a found space had a real quality for performing arts. We wanted them to look like they had always been like that, not as if they were “architecture,” so our goal was simply to find the least intrusive way to treat them that would preserve their rawness.”

That rawness was important, as an alternative setting for the museum to show and experience art, said Chris Dercon, the director of the Tate Modern.

“We need new, dark spaces for the kind of art that came into being in the 60s,” he said. “Artworks involving projection, performance, participatory events where the spectator is part of the art. Every big museum has a black box theater, but very few have these heterogenous spaces, where anything could happen.”

Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Museums, said the Tate had been aware of the Tanks’ potential from the outset.

“When we first went into them in the mid-90s, we saw the incredible possibilities of those raw spaces, which were closer to the kind of environments that artists were actually working in than the white cube space of the traditional gallery. What developed later was a realization that they should be used for performance.”

That realization speaks of one of the major museum currents over the last decade: the growing acceptance of performance art and experimental film work as valid elements of contemporary art-making rather than fringe activities.

“A few years ago performance art was seen as marginal,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in a 2007 review of Performa 07, a biennial performance festival started two years earlier by RoseLee Goldberg, who wrote a seminal early history of the form in 1979. “Dealers couldn’t sell it,” Mr. Cotter continued, “museums couldn’t show it; critics didn’t know what to say. It was some hippie-dippie remnant of the 1960s and ’70s, when art was ‘experimental,’ which meant you couldn’t prove it was bad or good.”

By 2010, when the Museum of Modern Art presented a four-decade survey, “The Artist is Present,” of Marina Abramovic’s work, there was no longer any doubt that there was a broad public ready to accept the idea of crossover, non-genre specific live art — and even more people were prepared to be fascinated by the charismatic Ms. Abramovic. During the show’s three-month run, the artist sat every day, unmoving, for seven hours, in the atrium of the museum as a thronging public queued to sit opposite her in silence.

“I think there is a reason why we all want to have encounters with people in the flesh at a time when we have an increasingly disembodied relationship with the world through digital media,” said Charlotte Higgins, the chief arts writer of The Guardian newspaper. “And surely artists’ increasing attraction to performance is a backlash against the sheer commodification of art that has happened over the last decade. The idea of contemporary art as part of the luxury goods market is not an appealing idea, especially in light of the financial chaos that we are living with.”

There is also the fact that artists themselves have become increasingly comfortable, over the last decade, with a blurring of disciplinary line. The trend has been clear to anyone involved in dance, which has increasingly found its way into museums over the last few years, and seen choreographers like William Forsythe, Trisha Brown, Jérôme Bel and Boris Charmatz straddle the lines between theatrical performance and installation, conceptual art and participatory experience.

“I think younger audiences are much more open to crossover than was the case 25 years ago,” said Mr. Serota, the museum director. “The growth of digital products, Internet and e-mail, interactivity and blogs have stimulated an appetite for dialogue and discussion, and an engagement with performance. And artists are spending more time in conversation with peers in other areas because they have more access to the work.”

The Tate Modern itself, and its mega-scale Turbine Hall installations, is quite possibly another element in the equation. Whether visitors basked in the virtual warmth of Olafur Eliasson’s fake sun in his “Weather Project,” or laid themselves upon Ai Weiwei’s field of 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds (until the dust stirred up was decreed a health hazard), the collective, interactive experience of these artworks has generated its own momentum and a new set of norms for the museum-going experience.

When performance art first emerged as a major artistic current in the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, its very nature seemed antithetical to incorporation by an institution — partly because the artist’s medium was largely his or her own body, partly because the idea of a time-based experience meant that the act couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be reproduced.

“People have had this idea that performance art is all about physical endurance, pain, nudity,” said Ms. Goldberg in a telephone interview from New York. “And it was that in the 1960s and 70s, when it was about breaking social rules and reflecting social issues. But one of the reasons I created Performa was to commission new pieces and introduce a new idea of what performance art could be. Contrary to what people often think, it’s actually a very accessible form. Bodies have a narrative, everyone has a comment.”

For the duration of the festival, which runs until Oct. 28, two of the tanks (the third is used for offices) will be given over to performance work by more than 20 artists, including a reworking of the choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s 1982 “Fase”; a three-week residency by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera; an examination of ground-breaking figures in experimental film; and, in the space known as the East Tank, a commission from the Korean performance artist Sung Hwan Kim.

In an adjacent space, known as the Transformer Galleries, the museum will show Lis Rhodes’s “Light Music 1975” and a recent acquisition; Suzanne Lacy’s “Crystal Quilt 1987,” a film of 430 women over the age of 60 that the artist describes in an essay for the museum catalogue as “a tableau vivant,” raising questions about the perceptions of older women.

The desire to preserve a history of performance work and incorporate it into an institutional memory isn’t without its opponents.

“There’s never a way that you could repeat the original thing; it just can’t be done,” said Joan Jonas, an important 1960s figure in conceptual and video art, in a 2010 interview.

“No one would say that a ballet performed in the 1920s shouldn’t be revived,” said Mr. Serota, in response to these observations. “Some of the most exciting artistic practice of the last few decades has been in performance and installation work, but it has been available to relatively few. The great thing now is that we have the chance to both recover the past, and the space to create something new.”

 

Photographs courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, at the Guggenheim Museum, with portraits here from Belgium, Croatia, England, Poland and Ukraine, as well as New York and South Carolina. More Photos »

 

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 5, 2012

Rineke Dijkstra has enormous faith in the power of two things: youth and the camera. In her best work this 53-year-old Dutch artist uses photography and sometimes video to coax out the emotional subtleties and raw energy that are special to children, adolescents and young adults, with grave, revelatory and sometimes ecstatic results.

 

At other times her portraits are more opaque, which can yield another kind of magnetism: We see pictures of resistance to photography in which Ms. Dijkstra’s subjects hold on to their secrets, showing us a more armored youthful vulnerability.

Both kinds of images can be found in Ms. Dijkstra’s richly affecting 20-year midcareer survey at the Guggenheim Museum. Organized jointly with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — and overseen by the curators Sandra S. Phillips of that museum and Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim — it brings together more than 70 color photographs and 5 video works. They create an engrossing meditation on the anxieties, pride and tumult of youth and the emergence of the self, and also on the degree to which the camera can capture these rites of passage.

Ms. Dijkstra studied photography at art school in Amsterdam and spent a few years working commercially, taking corporate portraits and images for annual reports — activity that left her frustrated. She felt that her subjects remained hidden behind social and professional masks and habits of self-presentation, while she sought a greater emotional intensity.

A serious injury gave Ms. Dijkstra needed time to think: five months in bed followed by physical therapy that culminated in swimming. One day in June 1991, toward the end of her recovery, she photographed herself immediately after swimming a grueling 30 laps. She thought that fatigue would lend the photograph an emotional immediacy. It did.

That self-portrait, which shows the artist in a dripping bathing suit, looking winded and slightly bowed but staring defiantly at the camera, is in the show. Drawing from traditional portraiture and postmodern setup photography, it signals the beginning of Ms. Dijkstra’s work as an artist, in particular her tendency to photograph the young, who are less practiced at self-presentation.

Echoing the swimming pool image, she began photographing teenagers in similar moments of physical exposure, in swimsuits on the beach. She then sought out situations of genuine stress or momentous change, as in her large head shots of young Portuguese toreros just after emerging from the bullring, their faces bloodied and garments torn, their eyes glowing with triumph and relief; or her full-length photographs of dazed young mothers standing naked with their newborns in their arms, like no-frills, modern-day Madonnas.

Ms. Dijkstra is member of a prominent generation of European photographers that includes Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, all Germans. But it is often said, and it is true, that her work is less glamorous and more human and frankly expressive than theirs.

Moreover, Ms. Dijkstra uses photography in a way that few of her contemporaries do: as a kind of pivot between portrait painting and reality — that is, between completely hand-formed and therefore fictive pictures of real people and real people themselves. Her photographs adopt some formal aspects of painting, but their subjects are also much more present and unmediated in realistic detail and emotional mood.

The pivoting nature of Ms. Dijkstra’s images is clear in the first gallery of the Guggenheim show, which is distributed somewhat awkwardly through four of the museum’s tower galleries adjoining the rotunda. It begins with an imposing selection of the beach portraits (1992-94) that established Ms. Dijkstra’s reputation: the full-length, nearly life-size color photographs of teenagers and slightly younger children taken at ocean’s edge in the United States, Poland, Britain, Ukraine and Croatia.

The monumental isolation of the figures is enhanced by low-angle shots, along with frontal poses and the austere, slightly abstract background bands of beach, water and sky, all of which echo the full-length portraits of Goya, Hals and Manet. This sense of form and formality contrasts markedly with the pictures’ contemporary casualness — the exposed flesh and intimations of fun and sun — even as it is confirmed by the prevailing seriousness and subtle anticipatory anxiety.

Some subjects, like a Ukrainian youth in a red Speedo-type swimsuit, are rawboned and angular; they have not grown into their bodies. A tall, lanky girl on a Polish beach has full hips but a flat chest; her pale green bathing suit is wet only up to the waist, suggesting the upward progress of puberty. A more mature blond girl in a silky orange two-piece in Hilton Head Island, S.C., has mustered makeup, jewelry and an elaborate hairdo worthy of a local teenage beauty contest.

Speaking about the beach portraits in an interview, Ms. Dijkstra hit the nail on the head when she said, “They showed what we don’t want to show anymore but still feel.” Looking at these pictures, we understand that the emotional vulnerability of youth is not so much outgrown as hidden.

Time, change and the lack of change are among Ms. Dijkstra’s themes, which she often emphasizes by photographing the same person over time. In a series of seven half-length portraits shot over three years, we track the maturation of a teenager named Olivier, starting with two images from July 21, 2000, the day he joins the French Foreign Legion, has his head shaved and dons fatigues. Over the next five images, as he appears in uniforms or sweaty T-shirts, his expression remains amazingly, almost frighteningly, constant and, in a way, young, even as he hardens and fills out, progressing from boy to man.

A fuller transformation is revealed in the same gallery by a series of 11 images taken between 1994 and 2008 that follow a young Bosnian refugee named Almerisa into adolescence and beyond, to motherhood. Always shown seated in a chair, Almerisa becomes tall and gangly, then womanly and, according to some writers, more assimilated.

More transfixing, however, are the subtle and not so subtle changes in her face and, it seems, her attitude. As she tries out different makeup and hair colors, her visage gains a palpable brittleness, becoming slightly common. In the final image she is shown with her infant; corny as it may sound, her face has regained some of the softness apparent in the first images from her childhood.

In Ms. Dijkstra’s videos the passage of time is, as might be expected, even more present, but in remarkably different ways. At one end of the spectrum is the near motionless quiet of “Ruth Drawing Picasso,” a wonderful six-minute portrait that may be as close to still photography as video can get but is much more revealing.

It shows a young schoolgirl seated on the floor of the Tate Liverpool completely absorbed in copying a Picasso painting (that is never shown) into her sketchbook. In her subtle shiftings of gaze, expression and position, Ruth comes across as an immensely likable, self-sufficient child whose existence brightens your view of the future.

In contrast to Ruth’s stillness is the sometimes ecstatic energy found in Ms. Dijkstra’s videos of teenagers in dance clubs: a two-channel projection from 1996-97, “Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK/Mystery World, Zaandam, NL,” and the four-channel installation “The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK,” from 2009.

In both Ms. Dijkstra once more presents her subjects in formally controlled circumstances, against white seamless backgrounds and shot mostly at three-quarter length. In “Buzz Club” the subjects mostly hang out: They smoke, chew gum and drink beer (often simultaneously) while swaying to the music and largely ignoring the camera. But one young woman in a white dress that reveals her midriff is an exception; as the music’s beat becomes irresistible, she locks eyes with the camera and dances her heart out, to riveting effect.

Her generous performance may have inspired the “Krazyhouse” video, for which Ms. Dijkstra invited selected clubgoers to dance before her camera to their favorite music. Again, their performances vary greatly in generosity or, put another way, in the degree to which the music (and the camera) is resisted or surrendered to. But when they cut loose, as do Simon and Dee, it is hard not to be enthralled, and grateful to Ms. Dijkstra for capturing such powerful flashes of human potential.

“Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective” continues through Oct. 8 at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street; (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org.

 A version of this review appeared in print on July 6, 2012, on page C19 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s Hiding In Plain Sight.

By TED LOOS

Published: June 28, 2012

SOME time in the mid 1970s Dorothy Lichtenstein stopped by her husband’s studio on the Bowery one day after lunch, expecting to find him at work on a new painting.

 But instead of creating, the Pop master Roy Lichtenstein was intent on an act of destruction.

Using a matte knife, Lichtenstein — who had long been a household name for his Benday dot paintings of the 1960s — was slashing away at several earlier works, small and colorful abstractions dating to the late ’50s.

“He had dug them out of somewhere and was just cutting them up,” Ms. Lichtenstein recalled recently. “So his assistant and I yelled, ‘Stop!’ ”

They managed to grab a few of the paintings and tucked them away. Now three of them, lent by Ms. Lichtenstein from her large trove of her husband’s works, are appearing in “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective,” a major exhibition of work by the artist, who died in 1997, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until Sept 3.

“In a way I’m hesitant to lend them since Roy was destroying them,” Ms. Lichtenstein, 72, said, seated in the living area of the large West Village complex, created from several buildings, that serves as her New York residence and also houses her husband’s last studio and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, which she started to preserve the legacy of her husband, whom she married in 1968.

Ms. Lichtenstein added that she assumed he simply wasn’t happy with the early pieces, but that they may round out the public’s perception of his work.

“I think it’s good to have them there,” she said. “He wasn’t someone who suddenly emerged fully formed in 1961. He had a somewhat tortured career as an artist before that. He used to describe putting his works on the roof of his old car, driving in from Ohio and going from gallery to gallery.”

Merely by saving them in the first place, Ms. Lichtenstein helped shape the Chicago show, which features more than 170 works and will eventually travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate Modern in London and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

But her influence is felt more pervasively too, since she lent dozens more works for the exhibition from her personal holdings, which number in the hundreds. And the foundation, of which Ms. Lichtenstein is the president, also lent pieces to the show.

Flipping through the catalog and referring to the lender identifications, she said cheerily, “Where it just says ‘private collection,’ that’s usually me.”

The organizers of the retrospective said that Ms. Lichtenstein’s participation was crucial.

“The biggest thing for us in the beginning is that she blessed this project,” said James Rondeau, chairman of the contemporary department at the Art Institute, who organized the show with Sheena Wagstaff, chairwoman of modern and contemporary work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “We wouldn’t have been able to move ahead without it.”

“A lot of people have come to her and wanted to do this,” he added. “Sometimes she has encouraged smaller shows, but nothing on this scale.”

Ms. Lichtenstein, who spends much of her year in Florida and the Hamptons, confirmed that there is no shortage of requests to lend crossing her desk. She often parts with one or two pieces here and there.

But she had been feeling that her husband was due for a “really major show”; his last full-on retrospective was in 1993, at the Guggenheim Museum, when Lichtenstein was still alive.

The Chicago show has many of the Pop paintings that audiences may already know, like “Drowning Girl” (1963), but Mr. Rondeau said that he was particularly pleased to feature nearly 50 works on paper, a medium that was not included in the 1993 show.

Ms. Lichtenstein encouraged Mr. Rondeau to pore through 70 boxes of works on paper that are kept in storage. “She had never given access to those before,” he said.

The focus on drawings pleased Ms. Lichtenstein, she said, because they “show Roy’s hand more” and make clear that he wasn’t just an artist who appropriated from comic books, but a master of composition in his own right.

But she stressed that she never tries to guide the hand of curators in terms of content. “I always love to see somebody else’s ideas and interpretations,” she said. “I’ll see things in a new light.”

On special occasions, however, she will get involved behind the scenes, if she knows works that the curators want to include are in other hands. For “Picasso and American Art,” a 2006 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she wrote two letters to collectors who own major Lichtensteins, encouraging them to lend. “I knew how important Picasso was to Roy,” she said. One letter did the trick; the other was a no-go.

For the Chicago show Ms. Lichtenstein went a step further. She knew that Agnes Gund, the renowned collector and president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, was being asked to lend one of the most famous works of the Pop era, “Masterpiece” (1962), in which a blonde tells a square-jawed artist, “Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece!”

Ms. Lichtenstein said that she surprised Ms. Gund, a friend, by offering another Lichtenstein work of the same size and shape so that she wouldn’t have a blank space on her wall for the run of the exhibition. “Masterpiece” did end up in the Chicago show.

Mr. Rondeau said that such diplomacy and effectiveness were typical of Ms. Lichtenstein’s efforts.

“She’s dedicated a huge amount of her life to protecting Roy’s legacy,” he said. “Not all artists’ spouses choose to manage and maintain that mantle. She feels it acutely and acts on it. She sees this as her job.”

 

May 29, 2012, 1:41 pm

By CAROL VOGEL

The Tate in London has received a gift of nine artworks by major 20th-century British artists, including a David Hockney, a Lucian Freud and a Rachel Whiteread.

The banker and philanthropist Ian Stoutzker and his wife, Mercedes, of Salzburg, Austria, who have been generous supporters of the arts in Britain, selected the artworks from their holdings because they fill gaps in the Tate’s collection, the couple said.

“The gift was an initiative from the Stoutzkers,’’ Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, said at a news conference on Tuesday. “They don’t receive any tax benefit from this gift but in the current climate they were very keen to make it public because they wanted to encourage others to give works to the national collection.’’

The works will go on display together at Tate Britain in October.

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty ImagesDamien Hirst’s ‘The Kingdom’, featuring a tiger shark in formaldehyde, on display at Sotheby’s in London in 2008.

LONDON — Don’t know much about art, but you know what you like? Well, what do you think of Damien Hirst, he of the pickled shark and diamond-encrusted skull?

The 46-year-old Briton is reputedly the country’s richest artist after making a fortune of around $300 million since breaking into the international art scene in the early 1990s as the most prominent of the Young British Artists movement.

His erstwhile patron, Charles Saatchi, has called him a genius and placed him up there with the Americans Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Donald Judd as one of a handful of contemporary artists whose reputations will endure.

But as London’s Tate Modern gallery prepares to launch the artist’s first British retrospective next week to coincide with the city’s hosting of the Olympic Games, one critic has ruffled art world feathers by advising investors in Mr. Hirst’s work to get out while they can.

“His works may draw huge crowds when they go on show in a five-month-long blockbuster retrospective at Tate Modern next week,” Julian Spalding wrote in Britain’s The Independent. “But they have no artistic content and are worthless as works of art. They are, therefore, worthless financially.”

He said collectors such as Steve Cohen, the Wall Street hedge fund billionaire who was said to have paid $12 million for Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” in 2005, could end up with something no more valuable than a shark in a tank.

“I’ve coined the term Con Art,” said Mr. Spalding, “short for contemporary conceptual art and for art that cons people.” He is so incensed that he’s written a book on the subject — “Con Art — Why you ought to sell your Damien Hirsts while you can” — to be published this weekend.

Hirst’s fans naturally demur. “Hirst’s work asks viewers to question the main dilemmas of human existence: birth, illness, death and religion,” according to the Tate Modern’s blurb, perhaps unwittingly reinforcing the thought that art should be seen and not heard.

And no one would begrudge Mr. Hirst his wealth. In an interview to be broadcast next week by Channel 4 television, Mr. Hirst recalls growing up poor in the northern city of Leeds. “When I was a kid we had so little money I remember looking for money on the street,” he says.

Oliver Basciano, a critic writing for Channel 4 News, castigated Mr. Spalding for conflating art and money. “His first key gripe seems to be that he thinks that Hirst’s work is likely to depreciate in financial value and the Tate needs to offload it quick.

“Now I have no idea whether it will or not — I’m no market monitor — but the idea that a public gallery should be building their collection with an eye to its market worth is beyond troublesome.”

Buyers, in any case, appear undeterred. A doodle of a dead shark that Mr. Hirst rapidly sketched as a tip for a cab driver fetched the equivalent of $7,500 at auction in London this week, 13 times the pre-auction estimate.

Perhaps I should declare a personal interest. Mr. Hirst gave a similar shark doodle to my son, Joe, a struggling painter and Hirst admirer who once met the maestro at a private view. Keep it safe, Joe.

The Tate Modern in London announced on Monday that it had purchased one of Ai Weiwei’s famous installations of life-size, hand-painted porcelain “Sunflower Seeds.” It bought 8 million of the 100 million seeds that were on view in a giant installation at the museum a year and a half ago. The mini-version was bought directly from the artist, officials at the Tate said, and the remaining 92 million seeds have been returned to Mr. Ai.

When “Sunflower Seeds” was originally installed in the Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall, the museum encouraged visitors to touch and even walk on the piece. But it reversed course days later after officials found that the movement of the crowds released hazardous dust. It was also determined that there were traces of lead in the paint.

The new acquisition may be less than one-tenth the size of the original, but it is still a lot bigger than a sunflower piece by Mr. Ai that Sotheby’s sold in London last year, one of an edition of 10 works each composed of 100,000 seeds. That version was bought by an unidentified telephone bidder for $559,394, or about $5.60 a seed. The Tate would not say what it had paid for its eight million seeds, but did say that it managed the purchase with help from the Tate International Council, the Art Fund and the collectors Stephen and Yana Peel.