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.”
