Miroslaw Balka's How It Is in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern / photo Tate Photography
BM: The Turbine Hall has a mass appeal that rivals the Turner Prize phenomenon but its effect on audiences seems to be different. People have epiphanies, it’s more thought provoking…
AS: They can break their arms on a slide…
BM: It seems as though it’s become the big art venue.
AS: I think so, and that also leads artists to make a major spectacle. I think last year’s installation by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster was not one of the successful ones. It was the wrong work for the space. And it was too much of a concoction as far as I could see. In Olafur Eliasson’s installation people laid under this artificial sun and had picnics and all the rest of it. With Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is, which is just this great black box, people kind of destroy it by use. They increase the light levels by using their mobile-phone cameras. I know Miroslaw wanted it to be a rather dour experience. I don’t think he wanted it to be an evocation of the Holocaust, although those associations are unavoidably made partly because he talks about them all the time. It was meant to be a somewhat Beckettian experience, to just go walking into a volume of dark. In a way it is a bit like a Richard Serra made of antimatter. Instead of you and the object, you’re inside it.
The French have done their own Turbine Hall project in the Grand Palais’ Monumeta project, which Serra did magnificently a year ago with a piece called Promenade. The next one in January is by Christian Boltanski. There you’ve got an architecture that is even more insistent than the Turbine Hall, this great beaux arts cast-iron pavilion. An enormously difficult space if you’re going to use it in a way that respects the architecture. That too seems to have had a similar effect on the public. I went back to the Serra on two different occasions. Again, there were people who were looking rather doleful and lost in their thoughts. But I think big exhibition spaces like these allow people a certain space. Artworks can be destroyed by too many people. It’s like the Mona Lisa, too many people have looked at it and it dies. There is a relationship of people to space that has an intense psychological effect. It gives you a chance to measure yourself against things.
BM: How is being selected to do the Turbine Hall a measure of an artist’s career?
AS: It must be, in a certain respect. But obviously you wouldn’t ask a miniaturist to do it, would you. You wouldn’t ask Morandi to do it, for example. And it isn’t a project for a painter. If he were alive you might well imagine Robert Smithson spilling several thousand tons of goo down the ramp. And I’ll bet you there are artists who will never be asked to do it because it would be too predictable. I’m thinking of Anslem Keifer. He did the equivalent at the Opéra Bastille in Paris a few months ago where he broke through the back of the stage into the rehearsal halls behind. It was almost as long as the Turbine Hall and you’re sitting in the auditorium and watching people 150 metres away wandering about on the stage until another load of ash falls.
BM: Any Canadian artists on your radar?
AS: I’m sure there are without me really being too much aware of their Canadian-ness. I suppose the one I’ve known longest is Peter Doig because he was my student at Saint Martins in the early 1980s. Of course, Rodney and Jeff and all those people…Joni Mitchell [laughs]. I hated the whole promotion of Brit art because it was Brit art. I feel that about wherever artists come from, whether you’re a Mexican, a New Zealander or a Canadian. Comparatively, there may be more artists with world reputations living in Toronto than there are in Madrid or Barcelona or Rome, or perhaps even in Paris. Not as many as there are in Berlin or in London at the moment, but Toronto is certainly not a moribund place by any means. As far as I know, and it’s not just to do with General Idea or things like that, there’s a very lively scene here in artist-run spaces and so forth, which you don’t get in certain European capitals, partly for socio-economic reasons and partly because people have never thought of it, which is strange. You’d think there’d be more alternative spaces in New York, but there isn’t really. So all of those demographic things are kind of interesting in that some cities—maybe it has to do with their layouts, the geography, available building spaces—lend themselves to the kind of activities that go on here that don’t go on in Barcelona. I suppose in a way, and it might be Toronto itself, or the weather, but I keep thinking of Glasgow for some reason, which is another extremely lively city where things go on despite official culture and the money that the city might put into them as much as because of them.
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