Miroslaw Balka: Nothing Doing
Miroslaw Balka How It Is Installation view © Miroslaw Balka / photo Tate Photography
There is only nothing, and to expect more is delusional or an act of religious faith. We enter the light of life to pass in a short or long march to darkness. In the latest work in a series of continuing installations at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, Polish artist Miroslaw Balka presents us with an abbreviated version of this walk from the light into darkness.
Balka's piece is an expansive, large-scale work presenting the simplest of metaphors. But from my perspective, the work is a pretentious mimesis of nothing.
Excuse me if I am harsh, but nothing means a lot to me. To see nothing abused on such a grand scale is something I cannot help but take personally. The artist and the Tate's curators should be collectively admonished for their frivolous sojourn into nothing and for their mutual abuse in rationalizing the work in the name of Plato and Beckett. Just because you are entering a dark, cavelike container does not mean you are entering Plato’s cave.
The installation is a discreet sculpture, an oversized steel container raised on stilts, open at one end. We, the collective audience, are asked to walk up a gently sloping ramp into the unlit container. The reference to the Holocaust is pronounced, as Balka’s shipping container is an updated railroad boxcar.
Bumping into each other in the darkness of the shipping container, we walk a short distance to confront the back wall head on. This short passage is intended to invoke feelings of fear; we are entering a mysterious, dangerous darkness. But we are not really afraid—the light of multiple cellphones illuminates the way in and out. We are inside the safety of a museum. Laughs, not screams of horror, accompany the journey. No one is afraid. Death and the void are not here.
The artist's title, How It Is, is a direct reference to Beckett’s short novel of the same title, an invocation, according to the artist, of the writer’s narratives where characters move from mobility through collapse to immobility. But it is just that, a mere invocation. We are not stumbling inside this sculpture existentially or physically; there is no existential emptiness here.
But perhaps the void invoked by How It Is is another kind of emptiness—rather, the nothing described by Jean Baudrillard in his late art writing, where art is identified as "emptied out," as “nil.” Balka’s container is not just empty; it is empty, overscaled melodrama.
Miroslaw Balka How It Is Installation view © Miroslaw Balka / photo Tate Photography
Miroslaw Balka How It Is Installation view © Miroslaw Balka / photo Tate Photography
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