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Jennifer Mundy - Art curator, Tate Modern, London, England - Brief Article
ArtForum, April, 2000 by Michael Archer
In describing the Tate Modern building, its displays, and its exhibition program, Jennifer Mundy chooses words that emphasize both contrast and congeniality. The plant might look brutal and industrial from the outside, but inside it is surprisingly elegant. "I think the light box, too, will quickly become a London landmark," she says of the fully glazed story that Herzog & de Meuron have placed on top of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's original power-station structure. It's hard to know exactly what the concourse areas will feel like because they are still being worked on, but Mundy is convinced that the cathedral-like entrance hall will have its own drawing power.
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Mundy's enthusiasm for the space spills over to the distinctive mix of presentational strategies that the curatorial staff has adopted in configuring the permanent collection for the new building. Earlier art-historical models, she says, seemed so distant that they weren't really considered "as things to work against." Broadly speaking, artworks have been treated thematically, "but there are diverse approaches to this. We've taken a pluralistic attitude toward subject matter."
Mundy has been at the Tate since 1986. A specialist in European, particularly French art between the wars, she has curated a number of exhibitions in this area, from the 1990 survey "On Classic Ground: Picasso, Leger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910-30" to the 1996 show "Hans Hartung: Works on Paper 1922-56." In addition to her work on the permanent collection, Mundy is now spending time on "Desire Unbound," a major loan exhibition of Surrealist work scheduled to open in the fall of 2001.
Of course, for one whose specialty is the classics of modernism, much of the curatorial challenge resides in maintaining visitors' active interest in such familiar work. Overall, Mundy hopes, the result of the Tate staff's effort will be to make things usefully "unpredictable" for the viewer, to provide a take on twentieth-century art--and increasingly the work of the twenty-first century--without recourse to tired "shock of the new"--style formulations.
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