Towers of London

ArtForum, Summer, 1996 by James Hall

Last year's sensation may have been partially eclipsed, but the slack has been more than taken up by the antics of London's cultural commissars. Here there were triumphs and tragedies, promising beginnings and ignominious ends. Eagerly awaited was the opportunity to hear Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, lecture on a subject close to his heart: the dilemma facing the contemporary art museum. Such was the level of anticipation that national newspapers deluged the lecture's sponsors, Thames and Hudson, with requests to prepublish extracts. In the end, they must have been glad such requests were denied. Everyone expected to hear something about Bankside, the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art, for which detailed architectural plans had just been released; instead, Serota gave a thoughtful but less than earth-shattering history of museum installation, and talked about creating loose "climatic zones" of like-minded art.

If Serota's lecture was a disappointment, the plans for Bankside are encouraging. Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have designed a neat, glass-fronted box to be inserted inside one half of the massive brick bunker, which will transform the existing structure into a minimalist, 100-foot-wide, 500-foot-long Crystal Palace with three floors of extremely flexible gallery space. The biggest drawback to Bankside is the shortage of natural light, though this defect is somewhat counterbalanced by the floor that will rise above the roof line. Even so, the Swiss duo overestimate the amount of available sunlight. Light in architectural drawings is almost invariably crystal clear. London skies tend to be, well, blurred....

One of the main reasons for building Bankside is to increase display space and thereby encourage loans and donations; though the Tate's collection boasts work by most major artists of the 20th century, the only non-British artists represented in any depth are Giacometti and Mark Rothko. This strategy is already paying off. German collector Josef Froehlich, who has rich holdings of post-'60s German and American art, will loan a number of works to the Tate, which will be incorporated in annual rehangings of the Tate's own collection - the most important contribution made by a German collector to a British museum since 1863 when Queen Victoria's German husband, Prince Albert, donated 22 old-master works to the National Gallery.

As the Tate moves ahead, the Hayward Gallery stalls. Its director, Henry Meyric Hughes, resigned suddenly after three years at the helm. The Hayward, housed in an impractical Brutalist structure, has never had a clear profile, or built up a loyal audience. No surprise, given that its program, prior to Hughes' arrival, lurched from Leonardo and Mexican sculpture to Warhol and photojournalism. Hughes' mandate was to give the Hayward a tighter, more contemporary focus.

Though his efforts met with a measure of success (recent highs were the Yves Klein retrospective and a contemporary photography show that included Andreas Gursky and Gabriel Orozco), several shows failed to gel: a survey of recent painting, "Unbound," was poorly curated and sloppily installed, while the Julian Opic "retrospective" seemed premature. Rumor has it that Hughes' superiors were pushing for a more populist and commercial approach. Hughes' resignation will have far-reaching repercussions. Because the Hayward is due to close at the end of this century for major rebuilding work, if it doesn't decide what its role is fast, it could be overshadowed and ultimately frozen out by the new Tate. Bankside is only a short walk up the river, and it will open in just four years, provided fundraising goals are met.

Already, the buzz surrounding YBAs and Bankside stimulated a spate of new gallery openings this spring. Robert Prime and Lotta Hammer opened up shop not far from Karsten Schubert and Laure Genillard in the discreetly bohemian quarter known as Fitzrovia. The Swiss dealer Marc Jancou closed his gallery above Karsten Schubert and relocated to Soho, right above Ronnie Scott's jazz club, reopening under the name London Projects. But Jancou doesn't plan on taking root here either: he intends to keep mounting shows in nongallery spaces. Robert Prime (an invented, British-sounding name) is run by two Italians - Tommaso Corvi-Mora and Gregorio Magnani. They represent YBAs Angela Bulloch and Liam Gillick, and will also show European and American work, kicking off with the grungy photoworks that French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster took in India. In a show that could easily have been entitled "Remembrance of Things Past Their Self-By Date," shots of Le Corbusier's gently decaying Chandigarh complex juxtaposed details of Indian miniatures and a local photographer's studio. Swedish-born Hammer opened with zany computer manipulations of tourist images by YBA Graham Gussin and plans to show more of this lost generation - both in the gallery and in a project room next door.

The most ambitious exhibition mounted by a new gallery was "Inner London" at Delfina in the south east section of the city. Delfina occupies the ground floor of an artists' studio complex, and the show, curated by David Gilmour, featured five YBAs. Alex Hartley encased photographs of dour tower blocks inside steel cabinets fronted by frosted glass (yes, that's what London skies are like); Catherine Yass offered lurid, backlit transparencies of London's main meat market, and Steve Johnson enlarged silver versions of London's monuments typically found on charm bracelets, then cast them in bronze. Resembling Dali-esque soft objects, they are lumpy souvenirs of a city in meltdown.