Today we have naming of parts
Martin Gayford on the relaunch of the Tate on Millbank Last week, amid a welter of champagne and celebrities, a brand-new London art gallery was launched on Millbank: Tate Britain. Guests wrote on a special graffiti- wall, Madonna was there. Stories appeared in the newspapers. The only small mystery is that, as close inspection shows, it isn't actually brand-new. It's the old Tate, minus the modern foreign collection, which has migrated to Bankside. The new art galleries and new entrance at Millbank won't be ready until next year (at present work goes on behind screens along the side of the building).
Why launch it now? Apparently, there were fears that the Millbank part of the institution would be completely forgotten in the celebratory brouhaha attending the opening of the definitely, indisputably new Tate Modern in the old power station on Bankside (which will happen in May). So Tate Britain decided to get their brouhaha in first, as is fair enough. After all, we live in the age of public relations. Therefore what happened last week was either, depending how you look at it, a re-launch of the old Tate, or a pre-launch of the new. In any case, at least it gives us a foretaste of what the new Tate Britain will be like.
So what is it like? What we have on show, it seems to me, is an extremely inge- nious solution to a difficult problem. The problem was created by the splitting of the old Tate — and the splitting was itself an ingenious solution to another difficult problem. The old problem was that the Tate was two museums in one — a collec- tion of British art since the Reformation, and a collection of modern — that is 20th- century — art from everywhere. Now that has been solved by the creation of a proper gallery of modern art, which is bound to be a colossal success: But that in turn raises the question of what to do with the rest of it. What remains is a rather old-fashioned thing, a museum devoted to a national school. This, as Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, writes in the introduction to RePresenting Britain, the publication that accompanies the relaunch, is rooted in a nationalist, cen- tralist Victorian ethic scarcely in harmony with 21st-century society. It is also the result of a chippy sense of artistic inferiori- ty which goes back at least to Hogarth. Artistically self-confident nations such as France do not have pantheons devoted to their national art. The Louvre is quite sufficient.
But all of this makes little sense now that British art is doing very nicely thank you on the international scene (unlike the French stuff), and Britain itself is possibly in the process of being dissolved into the EU, and simultaneously dismantled into its compo- nent parts. Even naming the non-modern half of the Tate must have been a thorny problem.
Apparently, the idea of calling the new Tate twins Tate Bankside and Tate Mill- Mouli-Julienne, 2000, by Mona Hannan bank was floated, but then most people would have had no idea what was inside them (even assuming they knew where Millbank was). There are other possibilities which probably weren't considered. Tate Cool Britannia, for example, or even given this propensity for launching things a year before they happen, like Mr Brown's taxes — Tate New Labour.
On the whole it was probably best to call it Tate Britain and take on the conundrum of what on earth Britishness might current- ly be and try to ignore the suggestion that there is an antithesis between being British and being Modern (as, indeed, some peo- ple may feel there is). As Mr Deuchar puts it, interrogating the roles of art in defining and challenging ideas of national identity may be a responsibility for Tate Britain, but it is also an exciting opportunity.
In practice, what does this seem to mean? Well, under the new regime the first big sculptural installation (until 23 July) in the Duveen Galleries, which have been used in this way for years, is given to Mona Hatoum, an artist born in Beirut. Art-polit- ically, this is a carefully considered gesture, meaning that Tate Britain is not going to be Tate Little England, but Tate Multicul- tural. And, politically, that is entirely sensi- ble, as London, where most of the art gets made, is indisputably a world city, a cos- mopolitan place, full of artists from all manner of backgrounds.
Aesthetically, I must admit I feared the worst since I have previously found Mona Hatoum's work stark and grim to a degree that prevented much enjoyment. However, she has risen to the challenge, especially with the first piece one encounters, a gigan- tic vegetable slicer `Mouli-Julienne'. This looks at the same time like a bit of welded- steel sculpture in the style of the Sixties, and a Kafkaesque instrument of torture (thus it perhaps inaugurates a new category of art, Sado-Caro).
The rest of the collection has been rear- ranged, or rather thrown up in the air and allowed to fall to the earth in new patterns. That is, instead of being hung chronologi- cally, or in stylistic categories such as the Pre-Raphaelites, it is hung thematically. Thus there are sections entitled The Land, Portraits, Home Life, which incorporate works from all manner of periods. Hoga- rth's Benjamin Hoadley faces Lucian Freud's Leigh Bowery in the face-painting room; under the rubric of Word and Image R.B. Kitaj meets Rossetti and Millais.
This rehang has caused a great deal of huffing and puffing amongst some of my critical colleagues. Personally, I think it's a perfectly legitimate approach, no different to the way that Pevsner collated art from different periods under similar headings in his classic book The Englishness of English Art. And the results make familiar works look fresh, and fresh works are brought to the fore. I was delighted, not only because he is a friend and an artist I have long sup- ported, to see John Wonnacott's 'Studio Portrait I' holding its own in a room also containing self-portraits by Reynolds and Turner.
But so far, I think, so good. There are juxtapositions which don't work, but the new hangings are provocative and enjoy- able (the only thing that worries me is the tiresome wordplay of that title RePresenting Britain; it's the kind of pun new-style aca- demics make, just as painful as the older kind of donnishness).
Who knows? It's even possible that this new Millbank museum might turn out to be more lively, more unexpected and — what would cause no sadness to the management — more controversial than its sister on Bankside. After all, if Britain is a problem- atic notion, modern is rather a tired, old- fashioned one. But we should wait to see what happens in May. We still don't really know what these new Tates will be like.
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