Accidental yet transformative: site-specificity of the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern

摘要

This article has demonstrated the transformative power of the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern to elevate the notion of site-specificity to a different level by referring to both Boullee's differentiation between the gigantic and the big, and Krauss's site-specificity. Boullee's distinction is found efficient in discerning at least two approaches addressing the site-specificity of the Hall, engendering eventually a productive modification of Krauss's diagrammatic mapping. The grand space comes as a horror. It appears as a void that would swallow up anything. Giganticism seeks to conquer the void with a colossal object, bringing void and object into a battle. In contrast, bigness takes the space itself as the theme in order to create an atmospheric effect. Bigness as embodied in The Weather Project faces the space as a fledgling potential landscape that would operate as a metaphor for the real in the external world. This metaphorical landscape is not inferior to the real. Rather, it is through this metaphorical landscape that one can discover the real and refresh his or her relationship with the real such as the earth, the sky, and the light that permeates the space in-between. The fundamental factor that gave rise to these questions of giganticism and bigness is the sheer scale of the Hall. In other words, what is at issue is not so much the conventional constituents of site-specificity - such as location, orientation, spatial composition, position of windows and doors, structure, materials and details - but the scale of the space itself. While this focus on the scale of a given space is equally true of giganticism, bigness serves as a better example in proving the point. In achieving bigness, for instance, the presence of the steel piers is not denied. However, the intended effect is not the illumination of the piers themselves but, following Boullee, their contribution to the augmentation of the perspectival depth and the captured atmospheric emptiness between the two series of piers. At a moment when major institutions of art on the global scale are engaged with a fierce competition for public attention, the grand scale of the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern could be simply seen as confirmation and extension of this global tendency to present hyperbolic spectacles. This view seems justifiable to a degree at least. The spectacular series of sculptures of colossal sizes and installations that gives visibility to immensity may define the Hall as the place of ideology that verifies and girders the hegemonic power of the Tate as an institution. The Hall's scale may further be criticised as institutionalising what was not previously easy to frame. Once a work such as a mark on the earth is unfolding within the Hall, it can be manipulated, domesticated and even purchased. It is this aspect of the relationship between the grand scale and institutional status the article did not delve into, leaving it as a task of a future study. However, it seems still possible to argue that the case of the Turbine Hall cannot be merely classified as another institutional tactic to be on the edge in the global competition of colossal spectacles. The challenge of how to respond to the scale of a space that contained the heavy machinery of the industrial era has become embedded as part of the process of artistic creation - perhaps rather fortuitously. This overlapping of different eras - as the Hall originates from the industrial period but operates now for a contemporary purpose; and overlapping of different fields - as it was the site of the energy industry and is currently that of art; marks itself as an event. This event is not merely a transitory episode, as it has reshaped the disciplinary rubric of an involved field, i.e., art. In other words, the scale of the Hall emerged not intentionally but quite accidentally, while retaining an unexpected force that is highly transformative of art. This is not to deny the role of Herzog and de Meuron, the two authors who intuitively augmented the scale of the Hall by removing the existing decks to set the ground level lower. However, the effect of the Hall in transforming the disciplinary constituents of art seems to have gone far beyond the anticipation of the two architects.