Simon Perry: Schemes, dreams & trivia

I went along to Tate Modern yesterday to catch the first day of the new exhibit to inhabit the Turbine Hall. Bruce Mauman’s piece, called Raw Materials, is a pure audio installation containing nothing visual, beyond the flat panel speakers scattered down the length of the hall.

Mauman uses 22 texts the have been gathered from his last 40 years of his work; some of the fragments are audio snippets from video or architectural installations, others from written texts from his drawings, painting or sculptures. These text have been translated in to 41 audio loops run for around an hour each, playing through the 34 wall-mounted speakers. Additionally there are 4 ceiling-mounted speakers playing a background track titled “Raw Materials - MMMM” as a background.

If you’ve not been to Tate Modern, you need to understand what a challenge this space is. The turbine hall is a very large space measuring 500 feet long, 75 ft wide and 110 ft tall. So up to now the pieces that have been in there have been huge, dominating and popular with the public. The last example, The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson, was a huge success with 2.2 million visitors. It emulated a giant sun within the Turbine Hall and lead the visitors to the unusual behaviour (for an art gallery) of lying on the floor in groups for extended periods. It was also pretty hard to take a bad photo of.

Watching the behaviour of people yesterday was interesting, I found many gathering around speakers, concentrating in much in the way that they might if it were a painting, but pointing facing away from it, angling their ears towards it rather than their eyes.

Wearing my Jens MP-130, as I always do, I took the opportunity to record my wander around. The resulting soundscape (which is available for download - get in touch) could, at a stretch, be called a live Mashup given I was choosing which direction to walk around the hall fading in and out the audio tracks by walking (I guess some may argue that the sounds were choosing for me which route to follow).

Clearly each person’s trip around this exhibition could be unique and if you do get the opportunity to do the same, get in touch or Trackback to this story and we can build an interesting, varied collection of visits.

Time will tell if Raw Materials will be the resounding success that Weather Project was, but from the very small, early sample I saw yesterday, I can’t see it raising the passion of the public like the Weather Project did. That’s not to say you should go - in fact I would recommend that you do visit. I found it is a piece that you think about more after you leave, rather than while you are there experiencing it. Judging by the number of people I saw walking around with professional microphones, there’s going to be a lot of radio show report on this exhibitions, but what do you expect things like this are major fodder for them.

The final set of speakers, which mounted considerably closer together at the end of the hall a, are called World Peace and contain the “I’ll talk/They’ll listen” and “You’ll listen to us/We’ll talk to you”. Not a bad final thought.

Bruce Nauman - Raw Material, Tate Modern, London

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