In the Turbine of Experimentation: Tate Modern and the New (?) Rationale of Collective Performance

• Published in: Angles (Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur) Vol. 6; no. 6
• Main Author: Bernard, Catherine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur 01.04.2018; SAES – Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur; SAES
• Series: "French Perspectives on Experimental Art"
• Subjects: Art and art history; contemporary art; experimental art; Humanities and Social Sciences; installation art; performance art; Tate Modern; Unilever Series; expérimental; experimental art; Unilever Series; Sehgal Tino; art; experimental; contemporary art; Tate Modern; art expérimental; installation art; performance; art contemporain; performance art; Salcedo Doris
• ISSN: 2274-2042; 2274-2042
• DOI: 10.4000/angles.1024

Artistic experimentation, as well as the concepts elaborated to define it, have undergone considerable changes since the age of the avant-gardes and yet experimentation still retains some of its critical purchase. The present article focuses on recent experimentations in the field of installation and performance art and on the way these works may enlighten us on the kind of critical leverage offered by aesthetic experimentation in its complex and often conflicted relation to our contemporary sensorium. Taking the case of some of the most prominent installations and performances commissioned by Tate Modern as part of the Unilever Series (2000–2012), we intend to understand how the criticality of experimentation as imagined by the great avant-gardes has been queered and reinvented by artists who work within the regime of the spectacular while remaining faithful to the incisive spirit of experimentation. Our first intention is to explore the empiricist legacy of experimentation, by returning to the semantic pairing of scientific and artistic experimentation, as evidenced, for example, in Joseph Wright of Derby’s great oil: An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768). Placing the likes of Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2008) and Tino Sehgal’s These Associations (2012) in a long historical and critical perspective, we intend to highlight a still relatively under-explored aspect of experimentation: that of corporeality and sensation in their relation to critical knowledge. Taking experimentation to rely on a subtle tension between sensation and intellection or between experience and concept, we try to show how contemporary experimentation reinvents such a tension. Placed at the very heart of the museum machine and of its economy of attraction, the works in the Unilever Series foregrounded the economy of sensation often harnessing the sensational to a complex critical stance. Working both with and against the sensation regime imposed by the culture industry, these works elaborated complex experiential allegories in which the visitor’s experience worked towards differential modes of being. More specifically even, it was, we argue, their collective logic that gave us to grasp our current regime of visibility and experience, at the juncture of the private and the public, of sensation and corporate culture.