Richard Hamilton at Tate Modern

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25 May

This exhibition at Tate Modern (@Tate) is about to finish (on Monday 26 May).

Its curation is almost as curious sometimes as some of the objects (or their juxtaposition) in the recreated exhibition, which Hamilton organized for The Festival of Britain in 1951, Growth and Form (in Room 1) :

Perhaps, somewhere, there is a room-guide equivalent to the text that appears, in the free exhibition booklet, to describe Room 1 and 2, but, if so, it is well hidden* - the appearance is of walking into Growth and Form with nothing to explain what it or its relevance are. It is good to show these things (as was also done with other exhibitions, a few months back, at the ICA (@ICA)), but there needs to be an introduction. A small ante-room with a video-loop, perhaps (if such footage exists) of Hamilton talking about the show, might have helped place it for visitors.

In any case, though Hamilton may have been (since he was nothing if not someone who observed carefully) ahead of his time in intuiting forms of patterns of growth in - to name but a few - plant, crystalline and shell development, structure and growth that have since been linked to fractals or The Fibonacci Series, this may not be the best place to start with him, nor may it be Variations on the theme of Reaper (1949) (in Room 2) (please see below).

For, in the choice of exhibits, display and interpretational material, one simple question seems not to have been asked (or, if so, the answer not carefully enough considered) :

Who is this Hamilton retrospective for ?


Is it something that, as with the big Damien Hirst show, people could wander into and around, such as they did past and even through his severed cow and calf, and make of it what the immediacy of the canvases, objects and videos conveyed*** ? Or, if people are to be able to value Hamilton's contributions to the British art scene and beyond, do they need a little more guidance (which the Hamiltonian enthusiast - keen to see some works live, but with a greater initial idea of these things - could ignore, if he or she wished (as could any level of visitor in between)) ?


In relation to Reaper, it is not as if we are being chronological, since it pre-dates Growth and Form by two years, but then, as with many recent Tate shows, we do generally adopt that approach by period : in the meantime, after the 1951, we have confronted the visitor with fifteen etchings of a reaping-machine, from all sorts of angles, and with varying techniques and levels of detail.

In this connection, the following point, which is made in the Introduction, would be more aptly drawn to the visitor's attention here :

He often produced several versions of a particular work rather than a single 'finished' piece [this suggests, however, that the versions have the status of sketches or maquettes, rather than being complete in themselves], and throughout his career explored new printmaking methods and digital techniques.


However, as the Introduction has been placed on the wall, the assumption is that the visitor has read and digested it, or seen it the booklet presented at the door, by the time that Room 2 is being viewed... Hate it also as a kiddies' version as one might, what is often said about Cubism is arguably as relevant here, e.g. that there is a response to Einstein on relativity and / or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle*** in giving us multiple views of a face - or a reaper.

As to this choice of exhibit, maybe there is merit in something produced whilst Hamilton was still at the Slade, maybe not (would one normally go as far back as art college ?), but there seem to be no obvious answers to the following questions in choosing or presenting the piece :

Where does Reaper fit into an account of Hamilton's entire work ?

How does the visitor know that it has that relevance ?


One may hate the description of Hamilton as 'the father of Pop Art' (not least as, in connection with the Bridget Riley exhibition in 2003, Tate was keen to put her in a different relation to art history than that of a pioneering exponent of Op Art), but one is in danger with coming out of this show not knowing (though Room 5 says quite a bit about Pop Art - at this stage) :

* What Hamilton did as an artist

* What his importance was to other artists or the art world

* His significance to appreciating Marcel Duchamp - though some explanation seems to be here, in (the booklet for) Room 8 - and, more importantly, who Duchamp was and what it was that Hamilton valued

* Likewise Kurt Schwitters and the Merzbarn ?

* Why one has seen five or six times the image mainly known as Swingeing London 67 [this one is (and owned by Tate Modern) - what do the four or five others add to seeing it ?


The Tate has not only long owned Hamilton’s reconstruction of what is often, in brief, referred to as Duchamp’s Large Glass (properly called La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (1915–1923), but has for many years had it on display at Tate Modern without (or without adequately – except here) explaining that this is not Duchamp’s original work***, which is too fragile to move (and in Philadelphia). Here, at last, matters are a little less unclear, but does one get much notion of the significance of what Duchamp had been working on between 1915 and 1923 through what is written in the room-note and shown in display-cabinets ?

In other words, who would know what Hamilton was doing in reconstructing this work – and why – who did not know already ? And what does the exhibition do to explain Hamilton’s involvement with the publication The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1966), what it is and why it was published ? Yes, there are two copies, one displaying the green cover, the other the title-page, but nothing other than the sketchiness of the room-note to convey the answers to these questions to the visitor (the Tate web-site, linked to here, is a different matter altogether) :

1915 – 1923 / Reconstructed 1965 – 1966 / Lower panel re-made 1985


The glaringly unstated sub-text of all this is that not only did Hamilton curate a Duchamp show for Tate, but went about reconstructing the work for it : maybe all this is there, if one buys the book of the exhibition, but what, then, is the point of the exhibition itself, if not to explain the exhibits and what significance they have qua exhibits… ?


Work in progress - more to come...


End-notes

* The last of these, too, were well hidden - which may be shorthand for saying that they had been put somewhere unideal, too. In this show, the Introduction did, as one checked, appear on the far side of Room 1 (Growth and Form), actually on one wall of Room 2 - with the room-guide for both Rooms on the wall where one went into Room 3...

** The spirit of Heisenberg is tacitly evoked later on (Room 7), with exposures of figures on a beach that have been enlarged over and over, and achieving greater proximity only at the cost of precisely the detail sought.


*** However, Duchamp did inscribe Hamilton’s reconstruction, as if it is the equivalent of the original. Here is what the Tate's web-page for the work much more usefully tells us :

The reconstruction took exactly a year to make. When Marcel Duchamp came to London for the opening of his exhibition, he agreed to sign it and inscribed it on the back 'Richard Hamilton | pour copie conforme | Marcel Duchamp | 1965'.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)