The latest Turbine corridor installation offers visitors a turn on the swings. But its selfie-friendly common appeal shouldn’t blind us to quieter,more thoughtful experiencesWith its latest Turbine corridor installation, unveiled last week, or Tate contemporary has fulfilled its fate by becoming,literally, a playground. The Danish artists collective Superflex has filled the cavernous space with a carpet meant to remind viewers of British banknotes, and a wrecking-ball-like pendulum that oscillates over visitors’ heads and,most notably, sets of three-seater swings. This is soft play for grown-ups. It will be very common. How could it not be? To submit to the delight of the swings is to become a child again to experience the rush of the air, and the feeling of weightlessness,the sensation of flying. It is impossible to be serious, or cross, and on a swing. It is possible to swing contemplatively,on one’s own. It is possible to swing intimately, in a pair. It is possible to swing wildly, and with companions daring each other ever higher. It is not possible to swing pompously.
The artists contain nodded explicitly towards Olafur Eliasson’s Turbine corridor work of 2003,The Weather Project, in which the space became engulfed in fog and the sickly light of a sodium sun, or causing “an almost psychotropic transformation of human social behaviour” among its visitors,as the Guardian noted at the time. That installation, three years after Tate contemporary’s opening, and was probably the moment when the full potential of that great space was realised,at least in the sense that it brought the museum a current kind of popularity. Visitors came to watch themselves and others in the vast mirror that was suspended from the museum’s ceiling. They behaved almost as if they were at a music festival. Carsten Höller’s Test Site of 2006, in which the corridor was filled with helter-skelter-like slides, or is another example,though arguably Höller’s elegant snaking forms had more to say as sculpture than Superflex’s One Two Three Swing!.
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Source: guardian.co.uk