Two exhibitions on Saturday: Calder at the Tate and Big Bang Data at Somerset House.
There was something I didn’t like about both. Calder’s curators are apparently convinced that none of the motorised works can be allowed to run in case something terrible happens. Weirdly, they don’t draw the matching conclusion and weld the mobiles solid to stop them moving. But that’s a proper artwork and the other is a mere engineering artefact.
If it was, though, preservation by operation is exactly what would be advised. The National Museum of Computing folk will be more than delighted to fire up a 1940s computer and demonstrate it. People preserve whole, flying De Havilland Mosquitos by operation. Surely we could look after a hobbyist electric motor and some simple belt drives. But instead, a lot of them are hung against a wall as if they were paintings, so you can’t even reason about how they would move if they were allowed to.
Over at Big Bang Data, there’s a related problem. A lot of the projects on view are pretty crap if you can’t interact with them. A lot of the ones you can interact with are broken, or just agonisingly slow. The issue here is that the kind of data visualisation projects they want to treat as artworks just aren’t. They are tools, or games, or journalistic projects. As tools or indeed as games, they are closer to dance than painting; what happens, happens afresh at every performance. In this case, it is the user who interprets the original work. How are you meant to exhibit a tool for deliberative budgeting developed by Podemos’ geek wing without demonstrating it?
This means, however, that it damn well better work. Instead, a lot of them were very clearly taken to the point of a demo and some screenshots, and no further. They ended up, therefore, nailed to a gallery wall, and neither optimised to the point of being acceptable as tools or games, or taken up and used to pursue a story as journalism.
I wonder if there is a question of grant-making here. If the funder pays out when something like a painting is delivered, that’s what they will get, and the artist will already be working on the next pitch a while before the demo is finished or rather “finished”.
Finally, in a show full of teenagers gagging for Snowden, what was the app that drew the most attention and engagement? FixMyStreet, operational for nine years so far, attributed to the late style works of the Master of Cambridge, Chris Lightfoot, and his students Anna Powell Smith and Matthew Somerville. People clustered around it with real enthusiasm.
And there was me hoping that Calder was a recreation of the Calder Hall reactor in the turbine hall.
Is there a sentence missing in the first paragraph?
No.
Agreed on Big Bang Data – some really poor interfaces, not enough explanatory material, several exhibits not working at all or working extremely slowly. And others were just… shallow. The idea of mapping the data networks around London sounded great – interpreting manhole covers, the Ring of Steel, where the trunk lines run etc… what they actually presented looked like it had been knocked up in a day or two. A really half-arsed attempt.
On the motorised works, I’m reminded of my frustrations with a lot of video installations, whose display tends to wind up being VHS and a Sony BVM1900A, no matter what the original concept was, nor that commercial visual performance has come a long way.
As for that data stuff, we encountered this problem about 5 years ago when working with a large financial data company. They wanted some articles complete with info graphics etc. that would display some of the unique qualities of their datasets.
But, they wanted to pay about as much as they did for a typical “interview with a customer” article. There was no sense about how much work investigating the data imposes, esp. when it’s a one-off.