On the second floor of the Tate Modern can be found a collection of displays called Poetry and Dream. It’s a broad sweep of Twentieth Century visual art and how it interacts with Surrealism, with exhibits utilizing chance, free association, and entirely inscrutable symbolism.
Upon entering Room I, with works by Jannis Kounellis and Giorgio de Chirico, one is immediately struck by a sense of alienation. The Uncertainty of the Poet by de Chirico offers nothing more than it presents: a limbless and headless statue, a train in the distance, an empty courtyard, and in the harsh sunlight a bunch of bananas. Looking on, I couldn’t help but wonder what the psychological associations of bananas were, and whether I was supposed to be feeling them.
The Poetry and Dream display mostly sticks to this trend, making me doubt the actual capacity for a rendering of the artist’s most obscure associations to convey any mutual understanding to the onlooker. It seems almost up to chance whether or not it should spark any interesting response. Sure enough, artists such as Max Ernst explored the extent to which their works could be both random and affect an audience, however it remains mostly alien.
The greatest enjoyment I got was when a scene was both perplexing and technically proficient; Salvador Dali’s works were simultaneously complex and confusing, yet coherent. This coherence, however, is not found throughout the exhibition — though my desire to find it may be simply bourgeois. Instead, I found it difficult to continually interact with rooms full of barely contained forms; it became frankly exhausting.
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Hidden in all the surrealism, however, is the small but fascinating display of the works of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin. These are a set of impossible architectural designs, huge in scale and hovering between utopian social projects and satirical dystopian black and white monstrosities.
This is the most interesting room on the whole floor, filled with ominously sentient designs on which the Russian artists collaborated from 1980-90. They are vast in scope and ambition, although not intended for actualization; they still form a measure of criticism of life in a Soviet metropolis.
Unfortunately, the Brodsky and Utkin room is finite, so I am left to leave through the somewhat disappointing collection of Poetry and Dream. Brodsky and Utkin manage to make their works eminently possible to engage with, quite unlike the art in the rest of the show.
However, before leaving the Tate, it’s worth stopping by Henry Wessel’s photography display. In the weird, soft light of San Francisco, Wessel has captured moments in the lives of strangers from the 1970s onwards. The effect is much like when you find yourself staring at someone on a train.
From these incomplete details of people’s lives, an entirely hypothetical narrative is effortlessly pulled from the viewer. It’s an engrossing display, and a much more graspable exhibition than that which dominates the Tate Modern’s second floor.
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All three displays deal with incompleteness, whether in the lack of context of the surreal, photography, or impossible architecture. The individual works of the Poetry and Dream exhibition are excellent, but when unified they make viewing the display a disjointed, uneasy performance of self-doubt. Brodsky and Utkin and Wessel, however, manage to make their subjects compelling despite the impossibility of interacting with them, and entirely worth a visit.
