LONDON — How should a video exhibition be? In light-filled galleries optimized for painting and sculpture, moving images can get lost: diminished to washed-out projections, or exiled to old, round-edged monitors. Video, film and other moving-image works need the same care as other media to look right in a museum — and they don’t always get it.
Any biennial habitué knows the experience of walking jetlagged from white cube to black box, and discovering some three-hour documentary projected in poor light conditions without even a bench for seating. Or the bank of 13-inch televisions, below eye level, with cheap headphones attached. Video art is more than 50 years old now, but you can still hear museumgoers — not just modern art haters, but committed cinephiles — brush off the whole premise of exhibiting video in art galleries: “If I wanted to watch a film I’d go to a movie theater …”
Well, Steve McQueen works both in museums and movie theaters — and the Amsterdam-based British artist knows very well which space is which. Having won broad acclaim as a feature film director (and netting the Oscar for best picture for “12 Years a Slave”), Mr. McQueen has never abandoned his first career as a fine artist, and he presents his moving image works with a careful, sometimes even fanatical, attention to their conditions of display.
Looped or linear, projected at small scale or filling a wall, McQueen’s art manifests the same cool exactitude as his movies “Hunger” or “Shame,” and his admirers from the multiplex ought to take the time to discover his immersive, elusive fine art in the darkened galleries of Tate Modern.
The show is something less than a mid-career retrospective, on the order of his praised-to-the-skies 2013 exhibition at the Schaulager in Basel. It includes only 14 works. It leaves out nearly all the film installations he made before winning the Turner Prize in 1999, and also omits important recent works like “Gravesend” (2007), an icy, abstract exploration of global capital filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But these 14 works — 11 of which are projected films and videos — come together into a meticulously choreographed exhibition that sticks up for the projected image as a medium in its own right. They’ve been installed out of chronological order, some in dedicated galleries but many in an open space, where they flicker, stutter and reflect one another, accumulating into an intense oeuvre that obsesses over authority, confinement, the body (of black men, particularly) and the state.
Mr. McQueen’s art can be intense or slight, but it merits the rare attention it’s getting here. On the day I went, dozens of visitors stayed to watch Mr. McQueen’s works for two hours or more.
Most of this show’s videos are projected on a loop, which you can look at freely, but two are projected at set times and can only be seen from the beginning. (Guards are stationed at the entrances; both are about 25 minutes and run on the half-hour.)
One of those is the murky, claustrophobic, absolutely relentless “Western Deep” (2002), hands-down Mr. McQueen’s greatest work in either art or cinema. Commissioned for Okwui Enwezor’s now legendary Documenta 11 exhibition of 2002, “Western Deep” drives us into the underworld of the global economy, via a descent into the world’s deepest mine, the TauTona goldmine near Johannesburg.
Its first shot unspools in near darkness, as we go down with the miners down a near-infinite elevator, espying their faces only in flashes, listening for minutes to the screech and rattle of the machinery. (Long takes are a McQueen signature, preserved in “Hunger” and “12 Years a Slave.”)
This is the heart of darkness, retained in South Africa’s post-apartheid state. Beneath the earth, the miners hazardously loose gold from the mine walls, but we see their labor only in flashes, whatever their headlamps allow. Mr. McQueen’s cuts are awkward and disjunctive, plunging us in and out of the mine; the sound oscillates between the clatter of the mining equipment and an even more disturbing silence.
At last, surfacing, we behold a terrifying (and unexplained) sequence of dozens of miners stripped to their boxers, performing calisthenics as doctors pace alongside, intercut with a blinking red light and a horribly loud buzzer. We learn nothing of these men’s lives, nor, for that matter, of the profits of the mining company.
“Western Deep” denies us the pat liberal satisfactions of documentary, and forces us, with its harrowing soundtrack and flashes of color and darkness, to look in the face of an economy that strips humanity to bare life. (I’d seen it before, but after watching it again I still had to lean against a wall to catch my breath.)
Mr. McQueen shot “Western Deep” with a Super-8 camera — the only one small enough to take underground, 20 years ago — and converted the footage to video, with all its graininess conserved. It’s projected here on a giant screen, with a booming sound system, faced by custom-built bleachers. And these conditions matter — not just for the comfort and focus of the spectators, but the very meaning of his art.
Ask yourself here: Is the film projected on a fixed screen, or does it stretch to the ceiling and floor, creating an installation? Or else does the screen hang in the center of a gallery, encouraging you to circle it like a sculpture? Is the projector visible — and, if it’s spooling celluloid rather than video, is it an antiquated projector? Are the gallery walls white, like a gallery for painting, or black, like a theater?
These are an artist’s questions. And in part because of his recent success in the movie business, the Tate’s McQueen exhibition seems to foreground these matters of display — and, with them, the ways of watching that a moving-image work demands and deserves. Certainly compared with other British video artists of his generation (think of Douglas Gordon, say, or Jeremy Deller), Mr. McQueen has been fastidious about what happens to his art films after the final cut.
That fastidiousness is more for visual and practical reasons than theoretical ones; he has never been an especially conceptual filmmaker. “Static” (2009), an overrated two-projection view of the Statue of Liberty shot from a helicopter, remains a thin and undemanding work despite its elegant cinematography. “Charlotte” (2004), a close-up loop of Mr. McQueen’s finger probing the open eye of Charlotte Rampling, is a literally pale imitation of Buñuel’s “Un Chien Andalou.”
He also doesn’t have a touch for more traditional media; this show’s only sculpture, a prison bed draped with a 24-karat gold mosquito net, looks like a ripoff of the British-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, and a cheap souvenir of Mr. McQueen’s engagement, from “Western Deep” to “12 Years a Slave,” with the denial of freedom.
But in “Ashes” (2015), the most accomplished of his most recent video works, Mr. McQueen confirms that his movie years have not dulled his sensitivity or his style. On one side of a suspended screen, he projects archival footage he shot in 2002 in Grenada of a beautiful young man nicknamed Ashes, sitting on the prow of a fishing boat, smiling, carefree, lost in blue. On the other side, more recent footage recounts Ashes’s death and burial in a pauper’s grave.
His story, recounted in voiceover, has only the barest details; it would never be optioned by a Hollywood studio. But on gritty 8-millimeter fim he is preserved, looped for eternity as he sails to a future he will never reach.
“Ashes” is a melancholy, magisterial work, of big dreams and sudden death. It can only be appreciated properly in a gallery, with one’s body as well as one’s eyes. (It echoes the earlier, single-shot “7 Nov.,” also here, in which the artist’s cousin Marcus recounts the excruciating tale of accidentally shooting his brother.) So too “Western Deep,” which you can easily screen in bootleg form with a quick Google search, but which re-emerges at the Tate as a corporeal experience, rattling your ears and accelerating your pulse. They make demands of you in ways that only the best art does, and that, in the age of Instagram, happens less and less.
Funny, given how much time I spend worrying about the role of the cameraphone in contemporary art, that I never thought of this. But here it is: Video art, once dumbly condemned by traditionalists as a mass-media takeover of the fine art gallery, now offers more of an escape from the hellscape of our digital feeds than other artistic media.
The real digitally fluent medium of our time is painting, which functions all too well as just another class of shareable content. Performance and installation can slip into the social photo stream as easily as beachside selfies. But in the darkness of the video gallery, with my phone in my pocket, Mr. McQueen was offering me, at least in his best works, a rediscovery of slowness.
Steve McQueen
Through May 9 at Tate Modern, London; tate.org.uk.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
