In some situations, emptiness is a highly desirable condition: a deserted beach, an open road, a Rothko painting. In a museum, however, it is a sure sign of failure. If a museum is as empty as Tate Britain was when I trotted around it last week to examine the latest rehang of the collection, then something is going badly wrong. It’s blindingly obvious what it is. And it’s all the fault of Nicholas Serota.
When they write Serota’s obituaries, they will rightly focus on the establishment of Tate Modern as his greatest accomplishment. If you live in a world where audience figures are the most valued yardstick — and we do — then nobody can deny Bankside’s spectacular success. Praise will be directed, too, at the creation of the national Tate franchise, with smaller Tate galleries — Tate locals? — scattered from Liverpool to St Ives: a good dictator always knows how to present territorial gains as vital increases in choice and democracy. Still, no great harm has come from Serota’s empire-building. In one crucial area only have his innovations actually been disastrous. And that is in the field of display.
It is to Serota that we owe the invention of the impermanent permanent collection. It may even have been one of the progressive-sounding ideas that originally got him the Tate director’s job two decades ago.
The approach involves the constant swapping around of exhibits and seeks to blur the divide between a museum and a gallery. A museum, remember, is a permanent collection of precious artefacts that tries to establish a grand narrative for its subject. A gallery, meanwhile, is a site for temporary exhibitions, and needs only to provide temporary pleasures in particular areas of interest. These are conflicting aims. Yet Serota’s display policies have sought to conflate them.
At Tate Modern, the result was a momentously confusing opening hang, where nothing had a place in the greater scheme of things because there was no greater scheme of things. Instead, a thousand mini-exhibitions, all with madly differing display ambitions, attempted to tell the story of modern art by crossing their fingers and hoping. My personal low point of this pointless game of snap across the ages was the ridiculous pairing of a conceptual glass of water by Michael Craig-Martin with a great cubist interior of a cafe, painted by Braque a century earlier, because both of them featured receptacles for liquids.
Coming up with temporary exhibitions is, of course, a lot easier than coming up with grand narratives. It’s the difference between dashing off this article and writing War and Peace. War and Peace is a huge, sustained, planned and mighty display of literary genius. I, alas, seek only to detain you for a few moments on a Sunday morning. I regret myself, yes. But not nearly as much as I regret what Serota’s display strategies have done to Tate Britain.
Contrary to general perceptions, there was always much more to play for at Tate Britain than there was at Tate Modern after the momentous splitting of the Tate in two. Museums of modern art are two a penny in contemporary-art land. But Tate Britain, as Britain’s first and only museum of national art, was a unique institution facing a unique challenge. Every nation needs to know its own art story. Every such story is different. Yet from his arrival at the Tate’s helm in 1988, Serota has perversely avoided the fulfilment of this contract.
The introduction of a constant cycle of rearrangements at Tate Britain, called New Displays, which culminates in a recurrent rehang, sponsored by BP, has been in place for two decades now, and has succeeded, for two decades, in not telling the story of British art. An entire generation has grown up without anywhere to go to understand its own artistic past.
The latest rehang feels even less useful and more bitty than usual. As soon as you enter the door, you ask yourself: where next? Left, right, straight ahead or down? There is no answer. People don’t flock to Tate Britain for the same reason that they avoid driving at night in the fog. You don’t go to galleries to get lost.
Twenty of the Tate’s 30 or so galleries have been reordered and rehung for this particular set of New Displays. It is being presented as a radical repositioning. But if you do the natural thing upon entering, and turn left, you find yourself in a set of Victorian rooms located exactly where the Victorian rooms at Tate Britain are always located. They feel exactly as they always feel, too, and mark neither the beginning of the story nor the end, but a low point somewhere past the middle.
Look carefully and some irritating thematic confusion is discernible in the new arrangement. To pick an obvious example, Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, which shows a young girl rearing up off the lap of an amorous suitor, is now located in the pre-Raphaelite room, while the London prostitute staring guiltily at her past, by the minor pre-Raphaelite Spencer Stanhope, is found among pictures of modern life. Yet the storytelling ambitions of the two paintings are entirely interchangeable.
Short in most areas of its collection, Tate Britain is regrettably well endowed with Victorian piffle: fainting maids, costumed knights, undressed nymphs, floating Ophelias. I find most of it laughably insincere, but I certainly see the point of exhibiting it. What I don’t see is the point of exhibiting it at the geographic start of the journey, where anyone entering Tate Britain might fairly expect to encounter some agenda-setting and the beginning of a narrative. This collapse of storytelling skills is Tate Britain’s fundamental problem. The progress of British art should not be made as blandly legible as the unfolding of a Harry Potter yarn, but some effort must surely be made to give us a beginning, a middle and an end.
As it happens, the beginning of British art’s story is fascinating and dramatic. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, with the crazed iconoclasm that followed, was a cultural tsunami that eradicated a millennium’s worth of British artistic achievement. The nation needs constantly to be reminded of this critical horror. The absence of actual artworks that make the point is a poignant part of the story: I will never forget a Tate display of medieval art in Britain in which the sole remaining fragment of a British Crucifixion was shown. It was just a pair of Christ’s feet. But it was all that was left. And it had more impact than a roomful of Victorian slosh.
