Mass & Swirl:
A secret installation for Tate Modern

As 2009 draws to a close, we finally release an article that the ADP editor has been grappling with for six months—a modest proposal for the Tate Modern exhibition Pop Life: Art in a material world.

R.J. Preece (ADP), L.A. Roka
ADP magazine 2(1): In between / ADP magazine 1(5) | Published 31 December 2009
Inspired by and dedicated to the 2009 contributors, interviewees and supporters of ADP. Musical inspiration: The classic CD Loveless by My Bloody Valentine—for its floating raft of dreamy texture and unease, half-awake range of emotions, embedded in noise.

Loomer by My Bloody Valentine.

Because the art publicity system still celebrates the artist—and to some extent the art.
Because one art is the performance of art publicity, within transitions from product to service-oriented economies.

Because the Artist is not one person as God, but a producer of objects and services and branding—a person just like the rest of us, working with us, in an invisible installation that is entirely visible.

Secret door

In the Pop Life: Art in a Material World exhibition space, ADP has installed a secret door in the wall of the final room of the exhibition exploring art, marketing and communications. It only becomes visible when alone in the space and after making a special, coded request.

Upon entering a small passageway, the secret room emerges, like one on the reality TV show, Celebrity Big Brother. Inside, a clinical white space features surveillance cameras of the exhibition rooms, to study the visitors.

In a half-awake dreamscape, also in the secret room are the teams of the Tate Modern press office and the White Cube press office, leading the commercial galleries that represent the artists in the show. They have formed a public-private partnership, performing a sort of non-objective workplace action-installation, led by artistic director Jay Jopling.

Mass and Swirl

Inside Tate Modern’s giant Turbine Hall in the former power station, the communications installation is ready. Multiple stacks of press releases and press clippings about the artists and related players occupy one side of the hall. Not just one clipping of an article, say in a newspaper, but copies of the clipping times the number of the newspaper’s circulation. Further, copies of all of the articles downloaded from the Internet have been included—times the number of online readers, as well as all copies read via digital databases. All of the artist teams’ coverage and communications have been included, plus transcripts of radio broadcasts about the artists times listeners, plus TV coverage represented by miles of video tape. Times viewers. Plus all of the conversations about the artists, everywhere, are represented by the estimated miles of transcripts. Yes, all of the communications are here in the Turbine Hall—for all to see—about every artist and every related player in the show, showing the mass and bulk, of the marketing and media/communications and the teams leading and steering the discourse.

Powerful fans emerge in several locations in the Turbine Hall.

They begin to loosen, flutter and elevate the communications documents into flight, across the space, up and down, forming gradually a giant, complicated and flowing swirl, comparable to migrating birds, simulating the current state of Art in the Age of Mass Media.