Exhibition review: The Bigger Splash, Tate Modern, London

A Bigger Splash, David Hockney, 1967, Acrylic on Canvas

A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance aims to bring together two forms of artistic practice that are normally thought as opposites, and aims to explore the development of painting after performance.

Beginning with ‘a big splash’ with two well-known pieces, David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967) and Jackson Pollock’s Summertime (1948), the Tate explores the creative thinking and processes behind the paintings, highlighting the similarities and differences.

Hockney may seem a random inclusion when compared to the energetic works of Pollock, however, teamed up with a short BBC documentary film behind the making of the artwork, it becomes aware to that A Bigger Splash is a perfectly captured moment of movement and velocity, almost enticing the viewer to jump into the pool. The illusion of the splash of water suggests a performance quality behind the work, perhaps similar to that of Pollock’s Summertime. Set on opposite sides of the first room, Summertime is an ‘arena in which to act’ as argued by the critic Harold Rosenberg, with the canvas becoming the literal tracks of Pollock’s movement across the surface. Deemed to be one of the earliest pieces of performance work, the painting seems only appropriate for this exhibition and is teamed up with Hans Namuth’s film, depicting the artist’s movement and splattering of paint onto the canvas beneath him. Bringing together the notion of painting and performance, with the help of video documentaries, the viewer is able to understand the relationship between the artist and their work. Each, though completely different, created a performance throughout the process, with Pollock quite literally performing.

The ’performance’ side of painting can be seen throughout the exhibition through the use of various video recordings depicting the creative processes of particular artworks. The juxtaposition of video performance and artwork is compelling, allowing the viewer to jump into the world of the artist, and transforming the still and static paint of the canvas into a piece full of life and history.

Shooting Picture, Niki de Saint Phalle, 1961, Plaster, paint, string, polythene and wire on wood

The first half of Painting after Performance takes the viewer on a whirlwind exploration through a wide range of performance artworks and themes. The work of Yves Klein, an organiser of public events in which nude models were covered in paint and became ‘live brushes’ to create pieces of artwork on blank canvases, advocates the idea of paint no longer being confined to the canvas, but also being applied to the human body. A notion also explored through the world of Viennese Actionism, a group of Austrian artists reacting to the political events in their country; experimented with paint on walls, floors, as well as using animal carcasses and blood. In addition, the exhibition explores the idea of painting as an agent of transformation, challenging views of gender and beauty, such as through Cindy Sherman and Sanja Iveković in the 1970s and how the artist can transform themselves through the medium of make-up, costume and drag.

In the second half of the exhibition there are rooms dedicated to individual artists and contemporary groups. Exploring and proposing how these present-day artists have been influenced by previous performance art, the individual rooms are some-what overwhelming. With several spaces made up from room-sized installations of stage sets, they become detached from the notion of painting, with the exhibition focusing more on performance, when really it should be perhaps the other way round. Karen Kilimnik’s  romantic and emotionally charged melodramatic space of Swan Lake (1992) is static and motionless, presenting anything but a performance. The inclusion of such set designs creates a tenuous link to the exploration of painting after performance, and intensifies the exhibition’s haphazardness in its display pieces and the premise behind its own title.

                                                       

An exhibition that starts strongly, Painting after Performance doesn’t seem to flow as well as intended. Using highly theoretical aims, the show fails to come to any neat conclusion, especially when attempting to explicitly answer the principle behind  its own title. However, overall Painting after Performance provides an interesting insight into performing art, and offers the viewer plenty of artworks to come up with their own interpretations regarding the creative process of art in the past and present-day. 

Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood), Ana Mendieta, 1973, Photograph on colour paper

You can see my review on Nouse: http://www.nouse.co.uk/2013/02/17/review-a-bigger-splash-painting-after-performance/