I quite enjoy going to art galleries and exhibitions, and I often wish I knew more about art history than I currently do. I've been to several galleries in Europe and of course the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and most recently, I visited the Tate Modern Collection in London. I had been to the Tate four years ago when I went backpacking with my friend Karla, but at the time, we could only rush through a couple of the rooms because the gallery was closing for the day. Now I got to go back and truly take my time to look at the collection and for many of the pieces I couldn't help but think "What makes some of this art?" My answers surprised me.

The Tate Modern, which is housed in an old power station on the Thames, is imposingly industrial from the outside, but even though the interior does retain much of its raw, warehouse-like elements (exposed pipes and concrete floors), something quite different happens inside in order to signal the Tate's position as an art gallery.

The rooms are divided by stark white walls with spotlights highlighting the various pieces and occasionally there are very minimalist glass boxes displaying other objects of art. By each piece, there is a little plaque telling you the title of the work, the artist's name and then a blurb about what the piece is supposed to mean. As I walked around, I found myself musing just as much about the environment housing the art as the art itself. As I stood staring at a canvas that had been merely slashed down the middle with a razor blade for a couple of minutes, I started asking myself, "Would I be staring so intently at something like this in any other context?" The answer was, "Probably not." 

I was pretty ignorant of most of the artists featured at the Tate, but there were a few I knew and already appreciated. I saw pieces by Dali, who I quite love. The Tate has his "Metamorphosis of Narcissus" and "Autumnal Cannibalism" among others (the latter depicting two beings blurred into each other and appearing to eat each other with cutlery to symbolize the Spanish Civil War - a visual I found particularly striking). I can identify Dali's style a mile away and maybe deep down this uniqueness is one of the criteria I use to judge whether something is art. I also saw pieces by Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst (his "Pieta," featuring a mustached man holding a dummy version of himself in his lap, was quite haunting for me), Joan Miro, Monet (whose waterlilies seemed completely out of place here), Jackson Pollack, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol - all names I readily recognized. And while none of these were traditional by any means, I don't think anyone would question their validity in an art gallery setting - at least I didn't.

Then there were the other pieces. One installment featured an industrial panorama sketched directly onto the wall with two stuffed dead birds staked to it  and a long sheet of paper covered in charcoal on the adjacent wall. Granted, anyone could probably glean the meaning behind this installment - our industry and progress is killing the environment and our humanity. But then there's an installment by Beuys, a German artist, entitled "The Lightning and the Stag." It features girders of metal coming down from the ceiling to the floor and then an old cart, a painted ironing board and lumps of unidentified glop strewn across the floor. According to the plaque beside it, the metal was lightning, the cart was a goat, the ironing board was a stag and the globs were primordial animals.  (Notably, this is one of the pieces I actually remember from my first rushed visit to the Tate.) Now, if you were honest, you know you wouldn't get any of that from just looking at it. I'm still not sure I completely see it. However, because of the plaque, denoting the piece as art and explaining it as such, I actually became somewhat convinced of its status as art - mythology in our modern times as interpreted through our industrial objects. And what I also found interesting about these two installments, along with many of the others, is the little calf-high rope that runs in front of them to section them off from the rest of the room. In effect, you cannot cross the rope, which makes it very clear that you should interpret the strangely arranged everyday objects as more important than the rest of the room. If they were paintings, the rope would be their frame. You are separated from them, and then are meant to regard them as something untouchable and preciously elite. Effectively, the pieces' environment becomes just as important as the art itself.

Similarily, there was a pile of bricks made from cork lined up on the floor, and there was an accompanying line around it saying "Do not cross the line." Yes, the line is also probably there to protect the piece from damage, but if you saw this mundane array of objects sitting on the floor anywhere else, what would it matter if you touched it or even destroyed it?

There were other rooms in the minimalist exhibit that continued to use the whole room as the piece of art. One of them had words written in neon lighting saying, "the whole world + the work = the whole world." The glowing white signs (not unlike signs that would advertise a store being open) ran along two walls of the room and the only other piece in the room was a floor piece (not terribly distinguished from the actual floor) by a different artist. The room itself became art.

Another room about objects as art contained a glass case filled with three suspended basketballs (apparently representative of young American males' pressure and hopes as they struggle to achieve wealth and success through basketball). There were also a projector that shone the image of a light switch onto the wall in the same place a switch would normally be and a tin of "unidentified substance" entitled "Artist's Shit" (number 004 of 40 tins). The most striking object to me was Duchamps's famous "Fountain," which is of course just a urinal with the artist's writing on it. I found this particularly striking because it was actually a replica of the original. Wasn't it a bit crazy that I was staring at and contemplating a replica of a urinal? Better yet, there are only so many replicas in the world that are approved by the artist. Who has the right to approve one urinal over the next? But because it was sitting in a glass case next to a little plaque, I did indeed look at it, and very obviously, it made me think about art and objects.

Then there were truly strange pieces like "Meryon," which was just a canvas painted over with heavy strokes of black paint. It meant nothing to me and didn't provoke any thought at all except "Why is this here?" But seemingly, Graham Coxon (former guitarist with Blur) saw something in it and wrote a song inspired by it, which you can listen to right next to it. His song, like many others, is part of a Tate project that links current bands with modern art. I did listen to the Klaxons' song inspired by metal blocks stuck to the wall and heard sounds just as indescribable as the art itself. The pieces that bands and singers chose just proved to me that others are affected quite differently by and attracted to pieces I wouldn't normally have had too much thought about. And I suppose that's yet another definition of art: multiple interpretations and effects.

To further provoke my thoughts on art versus environment, Mark Rothko's series of red paintings were housed in their own dimly lit room. The plaque outside stated that the paintings were originally made for a restaurant, but that Rothko decided that they didn't belong in that kind of an environment. These paintings were literally just canvases with different shadings of red on them. So, evidently to Rothko, environment greatly affects how art is perceived and understood. He confirms what I was already thinking about designated and manufactured spaces for art. There are different types of attention afforded in different spaces; perhaps it becomes an issue of semiotics as well - a painting's surroundings become just as much signifiers as the painting itself.

I remember reading Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word and how often artists like Jackson Pollock would just splatter the paint everywhere according to how he felt and then elitists (patrons or academics) would come up with theories to explain it after the fact and thus raise his "mess" into the upper echelons of art. In fact, I found myself creating theories to explain many of the art pieces, which is perhaps the point of modern art. Or maybe it's just being pretentious. But then again, there were pieces that I couldn't even attempt to explain away, including Barnett's painting that had one red stripe running down it, representing Adam. And there was also the canvas painted completely grey, entitled, yes, "Grey." 

While walking through the Tate, I was also reminded of another book which discussed the theft of the "Mona Lisa" years back; apparently, even more people came from miles around to gape at the empty spot. In effect, the environment housing the art became just as important as the art itself. 

I will admit that I probably remember more specific pieces from this modern art collection than I do from the numerous historical art collections I've seen, and I come up with more questions here than I ever have over impressionists or Renaissance painters (I still have plenty of questions about the film of ants carrying around pieces of confetti to the sound of dropping matchsticks). Perhaps that means they've done their job then.