Word: powers
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Jefferson could not only hold two contradictory ideas in his head, he could also act on both. Here, after all, is the great champion of small, limited government perpetrating the Louisiana Purchase, arguably the grandest exercise of extra-constitutional Executive power in American history. But what else should we expect from the founder whose great vision of America was the Empire of Liberty, as profound an oxymoron as political theory can provide...
What makes the occupation especially sweet is that as of this month, one has a supersize, super-hyped gallery of sufficient wattage to house one's work: the former Bankside power station, which for almost 20 years provided electricity for London, and will for the foreseeable future provide heat for its art and tourist scene. The Tate Modern, as the new gallery is known, is the brainchild of Nicholas Serota, director of Britain's venerable Tate galleries. And it's the adopted child and most high-profile work to date of the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & De Meuron...
...their adopted child because most of the work on this baby was done in 1947 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the original architect. As power stations go, Bankside was a looker, which is to say that it's a hulking lunker of a building with a tapering chimney that doesn't so much echo the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral on the opposite side of the river as flip it the bird. Nevertheless it has a happy squat symmetry, enhanced by groups of narrow windows that stripe nearly the entire height of the building. It also has size, which...
Just as the power station had three sections--one for the boilers, one for the turbines and one for the transformers--the Tate Modern has three divisions as well. Where the boilers were is now seven floors of museum, including 84 gallery spaces. The huge Turbine Hall is the gem: it has been transformed into a 115-ft.-high entrance hall, where visitors walk down a 75-ft.-wide ramp and encounter three enormous Louise Bourgeois towers, I Do, I Undo and I Re-do, comprising rusting spiral staircases and convex mirrors. On a bridge overhead is her gargantuan spider...
...work Red Slate Circle (1988) is exhibited below Monet's Water-Lilies (after 1916). Pieces by two artists, working at different ends of the century with the idea of pools, housed in a gallery made by two architectural minds working half a century apart with the idea of power. Who knew that modern art could be so tidy...