Date: 06-06-2010
Owning Institution: Tate Modern
Publication:         Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011    
Subject:     Now  20th Century      

''Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera” is the come-hither title of Tate Modern’s new show, which purports to explore “the nature and character of invasive looking” and “the uneasy relationship between making and viewing images that deliberately cross lines of privacy and propriety”. The exhibition includes many startling, troubling and extraordinary images, drawn from many different corners of the history of photography: Walker Evans’ snapshots of exhausted New York subway passengers, surreptitiously photographed in the 1950s; Brassai’s subtly appalling quadriptych of pictures shot from an upper-storey window, A Man Dies in the Street; Weegee’s Their First Murder; Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous picture of defiantly grinning Latin American whores, Prostitutes, Calle, Cuauhtemoctzin, Mexico City; Richard Avedon’s revelation of Andy Warhol’s surgery-scarred torso; Eddie Adams’ Viet Cong Officer Executed; and many, many more.

So why does this show as a whole come across as such a shoddy, lazy, resoundingly dull enterprise? Part of the problem is that its founding premiss is so blindingly obvious that the entire enterprise was at risk, from inception, of feeling like an unnecessarily elaborate waste of time and energy. Of course photography is an inherently voyeuristic medium. Of course photographers have collectively created some of the most unsettling and alluring images of atrocity and celebrity alike. Now tell us something that we did not know already. Find more to do with your sledgehammer of a thousand images than crack that one nut.

 The show’s failure to rise above stating the obvious is compounded by its bizarre failure to do even that particularly well, despite occupying what soon comes to seem an interminable labyrinth of rooms, hung densely at almost every point with a plethora of photographs. Its mantra might be Robert Frank’s acerbic one-liner, poided between gleeful celebration and glum warning: “You can photograph anything now”. But while Frank’s own work is well enough represented by photographs such as New York City of 1954 – a bilateral amputee wheeling himself along a rain-sheened sidewalk, like some animate package trailing in the wake of a well-heeled gent abbreviated to shiny shoes and a blur of black coat and trouser leg – several of the twentieth century’s most famously invasive or intrusive photographers have been unaccountably left out. In the section devoted to voyeuristic portraiture there are no photographs at all by Diane Arbus, which seems truly perverse. The pioneering Robert Capa, pioneer of what is now known as “embedded” photo-reportage, has just as unaccountably  been excluded from the rooms devoted to war photography.

Eccentric, thoughtless or slapdash selection fatally compromises the show at every turn. This is particularly apparent in its later stages, where the work that has been assembled to demonstrate the modern photographer’s engagement with a society where political and other forms of surveillance are rife amounts to little more than a lamentable pot-pourri of self-regarding, third-rate photography and video, interspersed for no apparent reason with actual photographs taken by agents working for Mossad or by American aerial reconnaissance missions in Iraq. There are some fine and memorable pieces lurking amid the detritus, but the suspicion lurks that they have been included more though luck than judgement.

“Exposed” is one of the most dispiritingly bad exhibitions to have been staged by Tate Modern, but the sad truth is that it is by no means exceptional. Many of its failings are symptomatic of the failings of the institution’s exhibition programme as whole. For all its popular success, much trumpeted in this the musuem’s tenth anniversary year, the general standard of Tate Modern’s shows has been disappointingly poor. There have been a handful of truly memorable exhibitions – the show dedicated to Rothko’s work during the years of his Seagram mural project, the Brancusi exhibition, the show dedicated to Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia – but far too many of Tate Modern’s exhibitions have been damp squibs and there have been a fair few disgraceful botches as well, most notably last year’s “Futurism”, quite possibly the worst major exhibition ever thrown away on a great subject. The sheer scale of Tate Modern’s operations may partly be to blame for the uneven quality of its shows, and indeed the schizophrenically confusing nature of its programme. Why on earth is it planning to show the work of Gauguin, essentially an artist of the late nineteenth century, if not simply in a rather desperate attempt to fill a blockbuster-sized whole?

It is certainly difficult to generate one large show after another while maintaining quality. The signs are that Tate Modern’s inability to meet that dual challenge has now brought it to crisis point. The problem is exacerbated by the apparent lack of anyone at the museum – below the level of Nick Serota himself, that is – with even the slightest flair for how to make an exhibition into an actual spectacle or experience. In the case of “Exposed”, this is painfully, glaringly obvious. This is a show that could well have been rescued from its own intellectual vacuity, at least to a strong degree, by the innate theatricality of its subject matter. The exhibition could have been made to feel like a journey through disparate landscapes of sex and celebrity, urban alienation and war. There could have been changes of pace and mood, shifts from large galleries to small, from spaces where viewers feel as though subject to surveillance, to those where viewers feel as though they are looking through a keyhole or into a peepshow. But no, none of that. The works have been arranged more or less as if in an archive. One sequence of images follows another, in room after room of Tate Modern’s crushingly anonymous, brutally dull version of modern gallery architecture. Even the most basic technical aspects of exhibition display, such as the control of sound spillage, have not been addressed, so at one point the visitor is invited to confront some of the most harrowing images of human cruelty – the charred body of a lynching victim, a torso with protruding spine in the killing fields of Nicaragua – while listening to Seventies soft rock leaking from the nearby installation of Nan Goldin’s trite slide-projected version of her Ballad of Sexual Dependency. On every level, this is simply not good enough.