The Artist Will ( No Longer )
Be Present

Between Object and Architecture
Tate Modern, London
17.06.16 –

Following a £260 million revamp by the Swiss architectural practice Herzog & de Meuron, on 17 June 2016 Tate Modern opened its new Switch House galleries with a permanent collection exhibition on Level 2, titled Between Object and Architecture. The display thematically gathers together a constellation of works made during the last forty years or so that either looks like architecture, is made with materials associated with construction ( such as bricks, breeze blocks, building-site detritus and spirit levels, etc. ), or is displayed in relation to the new building’s architectural features. On the website it says that the works in the exhibition are notable for their determination to be brought down from the pedestal – a support structure that has traditionally separated art from the viewer – and placed directly onto the floor, or attached to the wall. The idea behind this presentation, then, is for the spectator to engage more directly with the art by un-inhibiting the conditions under which it is displayed.

This intention was amply embodied by much of the work, but one piece pitted itself against the museum’s rhetoric and raised some interesting questions about the power of art institutions, the rules of the art world, and artists’ complicity in limiting the reach of their own work. Leaning against the back wall of the gallery, next to a floor-to-ceiling window that looks down on the bookshop below, stands a skinny rod of cylindrical wood blocks. About the length of a pilgrim’s staff, the individual segments that make up the rod are painted in a scale of recurring colours: red, white, yellow, green. The separate shades have dulled to suggest a bit of age, and any precision in the object’s line of trajectory from the floor to the wall that may have been present at the time of its making has gone. The succession of cheerfully coloured components sags ever so gently in the middle, under the weight of gravity and time. Titled Round Bar of Wood ( 1973 ), the work is by André Cadere, a migrant artist from behind the Iron Curtain who plied his trade in Paris in the 1970s before being taken by cancer at the age of forty-three.

Cadere was a one-idea artist. He travelled a single path. During his career he made 180 ‘round bars of wood’, each following the same system of colour permutations. The colours employed were always black, white, and the six colours of the rainbow: yellow, orange, red, violet, blue and green. The bar at Tate Modern is composed of fifty-two segments that account for every combination possible of the four colours chosen, plus a repetition of the first four and a built-in error. The last sequence of colours is always a repeat of the first, reflecting the artist’s view that a pole came to its natural conclusion when the first group of colours reappeared. The mistake is introduced to the mathematical system on purpose to create, as Cadere said, a dialectical link between order and error. The error also relaxes the formality of the chromatic composition and deprives the eye of an opportunity to detect a pattern. The effect of schematic uncertainty also raises the prospect that there might be some other purpose to this handiwork, some deeper intent.

In fact, the true significance of these poles has very little to do with how they look, and more with how and where they appeared. Their presence in the Paris, London and New York art worlds during the 1970s stemmed from Cadere’s arrival in the West from communist Romania and his sense of being an outsider – but crucially, one with an unshakeable determination to infiltrate the dominant cultural circuit, come what might. The tactic employed to inculcate himself was as opportunistic as it was symbolic: he simply turned up at other people’s exhibitions with his wooden poles and installed them temporarily, either by placing them in a suitably visible place, or carrying one underarm as he mingled with the crowd. He said about his work, when interviewed by Sylvère Lotringer for Semiotext( e ) in 1978: ‘I can go to the Museum of Modern Art or Castelli’s and present my work without anyone inviting me.’ One can only imagine the kind of reception he might have got from fellow artists, let alone the snobby dealers who controlled the commercial art world at the time. He said of this: ‘Obviously, it is not because I go to Castelli’s that I am exhibited there. [ But ] nothing can prevent me from being concretely, materially inside the place. He can throw me out, and it’s interesting if he does. This has happened elsewhere, and in other circumstances. When the institution defends itself, it becomes, in no uncertain terms, brutal and aggressive.’ And among the reasons why other artists might feel that he was a louse for gatecrashing the openings of their shows, he cites: ‘Jealousy and competition, for the most part.’ This was art that must have divided audiences and artists alike and yet, by persisting and remaining true to his cause, Cadere began to build a network around his interventions. He became a familiar figure on the scene. Eventually Yvon Lambert, the minimalist art dealer, showed an interest, and the rods began to sell. He was invited to exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Documenta 5, and many private galleries across Europe and worldwide.

The thing that appeals so much about this venture isn’t the folksy irregularity of the wooden bars’ minimal colours and proportions, nor the delightfully chippy attitude that Cadere held against the establishment that he was so keen to impress, but rather the idea that the artist would always be present when his work was on display. Holding his own art, instead of screwing it to the wall and walking away, enabled Cadere to create a mobile condition of engagement, where viewers were forced to consider the work in relation to the art system. In a conversation with Lynda Morris in 1976 he said bluntly: ‘My art is the situation of my work in the art world’ ( which Morris explains in a YouTube video of 2013: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NHZ70sOALY> ). This objective was ably achieved by operating in the margin between ‘closed’ museum and ‘open’ public space. Whether standing in the crowd at the opening of a show, walking in the street to an exhibition, or sitting in a pub near one of the important galleries, his modus operandi opened up a conversation about where the ‘art world’ and the ‘real world’ began and ended, and about the art gallery as a structure of power that needed to be challenged.

Lewis Hyde makes an argument in his book, The Gift, that although art can circulate simultaneously in two economies ( market and gift ) there exists a conflict of interests for the artist whose source is the gift of creative talent, but whose livelihood is dependent on a commercial context.¹ The reasoning here is that when thought of as a gift, what we get from art beyond selling or owning it is a kind of ‘blessing’. The artist shares his gift, Hyde proposes, in a way that ‘revives the soul’. A problem with this suggestion, as the author openly acknowledges, is the emergence of a state of affairs in which the twin spheres of ‘gift’ and ‘market’ economies become mutually exclusive. If a fundamental difference between gift and commodity exchange is that giving establishes a bond between two people, while selling leaves no meaningful connection, does the art market always taint the purity of the work of art? The example of Cadere’s insightful navigation between the separate spheres shows us that the market can, indeed, destroy a work of art, but in a way that bears a gift. Cadere created a situation that exposed this predicament, but in so doing produced understanding – and understanding, the avatar of knowledge, is itself a gift.

Today, in the absence of the artist, leaning against the wall of Tate Modern stands the red, white, yellow and green staff by André Cadere that was purchased by the gallery in 2006. Much against the wishes of its maker it has become more beautiful over the years. ( He once said in a lecture: ‘Tones are rejected because they would automatically make the work harmonic and aesthetic.’ ) In this fixed setting, framed by the protective cord of a barrier system, we can only admire the work for its use as a prop in a performance that took place many years ago. Where once Round Bar of Wood operated as a modern version of the ancient native talking stick, an instrument of democracy and symbol of the holder’s authority to speak in public with whoever came his way, sadly, the conversation has now moved on. On this winter Sunday morning most visitors to the gallery are thronging around a peek-a-boo mirror piece by Yayoi Kusama: it offers a more interesting photo opportunity to people carrying smartphones.

1. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, Canongate Books, Edinburgh, 1983.