Saw Tate Modern's new turbine hall installation last week, the one where its notionally 2058, London's drowned and sculptures by Moore, Bourgeois & Nauman taken in from the rain cohabit with refugees, on whose bunks there's strewn assorted classics of apocalypt-lit - Ballard,* Wells, 1984, Fahrenheit 451 etc.
Basically it does the same thing I think Doris Salcedo's crack in the floor did more eloquently and economically, evoking a time when contemporary culture shalt be but relics and ruins, playing on that Tate as surrogate cathedral trope and the (not wholly unjustified) gloom w/r/t our civilization's/planet's long-term prospects we're all feeling right now.
:(
The Tate also, you may remember, featured in a decline and fall context in Children of Men,** another work that tapped into this whole inverted Ozymandias complex we seem to have, whereby rather than being shamed into dumb humility by the monuments of long-vanished cultures we cultivate this vain curiosity about how we'll look to posterity, what future Hornbyesques will rank as our top 5 greatest hits - remember Michael Caine's adorable portrayal of an old geezer who gets dewy-eyed listening to Aphex Twin LPs from the turn of the century? Ahahaha.
*As a blogger from the London suburbs who's half-digested misc. modish Theory, I'm obligated here to mention the Kode9 & Spaceape LP - as inspired by Ballard's Drowned World (the which maybe the next printing could synergistically say on a cover sticker?)
**which I didn't much like, to go on the record. Bladerunner or Alien or Terminator 2 are pretty outwardly straightforward but let you extrapolate this or that, whereas this film wanted to let you know that it was very densely and profoundly freighted with serious and courageous messages about weighty issues but was basically a thriller with cute sight gags (Did you peep that London 2012 hoodie!)
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