From Power generation plant to Art gallery - Tate Modern's story

By Adrian Ellis 

Regeneration: Turbine Hall in 1994 and (right) during Olafur Eliasson's "The Weather Project", 2003-04 (Photo: Tate Photography Marcus Leith/Andrew Dunkley)

The philosopher WB Gallie developed the idea of “essentially contested
concepts” to describe terms that are central to political debate but
that necessarily lack an agreed definition—“freedom” and “equality”, for
example. When it comes to museum buildings, “success” is another
essentially contested concept. Everyone involved has a different set of
criteria. The curator judges success by how the art looks on the walls;
the architect is usually more preoccupied with the visitors’ and the
viewers’ emotional responses to the siting and massing of the building
itself; and the sponsoring politician is looking for economic impact,
tourism, jobs and some reflected glory. First impressions being what
they are, the rest of us will probably see the museum refracted through
the lens of the opening festivities, whether we were there or just read
about them.

To make matters more challenging for the leadership of a museum building project, the criteria that loom largest for those closest to it and that relentlessly
define and fill daily life—especially where public funding is
involved—are those that history treats most dismissively: the project
managers’ holy trinity of conformity to the budget, the timetable and
the original brief. If you ignore these you are in trouble today; but if
you are bound by them, you are in trouble tomorrow.

Tate Modern’s success

So a vital part of leadership is the ability to construct and reconstruct a consensus around what “success” actually means, —managing expectations; authoritatively
moulding and articulating a set of compatible aspirations for each of
the multiple perspectives that inform the project; and doing all this
forcefully enough and early enough in the process to have some impact
not just on the perception but on the reality too. You need to make sure
the project is considered by everyone that matters as both “doable” and
“worth doing”—neither is enough by itself.

Tate Modern, which opened ten years ago, is a success by most criteria. It is as close to the unrealisable ideal of the “incontestable” as any new museum building of even approximately
comparable ambition that has been completed in the past 20 years. It has
focused popular and critical attention on the art that it displays, and
it has done this with conviction and flair. It has drawn visitors to
its environs in vast and unanticipated numbers; in the process it has
had the intended catalytic impact on a neglected part of central London;
it has given a new life to a vast and intractable building; its
formidable Turbine Hall and—to a lesser extent—its other galleries have
housed a series of spectacular and memorable exhibitions; and it has
served as a focal point for a broad swathe of social activity,
engagement and play.

One need not adopt any position with respect to the wars that surround the historical significance and value of contemporary art to assent to this
success. As Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of
Art, memorably put it, Tate Modern “rebooted perceptions of the place of
London in the contemporary art world”. This is all in large part
attributable to the profound understanding of Nicholas Serota, its
long-standing director, of both the substantive and presentational
aspects of leadership in the museum-building game.

Refining the vision

On the substantive front, unlike many of the early lottery-funded grands projets in the UK, Tate Modern benefited from the process of a long, pre-lottery incubation
period, in which the underlying rationale for a dedicated gallery—and
the physical space that it would require—were refined and revised. This
happened in the context of both the intellectual and civic debate he
fuelled about the lack of a dedicated modern and contemporary art museum
in Britain’s capital, and of the fitting of that mandate to various,
ultimately aborted, early candidates for the location. Many lottery
projects that were pulled together to short order and in response to the
sudden turning on of the lottery funding spigot lacked this
incremental, lapidary process. This showed both in their functionality
as buildings and in their vitality as organisations—the Millennium Dome
downstream from Bankside being only the most obvious example.

The ultimate choice of site for Tate Modern was utterly audacious—above all, in embracing the scale of Giles Gilbert Scott’s defunct power station. In 1994, I walked the
length and breadth of the original building, courtesy of Nuclear
Electric, who at the time owned it as the result of an odd quirk in the
division of the spoils of privatisation. They were gingerly exploring
“adaptive reuse” and I, for one, declared it simply too big for any
single cultural purpose. I am sure many board members, funders and
others who had to be convinced had the same, initial, cowed reaction to
its mass and then had to be turned around, one by one, by a forceful and
imaginative account of its potentialities.

Rebranding Tate

The ground was carefully prepared for each constituency. Artists were canvassed and their preferences for exhibiting in “found spaces” underscored, faint though the traces of
those spaces ultimately were on Bankside; curatorial perspectives were
articulated—perhaps over-articulated—that replaced the conventional
“conveyor belt of history” approach with thematic juxtapositions. At
Millbank, the ahistorical re-hangs were designed to underscore the
abundance of the holdings, and thereby provide a rationale for
expansion; at Bankside, they were to gloss the historical thinness of
same collections.

Under the design consultancy Wolff Olins’s fastidious tutelage, the techniques of corporate branding were applied to external relations in their
totality with a thoroughness unprecedented in the arts at the time,
anywhere—New York’s Museum of Modern Art was agog. This applied right
down to the slightly jarring fiat that disposed of the definite article
in “Tate Britain”. The case study still on Wolff Olins’s website is
formidable and only conceivable with a client that is a willing partner
in every aspect of identity management.

Perhaps the most brilliant presentational move was securing political support at all levels—local, London, national—without any articulated operating plan, any hope of generating significant
income and with a strong commitment to free entry. Serota’s close
partnership with his chairman, Dennis Stevenson, was critical to this
coup, as probably was the formative hinterland provided by his mother,
the late Baroness Serota, a formidable force in London politics.

Gaining political support

An ongoing injection of public sector funding was going to be required to make a go of Tate Bankside and this was obvious to informed observers from the inception, no matter
how successful its catering or retail or its pioneering cultivation of
new donors and sponsors. But the later this truth became obvious to the
less informed, then the more difficult it would be for politicians to
repudiate this zeitgeist-steeped and, by now, politically fashionable
project.

Tate Modern was too big to embarrass or to be embarrassed by, and the revenue commitment was manoeuvred gracefully and definitively into place. For
all the doubtless fraught and on-going traumas of annual public
expenditure negotiation subsequently, this separated Tate Bankside from
the pack and made it closer to the grands projets of France than to most
other cultural capital projects in the UK.

Completing Tate Modern by 2012

For more than five years, the Tate has been publicly planning its next chapter of expansion, the “completion” of the Bankside site, a 60% expansion of floor space,
budgeted at £215m and designed by Herzog and de Meuron, the original
architects. Preparatory site work is under way, although the original
intention to complete by 2012, in time for the London Olympics, would be
a formidable sprint by any measure. The project has, like Tate Modern,
had the benefit of substantial incubation time and, in addition, it has
the perspective that experience and success has afforded the board and
management of the Tate, not just at Bankside, but on Millbank and in
Liverpool and St Ives.

For all this, it feels oddly lacking in conviction—not just with respect to fundraising, which always has a degree of bluster and bootstrapping
about it, and not just because of the veiled reservations of Tate
Modern’s exiting director, Vicente Todolí, expressed about the issues of
museums focusing overly on expansions. Rather, it is the brief itself,
so well-explored first time round, that this time is under-articulated,
anaemic even, in its cultural, civic and social rationale. It is the
focus on architecture rather than purpose that dominates the discourse.

Perhaps I am just re-walking the original building, again defeated by my own lack of imagination. But it may be that the arc of physical expansion of the cultural sector is
coming to an end. We live increasingly in a virtual age, in an age where
the weightless, the mobile, the contingent, the adaptive, the
provisional and the collaborative are more compelling than their
antonyms. Somehow the Tate gallery, and its leadership, need to
demonstrate more vividly how their aspirations engage with this
radically changed time and agenda. It’s not whether it is “doable”; it’s
whether it’s “worth doing”. Adrian Ellis

The writer is a director of AEA Consulting