The embodiment of art

Tate Modern, Bankside, London

There were bodies everywhere at the Tate Modern on May's bank holiday weekend, not only hanging on the gallery walls but streaming through the entrance in vast numbers. The doors were closed to visitors for a while, perhaps the first time that crowd control has been needed in a public art space.

The Tate gallery's 20th century collection, housed in a disused power station on the banks of the Thames, has been divided into four broad themes—“Landscape, Still Life, History, and Nude/Action/Body.” Entering the gallery through the vast and physically imposing turbine hall, our own bodies seem incredibly small. Other humans seem tiny as we rise above them on the escalators to “Nude/Action/Body” on level five, a cultural hall of mirrors reflecting how artists have looked at the human figure.

Just outside the entrance is Rodin's The Kiss, the art world's most famous embrace and probably one of the last great manifestations of the academic nude. Once inside, we see the body remixed and reworked by artists and shown in arresting and complementary juxtapositions. The tactile sensuality of Matisse's bronzes is beautifully matched by the inky washes of Marlene Dumas.

Among the obvious human figures by Picasso and De Kooning, there are more oblique references to the body in the paintings of Barnett Newman. His immense flat fields of saturated colour engulf the viewer, and we are momentarily lost.

In the 1960s and '70s the body became not only the subject of art but also its medium and terrain. This period is represented by Bruce Nauman's human fountain and the relics and props used by Rebecca Horn in her performance art, exhibited as a forlorn display of objects in need of a body to bring them alive.

More recent works question our attitudes to the naked human form. How do we really look? What do we see and how can this be described? In Sam Taylor Wood's video Brontosaurus we see a naked man dancing, projected larger than life on to a huge wall. He is completely absorbed in dance music that we cannot hear. Instead, the gallery is filled by a classical symphony. This is a mesmerising image of a body both vulnerable and strong, and it takes ages before we notice the tiny toy brontosaurus in the video.

Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych, shown here as part of a temporary exhibition called “Between cinema and a hard place,” is one of the most compelling works in the gallery. Two huge video screens show us real images of the beginning and the end of life. In between, a third screen shows a soft, ethereal image of a figure submerged. The figure floats, drifting in a transient passage between the two. As Hippocrates reminds us, “Art is long, but life is short.”

The works at Tate Modern bear witness to our insatiable fascination with the human body, and they reflect both past and current concerns. The body has never been more important than now. We see this in art that mirrors modern science, and in artists reconsidering the body as scientists update its constitution. We are almost in possession of another kind of portrait, the genetic blueprint of humankind. We cannot escape thinking about how we look and are looked at, since the media bombard us with advice on how to sculpt and surgically alter our own bodies.

This collected representation of the body in art, and the art of the body, is a timely and intriguing reflection of shifting preoccupations and emergent visions.

Figure.

Modern bodies at the Tate: Picasso's “The Three Dancers” (1925)