Stranger Than We Can Imagine

‘We needed to do what we wanted to do’
Keith Richards

Murdering Airplane
by Max Ernst, 1920
(Bridgeman/© ADAGP Paris & DACS London 2015)

I
n 2010, the Tate Modern gallery in London staged a retrospective of the work of the French post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. To visit this exhibition was to spend hours wandering through Gauguin’s vision of a romanticised South Pacific in late nineteenth-century Tahiti. This was a world of vivid colour and guilt-free sexuality. Gauguin’s paintings saw no distinction between mankind, divinity and nature, and by the time you reached the end of the exhibition you felt as if you understood Eden.

Visitors were then spat out next to the Tate’s twentieth-century gallery. There was nothing to prepare them for how brutal walking out of one and into the other would be.

Here were the works of Picasso, Dalí, Ernst and many others. You immediately wondered if the lighting was different, but it was the art that made this room feel cold. The colour palette was predominantly browns, greys, blues and blacks. Splashes of vivid red appeared in places, but not in ways that comforted. With the exception of a later Picasso portrait, greens and yellows were entirely absent.

These were paintings of alien landscapes, incomprehensible structures and troubled dreams. The few human figures that were present were abstracted, formal, and divorced from contact with the natural world. The sculptures were similarly antagonistic. One example was Man Ray’s
Cadeau
, a sculpture of an iron with nails sticking out of its base in order to rip to shreds any fabric you attempted to smooth. Encountering all this in a state of mind attuned to the visions of Gauguin was not recommended. There was no compassion in that room. We had entered the abstract realm of theory and concept. Coming directly from work that spoke to the heart, the sudden shift to work aimed solely at the head was traumatic.

Gauguin’s work ran up to his death in 1903, so we might have expected a smoother transition into the early twentieth-century gallery. True, his work was hardly typical of his era and only widely appreciated after his death, but the jarring transition still leaves us struggling to answer a very basic question: what the hell happened, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the human psyche? The Tate Modern is a suitable place to ask questions like this, as it stands as a kind of shrine to the twentieth century. The meaning of the word ‘modern’ in the art world means that it will be forever associated with that period. Seen in this light, the popularity of the gallery reveals both our fascination with those years and our desire to understand them.

There was one antechamber which separated the two exhibitions. It was dominated by an outline of a nineteenth-century industrial town by the Italian-Greek artist Jannis Kounellis, drawn directly onto the wall in charcoal. The sketch was sparse and devoid of human figures. Above it hung a dead jackdaw and a hooded crow, stuck to the wall by arrows. I’m not sure what point the artist was trying to make, but for me the room served as a warning about the gallery I was about to enter. It might have been kinder if the Tate had used this room as a form of decompression chamber, something that could prevent the visual art equivalent of the bends.

The dead birds, the accompanying text suggested, ‘have been seen as symbolising the death throes of imaginative freedom’. But seen in context between Gauguin and the twentieth century, a different interpretation seemed more appropriate. Whatever it was that had died above that nineteenth-century industrial town, it was not imaginative freedom. On the contrary, that monster was about to emerge from the depths.

Recently I was shopping for Christmas presents and went into my local bookshop for a book by Lucy Worsley, my teenage daughter’s favourite historian. If you are lucky enough to have a teenage daughter who has a favourite historian, you don’t need much persuading to encourage this interest.

The history books were in the far corner of the fourth floor, at the very top of the building, as if history was the story of crazed ancestors we need to hide in the attic like characters from
Jane Eyre
. The book I wanted wasn’t in stock, so I took out my phone to buy it online. I went to shut down an open newspaper app, pressed the wrong icon, and accidentally started a video of a speech made by President Obama a few hours earlier. It was December 2014, and he was talking about whether the hacking of Sony Entertainment, which the President blamed on North Korea, should be regarded as an act of war.

Every now and again there is a moment that brings home how strange life in the twenty-first century can be. There I was in Brighton, England, holding a thin slice of glass and metal which was made in South Korea and ran American software, and which could show me the President of America threatening the Supreme Leader of North Korea. What about this incident would have seemed more incredible at the end of the last century: that this device existed, and allowed me to see the President of the United States while Christmas shopping? That the definition of war could have changed so much that it now included the embarrassing of Sony executives? Or that my fellow shoppers would have been so accepting of my miraculous accidental broadcast?

I was standing next to the twentieth-century history shelves at the time. There were some wonderful books on those shelves, big fat detailed accounts of the century we know most about. Those books act as a roadmap, detailing the journey we took to reach the world we now live in. They tell a clearly defined story of great shifts of geopolitical power: the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the American Century and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet somehow that story fails to lead us into the world we’re in now, adrift in a network of constant surveillance, unsustainable competition, tsunamis of trivia and extraordinary opportunity.

Imagine the twentieth century is a landscape, stretching out in front of you. Imagine that the events of its history are mountains, rivers, woods and valleys. Our problem is not that this era is hidden
from us, but that we know too much about it. We all know that this landscape contains the mountains of Pearl Harbor, the
Titanic
and South African apartheid. We know that in its centre lies the desolation of fascism and the uncertainty of the Cold War. We know people of this land could be cruel, desperate or living in fear, and we know why. The territory has been thoroughly mapped, catalogued and recorded. It can be overwhelming.