Impressive though the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui's Behind The Red Moon installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern is, I must admit I came away feeling slightly underwhelmed. Merle Haggard famously sang that the bottle let him down, for me El Anatsui's bottletops let me down.
But just like when the bottle lets you down, the journey was at least fun. Behind The Red Moon is, El Anatsui states, "an artwork in three acts" and all three of those acts are made of liquor bottle tops and metal fragments that have been crushed, crumbled, and connected together by hand by El Anatsui's team.
They're epic in scale, making good use of the Turbine Hall's vastness, and when you first look at them there seems to be no meaning whatsoever beyond a huge abstracted field of colour and texture. Which would be fair enough. But there's information on boards dotted around the Turbine Hall which tells you what El Anatsui's thinking behind the work is. I found it to be quite instructive - if a little cold.
The viewer is invited to embark on a journey and to interact with the hangings (although eager security guards were on hand to stop anyone touching them or going beyond the marked out lines that surrounded the floor based work) but we're also told that we should, if we look close enough, be able to see the moon, the sail (?), and the Earth.
I didn't see any of those things. But I did see how, much like Hew Locke's Procession at Tate Britain last year, El Anatsui's work made statements about colonialism and the overlapping histories of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Split into three 'acts' (The Red Moon, The World, and The Wall) the installation is intended to evoke the ships that transported slaves (as well as gold, sugar, and spirits) across the Atlantic and the use of red bottle tops as a raw material is meant to evoke the 'blood moons' that sailors would use to navigate their way across the ocean.
It's likely, also, that El Anatsui wanted us to think of the thousands of gallons of innocent blood that was spilled on these voyages. A group of meshy figures suspended in the air seem to represent human figures. Perhaps they are alive but perhaps they were once alive. Perhaps they were consigned to a watery grave.
Perhaps they are embarking on a forced journey to a new, cruel, world. The inky black wall that stands at the end of the Turbine Hall is, I discovered, rooted in the ancient story of an earthen wall in Togo called Notsie that was built by King Agokoli to confine and oppress his subjects, the Ewe people. Despite their name the Ewe people were not sheep and a revolutionary uprising led to the wall's destruction and liberty for the Ewes.
It's good to learn about something I'd known nothing about before visiting this show but it would have been even better if I'd have learned that by looking at the art instead of reading about it. It's a problem I have with a lot of contemporary conceptual art. It's too obscure. It's fine to make the viewer do some work but sometimes the artworks seem to leave the viewer out completely.
I don't get the impression that that's what an artist like El Anatsui is aiming for. He's clearly trying to make connections (both physical and mental in his work) and by using everyday materials he's announcing he's an artist for everyday people and not just scholars and art bloggers. Sadly, for me, he hasn't completely succeeded in his aims (or what I assume to be his aims) but he's given it a good shot. Don't visit Tate Modern specially for this installation but if you are visiting, or just passing, pop in and have a look. You probably won't be quite as underwhelmed as I was. I'd been led to expect more.
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