Tate Modern has a ladder in its tights. Rarely have I seen such a ratty collection of torn stockings and desperate fishnets all strung up to dry. Mire Lee is the 23rd artist to take on the Turbine Hall and hers is a stomach-churning commission. The space, which has in the past played host to Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (the sun) and Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas (the trumpet), has been transformed into a grisly abattoir/laundry for this year’s Hyundai Commission, titled Open Wound. After wandering up and down the hall getting a crick in the neck I still can’t decide if the skins are closer to hosiery or charcuterie, nor if the raddled assembly was ethereal or emetic. That’s the way with the South Korean-born Mire Lee, whose work treads a fine, deliberate line between the beautiful and the grotesque.
Art is no stranger to the bloody and corporeal. Think of Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, the weeping sores of the Isenheim altarpiece or assorted flayings of Saint Bartholomew. Open Wound opens in the same week as Francis Bacon’s portraits at the National Portrait Gallery and Lee’s stretched, skinned and contorted beasties trussed in the Turbine Hall would go happily hand-in-hand, or claw-in-claw, with Bacon’s twisted sitters.
At the centre of the Turbine Hall is a vast steampunk contraption suspended from one of the building’s original chains, slowly churning and dripping rust-coloured, to put it politely, liquid onto a shallow, spattered basin below. (Lee has spoken in interviews of her interest in the scatological side of things.) Tangled in the cogs are long skeins and chains of matted metal like the hair that you’d pull from the plughole. So much for the gross side of the installation.
From the top of the Turbine slope the ensemble is better, balletic even, with the hanging figures dancing across the length and breadth of the hall like the ghostly wilis in Act II of Giselle, the effect conjured up by nothing more than a suggestion of tattered tutus and an extended armature or leg. Then the wind blows through the doors and the skins spin on their chains and look uncannily like corpses on a gibbet. It’s horrible and heavenly, meaty and lighter than air. Aesthetically, I’m coming down on the side of rather a success, but it did put me off my breakfast.
