'It has to be sloppy'

Tate Etc

As Mire Lee works on her new commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, artist and writer Ami Lien talks to her about the challenges of working large-scale, her strangely affecting abstract sculptures, and why sloppiness has always been an important part of her art.

 

AMI LIEN The Turbine Hall is a massive and, to me, very confusing space. Visitors enter from different points and move towards different goals, but it’s not necessarily so obvious how to move through it. It’s like a confusing traffic intersection. I’m interested to hear how your commission will carve out a different path through the space.

MIRE LEE The Turbine Hall is very high and feels like a vertical space, but, taken as a whole, it’s actually horizontal, longer than it is tall. Ever since I was in art school, I’ve had a desire to make things as big as possible and, as soon as the commission was confirmed, I knew I wanted to fill this space as much as possible. I’ve also always wanted to make something that looked, or felt like, the inside of an animal – like a typical vore1 fetish image of being inside a whale or another huge animal. So, my very first idea, which I had to drop because it would have been very expensive, was to lay out construction scaffolding inside the Turbine Hall, so it would become a bit like the skeleton inside an animal’s body.

 

AL You’re engaging with a very monumental scale here, which is something that artists don’t often have an opportunity to play with. There is a compelling tension in your work, I think, between monumentality and melancholia.

ML I’m interested in accentuating the sadness of monumentality, or how monumentality is essentially connected to stupidity or tragedy, because when you see something human-built and monumental, there’s an underlying understanding of how much labour has gone into it, which is surely based on inequality – between the builders and the people who have hired them, and between the perceived higher capacity of the artist or architect and the workers who actually execute the project. The aesthetic experience of monumentality is, I think, an experience of violence, even if we don’t notice it right away.

 

AL You’re describing a hierarchy, and I wonder if, by focusing on the horizontality of the space, you’re consciously toppling the vertical in your approach?

ML It’s not that logical. But for sure, when making a sculpture, I want to see it on the ground sometimes. As soon as it’s on the ground, it looks funny and sad and stupid. You can create affect very easily with sculptures or materials by just putting them on the ground or destroying them a little bit.

 

AL That’s a nice lesson in affect production – I’ll try it some time. So, how did you keep moving forward with crafting a work for this space?

ML I was inspired by a picture of the original turbines sitting in Bankside Power Station, before they were decommissioned, and a crane that was used to move things around the hall. It was gigantic – I wanted to steal the charisma of that crane! In my first proposal, I wrote that I wanted to create an ‘industrial womb’, a sort of machine that produces continuously over time.

 

I like to choose a starting point that’s quite blunt, and then bring in other ideas as I go, to make it more elaborate. I also rely on the input of other people around me, and beginning with imagery that is quite simple allows room for them to bring their own interpretations and contributions. For example, when we had to drop the scaffolding idea, Stephan, my advisor, showed me a photograph of a miners’ changing room, which has become an important reference. Then Alvin, the curator of the project, wanted to bring a durational aspect to the work, something that changes or accumulates over the course of the five-month run of the show. And then there have been the texts you’ve written and sent to me, which have been amazing to read.

 

September 16, 2024
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