Revealed: Turner Contemporary opens

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Jeff Fendall reviews the first show at Britain's newest gallery

Ascend the dozen or so wide stone steps that front the new Turner Contemporary art gallery in Margate, Kent, and you arrive at a broad concourse, with glass-fronted cafe to the left and double entrance doors ahead. Over your left shoulder is the harbour arm or jetty, once a raggle-taggle of fishermen’s huts, but now spruced up with paint and flags, many converted into bars, cafes, and galleries showing the work of local artists. Look beyond the jetty, westward up the Thames estuary and, on a fine Summer evening you might see the stunning sunsets of which JMW Turner was so fond, and used so often in his work.

It was from this concourse that Tracey Emin RA, together with Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Kent, Jools Holland, and the pupils of Holy Trinity & St John’s Primary School, officially opened the gallery at 10.00 a.m. on Saturday 16 April 2011.  Fortunately the sun was shining, which, together with substantial local, not to mention national, publicity, attracted a huge crowd, numbering more than 8,000 on the day, with a further 6,000 on Sunday 17 April. Apart from a number of earlier private viewings, there had been a week of evening receptions, to allow the great and good to see the gallery without the crush. The opening has been followed by a variety of ‘events’ and entertainments around the town, involving music, dance,  and everything else you might think of.

The glass entrance doors take you into the spacious Sunley room, with shop to the right, reception desk ahead of you and, wow! what’s that at the end of the room? Firstly, it’s an enormous window, 20 feet high and 30 feet wide, looking out northward over the sea. But it’s a window that’s been given a makeover, with alternate yellow and grey stripes, top, bottom and sides, to form a sort of reverse sunburst, leaving a huge porthole in the centre, to keep the seaview intact. The fact that the side walls, facing each other, are mirrored, extends the images to infinity. Stand and look at yourself in those mirrors, and you too are eternal.

This is the first commissioned work of the opening exhibition, by French artist Daniel Buren, called Borrowing and Multiplying the Landscape.  Stripes are a trade mark of Buren’s, whose best known work is  Les Deux Plateaux at the Palais Royal in Paris, consisting of black-and-white striped columns. All his work is created in situ, designed to emphasise and enhance the venue in which they are created. For Margate and the Turner Contemporary he has certainly succeeded, and it will be a great shame when his work has to be  removed at the end of the exhibition in September.

To one side of the Sunley gallery is the staircase leading to the first floor. The verticals of each step have been faced with variations of Turner’s reputed last words ‘The Sun is God’; examples are ‘the sun is bad’, ‘the son is god’, ‘bad is good’, ‘bad is the sun’ etc. in black lettering to one side, white to the other. This is the work of Douglas Gordon, born in Scotland, and is called Afterturner. Had this been a schools’ project, designed and executed by a group of children, it might have warranted a measure of praise.

In the first gallery on the floor above are two works, not specifically commissioned, by American artist Teresita Fernandez. One is horizontal, raised a few inches off the floor, called Eruption. This fits in well with one of the themes of the whole exhibition. It gives the appearance of looking down into the mouth of a volcano. On the wall above it is Sfumato, a spluttering of graphite beads bursting with light and energy. It doesn’t necessarily correspond with the Renaissance notion ofsfumato, that gentle shading or smokiness, except perhaps in respect of Leonardo’s definition: "’..without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke, or beyond the focus plane’. It is certainly that, and effective. This gallery is without its fourth wall, and looks down and out at the top of Buren’s window and beyond to the sea.

Hung rather low down in a short corridor between two other galleries is the only Turner work in the exhibition (there will be a show devoted to him alone in early 2012), The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains. For anyone unfamiliar with Turner, this is an excellent introductory work, with the volcano bursting its flames into the night sky, and all the subtlety of his colouring of light, and dark, and water. Seeing it close up, there is a great deal more detail, particularly in the foreground, than is visible in most reproductions, but even this could be improved with a gentle clean.

Ellen Harvey was born in Kent, but lives and works in New York. Her exhibit is the most specifically dedicated to the area. A large sign, ‘Arcadia’, is placed outside a  wooden shed. The title is a nod to the amusement arcades for which Margate is renowned as well as the unspoiled pastoral land of ancient Greece; the silvered lettering is brought to life with those old-fashioned light bulbs that formed the signage of Dreamland in the old days. The hut interior has been modelled after Turner’s studio, and all four walls are decked with backlit mirror etchings of the Margate seafront as it is today, producing a cyclorama, albeit with corners, of individual panels, showing buildings, beach and sea. There is no other lighting, resulting in a spectral effect that enhances both the work and its reception. It’s an effective piece, demonstrating imagination and industry on the part of the artist, but is limited in being so specifically dedicated to this place and time.

American Russell Crotty has provided a mix of some previous work, and some specific to this exhibition. Immediately striking are three paper-covered glass-fibre globes suspended from the ceiling so that their equators are exactly 54 inches from the floor. Upon them are gouache-and-ink illustrations of coastlines; two of California, where he lives; one of Thanet, created from a coastal walk from Joss Bay to Margate, called Walking towards Dreamland – an irony, since the amusement park closed some years ago (it is hoped it will re-open in due course as a heritage park). In addition, into the shading of the cliffs, Crotty has etched wording that expressed his random thoughts as he made the journey.

Two large books are on display of Crotty’s coastal illustrations (the pages to be turned only by gallery staff on request). One, Coastal Wanderings, includes and elevates Thanet to the status of California or the Mediterranean. The other Spot Check: Thanet, 2011 contains paintings, mostly in gouache and ink, of some of the area’s tourist features, such as the Winter Gardens and the Shell Grotto, as well as sea walls, jetties, cliffs, coves, rock pools and beaches that stretch for 26 miles along the coastline here. Finally, a previous work, also in the form of an enormous book of pages to be turned, or rolled back, reflects the artist’s interest in astronomy. It is called Field Charts for Telescopic Work on Starlit Evenings, 2005, and that is exactly what it is. Derived from his own home observatory, it consists of a number of huge vistas of the heavens recreated painstakingly by hand. The inclusion of this piece, as with the globes, satisfyingly conjoins the mundane scenery of everyday life in his other books, with the sublime infinity of the universe around us.

Projections of the Perfect Third, 2011  is the overall title of British artist Conrad Shawcross’s exhibit. His work tends to concentrate on musicality and harmony, failed or useless machinery, mathematics and philosophy. Here, a giant mobile tripod suspended from the ceiling spins and turns, shedding the light of its three sliding lamps across the floor and walls, creating shadows and patterns. Made of oak and metal, the arms have double ‘wiper blades’ at the ends, which again move and turn in a sequence ratio of 5:4 – musically ‘a perfect third’. On the floor is a single-stemmed bronze that twists and blossoms into a small tree, called Harmonic Manifold 2. This is a physical manifestation taken from automatic drawingscreated by Shawcross’s ‘Harmonograph’, an instrument from the 1890s that attempted to draw the physical patterns of sound. Five examples of these drawings are also displayed in this gallery. It is an exhibit full of interest, ingenuity and quiet beauty.

Overall this is a varied and satisfying opening exhibition of European and American contemporary art, and certainly a match for anything one would expect from an international gallery.  It is hoped that TC will help to regenerate a depressed Margate, which has the largest number of boarded-up high street shops of any town in Britain. Whether it can succeed in this, only time will tell.