Ceaseless Porousness
In Love With the World by Anicka Yi, installed in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (image: Joe Humphrys, courtesy of Tate).
“The attempts to seal the borders — and I mean that in all senses it might conjure — is symptomatic of our fears and anxieties,” the artist Anicka Yi told The New York Times’s Tess Thackara. “There is nothing but ceaseless porousness.”
The fluidity between categories plays a central role in In Love with the World, the 2021 Hyundai Commission that Yi has created for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Blurring elements of biology and robotics, Yi’s installation is intended to “decentre the human” and “break the binary that we have with machines that is purely adversarial.”
Yi’s machines take the form of “aerobes”, a series of 18 helium-filled, drone-powered flying machines that drift through the Tate’s vast space, reacting individually and as a group to changes in their environment. There are two types of aerobe: “xenojellies”, which have semi-transparent bodies and squid-like tentacles, and “planulae”, which are bulbous and fleshy, covered in short yellow hair.
Both of Yi’s aerobes are robotic, programmed to drift towards human warmth and respond to various sensory stimuli, but their aesthetic evokes the biological – the aerobes have been designed to unsettle and destabilise sharp divisions between plants, animals, microorganisms and technology, with this blurring of boundaries subsequently extended to our own framing of humanity – a question sharpened by the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Anicka Yi, the artist behind this year’s Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern (image: Joe Humphrys, courtesy of Tate).
“In a way, a place like Tate Modern does lend itself to being infected with a biological agent – that was a very good point of entry for me,” Yi told The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries. “Air connects all of us and yet it is highly risky in the age of Covid. We’re all entangled in this thing called life and we’re all vulnerable to it. The difference between self and other collapses when we realise we’re subject to the same forces. That’s what this project is about. We’re not the impenetrable autonomous entities we would like to think we are. We try to seal borders – against viruses and against humans and against other life forms. But that turns out to be impossible. We need to realise everything is porous.”
Yi’s interest in air is represented in the project through the use of scent – a recurring feature in her artworks. The artist has created what she terms a “scentscape”, in which the hall is filled with aromas connected to the museum’s site in Bankside. Yi’s scentscape will evoke over the course of the installation’s duration, but it is to include elements such as spices (mistakenly thought to ward off the Black Death in the 14th century), Precambrian marine scents, vegetal decay from the Cretaceous, and ozone and coal smoke intended to evoke the Industrial Age. It is scent, in Yi’s work, that aims to evoke the common background in which all forms of life operate.
The focus on scent is also designed to destabilise what Yi perceives as the art world’s patriarchal focus on visual material to the detriment of the other senses. “We associate smells with the feminine,” Yi told Jeffries. “We associate the invisible with the feminine. We associate sight and mastery and knowledge with the masculine.”
Yi’s two kinds of “aerobes”, both of which are filled with helium and propelled by battery-powered rotors (image: Joe Humphrys, courtesy of Tate).
“I think that smell opens up an incredible, totalizing potential for art,” Yi told The New York Times. “Smell alters our chemicals. It shapes our desires. It can also make us gravely ill. There is always going to be biological risk, social risk, when we talk about air.”
Yi’s work opens to the public today, but has thus far met with a lukewarm response from critics. Writing in The Guardian, critic Adrian Searle lamented what he saw as the installation’s failure to deliver on its conceptual promise. “We were promised artificial intelligence, alien life, smellscapes sculpted in the air. And what do we get?” Searle wrote. “Drone-powered, heat-sensitive balloons. Yi’s helium-filled pond life – rather too meagre in number to either truly amaze or to threaten – is all a bit ho-hum, however lifelike their invertebrate articulations.”
Searle similarly took issue with the potency of the scentscape, questioning its effectiveness. “I caught a whiff of armpit with a trace of Lynx Africa deodorant, but of Yi’s invisible, olfactory artwork – zilch,” he wrote. “Maybe the smell-o-vision needs more time to warm up, or our face masks are buffering the evocative scents.” It was a point of critique also taken up by Alastair Sooke, writing in The Telegraph. “When I visited,” Sooke complained, “[…] the only whiff I got was of my morning cup of coffee.”
Yi has also created a “scentscape” for the gallery space, which will change throughout the commission’s duration, and affect the behaviour of the robots (image: Joe Humphrys, courtesy of Tate).
Sooke did, however, take a more charitable interpretation of Yi’s aerobes than Searle, although his praise remained qualified. “Yi’s aerobes have a slight novelty-act quality, like fancy balloons at a ritzy party,” he wrote. “In such a big space, they also feel a little sparse: they don’t dominate the hall as, say, Anish Kapoor’s gargantuan sculpture Marsyas did in 2002, and you wonder if, in time, visitors will start to ignore them. That said, considered individually, each contraption has a mesmerising, magical quality.”
Nevertheless, it is through this fascination with the individual machines that Yi’s work at Tate Modern is intended to open up debate: crucial to the work, the artist argues, is that the artificial intelligence on display takes corporeal form, rather than existing as a series of disembodied functions. “It seems to me that that’s where we should be heading with our A.I. research,” Yi told The New York Times, “as opposed to artificial intelligence that is ostensibly pure cognition and disembodied.”
Story Source: The New York Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph