Amalgam by Theaster Gates (Tate Liverpool)

Where do you even start to write about an exhibition like this. Honestly, best exhibition that I’ve seen at the Tate Liverpool so far. It’s actually breath taking especially when you know a lot about the background history of Malaga which is the exhibitions running theme. So far I have visited Theaster Gates exhibition 3 times now and every time I have had a different experience to the time before.

The first time I visited the exhibition I didn’t know any background information and although I had the little booklet which has small amounts of information of each area of the exhibition, but I was actually in a little bit of a rush. So, I kind of decided to just look and see what I kind of thought and felt and found myself making a lot of notes around the curatorial and installation kind of aspects. For instance, when watching the video, I took notes of how that space was used, it seemed like there where multiple speakers, each playing different times and parts. Being sat in the middle it made this immersive kind of experience like the sound was traveling around me, it kind of felt like I was more involved in this piece then I initially thought. I remember being amazed with the use of sound and space in the last area of the exhibition. Where you enter this almost ship like room of white wooden floors with wooden steaks everywhere with these masks on, but the sound piece is amazing. I took notes on how immersive it was and how I sat on the wooden bench at the end and you can feel the vibrations from the sound, it was actually quite intense. The use of sensory stimulation is incredible and made me think about how I use sound pieces in my own installations. When I went to this exhibition I was actually in the middle of making a sound piece for a performance installation I was planning on doing for my exhibition (flat, mat, cat exhibition) I was really wanting to recreate this idea of the sound surrounding the audience and began experimenting with different speakers in different areas of the room and allocating section to separate speakers. I don’t know why this was never something id thought of before, but I feel like it really did add another layer to my work, to make it that bit more effective and immersive.

The 2^nd time I visited the show was with the university and we where given a curatorial talk about the exhibition before we would go inside and oh my goodness this truly changed how I felt about the exhibition. I liked it the 1^st time going but after this talk I loved the exhibition. The talk explained the backstory of the artwork and the history of Malaga, making the exhibition a lot more emotional than before. Malaga is an island just of off America and this island was an interracial community. Around the year 1911 the whole entire island was cleared by order of the American Government, the people of Malaga where brought to America and most where put into mental asylums for their rest of their lives due to made up tests from psychologists and to this day the island is still deserted. The exhibition is about the horror of this island each piece of artwork showed another aspect and created another emotional experience. For instance when you walk into the exhibition, the first thing you see is a giant slate roof and 1^st time going its kind of like oh wow a roof, but going after this talk and finding that the roof is because people where hiding and holding onto their roofs to try and get away from the Americans and stay on their island.

Something I took from the talk and found particularly interesting was the phrase used by Theaster ‘nothing is pure’. This was referenced multiple times in the exhibition. In the first area of the gallery there are these white tile kind of things and at first glance they look pretty clean and white, I weren’t entirely sure why they where there, but when you get closer you can see these marking, pencil lines and dirt on the white, hence nothing is pure, white is not pure. This quote is seen again, in the installation involving the chalk board and shoe shining chairs. Knowing this I made a connection which still hasn’t been confirmed when I asked some of the Tate workers. My thought was about the last installation where there are the white floor boards, I wondered whether these floor boards where painted white on purpose, knowing the audience was meant to walk around these floors, getting dirty and therefore once again ‘nothing us pure’. 

The 3^rd time I went to the exhibition was less intense in terms of stimulation and emotion, but rather I just tried to enjoy the art, the immersiveness and the emotions of each work all together. I had taken some friends with me and explained to them what the curatorial talk consisted off and added some of my own personal thoughts of the exhibition. I quite enjoyed it, maybe I could be a tour guide, id totally do that.

Even though it was my third time visiting the exhibition I was still seeing some things I didn’t realise before. For instance I noticed that Gates used tar as a material for some of his sculptures, which made me think about the connection of tar used upon slaves. As tar used to be used to cover the wounds on the skin of those stolen and to be auctioned as slaves. I wonder whether this was intentional, especially as in that very room where I noticed this sculpture there is a cabinet holding a branding ion that was used to brand slaves. I did ask someone who worked there but they didn’t know, maybe ill found out one day.

Anyway, as you can tell from my very winded blog, I love the exhibition in so many different ways and I can’t wait for this lockdown to be over so I can go visit it again.