Alex Robertson: 'Don't touch' culture in the grip of fear

Alex Robertson and his daughter Yasmin managed to roll around in Ai Weiwei's latest work at the Tate Modern. Photo / Jamilla Gibbes

Opinion

I photographed my 5-year-old daughter crawling across the sea of grey, pebble-like pieces that cover the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, London.

Then we lay down and played starfish swishing back and forth, making little mounds between us.

We were fortunate to be at the opening of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's latest work.

Four days later, the public was banned from getting too close because of a potential health hazard from dust created by walking over it.

The work consists of one hundred million individually hand-crafted porcelain sunflower seeds, poured into the Turbine Hall. It's the latest in a series of bold, large-scale installations during the past decade that include Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, a deep fissure running through the concrete floor of the building, and Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project, which filled the space with mist and mirrors.

The British newspapers ran many stories, pictures and previews in a flurry redolent of the birth of Damien Hirst's star with his preserved shark in the early 1990s or the Tate's showing of Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII (aka The Bricks) in 1976, later daubed with paint.

Sunflower Seeds ran true to the ethos of the Tate as the "people's gallery" as Weiwei and the curators encouraged visitors to walk across and roll in the work to experience and contemplate the essence of his comment on mass consumption, Chinese industry, famine and collective work.

Weiwei even appeared to encourage people to take a couple of the seeds home. "For the museum, it is a total work and taking a seed would affect the work. Institutions have their own policies," he was quoted as saying in the Guardian.

"But I know I would want to take a seed." The gallery definitely discouraged visitors from doing so.

Now, the public is restricted to viewing this bleakly beautiful and thought-provoking work from behind a rope or from the gallery above.

They will no longer be able to trudge across it as the artist originally intended, thus reducing the experience and impeding the artist's connection with his audience.

I, for one, did not notice clouds of toxic dust as we walked, waded and wallowed on the seeds.

The Tate's press release says: "Although porcelain is very robust, we have been advised that the interaction of visitors with the sculpture can cause dust which could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time. In consequence, Tate, in consultation with the artist, has decided not to allow members of the public to walk across the sculpture."

Weiwei has been silent on the matter, although appears to support the gallery.

At another large-scale public exhibition in Hyde Park, sculptor Anish Kapoor's highly reflective curved structures are dotted among the trees, lake and grassed areas, reflecting leaves, water, sky and people in a distorted reality. They also carry a health warning.

"Sculpture can pose a health hazard at certain times of the day," reads the sign with an accompanying exclamation mark in a yellow triangle.

In another assault on British culture and sensibilities, the Daily Mail reported that the playing of conkers (the schoolboy tradition of trying to break the fruit of the horse chestnut tree dangling on a piece of string held nervously by your opponent) has been banned from schools because of health and safety concerns. The BBC unearthed the story of a school headmaster insisting that pupils wear protective glasses and gloves to reduce the chance of injury when playing.

A teacher friend explained to me that schools were extremely wary of prosecution after several incidences of damages awarded to the parents of children who incurred small injuries during the normal course of a day on school premises.

Britain has taken Island Nation thinking to extremes. CCTV captures your every movement. Humps, bumps, chicanes and cameras slow your passing on the roads.

Culture and traditions are reduced to a passive, unconnected experience.

Britain is a nation in the grip of fear, screaming loudly from the pages of its newspapers. Maybe that's necessary for 60 million-plus people living in an area smaller than New Zealand.

We left the Tate Modern and walked along Southwark Rd and Tower Bridge Rd to the under-ground station and our journey onward.

Tonnes of speeding steel and glass thundered past us less than a metre away as we breathed in the fumes of the thousands of cars, buses and trucks that pass along those roads every hour.

And not a warning sign in sight.

* Alex Robertson is the Herald's deputy picture editor