The art world decamped from Basel to Bankside last night as the new Tate Modern extension flung both its Boiler and Switch house doors open for the most grand and expansive of opening parties. Crowds poured through the new Herzog & de Meuron-designed spaces, crammed themselves into the lifts to take panoramic pictures from the viewing terrace on the tenth floor and descended into the subterranean and still-slightly-pungent former oil tanks to admire the improvised musical performances of Tarek Atoui. There was much admiring of the elegant brick lattices, the beautifully proportioned galleries and the general attention to detail along the way.
In his welcoming speech, Nick Serota, projected Big Brother-style onto giant screens in the Turbine Hall and on monitors throughout both buildings, made a point of foregrounding the contribution of the artists to this massive venture. And unusually for such events, people were indeed actually looking at the art. Plaudits were flying thick and fast for both the rehang and the new displays, with the Louise Bourgeois artist rooms (a speciality of new Tate Modern director and your correspondent’s old college mate Frances Morris) a particular favourite. Here there was widespread enjoyment of the new Tate policy, which permits visitors to get up close and personal with the works—selfies under the spider sculptures, anyone?
But for many attendees, the high point of the evening was the captivating performance in the Turbine Hall by the London-born, Mercury Prize winning 27-year-old poet and musician Benjamin Clementine, who filled the vast space with his extraordinary sound and presence while at the same time managing to make it seem utterly intimate.
It was both poignant and appropriate when Nicholas Serota made a solemn and severe re-appearance later in the evening to command silence from the noisy throng. “I would love to be able to hear a pin drop in this space right now,” he said, as he dedicated Clementine’s second set “and some silence” to Jo Cox, the MP who had died after being shot and stabbed in her Yorkshire constituency earlier that day. Celebration and commemoration thus came together in a night that no one present will forget.