‘Listening to both side of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides’

As our mad bad crazy world becomes seemingly more and more polarised, fuelled by the flinging of stats and statements disguised as information, the need for space to reflect becomes every more crucial. Over at the Tate Modern, a new collaborative project is offering just this. In the context of a world gone hysterical, this event leaves behind the claustrophobia of current affairs to present ‘what it is we are really talking about’, according to director Peter Sellars, in a creative and novel way.

Inspired by Anish Kapoor’ s sculpture Marsyas, the director Peter Sellars and composer Arvo Part have offered their own interpretations of a work which is named after a Greek mythological figure who was flayed by the god Apollo for daring to be more talented than he was. It is through metaphor that we are able to stare the most horrible aspects of who we are directly in the face, and if that doesn’t sum up how ugly the world can be in one image, then nothing can.

Why is such an event so powerful? How does it allow public space to become contemplative space? Part of the answer is in ‘refusal to be reduced’ according to Sellars. Rather than allowing art to be subsumed by ideology, such a project offers an alternative vision where creativity takes precedence over politics.

This project gives a glimpse of how the ideals of art in public space can be realised in a number of ways. Firstly, the way that the very different artists have worked together shows how powerful collaboration based on mutual inspiration can be. The way the project evolved is a model example of creative interchange, and a case study of successful collaborative effort. The artists worked completely independently on individual projects, but remained reliant on each other for inspiration and the overall success of the project.

Secondly, the project explores the horrors of war without making any specific references, and through this avoids adding to the ’contemporary propaganda battle’, as Kapoor describes the current discourse around Iraq. Politics inevitably loses touch with the realities of conflict and cruelty, as the need to maintain a marketable campaign in our highly competitive world serves to detract from the root issues, but art can refuse to do this. Therein lies the power of art as protest, where image takes precedence over information and individual interpretation is valued over loyalty to any one cause.

As we get consumed by our consumer culture, as we all rush out to purchase the appropriate paraphernalia (badges, peaked caps) in order to be identified with whatever cause suits us best, such an event allows, in Peter Sellar’s words, ‘space to breathe without anyone telling you what to think’. Public art can open up debate through being the one area that does not demand certain allegiances or opinions, a sanctuary where we can consider what is really going on beyond the debates and speeches and interpretations and obfuscations and information overloads and criticisms and protests and counter-protests and spin doctoring and internal politics and statistics and........