Dr Andrew Lee
Communications Director & Newsletter Editor
Oxford Climate Alumni Network
The Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern is a monumental space the likes of which has few parallels. Monumental space lends itself to monumental art, and Mire Lee’s work is certainly grand in scale. I have visited the Tate many times and viewed what appeared to be dirty hanging laundry draped across the hall, a work which did not immediately reach out and speak to me. However, having more respect for the curators than I had shown them, today I spent some time looking closely at Mire Lee’s work.
Approaching it was a much more visceral moment than going into one’s laundry, and standing beneath it one could feel the value of the scale of the piece. In the centre of the work was something I had not noticed in my earlier fleeting visits, which is perhaps part of the ploy. Incessantly churning, the whirligig of capitalism spins ineluctably and embodies the machine of which we are all a part. But it is not the sexy machination of the car factory making shiny new machines, but it is the machine that emaciates its workers, as it drips spoil onto the floor of the sculpture, is it oil, is it blood, is it tears?
There is nothing warm, endearing or optimistic about this work but the filthy carapaces of worn through blouses or shirts or coverlets of indeterminate shape, but only the withering remnants of the fuel of the capitalist process, consumed, gone. Suspended by chains these metaphors are harnessed by the machine. This reminds the viewer of the inescapable onslaught of historical and extant industrial and commercial process that has worn away children at the coal faces of the industrial revolution, indentured workers, slaves, the exploited, the poisoned, the maimed, the injured, as the wheel keeps turning. There is no room in this work for the lifting people out of poverty, the increasing lifespan and education across the world, it is a meditation on the victims. As the neoliberal searches to commodify all it can, not only our lives through labour, but our housing as we profit in buying and flipping, our spare rooms through AirBNB, our organs through the human organ trade; it goes without saying that we have certainly commodified the planet, its resources, its soil, its oceans and its atmosphere. Everything is for sale, or used to turn a buck … and so, ‘here's another nice mess you've gotten [us] into.’
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