Photo: Lucy Dawkins, courtesy Tate Photography, London
A few weeks before the start of Tate Modern’s ambitious extension works, the space which used to shelter the oil tanks of the former Bankside Power Station offered a scenic backdrop to the last in a series of specially commissioned artistic projects. On four consecutive days, to coincide with the Frieze art fair, this part of the building, normally inaccessible to the general public, hosted John Baldessari’s film installation Five 1968 Films (New) from 2000 alongside his retrospective Pure Beauty (on display until January 10, 2010).
The five-screen projection by the artist, cast in the retrospective as one of the pioneers of conceptual art, takes as its starting point all the US-produced films shown in cinemas in Los Angeles on August 21, 1968, the day of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by armies of the Warsaw Pact, which stopped the Prague Spring in its tracks and thus effectively marked the beginning of the end of the Socialist utopia.
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This article also appears in the issue 68 - Sabotage
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