Performance art was outside the museum for half a century and more. You know you're right at the bottom of a tank when a staircase, like the steps of an empty swimming pool, rises high above your head.Įvidently the place is an event in itself, and redolent of those weird performance venues of the past – old factories, aircraft hangars, the sorting offices and chapels of Artangel productions. There is a faint but pungent scent of oil the deeper you go and the further you get from the Turbine Hall entrance.
The walls are raw concrete, still bearing traces of the industrial past in dark stains and hastily scribbled engineering measurements. The Tanks are adapted from the spectacularly vast cylinders that fuelled the former power station, originally designed to hold a million gallons of oil. It's not an art gallery, nor a concert hall and definitely not a theatre, for the audience will always be eye to eye with (and frequently milling among) the performers. I doubt they will ever have a better venue than the performance space at the Tanks – dark, circular, subterranean and with enough room for several hundred people. McCall gave up making art while the going was good fittingly, you can see his films only for a day.
These films have become something of cult over the years, not least because they vanished from the 70s scene almost as soon as they appeared. It flickers with gigantic phantasmagoria. The white light feels by turns solid, as if you are walking through walls, then diaphanous, then floating like a butterfly that can be held for a second.
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