The Tate Turbine Hall, in case you didn’t know, is quite big. It gives an artist a unique opportunity to work on an epic scale and animate this colossal post-industrial space all the way from piazza floor to girdered roof. Artists have put the sun in here, built slides, opened a crack from one end of the floor to another. Yet Máret Ánne Sara seems either scared, repelled or just uninspired by it. She has built a little fort of sticks to hide away from the vastness. That’s the best I can say about her installation – that a small child might enjoy it as a pretend stockade. This easy-to-escape maze of trees actually reminds me of an upmarket adventure playground.
It’s hard to understand why Tate Modern didn’t ask Sara for a bit more, well, art. She must have submitted drawings. Did these not suggest it was all going to be rather slight? You do know, they might have gently said, this is the space Ai Weiwei carpeted with sunflower seeds, and Rachel Whiteread filled with a simulacrum of Arctic ice?
When you stand on the Turbine Hall bridge looking down, the main part of Sara’s installation is swallowed up in the scale of its setting, the weakly spiralling wooden fences failing to impose themselves at all on the eyes or imagination. You hope it will be better inside. But when you enter, you don’t feel immersed. The neatly cut shafts of raw wood and bark are not that high, nor are they lashed very close together. It’s skimpy. Any atmosphere is dissipated by the views you keep getting of the Turbine Hall.
This is a thin, unengaged excuse for land art that entirely fails to carry you off into the world of the Sámi that Sara wants you to respect and understand. The Sámi have a long history of oppression by the nation states in which their ancestral lands are enclosed, their shamans even persecuted as witches. So it’s exciting that Sámi artists are now making their culture visible, showing how a tradition of intimacy with nature might inspire a world in climate crisis. I’ve seen powerful, magical contemporary Sámi art. But not here.
Reindeer herding, which plays a crucial economic and ritual role for the Sámi, is represented at the other end of the Turbine Hall by a column of hides flowing up from ground to ceiling. They are suspended between chains and white neon tubes in an imposing yet vacuous minimalist stack. It’s coolly decorative. The animal skins are washed and clean. They look like rugs.
The main part of this commission, the weedy tree maze, has well-cleaned and neat arrangements of reindeer skulls and bones. There is no shock or confrontation with the realities of living close to nature in an installation that would suit a hotel lobby. Instead Sara has farmed out the content of the work to the audio recordings about Arctic life on headphones installed by reindeer hide-covered seats. They come with a warning that you will hear descriptions of animal slaughter. But the stories and viewpoints, intercut with bits of plangent Nordic sound, are miserable rather than eye-opening. Of course the point is that climate change makes this fragile ecosystem tougher. But why not confront us with this visually, physically? Butcher and serve reindeer meat perhaps. Just make it real. Somehow.
The biggest problem with the recordings is that you don’t need to be here to hear them. This is essentially a podcast that could be listened to anywhere – though I don’t think it would be Spotify’s biggest hit. And you don’t need to have been to the edge of the Arctic to know that when you leave behind cities and towns, when you are in a natural landscape, there is an immensity, solitude and strangeness that can be overpowering. Land artists as well as landscape painters find ways to make us feel that in a museum, to isolate us among stones or wood or fur and put us in another place, as Andy Goldsworthy’s recent Edinburgh retrospective did. But Sara, with such an extreme and spectacular natural world to share, makes the most desultory gestures towards making us feel what it’s like. She tells instead of shows, lectures instead of lures.
The only rationalisation I can make of this approach is that it’s aggressive to the Turbine Hall and the city it’s in. Perhaps Sara doesn’t believe you can bring the Arctic into London except as some shallow consumerist spectacle. She sulks in her fort instead and invites those who truly care to sit in there and listen to sombre truths about Sámi existence.
But art is a form of communication and this space is a tremendous chance to do that. Refusing to use it is artistic dereliction, or just incompetence.
Máret Ánne Sara: Goavve-Geabbil is at Tate Modern, London, from 14 October to 6 April
