Whitechapel Gallery is reinvented

Nowadays, you have to spend a trillion to impress me, so the Whitechapel’s £13.5 million renovation feels like rather small beer.

The century-old gallery has taken over the library next door and doubled in size, but it’s not the increase in space that stands out — at the end of the day, it’s just a few more whitewashed rooms and a big lift, and I’ve seen a glut of them in the past six months with the Saatchi Gallery reopening and Alex Sainsbury’s Raven Row.

What makes the new Whitechapel interesting is the art it is showing and the concept behind the gallery’s expansion. Downstairs there is a large installation by the London-based Polish artist
Goshka Macuga, who was nominated for the Turner Prize last year. Macuga is one the leading proponents of the new genre of exhibition-as-artwork.

Here she pulls together a tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica, some films of the Spanish Civil War and her own sculpture of Colin Powell holding up a vial of Anthrax at his famous speech to the UN in 2003.

There are some highly desirable Afghan war rugs — carpets decorated with tanks and Kalashnikovs (I want one!) — and a circular table in the centre, in the style of the UN meeting room. This also doubles as a set of vitrines, in which you can see photos and graphics from the Spanish Civil War and the UN’s deliberation on Iraq.

It’s a good puzzle — what links these elements? Picasso’s original Guernica was shown in the Whitechapel in 1939. The painting commemorated the Nazi’s aerial bombardment of the Spanish town during the Spanish Civil War. The Guernica tapestry usually hangs in the UN outside the Security Council room and the Americans ordered it to be covered up while Powell gave that speech attacking Iraq.

This is an elegant and stimulating combination of disparate elements but it is also clever. It was a rare moment in which art suddenly became involved in an inadvertent admission of truth — a revealing by hiding — a gesture from the US questioning its future bombing of Iraq.

The Whitechapel’s main gallery spaces are filled with a well-selected retrospective of the idiosyncratic Riddley-Walker-esque work of Isa Genzken, Germany’s leading female artist, spanning her career since the Eighties. Genzken is more or less a pop artist, with her own sleek and miminalist, witty and feminine, sensuous and vulnerable take on the icons of urban living.

There are appropriated photographs of adverts for old hi-fis, thin and tall totems covered in a chequerboard of wood veneer wallpaper and holographic wrapping paper, shop dummies sprayed in Day-Glo colours and dressed in mismatched second-hand clothes and nostalgic sculptures of transistor radios, slim rectangles of rough concrete out of which poke extending aerials — remember them? It all has the feel of a makeshift tribal culture constructed out of the shattered ruins of our consumer society by the survivors of a nuclear — or maybe economic — apocalyse. So it’s all very now.

There’s a third exhibition upstairs, too, which outlines an ambitious new blueprint for the contemporary art gallery. Passports is a crowded room of greatest hits from the British Council collection with the grubbily mercenary curatorial concept, Great Early Buys.