Sublime salvage

There was a moment more than 20 years ago when Bankside Power Station was derelict but its transformation into Tate Modern had not yet begun. I remember thinking, on a visit to the site, how beautiful and impressive the huge rusting generators looked — like enormous real-life sculptures by Anthony Caro. Nothing that has since been exhibited in what came to be called the Turbine Hall has looked quite so strong.

A quarter of a century later, the artist Mike Nelson has reversed the process — not at Tate Modern, but at Tate Britain where he has filled the Duveen Galleries with massive pieces of redundant machinery: cement mixers, engine blocks, metal filing cabinets, drill bits, racks, scaffolding and pallets of rough, functional wood. You enter through battered swing doors salvaged from a hospital. It all looks just as powerful — perhaps more so — than the pieces of sculpture that are usually displayed in these chilly, neoclassical spaces.

In a way, of course, this is a sculptural work — or at least an installation. Normally I think that this idiom, which consists of selecting and arranging real things, is limited in comparison with, say, carving or modelling. But that does not mean it cannot be done in a masterly fashion, and that’s what Nelson has achieved here.

His arrangement, entitled ‘The Asset Strippers’, looks ruggedly grand and is packed with complex implications. It consists of a mass of redundant equipment, fittings and fixtures accumulated by the artist from online auctions. In a very direct way, therefore, it’s about the end of an era: industries moving on and out of the country, a vast closing-down sale in which everything must go, entire eras of the past and ways of life included.