SOUND AND VISION

In 'Theatre Picasso', the great artist's work is juxtaposed with film and music - to wonderful effect, writes Mark Hudson

- Mark Hudson

Tate Modern, London

I was all set to hate this exhibition. Celebrating the centenary of one of Tate Modern’s key Picasso works, The Three Dancers, by getting two precocious younger artist-curators to “restage” its Picasso collection seemed like a great idea. And with Tate’s attendance figures flagging, a major show by one of art's most gigantic and still controversial figures seemed a commercial no-brainer. So why did they have to hinge the whole thing on "performativity", a voguish philosophical concept few visitors will even have heard of?

Certainly, Picasso's involvements in this area were wide-ranging and in many cases revolutionary, from his compulsive painting of actors, dancers and acrobats, to stage designs and costumes that were great artworks in their own right. His own incarnation as the ultimate rebel artist - instantly recognisable throughout the world's media - is perhaps the greatest performance art turn of all time.

But approaching this fertile territory via the notion of performativity, which the blurb defines, a shade tortuously, as the "way identity can be constructed or transformed through words and actions", suggests this will be one of those text-heavy exhibitions that are more concerned with impressing other curators than addressing the paying punter.

Fortunately, however brain-aching the theorising behind the show, there's more than enough here to entrance the eye spectacularly. Its artist devisers, the American filmmaker and performance artist Wu Tsang and the Spanish writer Enrique Fuenteblanca, have delivered on their idea of turning the gallery into a theatre to frame the "performance" of Picasso's art.