Reima Husain and Owais Husain, The Genesis of Gaja Gamini, 1999, © The artists

Tate Modern, Britain's new national museum of modern art, is under fire from British critics for its first major exhibition, which opened on 1 February 2001. Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (to 29 April 2001) features what the curators consider key moments of "cultural creativity" witnessed in nine cities across the world -- Bombay (or Mumbai), Lagos, London, Moscow, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Vienna.

The gallery was attacked both for being politically correct, apparently for including Third World cites, and for being misguided about its choice of cities and epochs. Despite the bickering, however, the show's attempt to illustrate what the curators consider defining moments of modern art and culture deserves attention. One doesn't have to agree with the gallery's assertion that Century City shows how the creative flashpoints produced a "cultural explosion in which art, architecture, cinema, dance, fashion, music and theatre flourished." There is value, however, in the assertion by Tate Modern's Iwona Blazwick that the show recognises that (contrary to representations by influential art curators and art historians), there has been no single "origin of creativity", and that there have been "multiple modernisms sparking all over the globe."

The show opens in the Paris of 1910 with Picasso's Cubism, and ends in 2001 with London's artists using city life as both inspiration and raw material.

For the initiates, Tate Modern is housed in the former Bankside Power Station by the river Thames. Aside from temporary exhibitions such as Century City, the gallery displays the Tate's collection of international modern art from 1900 to the present day, including major works by Dalí, Picasso, Matisse, Rothko and Warhol as well as contemporary work by artists such as Dorothy Cross, Gilbert & George and Susan Hiller.

In addition to featuring London and Paris, Century City focuses on and explores the relationship between cultural creativity and the metropolis in:

Vienna 1908-18 - The city of Freud, featuring Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, and the music of Schoenber

Moscow 1916-30 The painting and sculpture of the Russian Revolution

Rio de Janeiro 1955-69 Post-war architecture, art and design suffused with the sounds of the Bossa Nova

Lagos 1955-70 Post-colonial growth featuring African music and vibrant culture of photography

New York 1969-74 Intense artistic and social experimentation, where pop, minimalism, and conceptual art clashed

Tokyo 1969-73: A decisive shift away from modernism to a new contemporary understanding

Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001 Vigorous economic and cultural globalisation during intercommunal rioting in 1992-3, which resulted in new architecture, art, and literature, and the Bombay film industry

by focusing on nine cities from around the world at specific moments over the last hundred years.

According to Tate, all of these cities, at particular periods, have acted as crucibles for innovation, not only in art but in other disciplines, from architecture and dance, to film, literature, music and design. While each of the nine cities featured in the show "generated a distinct artistic culture, they can also be seen as emblematic of wider global tendencies," says Tate. "Century City is a celebration of creative flashpoints, the pivotal artistic and intellectual movements that have emerged in and reflect the context of the metropolis.

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Hikosaka Naoyoshi, Floor Event, 1971 © The artist

Tokyo 1967 - 1973, curated by Reiko Tomii, an art historian, curator and writer based in New York, looks at the Japanese capital at a time when it was "on the brink of crisis," with rapid growth leading to housing shortages, environmental pollution and traffic congestion. As in other cities across the world, old buildings, including some major landmarks, were torn down to give way to the city's first skyscrapers.

Rising discontent, student revolts and latent opposition to the terms of Japanese surrender to the U.S., led to the election of Marxist economist Minobe Ry_kichi as the city's governor in 1967. Radical artists focused their anger on the 1970 Japan World Exposition, Expo '70, which they condemned as an arrogant display of Japan's economic might.

Architects and cultural practitioners began to question received values and artistic traditions, and the morality of working within a mass consumerist society. Architect and theorist Isozaki Arata wrote a series of articles arguing for the 'dismantling of architecture.' Artists who considered modernism to be institutionalised, and tainted by its tendency to glorify technology and progress, sought new ways of making - or, in some cases, of deliberately 'not making' - art.

The building boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s was marked by big construction projects executed with little regard for environmental or social consequences. However, some architects were prompted by the mounting problems of overpopulation to focus on residential housing. A slide presentation, Constructions: A Pedestrian's View, is a survey of that architectural landscape as it stands today, including Azuma Takamitsu's Tower House, designed to accommodate his family of three on a cramped twenty-square-metre lot.

Countering the triumphalism of Expo '70, the Tokyo Biennale of the same year brought together examples of post-minimalist and conceptual art from around the world as well as Japan. One of the key works was Matsuzawa Yutaka's My Own Death -- an imposing sign that hung across the entrance to a gallery, inviting visitors to reflect on questions of time and mortality.

The Mono-ha movement was originated by artist Sekine Nobuo and artist and theorist Lee Ufan. Sceptical of the act of making painting and sculpture, they advocated artistic gestures and ways of engaging with materials to reveal 'the world as it is.' This might be achieved through digging, moving or arranging materials. By the early 1970s, Lee had come under attack from the more politicised Biky_t_ group, who criticised his theories as a 'mystification of art'. Biky_t_ had emerged from the student protests, and included artists Hikosaka Naoyoshi, Yamanaka Nobuo and Hori Kosai. Like Mono-ha, the group opposed traditional ideas of 'art-making', giving priority to process rather than the physical production of art objects. However, they believed that art existed only as an integral part of society, and aimed to expose its institutional workings. Another much-contested work was Horikawa Michio's project of gathering stones to send through the post. The Shinano River Plan 11 was conducted at the same time as the gathering of lunar samples during the Apollo 11 mission. Horikawa felt it was more important to gather the stones of the earth, which he posted to eleven luminaries of the art world.

Not all artists were affiliated to groups. There were brilliant individuals, like Kusama Yayoi, who had produced public and performance-based art in New York during the 1960s. With the exception of her elongated, crawling sculpture A Snake, Kusama's work in the mid-1970s, when she returned to Tokyo, consisted primarily of poetry and small but intense works on paper. Yamashita Kikuji was another important figure. Using the image of the emperor, he examined the imperial legacy that continued to underpin post-war Japan, and particularly its collusion in the atrocities of the Second World War.

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Kusama, Yayoi, Now That You've Died, 1975, Courtesy of Stetagawa Art Museum, Japan © The artist

The radical spirit of the times brought artists into the streets. The photographers of Provoke magazine took disquieting, often grainy or blurred images of the city as part of their attempt 'to provoke thought'. A growing feminist movement tried to raise awareness. From New York, Yoko Ono added her own contribution to the debate, including writing an article 'Japanese Men Sinking' for a women's magazine.

Radical theatre groups eschewed traditional venues in an effort to develop a closer communication with society at large, organising performances in small spaces, tents or even the street. Posters produced by like-minded designers became public manifestos for the theatre company, and were regarded as an integral part of the performance. However, the most subversive attempt to interact with the public came from Akasegawa Genpei. He invited people to send him real money in exchange for his privately printed zero-yen notes with the ultimate aim of putting the state's currency out of circulation.

Bombay/Mumbai, 1992-2001, curated by Geeta Kapur, an art critic and curator based in New Delhi, and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, a film theorist from Bombay, now based in Bangalore, looks at the city in the 1990s. "Some tens of thousands come here to make their future," according to Khwaja Ahmed Abbas. "Some make it, others don't. But the struggle goes on. That struggle is called Bombay."

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Atul Dodiya (b1959), Missing-I, 2000 (part of Triptych) © The artist.

A spate of riots of unprecedented ferocity erupted in Bombay between 1992-3. The outburst of violence, in which Hindus and Muslims clashed, followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid, a mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya. The riots resulted in the wider polarisation of classes and communities across this city of 12 million inhabitants.

The title of this section of the exhibition, 'Bombay/Mumbai', reflects the city's contested history. The old colonial name combined with the recently revived version in the Marathi language suggests a city re-figuring itself in history. A society of contradictions, Bombay has always accommodated both colonial and indigenous cultures, big business and slums, high art and populist entertainment, tradition and radicalism. This complex mix of ingredients provides the context for a contemporary art that seeks to contend with the violence of recent years in the city.

The art selected ranges from painting and sculpture to the latest technologies of photography, film, video and the web. Its prevailing spirit is eclectic: realism and modernism overlap; Indian mythology and the fictive melodramas of Bombay films are quoted; the impact of globalisation is explored. Rooted in the experience of modern urban life in India, the works address, amongst other themes, politics, identity, class division and the spectacle of the street.

Bhupen Khakhar, one of the most prominently and overtly gay contemporary Indian artists, is presented here. His consciously naive oil and watercolour paintings draw on Indian popular art. Since the 1980s, the paintings have primarily explored his own sexual identity through the portrayal of homoerotic and transvestite subject matter.

In a new commission for the exhibition, the younger painter Atul Dodiya chooses to work on laminate board and the kind of metal roller shutters used on shopfronts. Evoking the jostling imagery of Bombay streets, he mixes autobiographical portraits with those of well-known Indian public figures. Jitish Kallat moves into the culture of consumerism, creating an aggrandised self-portrait that effectively becomes an advertisement for himself.

In her installation Between Memory and History, Navjot Altaf explores the pain of social disruption. It incorporates hundreds of paper ribbons knotted into a metal mesh, on which are written the testimonies of those who have witnessed cataclysmic events such as the Bombay riots. The monitors show documentary images of the events, while the multitude of voices offer possibilities for reconciliation. Vivan Sundaram's sculpture Memorial uses a newspaper photograph taken in the midst of the riots of a man lying dead in the street. In an elegiac act the artist places the photograph in an iron coffin mounted on a gun carriage, as if for a state burial.

The title of Rummana Hussain's installation, A Space for Healing, which is part shrine, part hospital room, makes reference to the anguish of the city and her own illness - she died shortly after the work was finished. In the video installation Hamletmachine, Nalini Malani collages a text by the German playwright Heiner Mueller with images and sounds recalling the fascist era in Europe and Japan. In doing so she confronts fears of political violence in India.

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Nalini Malani, Hamletmachine, 2000 © The artist

Reality and Make-Believe

Raghubir Singh's photographs follow workers, traders, and commuters engaged in their business, revealing Bombay as a crammed, colourful cosmos. Dayanita Singh explores the culture of performance, entertainment and pleasure in Bollywood cinema. The emphasis on theatricality is shared by Pushpamala N., who reinvents herself as the vampish heroine of her own cinematic 'photoromance', which she sets in Bombay and captures in a series of black-and-white photographs. Other photographers have examined the multitude of communities that make Bombay such a cosmopolitan city. Sooni Taraporevala documents the ancient immigrants to the sub-continent, the Parsi community, while Ketaki Sheth studies the Gujarati Patels, an upwardly mobile clan that has spread across the world. By photographing the sets of Patel twins she encountered in many different locations Sheth produces 'doubly' irrefutable evidence of the clan's biological and social success.

Bombay Cinema/ Bollywood

Bombay's famous Hindi film industry offers numerous allegories for survival in the city. Melodramatic stories of faith, corruption, love and betrayal have helped mediate the real-life anguish of transition from rural to urban, feudal to capitalist, and local to global economy. On the streets of the city, hand-painted film hoardings are giving way to the enormous, digitally printed posters of the Bollywood spectacles of the 1990s. The exhibition brings together some of these hand-painted hoardings, reflecting the bold gestures of popular art in Bombay.

Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis

Lagos 1955-1970

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Highlife in the City

'Young artists in a new nation, that is what we are! We must grow with the new Nigeria and work to satisfy her traditional love for art or perish with our colonial past.' Uche Okeke

Malangatana Ngwenya, The Story of the Letter in the Hat A)The husband departs for work carrying his wife's hidden letter to her lover, 1960, D and A d'Alpoim Guedes, © The artist

Lagos is one of Africa's most vibrant and diverse cities. Since the late nineteenth century, its importance as a trading centre has attracted a unique mix of peoples from across Nigeria and the rest of West Africa. The years 1955-70 were an extraordinary period in the life of the city. Nigeria was moving towards and celebrating independence from British rule, which it achieved in 1960.

In Lagos, this energy was manifested in a self-confident popular culture, symbolised in our exhibition by Highlife music. Literature and the visual arts also thrived at the Mbari Writers and Artists Club, established in 1961 by a group of Nigerian artists, actors, musicians, designers and writers. In the words of one of its most famous members, the writer Chinua Achebe, the club was 'a theatre in which to do battle'. Here politicised artists and intellectuals sought to shape a new post-colonial identity for Nigeria. Highlife music also reflected an incipient African nationalism, although it incorporated the sounds of Cuban rumba and Latin music. This process of fusion and exchange was one of the essential ingredients of Nigerian modernism. The coups of 1966, followed by the long Biafran civil war, ended this decade of optimism and caused many artists to flee the country.

Curated by Okwui Enwezor, writer, adjunct curator at the Chicago Art Institute, and director of Documenta XI, who is based in New York and Chicago, and Olu Oguibe, an artist and art historian based in New York.

Mbari Writers and Artists Club

Artistic activity coalesced around the Mbari Club, founded by a diverse group of artists, writers, musicians and actors in the neighbouring city of Ibadan. Their intention was to develop a strong artistic identity for the new nation, celebrating Nigerian traditions while drawing on elements from other cultures. Mbari was an international environment, attracting artists from across Africa and beyond. Amongst the foremost visual artists associated with the group were Nigerians Bruce Onobrakpeya and Uche Okeke, the British artist Georgina Beier and the African American painter Jacob Lawrence, all of whose works are featured in the exhibition.

Literature

Mbari played a major role in the birth of modern African literature. Following the publication in 1958 of his first book, Things Fall Apart, a study of the impact of colonialism, Chinua Achebe was hailed as 'the father of the African novel'. Drawing on the unique linguistic and narrative style of the Igbo, he created a new approach to the novel since, he later explained, 'The standard English of Dickens and other writers we read could not tell the story I wanted to tell'. Another leading member of the group, the future Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, was the founder of Masks, one of the first professional theatre companies in the country. In just two years, between 1963 and 1965, he produced five theatrical works that would earn him a reputation as Africa's foremost playwright. Black Orpheus magazine, co-founded by German academic Ulli Beier (the husband of artist Georgina Beier), provided a forum for writings from across Africa and its diaspora.

Georgina Beier, Sunbirds, 1964. Courtesy Stanley Lederman

Architecture

The booming economy and rapid urbanisation that accompanied independence led to a major building programme in Lagos. The shift from colonial enclave to a cosmopolitan, postcolonial centre made a critical impact on the city's architectural development. A new society demanded a monumental, nationalist architecture to reflect its transformed status. This was realised both by expatriate architects such as James Cubitt, and John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood, and by Nigerians including Oluwole Olumuyiwa. The concrete structures they produced belong to the global modernist tradition, but have been adapted to the tropics and to Nigerian traditions through collaboration with the country's leading artists. Paying little heed to any formal or hierarchical urban plan, Lagos developed into a tangled sprawl of contrasting districts, from the modern municipal centre, to the nineteenth-century 'Brazilian' quarter and the vibrant clubland. This eclecticism is part of Lagos's special identity and appeal.

Highlife Music

Highlife music is an expression of the creative effervescence of African popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s. The origins of this jaunty guitar music can be found in the music of the slaves. When these immigrants returned to Nigeria from Brazil, Europe, the US and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, they brought with them a musical style that blended the sounds of all these areas into a new, Pan-African form. Many of these influences, such as Cuban rumba and Latin music, had themselves originally been based on African music. Since Highlife was multicultural and transnational, whilst deriving from original African forms, it captured the sense of an emergent African nationalism based on notions of cultural exchange. The great period of Highlife music arrived when the Ghanaian bandleader E T Mensah visited Lagos shortly after the Second World War. Almost overnight, the modern incarnation of Highlife emerged, becoming immensely popular with the new leisure classes. Highlife stars included 'Cardinal' Jim Rex Lawson, Bobby Benson and Victor Olaiya.

Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis

London 1990-2001

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City as Found Object

'London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It is illimitable.' Peter Ackroyd

Gillian Wearing (b1963), Homage to the Woman with the bandaged face who I saw yesterday down Walworth Road, 1995, Courtesy Maureen Paley/Interim Art, © The artist

The end of the twentieth century has seen London proclaimed 'the world's coolest city' by Newsweek magazine. Restaurants, clubs and bars are thriving. At the same time, homelessness has risen, and public transport is on the verge of collapse. At the beginning of the 1960s, half of the jobs in London were in manufacturing. That figure is now less than one in ten, and financial services have become the most significant source of revenue. London has been transformed into a post-industrial metropolis.

Ironically, it was a recession that laid the groundwork for London's thriving art scene. In 1987, £50 billion was wiped off share values in a single day, signalling the end of a stocks and property boom. Former shops, offices and warehouses became available on cheap, short-term leases as studios and exhibition spaces. Young artists, some still at art school, began to promote themselves outside the established gallery system. Their work was clever, accessible and often funny. A nation rarely concerned with modern art woke up and began to take notice.

Since the 1990s, an aesthetic that is particular to London has linked the worlds of fashion, music, design and fine art. It is vernacular, recycled, humorous, able to draw poetic beauty from the ordinary and humdrum. The city is more than just a platform for international success: it has become a catalyst, a theme, and a source of inspiration.

Curated by Emma Dexter, senior curator at Tate Modern.

Street Life

The 1990s saw a number of artists turn to the city itself for inspiration, materials and a way of connecting with a wider world. Gillian Wearing's video Homage to the woman with the bandaged face who I saw yesterday down Walworth Road celebrates London's power to throw up chance encounters. Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas brought art into the streets by opening their own shop in Bethnal Green where they sold their work. Gary Hume's use of ordinary household gloss paint reflects an aesthetic of the everyday shared by many London artists.

Urban reality

For most of its residents, London life has little connection with the city portrayed in tourist brochures. Runa Islam conveys this gritty reality by recording the rubbish regularly dumped outside her home. Janette Parris's Skint reflects the continual presence of the homeless on London's streets. In Wolfgang Tillmans's photographs, the city's architecture is contrasted with glimpses of the distant glamour symbolised by Concorde. Architecture is also a theme for Rachel Whiteread who pictures tower blocks on the point of demolition, and for Inventory, who use a map of a council estate as the backdrop for a graffitied analysis of urban geography. A different side of London life is provided by Henry Bond and Liam Gillick, who posed as journalists to gatecrash a series of press conferences and other events, documenting their experiences.

Rachel Whiteread, Demolished A Clapton Park Estate, Mandeville Street, London E5; Ambergate Court; Norbury Court; October 1993, 1996, Tate, © The artist

Mixing it

A characteristic of the London art scene is the fluidity of exchange between different disciplines. Style magazines like i-D and Dazed and Confused combine fashion, design and fine art, publishing works such as Nick Knight's groundbreaking photographs of disabled models. Designer Paul Elliman approaches the creation of typefaces with the ingenuity of an artist. Tord Boontje transforms furniture design into a political act, recycling bits of wood found in skips near his studio, and publishing instructions inviting the public to do the same.

To download Tord Boontje's instructions on how to create his furniture designs, click here.

The traditionally separate roles of artist, curator and dealer have been combined by groups such as City Racing, an artist-run gallery space situated in a former betting shop. Collectives, such as Bank and Inventory, have also challenged the idea of individual creativity by producing work authored by the group.

Tracey Emin/Sarah Lucas, The Shop, 2000. Courtesy of Tracey Emin

Art of the Everyday

Like many artists working in London today, Tom Dixon, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin draw on everyday materials and subject matter. Chris Ofili's Shithead, made using elephant dung and human hair, takes this 'back to basics' aesthetic to extremes. Ordinariness is also a theme of Go-Sees, a record kept by fashion photographer Juergen Teller of the endless stream of girls who appear uninvited on his doorstep hoping to be the next Kate Moss. Other artists such as Michael Landy, Gavin Turk and Johnny Spencer produce work that aspires to blend back into the urban surroundings, or to disappear among the signs and plaques of the gallery itself.

Sun - Thurs: 10.00 - 18.00 (last admission: 17.00)

Fri and Sat: 10.00 - 22.00 (last admission: 21.00)

Admission

£8.50, £6.50 concessions

Family ticket (two adults and two children) £23

Disabled visitors: £6.50 (escort free)

Free to children under 12 and to Tate Members, Fellows and Patrons.

Advance Tickets from First Call on 0870 842 2233 (booking fee applies)

Pre-booked adult groups (Monday - Friday only) £6.50/£4.50 (max size: 25)

School Groups: £2.50 per head. To book group tickets call Tate Box Office on 020 7887 8888

Timed entrance for all tickets

Free Exhibition Guide

Exhibition Shop

The Century City shop sells catalogues, books, posters, cards and a wide range of Century City-inspired gifts. The catalogue published to accompany the exhibition is £29.99 (£25 for visitors to the exhibition) and features essays about each city and over 200 illustrations. You can also choose from a wide range of Tate books and gifts in the Online Shop.

Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis