Babel
Cildo Meireles (Born 1948) · 2001
A tower of radios rises five metres into a darkened room, hundreds of sets stacked in rings, old wooden valve radios at the bottom, smaller plastic ones higher up and tiny transistor radios at the top. Every one is switched on and tuned to a different station, so the tower hums with a low murmur of voices and music in dozens of languages that never resolves into anything you can follow. The room is lit blue, and the effect is of standing inside the story of the Tower of Babel, when the human race lost its single language.
Cildo Meireles is Brazil's most important conceptual artist, and his installations are built for the body as much as the eye. Walk around the tower and listen to how the sound changes; the volume of each radio is set just low enough that the whole becomes a single texture. Look at the chronology built into the stack: the radios get newer and smaller as they rise, so the tower is also a history of the twentieth century's most democratic medium, from the family wireless to the pocket set. The light gives the plastic and Bakelite a strange, cold glow.
Meireles made Babel in two thousand and one, and Tate bought it in two thousand and thirteen. It has become one of the most durable fixtures of the museum's displays, often installed in the Blavatnik Building or the Tanks, where its sound can be contained. The artist has spoken of it as an image of the failure of communication in an age of infinite information, but many visitors find it oddly consoling, a crowd of voices that keeps talking whether or not anyone is listening.
Did You Know? The radios in the tower are arranged so that the oldest and largest are at the bottom and the newest and smallest at the top, making the tower a timeline of broadcasting.
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