Eye of the beholder

I’m a member of the Tate again.

I let my membership lapse after lockdown ended and you still couldn’t just rock up on a whim. You had to book with a time slot. Well alright, pandemic and all that, but I prefer a more spontaneous approach to my art viewing activities.

I’ve gone the last seven months without.

Now I’m back…in, art, drink, shop, go….anytime.

GorJus and I nipped out to Tate Modern during the printer debacle for a couple of hours.

In amongst the ok, the good and the fabulous, the shop and the bar, there were of course those items that I considered absolute twatmongery. I’ve spent so much of my life in art college one way or another that you might think I’d have more time for those types who like to push boundaries, or their luck in my opinion, but no, I don’t.

Top of the list in the twatmongery category this visit were two people in overalls with long handled brooms and a pile of sand. They were brushing the sand into lovely, shifting, curved patterns over a large floor space, Japanese garden style, but the laboriously slow, studied movements of the artists made me roll my eyes and snort, I could only manage a few minutes, had GorJus insisted we stay, I might have started heckling,

Marmalade came into the studio Monday having been to the Tate over the weekend.

Me and GorJus went too last week, I said.

Marmalade wanted to know if we’d seen the beautiful performance with sand in the Turbine Hall? Hypnotic, mediative and trance like? She and a friend watched it for three hours.

No, I don’t think we did, but on second thoughts, are you referring to those irritating knobs with floor brushes?

This obviously says way more about our state of mind, our tastes and our own artistic sensibilities than it does about the ‘art’.

She’s a sensitive soul, I’m just bad.