Time and Tide

Five, six, seven black-clad performers at a time, with veiled faces, silently selected books – ‘fictional and factual responses to art, activism, climate change and the oil industry’ – took sticks of charcoal and copied texts onto the floor of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. From the bottom of the slope the tide of words slowly rose. This performance by Liberate Tate, who create unsanctioned live art inside Tate spaces ‘to free the Tate from BP sponsorship’, started at 11.53 this morning, high tide on the Thames outside, and will, unless the Tate authorities throw them out when the gallery closes at 10pm, continue until high tide tomorrow, just before 1pm.

(Can the Tate, whose wealth was originally created by the labour of slaves on sugar plantations, ever have clean hands? How much does it matter if a small amount of money that would otherwise go to shareholders gets diverted to a public art gallery?)

Meanwhile, outside the Tate, Kendallishere, Bluheron, lookseeclick, MissRae, Pokeybagel, Emmala, Goateebooknerd, SaraEvans, POD2008, blast and I, tried to identify each other from self-portraits and match real-life names to blip names. Then in the café we started the curious business of getting to know people we already knew. Lewishamdreamer, who’d been observing the blippable activity on the Turbine Hall floor, arrived soon after and seemed to have no problem working out which of the many tables in the café was the blip-table. Possibly by the number of cameras being wielded, as the portraits elsewhere on blip this evening attest.
 
Over the last three weeks I’ve watched the waves of blip-portraits of Kendall and Sue as, wherever they stop, they attract a new tide of blippers. If it was me, I'd have forgotten my own name by this stage but they remain interested, friendly, engaged and engaging. Stars, they are. With very big hearts.


Black and white in colour 63