The People Are The Art

56. The Recovery Diaries

The people are a work of art in this, the busiest room at the Klint & Mondrian, I’m at The Tate, this show closes tomorrow.  Tell me why it’s your favourite, a mother to a child, the mother excited by her daughter’s interest, the child serious.  Another says you’re ruining everyone’s enjoyment of the paintings this child sulky, who cares about the paint, this place, I want to go home.  Pushed buggies seeking with wheels a way through. Kneeling in wide skirts to toddlers to explain the context of the first world war. Beautiful people, this art world space that reaffirms my faith in human nature, that there are so many who’d flock on a Wednesday afternoon to see these paintings, to care to walk slowly, to take it all in, try and understand, drink it.  A woman with flame hair, red out of a tube like the paint, and her friend small and mouse do you want to go to the roof for a sneaky glass of wine to talk about it? as they paused in the doorway, the show almost done.  A young, floppy curls Adonis and his mythical lover, arms about shoulders, slim hips, photographed in front of a large pastel curly flower by his sister perhaps, his proud mother, a sculptural face, a headscarf, smiling at her shoulder. A woman with talking-point glasses, orange and thick-rimmed.  A boy with dragons etched into his jeans.  Colourful trainers and psychedelic skirts over jeans.  A blonde moustache on a young man’s face worn with awareness and John Lennon glasses.  Head-turning elegance in a woman all in white, pink boots.  And the work on the walls?  How Klint swirls how Mondrian orders, it’s a clever curation, I’m not sure we all bother to read all the words that inform, I never do, or rarely, I want the artist to speak not the person who thought long and hard how to hang it.  I can’t walk in order when I arrive, I have to walk through, double back, pass by, let it wash over me, swim in it, arrive somewhere like here, a bench in the last room where I can watch paintings and people interact.  I always get waylaid by the moving art, distracted by it, I wonder what this place would be like without people, how would I receive the art differently, would I enjoy more or less.  The Tate is my church, one of them, any altar to art will do. It’s where I see sacrifice and god, it’s where I am replenished.  And the comfort in this crowded place that I am not alone.  The care in the air.  It’s palpable.  Magnificent.  Like the paint. Like the people who walk by.

Self Portrait - Piet Mondrian

From The Tree Of Life series. - Hilma Af Klint