Birds in London
By frances
- 405 reads
On my day off, Sue and I visited the Tate Modern. We saw the giant
metal spider by Louise Bourgeois, standing on tiptoes in the vast
turbine hall. We saw Ballet of the Woodpeckers by Rebecca Horn, a room
of huge mirrors, endlessly repeating reflections. Little mechanised
hammers attached to the mirrors would tap the glass at irregular
intervals, making a vibrating sound. The catalogue said 'Horn has
described them as being like birds confronted by their own image,
aggressively pecking at themselves before suddenly taking fright. The
installation was designed for the entrance hall of a theatre housed
within a famous psychiatric clinic in Vienna.'
Another drill sprang into action, boring through a little bundle of
charcoal sticks fixed high up on the wall. The charcoal dust fell on an
egg, fixed lower down, and on the floor. The catalogue said nothing
about this bit. Perhaps the egg was the fragile mental state, or the
soul? Remember Dad holding the egg in a teaspoon, near the boiling
saucepan and laughing, not knowing what to do next, some connection
gone in his mind. Seeing standing there helplessly, at first I laughed
too, then John came and put his arm round me. Dad won a silver egg-cup
at school for bed-making, or was that for the high jump? He was so tall
he just stepped over the jump. He made the bed round me, tucking in the
blankets so tight and safe I could hardly move. He bolted the front
door against burglars. Then Helen's dad would come upstairs and
reassure his daughters, "I don't want you to worry about burglars. No
burglars will break in tonight. If any burglars to try to get in, I've
bolted the door" - making them scared where before they hadn't been.
Ella, Sue's aunt, would get up in the dark to check the hen and egg
temperatures in the breeding cages on her father's farm - then she
vanished and was never heard of again. She disappeared into the void.
Sue tried to trace her years later through Somerset House.
The painting of a pigeon-chested man, also Dad - the hollow, sunken-in
chest I've inherited, which breasts redeem.
Rebecca Horn's Unicorn, a costume of bandage-like straps hanging in a
glass case. And a horn. Her fellow patient in the sanatorium with the
graceful walk Rebecca admired, she wore this costume, was prevailed
upon to wear it. From dawn till dusk she walked slowly, gracefully,
mysteriously through the ripe cornfields, while Rebecca Horn took
photographs.
We left the Tate Modern and walked towards Blackfriars Bridge.
Everything looked like modern art. The glittering, shape-changing,
muscled river, the sky, the white newly cleaned church towers and
steeples poking up between the office buildings, the new wobbly bridge
which opened earlier this year and closed shortly after, the six pairs
of gigantic stone bridge supports painted red, supporting nothing where
once a bridge was.
I tried not to stare at the pregnant woman in the tube. Her fawn jumper
was stretched over the place where a child was sleeping curled up. She
was talking in a foreign language, maybe eastern European. The old
woman sitting next to her would nod from time to time. Sue kept looking
at me and away, pointing with her eyes. Leaning forward I saw a young
fair-haired girl sitting two seats up from me. She was blindfolded and
gagged. Her arms were bound with cord to the seat dividers. Just before
King's Cross she was set free by two student types in black greatcoats;
she shook her head and smiled, then all three of them dashed through
the opening tube doors into the station, like birds flying away into
the forest.
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