Waterloo to Tate Modern / 5 Favourite Headfucks at the Tate Modern

(Disclaimer: this list is somewhat predictable and may be boring for aficionados... Nick, Dave ;-D).

1. ‘The Rothko Room’ by Marc Rothko. Of course, any Rothko is moody – think the look on a Shapelle Corby’s face when convicted, expressed as variegated colour. But in this room, moody is an understatement.

(The Rothko Room)

The four walls are like a migraine just as the valium’s kicking in: the throb with the receptiveness, the thump with the rush. There’s a guilty pleasure to be had here also in the subtle figurations; gaping squares like mental yawns, straight lines like lazy sneezes. (Come on, it is abstract art after all). To me the room seemed to express the whole gamut of consciousness.

2. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) by Francis Bacon. Long before an otherwise unknown actor begged of Sigourney Weaver, “Kill me!” in the Aliens franchise, there was Francis Bacon. If you ever hear anyone complain about being treated like a piece of meat, refer them to the plight of Bacon’s sitters. These ghastly abominations sum up your worst imagined idea of suffering (probably a bit like being nailed through the wrists, having your legs broken etc) physical and mental. For some reason, the deep arterial-blood-red background always comes up as orange in the prints.

3. The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913) by Giorgio de Chirico. I'd never really understood this iconic painting before, but standing before it I felt something slip out from under my feet like, well, a banana-skin.

(The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913) by Giorgio di Chirico)

The comparatively pliant feminine torso turning to face us is juxtaposed with the bunch of bananas, which is much like the feminine torso as if it were lying down. The bananas are, of course, individuated, but as a group, they constitute a body.

The key, perhaps - and also to the title - is the single banana that is detached from the bunch. How can a bunch of individuated objects respresent something else - without there being something left over? How does a poet assemble a bunch of individuated words to imitate life? How can a bunch of words be a body, and why is there always a word that doesn't fit, a remainder - something that can't be said? These and many more imponderables saw this de Chirico make my top 5 headfucks at the Tate Modern.

4. The Metamorphosis of the Narcissus by Salvador Dali. Well, does having a print on one’s wall back when one was still listening to The Doors mean it too is to be grown out of? That’s for you to decide. But for me, seeing this up close and personal was like, well… like Ovid cumming all over my retinas. (Okay, so that one’s a bridge too far... oh no! I'm sounding like Kevin Rudd.)*

5. Piet Mondrian. This one’s lengthy but worth it. Now normally Mondrian wouldn’t make such a list, but this is an exception. Though I don’t recall the exact name of the painting, it was one of his famous ‘red, yellow and blue’ compositions. The headfuck begins like this: in such a Mondrian the red, yellow and blue is usually snug within the vertical and horizontal black axes, so that from front-on, all is clearly contained; but peering around to the edge of the canvas, I noticed one tiny moment ie. about 1 cm sq where the red ‘bleeds’ out, into where the black line should be – clearly intentional. This is not done with any other square of colour. Now I thought this was perceptive of me, and I believe I mumbled ‘smartarse’ aloud. But that’s not the headfuck. About an hour later, I recalled that around seven years ago at uni, my sometime art history lecturer Rex Butler had described this very detail to us once in class (HA105). Later that night (ie. a few nights ago now) – and this is the screw – guess who appeared in my dream – and actually shook my hand. The one and only Rex Butler. It wasn’t until a few hours after I woke up that I realized the significance (at first I wondered, why the hell did I see Rex Butler in my dream?). So I’d noticed Mondrian’s smartarse detail; then remembered Rex Butler describing it to my class seven years ago; then that night dreamt that I shook Rex Butler’s hand, and didn’t figure it out until lunch the next day.

And to top it all off, two days later, I came across another Mondrian in the Tate Britain, same vintage, in which he’d done exactly the same thing – only this time with the yellow square, rather than the red.