My Modern Life

So I hit up Tate Modern today.

Ideally, when visiting a contemporary art museum, one must choose their companions carefully. The last thing you want is someone who spouts off text book chapters at every single painting/sculpture/toilet, or someone who hates modern art because their "dog could do that." You need someone with enough imagination to appreciate some works and laugh at others. Someone who will come up to a piece you've been staring at for hours and casually point out something you hadn't even noticed, which completely changes how you view the work.


But this is college, where nothing is done carefully, especially choosing friends. Thankfully, my fellow art-goer turned out to be just the right kind of person to bring to Tate Modern, and we had a lovely time making witty banter that probably sounded idiotic to everyone else in the corridors. Things work out sometimes. Like when it rains all day, but your plans don't require you to go outside for more than a five minute walk from the tube station to the museum.

The great thing about museums, especially modern art museums, is that they have lots of rules and boundaries. Everything is there for a purpose. Therefore upsetting anything, even the profound silence in which people love to walk around and stare, can cause you to get thrown out. And so it became a competition between the two of us to think of ways that we could get thrown out of Tate Modern, and which would get us banished the fastest. The game began as soon as we entered the front doors, which lead you to what looks like a parking garage. I'm expecting the Guggenheim and end up with a concrete ramp, so naturally I suggest we steal some shopping carts from a local grocery store and race down it.

Sadly, we had no idea where to find a grocery store.

The next option was thought up by my fellow appreciator of the arts. We came across a giant pile of sunflower seeds lying in the middle of the room and he mentioned an extreme urge to jump in it, like you would a pile of leaves.

"It's too perfect," he said. "I just have to mess it up a little." Which was true. The sunflower seeds formed a perfect cone coming up to a little past an average person's waist.

I told him if he jumped in it as is, he would definitely get thrown out, but if you dove in with nothing but your birthday suit, people would probably think it was part of a performance piece. Nudity is the secret to all "high art."

He never jumped, clothed or naked. This turned out to be a very good thing on multiple levels. First, destroying someone's art--no matter how seemingly ridiculous--is akin to slapping their mother in the face. That is one obvious reason not to get kicked out of Tate Modern. Second, this artist had recently been arrested by the Chinese police for his highly controversial art, so there's no reason to make the guy's bad day worse. Lastly, we later learned that each of the sunflower seeds had been hand crafted from porcelain, and individually painted to look like real sunflower seeds. So...

Ow.

Our last attempt to get thrown out of Tate Modern was not nearly as elaborate as the first two. It's a tradition that has long been popular among socially conscious people to trick audiences into thinking they are looking at great art, when really they're looking at a mockery (see "Animal Crackers" or "The Ladykillers"). Basically, you switch out the art with a fake, or change something about the piece. I actually tried this one. There was a room completely devoted to an upside down staircase made out of red fabric hanging from the ceiling. It gave one the feeling that they had just stumbled into Alice and Wonderland. So I took a guard's chair and set it underneath the staircase.

In the end, it looked a bit stupid, and no one really cared much. Except the guard, who upon entering the room promptly removed the chair from under the staircase. This is why I fail at practical jokes, but am pretty good at talking about them hypothetically. It is also why we left Tate Modern like every other tourist in London: by letting ourselves out.