The finish of the queue, on a cloudy night by the Thames, was a disappointment. It was laborious to inform the pilgrims from folks simply leaving work or heading for an evening out. Step by step, as I traced it previous the Golden Hinde in its dry dock and the Clink jail, the relaxed procession turned extra substantial and packed. But it nonetheless appeared totally different from the tales being advised about it.
The British love a queue, say US media experiences, and that is supposedly the queue to finish all queues, the Mom of Queues. Social-media posts purporting to return from the queue say a lot the identical factor, some suggesting it’s a queue for its personal sake, even a collective murals. However a queue is mainly a disciplined try to get someplace lots of people wish to be. And at first look this could possibly be a queue for the most recent cellphone or a gig – besides a lot much less intense.
At Tate Fashionable, a number of banners of Andy Warhol’s Queen Elizabeth watch over the queue. As folks file previous three and 4 abreast, leaving loads of room for non-queuers to jog and cycle the opposite approach, Warhol’s aesthetic would be the key to what’s occurring right here. Particularly as, after they have accomplished the stroll in 9 hours or so, everybody within the queue will briefly seem within the BBC’s Warholian reside protection from Westminster Corridor with its soundtrack of near-silence punctuated solely by footsteps, marching guards and the occasional, mysterious ritual thud. Warhol feigned indifference, mimicking the coolness of the media age, when in actuality his artwork is stuffed with compassion and love. In the identical, very trendy approach the queue seems in its straggle nearly disengaged: however at its climax there will likely be tears.
There's additionally one other, older information to the character of this procession. Not removed from right here, Geoffrey Chaucer joined an organization of pilgrims on the Tabard Inn in Southwark sooner or later within the 14th century. Or so he tells us in The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s travellers had been headed for Canterbury, “the hooly blisful martir for to seke”: they had been ritually visiting the shrine of the murdered archbishop Thomas Becket. However Chaucer’s pilgrims don’t course of in pious silence. They inform soiled jokes and ribald tales. It’s a merry firm, regardless of its holy purpose. Warhol and Chaucer each understood the wafer-thin line between sacred and profane. Warhol, a believer, would go from New York events to meditating in church. Chaucer’s medieval chatterboxes additionally stroll that line. As does the queue.
Immediately’s equal of telling a story is checking your cellphone (David Beckham, noticed within the queue, stated he had spent the earlier 12 hours sharing tales, so look out for the movie Queue Tales), however similar to Chaucer’s pilgrims, it's important to cross the time someway. In neither case is that a mockery of the event. Medieval folks believed they might cut back their time in purgatory by making a pilgrimage. Nobody thinks they may really be saved in such a literal sense by paying their final respects to the Queen; but by going via what would in any other case be a meaningless, draining technique to spend a day you attain the sanctified second of a direct encounter with the monarch in her coffin.
It’s medieval, actually – a journey again in time to the Gormenghastian setting of Westminster Corridor, first constructed within the eleventh century, to participate in a ceremony that feels simply as historic. By doing this, folks certainly really feel they're giving one thing again to Elizabeth. Her reign has been known as “a promise saved” and by becoming a member of the ragged again of the queue, staying in place for that lengthy stretch of time, then making your individual chosen gesture – a curtsey, a bow, an air kiss – you’re maintaining a promise of your individual.
Within the medieval world, wrote the good historian Johan Huizinga, “all occasions had a lot sharper outlines than now”. Folks wept extra overtly, laughed extra cruelly, fought and grieved with copious pageantry and extravagance. Artwork is about the one place the place among the ornate, emotional rituals of the Center Ages will be discovered at this time. If you wish to expertise gothic emotional extremes, a efficiency artwork occasion by Marina Abramovic could get you shut. And Punchdrunk’s immersive spectacle The Burnt Metropolis takes you throughout a threshold to develop into the totally implicated witness of a barbaric, murderous ritual.
Not that there’s something savage concerning the queue. It couldn’t be extra smart and civilised. And but, sooner or later in that lengthy stroll, the ritual threshold is crossed. The telephones are put away. Silence falls. Folks depart Westminster Corridor in tears. Who wants efficiency artwork when you may step into historical past?
I dipped a toe within the queue, crossed from the conventional city move into the affected person line as if I used to be a part of it. Then shortly stepped out. Some shadow of irony or lingering republican sentiment made me head the opposite approach. I didn’t really feel a greater particular person for leaving.
Jonathan Jones writes on artwork for the Guardian
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