the coral reef
There's a particular artwork that has haunted me for a long time.
It's one that exists in my memory, a story I tell myself sometimes, but it's a story of absence and forgetting. Before I sat down to write this letter I couldn't remember what it was called and almost what it even looked like. I knew it was an installation: a series of rooms that you entered through a bland white door in a gallery with a security guard outside in bright yellow fluoro counting the number of people allowed in. I knew I had gone in. I knew I had come out again shortly afterwards. I knew there was a couple in the installation with me, moving about in the next room and that I could hear their low mutterings to each other. I knew I felt a sense of unease and dislocation entering the space, somewhere completely different from the more familiar surroundings I had been in moments before. I knew I felt a prickling up my spine and a sense of dread settling over me. I knew this felt irrational. I knew I had seen this artwork at Tate Britain on a visit before or not long after I had moved to London. But that was all I knew. Not really what the rest of it looked like since I made it through only the corridor and into the first room before bolting back out — too afraid to explore more. The rest was unknown to me.
I'm not going to tell you the story of the artwork, you can find that out for yourself if you like. I don't want to look too hard at the pictures on Tate's website and erase my memory, replace it with the 'proper' narrative so to speak. This is a story instead of regret and fear of not doing, of feeling that I didn't belong, of missing out on an experience — of not knowing how to react. And so retreating. And maybe that was the whole point, I tell myself, I rewrite the story to convince myself I didn't miss out on something great. Some art demands the sublimation of the self and to enter into a different narrative it has created: to abandon your own life for a while and enter into the new one in front of you. I think I was afraid to back then. I was younger and new to London and did not yet know who I was.
Perhaps I was afraid if I abandoned my own narrative I would not be able to find it again.
You can see the artwork for yourself and read more about it here
If you have a tiny narrative to share please get in touch at thetinynarrative@gmail.com