PILGRIM'S PROGRESS: 3/14/26

A WEEKLY GALLERY OF MY LIFE IN LONDON

1.

In my LETTER FROM LONDON this week, I wrote about attending the Tracey Emin retrospective, A Second Life, at the Tate Modern and described in one of its paragraphs the cross section of people who were there as well on Monday having bought their own 4:15 p.m. entrance tickets. Above are the man and woman who were entering the exhibition in front of me and below is a fellow attendee giving her full attention to, “It’s Not the Way I Want to Die,” Emin’s 2005 roller-coaster-like sculptural contraption concocted from reclaimed lumber and metal. By showing us the many ways she has chosen not to do so throughout the show, Emin is explaining to herself why she continues to live.

2.

When I came upon this embroidered piece above by Emin from 2009 at the Tate Modern retrospective, I thought of the framed question below that is by my bed here in London and has been by my beds in Paris and Porto and Tangier and Lisbon and Vienna and Prague and Ptown and Santa Fe and New Orleans and San Francisco and Harlem and Brookhaven, Mississippi, in the last three years or so since I’ve begun to live in the wider world in smaller rooms. It will be by my bed in Paris again in a couple of weeks.

When I arrive in these rooms, the first things I unpack are the talismans I took with me from Hudson, New York, after letting go of almost all there was in the largeness of my loft there. The only largesse from such largeness I allowed myself at the end - which became a beginning - not only had to be deeply personal but also small enough to be tucked into a suitcase. A rock from my climb up Kilimanjaro. A stone from my walk along The Camino. Photos of my family. Things like that which I now place about a newly-arrived-at room that give it the slight feel of home, that feeling, its slightness, all I have left of one.

One of the other things like that is this question. I had been invited to a Young Hope Young People’s Meeting at a church on Green Street back when I lived in Hudson and the format that night was to write down a question and put it in the hat which would be passed around. You were then to draw a question from it and speak to that. I drew this question. Instead of leaving the scrap of paper behind, I brought it back to my loft, framed it, and put it by my bed there. It’s been by all these beds of mine ever since. I’m still not sure of the answer but I am sure that part of it is to keep the question close.

3.

There was a kind of anteroom off to the side of the flow of rooms that a gave a directional flow to the Emin exhibit. I looked into it when I stepped out of the flow and saw that there was a single file line to get to a door of a huge box in order to peer inside. Seeing it, I immediately gave in to my instinct to reject anything that requires a line. I moved back into the flow but felt the pull of the deeper instinct not to be quite so herded. Sorting out indecision is the instinct where all my other instincts gather. I sorted this one and circled back to stand in that line. That’s when I discovered the statement above. The box in the anteroom was the one in the statement. Below is one of the several photos I took when it was my turn to stand at the door and peer in at the rigor with which the madness to create - the mess it can make of us - had been newly realized. The us there was my too having realized it anew.

4

That directional flow of rooms at most exhibitions at most museums leads you through an exit into a gift shop hawking not only prints of the work but items emblazoned with it so that the experience becomes blemished with kitsch. I assume the artists have to sign off on all this commercialization and get a cut. It certainly has its own kind of rigor, this gift shop glorification, the grab of it. A Second Life is no different and there at the end of it you are delivered into lots of Tracey Emin mech, including this apron and next to it a tea pot with some Emin kittens etched onto it. But it’s all one big meow for your money.

[TO VIEW AND READ ABOUT THE REMAINING IMAGES IN THIS WEEK’S GALLERY, JOIN OUR PAID SUBSCRIBER COMMUNITY FOR ONLY $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. THAT’S MY OWN SMALLER MEOW, I GUESS. BUT IT MEANS A LOT. THANKS.]