Parts of her four hour epic make it hard to tell whether one is adrift inside a sunken ship or in some cavernous shadow of Berghain but the plane the work conjures is certainly the endpoint of some murky undertow. “I have the feeling it still lingers somewhere” Imhof told the assembled journalists that morning. The weighty act it describes can even feel like drowning (in the other, in sensation) and the original title for the piece was “Death Wish”. “Sex,” as curator Catherine Wood explains, “is a big word”, both “heavy” and “meaningful”. Imhof has described the piece as being about dualities and “how things merge into each other” but the work as a whole is permeated with some melancholy mirror to Freud’s “oceanic feeling”.
And as I watched two beautiful boys eddy around one another to the sound of Eliza Douglas’ mournful siren song and a lilting string refrain from musicians Billy Bultheel and Ville Haimala that would stay with me for days, I felt something move in my own depths. In the second tank a timber pier lurches through the space above a crowd that parts and swells as performers act as currents in a sea of people. Besides the jetty the rearmost tank room holds three platforms resembling diving boards or lifeguard stations and there are two others in the switch room. Once seen from this vantage one cannot unsee the maritime imagery (and the tragedy of places where no isles meet) across German artist Anne Imhof’s new body of work “Sex”, comprised of three rooms of sculpture and wall works accompanied by a four hour performance staged in the Tate Modern’s tanks space. It was a wave that broke us, some 8000 years ago and it is a wave that threatens to break us again today. Until the sea swallows us up again, we will always be a slash of mainland gone adrift.
And yet, whether we remain or stay we cannot stop being an island. “We remain staunchly European” said Tate Modern’s director Frances Morris last Thursday morning. Sixty or so other journalists are stood upon a jetty listening to a woman telling them – just two days before another Brexit march– that “the networks still hold”.
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