On paper, it sounds an activity not a million miles away from slave labour. Sitting for four hours at a time in a windowless box patrolled by uniformed assistants whilst strangers gawp at you probably isn’t the typical pre Christmas mini break. And what is modern art anyway? Being pickled in formaldehyde and hung up alongside any farmyard of assorted creatures? However, having become dedicated followers of BBC’s The Apprentice-Does-Art “School of Saatchi” and subscribing heavily to the theory that twins are natural attention seekers (something to do with the amount of gawping attracted by any activity done in tandem), my twin Fizz and I were more than up for the challenge of being exhibited for 4 hours at a time over 2 days.
The whole business revolved around the Pop Life Exhibition held at the Tate Modern from the 1st October 2009 to the 17th January 2010, a conglomeration all of the biggest and brashest names in Pop Art and of course, Young British Artists. Jeff Koon’s iconic bunny sculpture rubbed shoulders with Warhol’s Factory relics, and in our very own section of the gallery, following from Koon’s strictly over 18, strictly eye-watering room of life sized sex sculptures, we were back to back with Hirst’s “Golden Calf” (another formaldehyde jobby) and face to face with a rambling, gigantic quilt courtesy of Tracy Emin. All of this was soundtracked to booming 80s and 90s dance cheese classic, which, playlisted on repeat, ensured slight nausea occurring to the opening bars of “I Wanna Have Sex” by the end of our total 8 hour stint. It had actually been on visiting the exhibition way back in October, sandwiched neatly between appearing on This Morning commenting on Stephen Gately’s death and indulging in the guilty pleasure of 3 hours in the company of Piers Morgan as he filmed his chatshow, that Fizz and I discovered the potential to put our twinship on display. Having badgered the then twins on display for contact info, a campaign alternating between pleas and demands zapped between Fizz’s inbox and the Tate’s. Getting the precious email was the single greatest thing to occur at the end of a November dominated by essay deadlines
I really should explain what our whole piece was about, as best I can without sounding too abstract-y or with modern art-esque pretension. The premise was that a set of twins, dressed the same, doing the same thing at the same time, be seated beneath two iconic Hirst spot paintings in an effort to make a comment on individuality. From a distance, the paintings look the same, but up close, you can see how the paint is ordered differently, and I suppose that the same thought was to be applied to the twins as well, an idea that I completely support; even though we look the same, we ARE different. There was also some subtext in there about being Nature’s attempt at mass production, but I’m not so much a fan of that interpretation. The fantastic part to it was that the title of the piece was subjective according to which twins were participating at the time, and so during our stint “Felicity, Miranda”, Damian Hirst (1992), composed of “gloss household paint on wall, chairs and twins” hung proudly on the wall of the Tate. The date 1992 managed to perplex many, including us, until it was explained that that was when the “piece” was first shown. Even so, it elicited confused questions from punters, wanting to know if we had been sat in the room since 1992, and were therefore professionals at twin installation art or whether it was simply our birth date.
I had no idea of what to expect before Fizz and I took our places beneath the paintings at the beginning of our first shift, decked out in matching clothes for the first time since our late toddler-dom of the early ‘90s. I certainly didn’t expect a safety warning from our “twin co-ordinator” on what to do if any admiring visitor got too close or inappropriate, leaving me generally glaring at anyone who came within 5 feet for the next hour or so; whilst interaction with the public was encouraged, there was a definite limit! Since we had to do the same thing at the same time, for the sake of not getting too complicated we’d chosen a selection of publications to simultaneously flick through, making sure that we were on the same page too. A great way of ruining a read, I can tell you now. However, once being absorbed into the magazine, any thought of being on display in a public art gallery completely fled my thoughts, leading to a complete mind-fuck on lifting my head from Q’s 50 Biggest Stars of the Century. On the second day of exhibition, we’d splashed out on Battleships to spice up what was beginning to become quite a mundane experience, raising lots of questions from art-goers on who was winning. The realisation that being on display was beginning to be bog standard was also, dare I say it, thought provoking. In the same way that people sometimes LOVE meeting a set of twins, Fizz and I tend to be quite immune to our twin-ness, and our extreme excitement about being in the Tate was itself fading into casual acceptance. It really did make me think that that which someone might take for granted is actually something which should be prized more.
The highlight of the exhibition though, was definitely the interaction with all kinds of visitors, from friends and family proudly grouped near us like best in show at Crufts (and a certain “mate” confusing all visitors by winding them up that we were Damian Hirst’s children) to both kids and adults who were either spellbound or completely unimpressed by our presence. The period in residence ran like a series of peaks and troughs; high points pinpointed where massive groups crowded round for some sometimes rowdy Q&A or getting into deep and meaningful conversations with foreign tourists on the finer points of sitting on a chair in a room. The latter actually meant that I ended up regularly rolling out the rusting French, in possibly one of the more bizarre places in life where I’ve practised my oral froggy skills. Practically everyone we spoke to shared our opinion that it was a fabulous opportunity to be involved in, with one woman declaring that seeing us was “the first time Damian Hirst’s made me smile”. We were even proclaimed to be one keen bean’s “favourite set of twins” on her fourth visit to the exhibition, but then again she was a Californian and probably has different excitement levels to the rest of the world. Of course, there were those who blithely ignored our purpose as art exhibits, either asking us questions because they thought we were gallery assistants or else craning over us to look at the paintings because they thought we were just sitting down.
Not so great bits? When, despite best teeth baring and smiley eyes, people scuttled past avoiding eye contact and you had to resort to rereading a piece in Marie Claire about body brushing or some similar stimulating subject. Also, without sounding like a sanctimonious arse, the whole part of offering yourself up to inspection by people to compare and contrast between us, never mine or Fizz’s favourite part of having the twin factor picked over. I think that is only in being a twin that people seem to legitimise this practice without realising the annoyance it causes; who’s the cleverer one, who’s the more fun, even who has more spots? Yet the exhibition wasn’t full of people loudly listing what they perceived as our differences, though I did cringe in anticipation when a four year old girl, prodded by her mum loudly announced she knew the difference between us. You can imagine my relief when she pointed at me and shouted “That one has darker hair!”
What was it like to actually be a piece of art? Completely and utterly bizarre, although the people-watching opportunities were like no other (literally being a fly on the wall) as was the opportunity to have a good old chinwag with hundreds of random, interested people. Consider it Modern Art speed-dating.
Without sounding too schmaltzy, the exhibition gave us an opportunity to re-evaluate my own sense of identity; I can’t say that I had a gap year in India type revelation where I “found myself”, but it made me realise that being a twin isn’t always the burden that I perceive it to be. In fact, it’s incredibly special.
© Miranda Thompson 2010
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