LONDON – Where exactly – and what exactly – is the Thames Codex?
It’s somewhere in the Tate Modern, but most people, including the staff, don’t really seem to know about it. I tell everyone I meet that this is a work of art by an artist called Bob and Roberta Smith. Yes, A artist – singular – because Bob and Roberta were born Patrick Brill, but decided to grow into an identity that would encompass the masculine and the feminine. It’s on the fourth floor of the Natalie Bell Building, I know that, I say to two attendants standing on that floor.
I know it’s on the fourth floor of this building, I tell my new friends, the attendants, because it says online…. Then, for at least one of them, the sun begins to appear on the horizon. Ah yes, I think it’s this way, she said, pointing down the hallway near where it meets a bridge…
She’s right, and she’s here for a very good reason, I find out soon. THE Thames Codex consists of 16 panels painted with words and a handful of images, all neatly hung together on a hallway wall in groups of four. It faces the bridge that takes you over the Turbine Hall from the Natalie Bell Building to the Blavatsky Building. So it’s not in a gallery but at an intersection, a bit like it was usually on the move and only stopped to breathe. It just seems right.
What is it, though? According to Latin dictionary for schools that lives on my desk in anticipation of the arrival of a moment like this, a Codex is a book or a manuscript. The hand-painted words on these 16 panels are often tightly packed together, and sometimes of varying sizes, depending on the emotional pressure they find themselves under.
But why Tamesmead? What is Thamesmead? Thamesmead is a small, overflowing town on ancient marshes, on the outskirts of London – just head south, then a bit east, and you’ll find your way there eventually. It is what one could even call a NEW CITY. He was created out of nothing, and so when he emerged, not without a lot of gestational pain, he was in search of his own identity. What would that be? Who would live there? And how grounded would these people be?
The whole thing amounts to a kind of city diary or will, voices speaking over each other, voices speaking simultaneously, about their experiences surviving through lockdown, seeing hope in the form of greenery through the window. In all the sparkling urgency of its randomness, it reads like a pile of traffic. Interiority – “my youth was full of inaccuracies” – and, to counter this, exteriority turns into confessional tales and far-reaching reverie: the Welsh-bred coal miner’s daughter watching incredible sunsets and thinks of his years lived in Africa, of patterns and colors…
That’s what these panels are about. They are fused, blended, blended fragments of the many human stories told to Bob and Roberta about experiencing life in Thamesmead – stories of hope, anxiety, displacement and grounding. Reverie Tales. Tales in pursuit of a rural Eden, which some of them find in part. The voices intertwine, much like voices moving through a hallway like this. Changes in color and size are equivalent to the raising of a voice of anger or wonder, the sudden kindling of a flame of feeling. Sometimes the colors blend into each other, as if what was being said has receded into some sort of hazy blur of feeling. It’s kind of nice to get lost in the book — sorry, the Manuscript — of Thamesmead.
Excuse the Latin, but this is serious business.
Bob and Roberta Smith: Thamesmead Codex continues at the Tate Modern (Bankside, London, England) until May 7. The exhibition was organized by Tate Modern and the Peabody Housing Association.
