Tim Key reveals his favourite painting: “A big, humourless number”
“Tanya Googled herself,
Still nothing.” – Tim Key
There is a notion that art should abide by certain principles. That it shouldn’t only be five words or about people Googling themselves would come under this remit. However, Tim Key – a man who claims a human can’t technically meet a horse, and that birds aren’t, strictly speaking, animals, no less – has flouted these laws gorgeously, pulling off an artistic feat akin to one of Jurgen Cruyff’s fabled penalty routines, rendering the rules ridiculous with magnificent flair.
Much of this carefully crafted excision of where banality and absurdity meet comes from the Tennants-swigging poet’s time in Russia. Much of the art of his Russian heroes, Daniil Kharms and Nikolai Gogol, was borne from a need to swerve the beady-eyed gaze of the state censors and yet somehow pull their pants down in an undetectable manner. Key’s censors are unknown and quite whose pantaloons he’s dropping his business alone, but he has carried their quirks into the modern day and beguiled the West with the wonder of society ridiculing absurdity.
Thus, it comes as little surprise that his favourite painting also hails from the realm of covert dolls, dapper writers, and overly aggressive full-backs. However, he is keen to tell us that he soaks in culture of all forms from everywhere, like a sponge with an Art Pass, Spotify account and job that gets an Odeon Cinema discount. “I love all sorts of art,” he begins. “From the epic art that makes your jaw drop right down to a gif I like of a chubby, pencil drawn man prancing along and whistling, with the caption ‘haters gonna hate’ underneath him. It’s a broad church.”
Continuing: “One of my favourite experiences of art was going to an exhibition of David Shrigley’s works in Manchester. People wandering happily between the exhibits, suppressing giggles and occasionally snorting, really hammered it home that art can be and do anything. The painting I have chosen, however, is a big, humourless number. It’s The Queue by Alexei Sondukov. It’s a bunch of Russian people queueing for something, don’t know what.”
“I was living in St Petersburg at the time, and there was a fair bit of queuing going about, so I guess Sondukov had painted that. Right up close, on this enormous canvas, you have a vast lady in a light brown coat with smart leather boots. She’s at the back of a queue. In front of her: another lady, a darker brown coat, smart leather boots, and then on and on,” our hero explains.
Concluding, Key adds: “The queue, straight as an arrow, disappearing, eventually to some distant vanishing point. It was a popular painting. Of course, I’d like to report a 50-strong queue of art enthusiasts lining up to drink it in, but I think we were more of a blob, unfortunately. This painting was big. I like it when they’re big, where you’ve got to move your head a bit to take it all in, work the neck muscles. The Queue really stayed with me.”
Sondukov was born in 1952, and since the 1980s, he’s been depicting a society where there is no room for an individual, but there is room for a crowd. The Queue, from 1986, is his most successful work (not to portray Key as a Best of The Beatles man), and the first question many ask when they gaze upon the vast peculiarity pretty much defines the rationale behind it, ‘I wonder what they’re queueing for?’ As Key mused to himself, there’s always a lot of queueing on the go these days, and you can’t help but think that the act of standing in an orderly line awaiting an available self-check-out machine is one of the most banal things ever to happen.
These are the witticisms and wonderings that Key has strewn across his simply lush new book, Chapters, available now either on this link or elsewhere; just please don’t bloody queue for it; the exception, of course, is if you happen to be joining one whereby you happen to add to the formation of a rather pleasing succession of unending brown-coated ladies in boots. But that’s a bloody big if.
