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On 18 March the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, Australia, closed to visitors due to the coronavirus lockdown. Mona is now empty, except for the art. Except for Tim.
Tim is hard to explain neatly. He is a man, a former tattoo parlour owner from Zurich. He is also an artwork by the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye.
The tattoo on his back was completed by Delvoye in 2008. It features a Madonna figure along Tim’s spine, a skull at the nape of his neck and myriad other creatures etched in ink across his skin.
This artwork was sold to a German curator and collector, Rik Reinking, for €150,000, with Tim collecting a third of the sale price. When Tim eventually dies, his skin will be removed and preserved as a canvas. Until then, as part of the contract, Tim agrees to sit in galleries three times a year.
Since 2006 Tim has sat in museums around the world as a human canvas. Since 2011 he has come to Mona for seasons that can last six months at a time. Since November, when his current stint began, he has come to the gallery every day – excluding Tuesdays, when Mona is shut – and sat on his plinth on a mezzanine, overlooking a thoroughfare, from 10am to 4.30pm.
Mona has now been closed for more than a month but Tim continues to come.
I wait for Tim at my desk. There’s bowl of grape stems by my laptop. A tea, cold, sits to the right. It’s quiet except for the distant sounds of traffic and kids in the backyard.
Tim has been livestreamed by Mona for his entire season. Now I’m waiting for Tim but Tim’s not there. A sign on the plinth says he’ll be back in 15 minutes.
Soon, from the shadows, he walks onscreen without ceremony. He purposefully strolls in front of the black box, lifts himself up and on, briefly settles – adjusting his trousers, shifting weight just a little once or twice. And then he is still. On view. Alone.
He does not move. He does not speak. The space around him silent and cavernous. It looks cold but peaceful. And I, also alone, watch him. Hypnotised by his isolation and stillness from my own isolation and stillness, 1,000km away.
The lights, normally illuminating the path for visitors, are out. Tim is lit from his lower neck to his waist. Some trick of the light renders him headless, which is unlikely to be an accident.
“It’s not the Tim show,” Tim says in a video for Mona. “I’m just decoration in the Wim show.”
Delvoye found Tim through Tim’s girlfriend, who mentioned to Tim that the artist was looking for a human canvas. Tim spontaneously said he would be up for it, and then sat to be tattooed for 40 hours over two years.
Tim might have a lot to teach us about stoicism, persistence, boredom, sacrifice and isolation. But Tim prefers silence.
As such, he declines interviews. Instead, he sits. It is an act not without physical or mental pain and strain. He has sat still on his box for Mona for more than 3,500 hours. But Delvoye, says Tim, shows that we need contraction. For Tim, the hardship of his ritual allows him to appreciate “how amazing this is”.
When Tim asked Mona’s owner, David Walsh, if he could return to work after the museum closed, Walsh was flabbergasted. “I shouldn’t have been,” Walsh writes on his website. “It’s his job. Dereliction of duty is much more derelict when the Earth is yawing.”
Tim is one of numerous artworks in Mona and museums around the world that continue to hang, or stand, or sit, in emptiness. As coronavirus has shut down live access to the arts, the art remains. The humans behind, around and under the art remain. They remain in anxious, faithful anticipation of their audience’s return. They hold firm. Steady. Constant.
Tim’s current Mona sitting will end, as scheduled, on 30 April. Until then, he comes into the space quietly, and we watch him. And we wait – and wait, and wait – until we may see his flesh of art in the flesh one day. And if we do see him in the flesh again, or any artwork anywhere in the world that is not our home, we will know that this is all over. And that during this whole time of dislocation and disruption, art was constant and human and waiting.
• Livestream Tim, by Wim Delvoye, through the Mona site
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