The end of the queue, on a cloudy evening by the Thames, was a disappointment. It was hard to tell the pilgrims from people just leaving work or heading for a night out. Gradually, as I traced it past the Golden Hinde in its dry dock and the Clink prison, the relaxed procession became more substantial and packed. Yet it still seemed different from the stories being told about it.
The British love a queue, say US media reports, and this is supposedly the queue to end all queues, the Mother of Queues. Social-media posts purporting to come from the queue say much the same thing, some suggesting it’s a queue for its own sake, even a collective work of art. But a queue is basically a disciplined attempt to get somewhere a lot of people want to be. And at first glance this could be a queue for the latest phone or a gig – except much less intense.
At Tate Modern, multiple banners of Andy Warhol’s Queen Elizabeth watch over the queue. As people file past three and four abreast, leaving plenty of room for non-queuers to jog and cycle the other way, Warhol’s aesthetic may be the key to what’s going on here. Especially as, when they have completed the walk in nine hours or so, everyone in the queue will briefly appear in the BBC’s Warholian live coverage from Westminster Hall with its soundtrack of near-silence punctuated only by footsteps, marching guards and the occasional, mysterious ritual thud. Warhol feigned indifference, mimicking the coolness of the media age, when in reality his art is full of compassion and love. In the same, very modern way the queue appears in its straggle almost disengaged: but at its climax there will be tears.
There is also another, older guide to the nature of this procession. Not far from here, Geoffrey Chaucer joined a company of pilgrims at the Tabard Inn in Southwark one day in the 14th century. Or so he tells us in The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s travellers were headed for Canterbury, “the hooly blisful martir for to seke”: they were ritually visiting the shrine of the murdered archbishop Thomas Becket. But Chaucer’s pilgrims don’t process in pious silence. They tell dirty jokes and ribald stories. It’s a merry company, despite its holy goal. Warhol and Chaucer both understood the wafer-thin line between sacred and profane. Warhol, a believer, would go from New York parties to meditating in church. Chaucer’s medieval chatterboxes also walk that line. As does the queue.
Today’s equivalent of telling a tale is checking your phone (David Beckham, spotted in the queue, said he had spent the previous 12 hours sharing stories, so look out for the film Queue Tales), but just like Chaucer’s pilgrims, you have to pass the time somehow. In neither case is that a mockery of the occasion. Medieval people believed they could reduce their time in purgatory by making a pilgrimage. No one thinks they will actually be saved in such a literal sense by paying their last respects to the Queen; yet by going through what would otherwise be a meaningless, draining way to spend a day you attain the sanctified moment of a direct encounter with the monarch in her coffin.
It’s medieval, literally – a journey back in time to the Gormenghastian setting of Westminster Hall, first built in the 11th century, to take part in a rite that feels just as ancient. By doing this, people surely feel they are giving something back to Elizabeth. Her reign has been called “a promise kept” and by joining the ragged back of the queue, staying in place for that long stretch of time, then making your own chosen gesture – a curtsey, a bow, an air kiss – you’re keeping a promise of your own.
In the medieval world, wrote the great historian Johan Huizinga, “all events had much sharper outlines than now”. People wept more openly, laughed more cruelly, fought and grieved with copious pageantry and extravagance. Art is about the only place where some of the ornate, emotional rituals of the Middle Ages can be found today. If you want to experience gothic emotional extremes, a performance art event by Marina Abramovic may get you close. And Punchdrunk’s immersive spectacle The Burnt City takes you across a threshold to become the fully implicated witness of a barbaric, murderous ritual.
Not that there’s anything savage about the queue. It couldn’t be more sensible and civilised. And yet, at some point in that long walk, the ritual threshold is crossed. The phones are put away. Silence falls. People leave Westminster Hall in tears. Who needs performance art when you can step into history?
I dipped a toe in the queue, crossed from the normal urban flow into the patient line as if I was part of it. Then quickly stepped out. Some shadow of irony or lingering republican sentiment made me head the other way. I didn’t feel a better person for leaving.
Jonathan Jones writes on art for the Guardian
