Читать книгу More Moaning - Karl Pilkington - Страница 8

AS I WRITE this I’m twirling a stainless steel teaspoon up my nostril. I have my reasons for this, which I’ll explain in a minute. Hopefully that will keep you hooked enough to get you through the introduction to this next topic, which is art. If you’re like me, you might struggle to read about art. I know it’s really important and is a big part of everyday life – I mean you can’t even buy a cappuccino these days without it coming with some sort of doodle in your froth – but it’s boring to hear someone go on about it at great length. It’s as dull as someone telling you about their dreams. They say that in reality, dreams only last two to five seconds, so why is it when someone tells you about one they’ve had, it lasts longer than the Harry Potter series? I’ve switched nostril now. It would be a lot easier if I had one of them two-pronged forks so I could do both nostrils at once.

The art I grew up with wasn’t proper art. Money was too tight to throw away on things that hung on walls or sat on shelves collecting dust. The only art we had was the gear my dad had got off someone down the pub, or ornaments that people had bought us as gifts. I’m not sure any of us really liked what we had; it was just there to fill a space. I’d go to my mates’ houses and they had a lot of the same stuff, as their dads drank in the same pubs as mine. A game of Through the Keyhole would have been impossible on our estate as all the front rooms looked the same. Apart from the fridge magnets. My mam went through a phase of collecting them, but my dad soon got rid, as when you closed the fridge door they’d all fall off. It was like playing a game of Buckaroo every time you had to put the milk back!

Even though I didn’t grow up around expensive art, and I don’t own any now, I do like art. I just don’t like the pretentiousness that surrounds it. I don’t want a critic telling me WHY I should like the art, and how every glance at some painting ‘will evoke painful visceral experiences with forms that are tactilely appealing’, when to me, it just looked like what the bloke did in my cappuccino froth. But then I’ve never been keen on people telling me what I should enjoy. I’m a big fan of fish and chips, but I won’t bother if I can’t have a cup of tea with them. To me, that’s like Ant without Dec. Recently I was away filming and I’d decided to have fish and chips, but when the waiter came to take the order he said they don’t do tea. The cameraman piped up and said a sommelier he knew had told him that the best drink to have with fish and chips is champagne. I said, ‘What else does he suggest, a martini shaken and not stirred with a bloody Scotch egg!’ Seeing as I didn’t know what else to eat and everyone else had ordered, I took his advice. I wish I hadn’t. It was like sticking Anne Frank in an episode of Cash in the Attic – the two things should never go together. I should have known his mate was talking out of his arse. Since when have you gone in a chippy and they’ve stocked bottles of Cristal next to the cans of Dandelion & Burdock?

The thing is, there are seven billion people on the planet, we’re not all going to enjoy the same things. I like stuff more when I’ve come across it by accident and without any preconceptions. I found out I liked calamari this way. I actually thought I’d shoved an onion ring in my mouth at the time. And I tried wasabi for the first time thinking it was mushy peas. That gave me a right shock and nearly blew my head off.

The weird thing is, even though I didn’t enjoy my wasabi experience, the memory has stuck with me more than my enjoyment of the calamari. It’s the same with art. I get something out of the stuff that I don’t like as at least the emotions get going. We like getting wound up. Why else would people watch Jeremy Kyle? It gives us something to moan about. You have to have the bad to enjoy the good. Last night for me dinner I had a garlic Chicken Kiev. I loved it at the time, but now I’m paying for it as I can’t get rid of the smell of garlic out of my nose. I read online that the solution is to stick a stainless steel teaspoon up your nose. So that’s why I’m sat here with cutlery dangling from my nostrils like some sort of human wind chime. It seems to be working. I read that the nose can remember 50,000 scents so I don’t know why it can’t have a go at remembering one of the other 49,999 smells it knows right now! It just goes to show that even my nose goes for remembering the bad things over the good. Thinking about it, I should have some wasabi now. That would clear it.

ART IN THE MUSEUM

My trip about art started in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. As much as I like art I don’t like visiting galleries. One of the reasons being the whiteness. I can’t handle it as I have really sensitive eyes. Instead of handing out audio guides, they should hand out sunglasses. I’m not alone with this problem, either. Look around in a gallery and everyone is squinting like Clint Eastwood. I wish they would wallpaper a few walls or use magnolia in places to calm it down a bit. One of the things that put me off the idea of going to heaven, if it exists, is the way it’s always depicted as being really bright white, with everyone wearing bright white robes. It always looks like it would stink of bleach to me. Anyway, it’s not just the white walls that give you a headache in a gallery, there’s also the shiny, squeaking floors! No matter what shoes you wear you can’t avoid causing squeaks. On a busy day it can sound like some sort of dolphin get-together.

The first thing that grabbed my eye in MoMA was the piece by Andy Warhol. It was the famous one of thirty-two cans of Campbell’s soup which all look the same, apart from the contents of the tin. Vegetable soup, oxtail, tomato, clam chowder, chicken gumbo and loads more. I stood there looking at these for a good ten minutes, not trying to work out what Warhol was trying to say through his work, but just going through which soups in my forty-three years of life I hadn’t tried. I may as well have been stood in Asda doing a food shop. In a way, I think that’s where the art should be really – in everyday spots where normal people go. Post offices would be a brilliant place to show art as the queues take ages to go down. Whenever I have to go and buy stamps, I take a packed lunch, so what better space to show off art? Research says we spend about six months of our life queuing, so why not make it more enjoyable? It seems mad to have all these costly art galleries when there are loads of walls and spaces to fill elsewhere. Damien Hirst’s shark could be displayed at a fishmonger’s. Tracey Emin’s bed could be in Bensons for Beds. If shopping on the high street is dying due to internet shopping, give us another reason to go out and shop.

I moved on from the tins in the museum and got to a pile of bricks. Normal-sized bricks. No cement. Just bricks laid out five by twelve, two bricks high, 120 in total. Now if this was in a builders’ yard I wouldn’t have stopped and looked, but I was in MoMA and knew this must be serious art. I gawped at it for a good fifteen minutes to try and work out what this was all about. The first thing I noticed was that they were fire bricks, the sort you have in fireplaces and kilns. I knew this as me dad used them when he built a brick BBQ outside our caravan in Wales. After that, everyone went and got one, and the smell of BBQs filled the air every day. I don’t know if there was any truth in it, but there was a story going around that a woman had sat outside her caravan in the sun, wrapped herself up in silver foil to get a tan and ended up cooking herself alive. No one noticed as they thought the smell was just meat from another BBQ. I always think of that story when I see people wrapped up in foil like baked potatoes at the end of the London Marathon.

There were no details next to the pile of bricks, so I wasn’t even sure if this was a piece of art. They might have just been having an extension built. The thing with this is, I know that I could recreate it quite easily myself. Fire bricks are £2 to £3 a brick, so for no more than £360 I could have knocked one of these up in no time. After a while I came to the conclusion that the creator of this piece could just have been having a laugh. Perhaps you’re supposed to think of the bricks as blocks. One hundred and twenty blocks. That’s a load of blocks, and if you repeat that line over and over – ‘a load of blocks, a load of blocks, a load of blocks’ – it starts to sound like ‘a load of bollocks’. That was my interpretation, anyway.

After having some time to take in some of the art on my own, Jamie the director had arranged for me to meet a critic. His name was Blake Gopnik.

KARL: I’ve been a bit confused so far.

BLAKE: Oh yeah? That’s really good news. I wish I was more confused with art. I mean, for me the mark of a good work of art is when I keep looking at it, I keep being baffled by it. So anything that I immediately say ‘oh, that’s beautiful’, ‘that’s a great work of human invention’ or any of those kind of clichés, I think it’s lousy.

KARL: I’ve just been looking at a pile of bricks and it sort of annoyed me a bit at first. I’m looking at it thinking this is a big joke. Then I’m stood there trying to work it out. Is there one answer to that pile of bricks?

BLAKE: There better not be. If there is, it’s a crap work of art. I actually think that they look pretty damn good, and that a pile of bricks in a construction yard looks good too, so part of the point is just to make us rethink what it is to look at the world.

Fair enough, but a construction yard doesn’t charge you $25 to get in. Blake took me over to a piece of art called ‘In Advance of the Broken Arm’, which was a snow shovel hanging from a ceiling. It wasn’t a snow shovel that had been sculpted from stone or made out of glass or anything, it was just a bog-standard snow shovel. What with the bricks and now a shovel, I was wondering if I was in a museum of art or a branch of B&Q! To me this is art for people who have too much time on their hands. I can’t imagine someone in a Third World country getting much from it.

Blake’s eyes lit up when he saw the shovel. I reckon if he saw me today with the teaspoon hanging from my nose, he’d have me put in a Perspex box next to the pile of bricks. It was more interesting watching Blake’s reaction to the shovel than looking at the shovel itself. But I like people-watching. When I was a kid I got into looking at paintings of normal people doing normal things by a bloke called Lowry. Kids playing in the park or factory workers making their way into work. They were simple images, but you can look at them again and again and see someone doing something you hadn’t noticed before. I used to sit and do my version of these after I’d played out, drawing people I had seen watching a football game on the fields or people knocking around the shops.

BLAKE: I’ve probably written ten thousand words on this thing. And it still makes me wonder. It’s actually weirder than it looks – most people don’t realise this is not Marcel Duchamp’s snow shovel from 1915; this was remade in the ’60s. These pieces are called ready-mades. The whole point is you went and bought a shovel, and you put it up and that was it, that was the work of art.

KARL: How much is that worth?

BLAKE: That’s probably the least interesting question you could possibly ask.

KARL: I know, but I’m looking at it and thinking it’s a shovel, what’s a shovel doing in here?! So go on, how much?

BLAKE: I don’t know, they don’t come up for sale very often. I guess not very much, ten million at most. Maybe more, maybe twenty. But not a lot in other words. Because pictures are selling, stupid bits of paint on canvas are selling for two hundred and fifty million dollars. I mean Marcel Duchamp’s one of the biggest bargains you can get.

KARL: Ten million dollars? That’s ridiculous.

BLAKE: Yeah, but it’s all ridiculous. I mean, the fact that anyone has ten million dollars to spend on something that you can’t use is sickening and criminal. My favourite thing in the world is to have my notebook, or to have a friend with me, and to spend at least an hour with one work of art.

KARL: What? An hour looking at a snow shovel?

BLAKE: Yeah! It’s easy. You and I could do it easily, in fact. I mean, you spend two or three hours looking at a football match, right? Or a movie?

KARL: An hour’s worth of thought, on a shovel? All right, so what should I do then? If I’m going to look at this and try and get more from it, what should I be thinking?

BLAKE: First of all, I don’t think you should be thinking, I think you should be talking or writing, because the notion of contemplation I just don’t buy. It has to be active. There has to be a real engagement with the work, just as if you’re watching a football game. You’re constantly talking, thinking, screaming at them. Scream at Marcel Duchamp, tell him that you think he’s useless.

KARL: I feel a bit . . . a bit sorry for it.

BLAKE: For the work?

KARL: Yeah, because it was made to be a shovel and it’s not. It’s like looking at an animal in a zoo. Where you know it’s not really doing what it’s meant to do.

BLAKE: That’s interesting. You’ve just said one of the most interesting things I’ve heard about a Marcel Duchamp. Can I pretend I said that?

KARL: You’re just taking the . . .

BLAKE: No, I’m serious. To look at this from the point of view of the shovel is a genuinely original thought that has not been had. See, that’s what happens if we spend enough time on it: new stuff happens. That’s what art does, it makes new stuff happen.

The thing is, it would have been easy to just say it was all shit and walk away, but because I didn’t, I had a good time chatting with Blake about art. Still think ten million quid for a shovel is ridiculous, though.

MAKING ART

The next part of my trip was not just about looking but actually getting involved in the art. First up, I was meeting an artist called Trina Merry. Her thing is to create art using human bodies and a load of body paint. She was making human sculptures of the twelve astrological signs by getting her volunteers to squeeze and huddle together to create the shapes. Once in position, she applied body paint to bring the image to life before she took a photo. I was looking forward to getting involved in this as it was something I could have a copy of once it was all finished. I’ve never been one for taking photographs. I only use my phone camera for taking a shot of the gas or electric meter reading so I don’t have to write down the long number. I think this is because my mam and dad didn’t bother with photos much when I was growing up. My mam hates having her photograph taken as she never likes how she looks and she always turns away or covers her face like some criminal coming out of the Old Bailey. God knows what we would do if she ever went missing as we’d have nothing to give the police to help identify her.

We were all pretty hopeless at taking photographs too. There would always be a finger over the lens or heads would be missing altogether. If anyone in our family had a photographic memory it would be useless, as everyone’s heads would be missing. When we did take photos we never got round to getting them developed. We’d go on holiday to Wales for four weeks and only take one roll of film, so before taking any snaps there was always a big discussion as to whether or not it was worth taking a photo, which led to not many being taken. One roll of film could last for ages and by the time we actually got it developed, the photos showed me going from six to eleven years old!

The photo I remember the most from all my holidays growing up is one of Uncle Alf (he wasn’t a real uncle, just me dad’s mate) lying on the sofa in a caravan with a KitKat wrapper stuck to his head. I don’t know how it was agreed that using one of the twenty-four photos for this was justified.

We didn’t always remember to take the camera with us, either, so there are big parts of my life where there is no photographic evidence that I was around at all. The only evidence of my existence in my teenage years are the X-rays of the wisdom teeth I had done. These days, it’s gone the other way – everyone is photo obsessed. Kids are growing up with every movement being photographed, and even before they have left the womb parents have enough scans of their kid to fill an album. It’s no longer ‘Here’s Billy taking his first steps’, now it’s ‘Here’s Billy using the placenta as a trampoline’. They may as well have a photo of the dad’s bollocks in there to show where they were before the womb!

I met Trina in a busy studio where dancers, artists and musicians practise their craft. She showed me a few images of her work that she had on her iPad. They were really good. There was one of around nine people intertwined to make up an image of a motorbike being ridden by a woman. There was one of a skull and another of a temple. On first glance you can’t see the people involved, but on closer inspection you can see a lot more than you might expect.

KARL: Are they totally nude?!

TRINA: Yeah, they are totally nude. But in my work I try to obscure the body, because I don’t want anyone to stick out solely as an individual. Except for maybe one focal person. It just depends how shy they are – if they need to cover up for whatever reason, I just throw them in back. People who are more confident, or if their body is needed for a particular piece, come forward.

KARL: Bit nervous now.

TRINA: Yeah, that is totally normal, to be honest with you – like we haven’t even gone out to a café or had a dinner yet and you are going to take your clothes off for me!

Art seems to be the only place people accept nudity these days. The Greeks started it all off when they made naked sculptures of known athletes of the day. Apparently most athletes did their events in the nude back then, so this was the way people were used to seeing them. I saw one statue when I was in Greece of a fella sprawled across a rock, head tilted back, and his legs akimbo. He looked like a pissed-up bloke on a stag do, so I don’t know what sport he did. I suppose he could have been the Freddie Flintoff or Gazza of the day.

To be honest, today’s runners may as well go back to being nude as them Lycra pants they wear don’t really hide much, do they? It’s plain to see that if Usain Bolt went back to the old ways of running in the nude he would have an advantage getting over the finish line before anyone else. It can’t have been easy running in the nude, though, having a couple of testicles slapping against your legs.

The only good thing is it must have given them more encouragement to run faster as it would have sounded like they were being clapped along.

I popped on some jogging pants and a T-shirt and went into the studio where Trina tried to relax me by introducing me to all the other volunteers. It didn’t help much as there were six girls and one bloke . . . who looked like Leonardo DiCaprio. I stood there in front of a big mirrored wall. I shouldn’t have been there at all. It looked like S Club 7 with one of their dads.

KARL: Would everyone agree that it is harder for a man to be naked?

JAMES THE MODEL: I would agree, yeah.

TRINA: But you have one thing hanging out there – we have two.

KARL: No, no, no, but . . . I kind of think that they are all . . . the same. Breasts.

TRINA: You think that women are all the same?!

KARL: Breasts are, yeah. Everyone sees breasts every day, but you don’t see knobs every day. There are loads of magazines with topless woman, it just goes over my head. If you suddenly took your top off – I would be like ‘fine’.

JAMES: I think that male genitalia are much more offensive to the public eye.

KARL: I think it looks horrible as well. It’s just not very nice. I don’t think anyone wants to see it in a picture.

TRINA: I do. I think over fifty per cent of the population, females and homosexual males do want to see that. (giggles)

KARL: Not mine they don’t.

TRINA: I don’t look at the male that way. I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable. To be honest, I feel more uncomfortable when people are in their clothes, than when they are nude, because I am so used to these people.

KARL: Really?!

TRINA: Yeah.

Another problem I was worried about was getting a bit active down below. Being nude is one thing, but if it got excited, that could open another can of worms. Quite an appropriate phrase. I didn’t know how mine would react as it has a mind of its own. I can be sat on a bus or train and the slightest tremor can set it off. It goes up and down all the time for no reason, so much so that I reckon it could conduct an orchestra by itself at times. I tried to subtly bring the matter up.

KARL: And if there’s any sign of excitement?

TRINA: Sorry . . . what’s that?

KARL: Just saying . . . if I get a little bit of excitement . . .

TRINA: (blank expression)

KARL: A little bit of movement, little bit of stiffness? Is that . . . ?

TRINA: Errmmm . . . you mean . . . ?

KARL: HARD KNOB!

TRINA: Oh. To be honest with you, I have painted, I don’t know, at this point about a thousand people and it has only happened twice.

I’ve never been a fan of odds. And odds on knobs don’t work. I can’t control it. If it wants to get active, it just will. It could end up hailing me a cab back to the hotel if it gets out of hand. That’s just reminded me of a joke.

HOW DO YOU SPOT A BLIND MAN ON A NUDIST BEACH? IT’S NOT HARD.

Before we got into any positions Trina got us to warm our bodies up by doing some basic stretches followed by some slow walking.

KARL: What’s this about, Trina? Why am I doing this slow walking?

TRINA: So, this is a practice that helps you to master your body and your focal awareness, so that you can stay concentrated inside the pose and use your body like an instrument, like a performer.

I was pretty good at it. They should do a race in the Olympics like this. Usain Bolt is the fastest man ever, so surely no one is ever going to beat him. And I don’t get much enjoyment out of things that are over so quickly. It takes these runners longer to tie up the laces on their trainers than it does to do the race. Usain Bolt does the hundred metres in forty-one strides! The Red Arrows are another thing I don’t enjoy as they are too fast. By the time you hear them above you, they’ve gone! So let’s see who can do the slowest hundred metres.

Before anyone got nude, Trina got to work on designing how the lion of Leo would be put together. One by one we were called over and added to her vision. I couldn’t make out what she was doing. I couldn’t see the shape of a lion at all. I was called over and was asked to kneel down and get into a tight ball, and was crammed in between the others. This wasn’t going to be as easy as I first thought. As we all crunched together, Trina and her assistant came over and moved arms and legs into place, criss-crossing limbs up and over each other. If I’d have had an itchy leg it would have been difficult to locate which leg was mine to scratch. An arm was pushing against my head while my face was being pushed into someone’s knee. It was like playing Twister on the London Underground in rush hour. This went on for around thirty minutes, then Trina told us all to relax. I was pretty stiff and had problems standing up as my legs had seized up. I wandered around the studio looking like a newborn deer. As I was starting to get the feeling back in my legs Trina asked everyone to quickly trim any hairy areas of the body before she applied any paint. Now, trimming my body isn’t a job that can be done quickly, as I’m quite hairy. I eventually gave in to Suzanne having a cat recently as she argued that I get more hairs on the sofa than any cat ever will, and she’s probably not wrong. I was half thinking of suggesting to Trina that instead of being part of the lion, I should play the role of a hairball that the lion has coughed up.

I lifted my T-shirt and showed Trina and the other models my hairy chest, and I swear there was a gasp. Some men are described as being rugged, I’m just a rug. It’s now my job at home to clean out the plug in the shower on a weekly basis as I shed that much hair. Some days it looks like I’m dragging Chewbacca out of the plughole.

I ended up borrowing an electric shaver and got to work on my body, removing a layer off my chest before handing the shaver to Jamie the director to sort stuff out on me back, which isn’t thick hair, more like the little clumps of dust you get under your bed. Removing the hair made me feel even more nude and so I decided not to go and do the full monty. At the end of the day, I feel I have to keep something for Suzanne. The rest of me is out there on telly, the knob and balls are hers to see, if and when she wants.

Jamie said he knew I was never going to go through with it so had brought me some pants. He got them out and they were the finest pants I had ever seen in my life, and when I say finest I don’t mean the best quality, I mean thin. Imagine wafer thin ham, and then slice it again! Jamie explained that they would make life easier for Trina to apply paint to as the material is the closest thing to skin. He wasn’t kidding. I don’t think I’ve ever had to handle something so delicate. A pair of pants made out of a spider’s web would have been tougher. The strongest bit about them was the label. I eventually got them on and went back into the studio where I was greeted by the same bunch of people, but now they were nude. They applauded me as I walked in, as I think the pants were that thin they thought I was naked. I’m not a fan of being nude at the best of times, but with other people it’s even weirder. I bought a hot tub recently to help with me bad back, and the salesman showed me a big seven-seater one and said I could invite mates round if I bought this one. There was a couple of problems with that: one being I don’t have seven mates, and two, if I did, I wouldn’t want them in a hot tub with me.

It’s like phoning a mate and saying, ‘I’m having a bath, do you fancy popping round and joining me?’

Trina started getting the main colour on our bodies to make us look like a lion. A light brown colour. It definitely took longer to do me due to my body hair getting in the way. I think I had more hair on me than Trina had on her brush. She was struggling to get through to skin so switched to a sponge and dabbed it on. Not many places were left untouched. She even dabbed between my cheeks. She kept telling me to relax as my arse cheeks clenched every time, but I couldn’t help it; soon as the sponge touched my hairy arse, the cheeks closed like a Venus flytrap.

We crouched back into our rough positions, and Trina and her assistant got to work with more touching up while giving out instructions as to where we needed to move our feet or shoulders. This was so much harder than I thought it would be. Not only on the knees and legs, but I’m also not a fan of being in tight places. Last time I felt like this was when I was trying to get some trainers at a Sports Direct closing-down sale.

Suddenly my cheeks clenched again as someone was dabbing a soggy sponge on my arse. It was Trina. She stepped back and said she wasn’t happy with what she was seeing. At first I thought she meant my arse, but she was talking about the whole thing and said we should all relax as she wanted to start again with a different design.

Everyone took this opportunity to grab some food, but because of all the paint, they couldn’t put their clothes back on so it was a buffet in the buff. This wasn’t that unusual for me as I tend to eat topless at home most days. I can be a messy eater. I’ve ruined loads of T-shirts from gravy splashes. Sunday lunch is the one that I make the most mess with, so I sit there looking like Peter Andre. I also prep my surrounding area like I’m about to do some painting and decorating before I have gravy.

Having food to look at was a bit of a blessing as it meant my eyes could relax a bit. They had been bouncing round the room like a squash ball trying not to stare at anyone’s bits all morning, which is pretty difficult when you’re in a room full of naked people.

Time was passing. We had already done around five hours in total. If it went on any longer, there was a chance I’d have to shave my body again. Trina announced she had a new design and planned on changing the lion’s head.

This is where I would struggle as an artist. I wouldn’t be able to start again on the same project. The saying ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again’ made sense years ago as you had no option, but now with Google it’s easier to find someone else who can. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll have a go at doing something and put research into it beforehand. I’m always using YouTube these days before I take on anything. I’m pretty sure I would have done a lot better at school if YouTube had been around. It’s like the best encyclopaedia ever, with the added bonus of dogs on skateboards.

Trina’s new idea didn’t change my position, so I was back down on my knees for another hour or so. Even though I wasn’t doing much I felt shattered. It’s funny how doing nothing can be so tiring. I always have a go at Suzanne for saying she is tired after sitting on her arse all day, but full respect to her: it is hard work. I could sense that Trina felt under pressure with the time. The studio was only booked until 6 p.m., so she now had just thirty minutes to get it finished. I don’t quite understand what happened but when I looked up from my pose I saw Trina was now undressed and getting involved in the modelling side of things while her assistant painted her. The room felt pretty tense now. It was like watching DIY SOS when they’re trying to do up a house and the roof’s off and it’s clouding over.

TRINA: Do we look even? (speaking to assistant)

ASSISTANT: Stay in there, hold on!

KARL: Who?

ASSISTANT: Okay, now there is a space between the two guys . . . You have to tuck more down, Karl, you have to tuck more down.

KARL: Tuck more down?! Where? Here?

ASSISTANT: Between your chest and your . . . Tuck your head down, sweetheart, one mil . . . Okay, the head space is much better but there is still a space with Karl . . .

KARL: Mmmm . . . I can’t move my neck down any more. I’m not a flamingo.

Trina’s assistant asked everyone to hold still while she took a photo. ‘Click’ and it was done. I wanted to see the photo, but Trina said we had to clear the studio as our time was up. It was like a brothel being raided by the police as naked bodies ran about the place. I popped my clothes back on and she showed me the rough image.

TRINA: I am really happy with how the painting turned out. It looks great, and you were an awesome model even when your legs were going numb. You didn’t even complain about moving.

KARL: Because everyone else was sticking with it and I didn’t want to mess it up. Plus I wanted it to end. I was just thinking ‘press the button, take the photo!’

TRINA: I was feeling the same thing myself . . .

KARL: I am glad that you are happy because I wouldn’t be going back and doing it all again.

TRINA: You were very courageous, and you went for it, and I am like super proud of you and I really appreciate you doing that.

KARL: Well, thanks again for having us. Good luck with it all. All right, let’s get out of here!

When I got home I looked at Trina’s website to see if I could download the finished image, to find that she had done the image again. So I still don’t have a photo of myself. What a bloody waste of time that was.

PERFORMANCE ART

After being locked up in a studio all day it was nice to get some fresh air in Central Park. I love parks, and I’d say they do for me what galleries do for art lovers. It’s natural art that I like – trees and lakes, insects and birds. I’m considering getting a dog, though, as I get strange looks from people when I’m walking through a park on my own. Dog or no dog, later that day I was definitely going to be getting funny looks as the plan was to get involved in some performance art in Central Park. In performance art, the artist is the body, and the live action they perform is the work of art. I suppose it’s not too dissimilar to what I had been doing with Trina, except this time there was no chance to start again if it didn’t work out, as it would be in front of a live audience.

In London, I used to see a lot of performance artists in Covent Garden. Getting to the shops was like walking through Britain’s Got Talent auditions. Everywhere you looked there were jugglers, clowns on unicycles, sword swallowers, tightrope walkers, endless numbers of human statues and mime artists. I’ve done a bit of mime myself. It was when I was in the Peruvian jungle. I was in my tent and was really fed up, so I imagined unwrapping a Twix and eating it just like I normally do, biting the caramel off the top first and then the biscuit. It sounds mental but it kind of worked. After that I mimed eating an orange. That didn’t work quite as well, as an orange does more to your taste buds, but the upside was I didn’t have sticky hands. I did it again recently when I was thinking about buying a table tennis table. I stood there reaching for and hitting a nonexistent ball onto a make-believe table, but I got bored fairly quickly so binned the idea of getting one.

The performance artist I was meeting was called Matthew Silver. He’d been doing his art on and off for nine years. I met him at the apartment he shares with a friend and a cat. On first impressions you could think Matthew was a proper mental, or homeless, or a stand-in for Tom Hanks in the film Cast Away. A gangly, thin man with a mass of hair covering his head and a smiley face. He looked like a dandelion. He invited me in and made me a cup of tea. I quickly realised he wasn’t mental when he offered me a posh cinnamon herbal teabag. Not an official way to work out if someone is mad, I know, but then I’ve heard that one of the ways they work out if someone is a psychopath is by asking them if they like cats, so judging someone on their choice of teabags doesn’t seem that daft. I’ve never got into these types of teas as you can’t dunk biscuits into them. But I wanted to be polite so I accepted the offer. I didn’t want to drink much of this tea, either, as cinnamon sends my heart rate through the roof for some reason, and it was already pounding thinking about having to perform in front of strangers in Central Park.

KARL: How did you get into this, then?

MATTHEW: Well, I was the class clown, I was always one of those characters. I go very simple, I go very raw and just like (makes fart sound) or (makes chicken sound) and then just dance in my underwear. I use awkward pauses to create tension, and usually because they are complete strangers they start laughing. It’s freebase, it’s all improv, it just happens, I just do it. I have a little technique, but the good thing about performance art is even a disaster can look amazing.

I think everyone would like to have the confidence to do what Matthew does. Most people don’t take it any further than singing in the shower, but I don’t even bother with that since I’ve moved to a house with a water meter. I try to get in and out as soon as possible. What I do like to do is dance for the cat. I mainly do it when I’m hanging around for the kettle to boil. I count while I’m dancing to see how long I can keep his attention before he looks away or closes his eyes. He’s a tough crowd. I tell you, if Cowell ever leaves The X Factor they should get my cat in. Or do a version of The Voice – three cats, once they all look away, you’re out. Would be good that. I’ve gone off point, but all I’m saying is, we all like to show off and perform to ourselves (and cats), but it’s a different ball game when there’s a crowd.

Matthew handed me a pair of ‘lucky pants’. They were Y-fronts, dyed bright green with ‘LOVE’ written across the arse. He said we should go onto the roof so he could show me the sorts of things he does. I popped on the green pants and he stripped down too, and then I gave him some help getting his props up to the roof. These were mainly toys that he had found, along with a wobbly stick and part of a highway barrier. He put on a motorbike helmet and carried a sign with ‘LOVE’ painted on it. He then went through his method.

MATTHEW: I like to just come out with a silly movement, you know, something like (waves arms and dances on the spot), really stupid, you know, and when you do it, you look at people’s faces, make eye contact. You’ll notice that people are actually smiling. You’ll see people who are not into it, but then you’ll see people who are into it, and if that person is into it and they’re smiling, you can take it to another level. You could do my two favourites – fart sounds or the chicken noise. Eventually someone with an iPhone will start recording you, right? And then boom! That’s your opportunity to come closer to that person.

KARL: What? Because they’ve got involved then?

MATTHEW: Right, they got involved. They gave you permission to . . . You know, if they’re smiling or if they’re videoing, they’re involved. So you come up to them and you engage. You go up to them slowly, though, cos if you go in too quick you might scare the shit out of them. But if you just, you know, smile, they might be into it, you know.

Matthew’s message was all around giving love to people, but that isn’t really me. I find most people are a pain in the arse so I tend to avoid them if I can. I didn’t even have an imaginary friend when I was a kid.

I thought about what message I would like to push in my performance and remembered the warm-up exercises I did with Trina where I had to walk as slowly as possible. I showed Matthew my skills as I thought I was quite good at that, and he liked it, so I suggested we both do it. Instead of spreading the message of love, I came up with spreading the message to slow down. New York is a place where everything is at a fast pace – it’s the city that never sleeps – so it’s a good message to get out there. I showed him my moves and he copied. He was impressed. Jamie the director just stared at me not saying much, which didn’t really help. Who should I take notice of, Matthew who does this daily, or a bloke who makes TV? I decided I believed in the idea enough.

We went back inside and painted some cardboard signs with the word ‘SLOW’ to use during our performance.

KARL: What about money and stuff?

MATTHEW: You know . . . I perform when I can and lately I haven’t been holding out the bucket. I don’t ask for it. I let them give it to me, out of love, you know? Cos if I’m focused on making a certain amount of money, I’m not happy. I do all these great performances, I make a lot of people laugh, but then I’m like, oh, but I only made ten dollars. You know, today’s typical person, if they don’t make a certain amount of money they feel bad about whatever art they do. That’s why art and money don’t really work together.

I was confident. That was until he told me we might not be able to do this in Central Park as it was starting to get dark, and suggested Times Square instead. The idea of that made me nervous and I started to shake. Though that could just have been cos I was stood on Matthew’s roof on a cold day in December in just a pair of green underpants, and I had less hair on my body than normal due to being shaved at Trina’s body-painting session.

We headed off to Times Square to do our thing. In a way there was no better place to spread the message of ‘slow down’ as it’s the most hectic place in New York. Thousands of people filled the streets. My heart was pounding like I’d eaten a full tub of cinnamon. Matthew had nothing to fear, he does this day after day. He doesn’t even have to do anything, he just looks funny. He said I looked funny too in my costume of green pants, socks and trainers, and my back brace. The back brace wasn’t part of the costume, though. I need it due to my bad back. I felt weak as I didn’t have his hair and beard. I can’t imagine he would look as funny or be as funny without the hair and beard. I’ve grown a beard now and again, but once it gets quite long Suzanne says I need to shave it as it doesn’t work with a bald head. She says I look like a shuttlecock. To finish my look off, I borrowed his motorcycle helmet and a pair of shades. I’ll be honest, I was shitting it. It was easy earlier on his roof when no one else was watching. We found our spot in Times Square and it happened. We did our slow-motion walking and added slow talking to it too. It’s hard to explain now, but I think it worked. We improvised for around thirty to forty minutes. Crowds of people surrounded us, laughed and took photos as we told them to slow down in their busy lives. The fact that people stopped and watched means the message worked.

I got a proper buzz from it, probably more than I’ve ever got from anything else I’ve done. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be getting invited to perform on the Royal Variety Show any time soon, but I thought the result was pretty good for something I’d not done before. The only problem I have with it as an art is that it’s now gone. If people missed it, they missed it. Matthew has nothing to show for that night’s work, and he will just have to start all over again tomorrow. He’s like a council worker with a leaf blower – his work is never done.

I couldn’t get to sleep for a few hours that night due to the adrenaline rush that I got. I sat in bed and googled ‘performance art’ on the internet to see if what I had done really counted as that. One definition I found said that ‘performance art usually consists of four elements: time, space, the performer’s body, and a relationship between audience and performer’. We’d ticked all those boxes. Now every year when I see Times Square on the TV for the New Year celebrations I can say ‘I’ve played there’.

That’s not bad, is it?

PAINTING A MASTERPIECE

My performance with Matthew was all about slowing things down. The next day I was due to meet an artist who does the opposite and creates artworks in record time. It’s easy to think that stuff that doesn’t take time to do is no good, but for art to be of any quality does it have to take years in the making? The ceiling Michelangelo worked on in the Sistine Chapel took him almost five years to complete. I’ve seen it and it is pretty good, but I think it’s a bit daft to have a fancy piece of artwork in a building where people spend most of the time with their eyes shut praying.

Recently, critics seemed to go mad over the film Boyhood, the main reason being it took twelve years to make and the director stuck with the same cast over that time so you watched them age in the film. This fact seemed to take over from the storyline, and everyone just talked about how it was interesting to see the cast age. I watched it with Suzanne with her going on like ‘Oh, look, hasn’t he grown’ and ‘That hair suits him more than his last style’. It was more like going through a sodding photo album than watching a film. I didn’t understand all the fuss. William Roache has been playing the part of Ken Barlow in Coronation Street for fifty years and the critics don’t go on about him.

The artist I was going to meet up with was called Ushio Shinohara, a well-known Japanese painter (to those in the know). As soon as I entered his home/studio in Dumbo (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass), the art district of New York, I could smell that familiar, chalky, damp smell of artists’ paint. I recognise it even though I’m not around it much. Elephant shit is another smell like that. Ushio introduced himself. He was a small man, eighty-three years old with white fluffy hair, similar to my auntie Nora’s, but unlike her, he had it in a flat Mohican. His hands were covered in so many specks of colour that when he put out his hand to shake mine I thought he was offering me some Skittles. I tried having a chat about his art but didn’t get anywhere, as although he had been living in New York for almost fifty years, his accent was still strong and with my northern accent we couldn’t make much sense of each other. I like being around people and having company, but I don’t always want to chat so I quite like meeting people who can’t speak English as it gets rid of all the small talk. Han Solo had it right knocking about with Chewbacca – someone to watch his back and help him out without having to discuss what he got up to over the weekend.

The fact that Ushio couldn’t understand me didn’t matter anyway, as it was the art that was going to join us together. He got me to help mix up some paint so I could have a go trying out his painting technique. Only two colours were mixed: black and the brightest pink I have ever seen. The sort of pink that you only see in alcopops.

His wife Noriko appeared, a grey-haired trendy-looking woman, who handed me some boxer shorts to pop on. Not boxer shorts as in underpants, but actual shorts that a boxer wears to fight in. I always wanted a pair of these when I was younger, but my mam said the shorts were a waste of money as boxing was just another fad that I wouldn’t keep up. After getting battered by a lad called Leeroy and hitting the canvas, my mam was right, I jacked it in. Today I’d be hitting the canvas again, but with my fists dipped in paint rather than my head. This was Ushio’s technique of getting paint on the canvas. He started doing it in 1958 and has done thousands of huge paintings this way. It looked like he still had most of them rolled up and stacked in virtually every available space in his studio like some sort of carpet warehouse. He handed me a pair of boxing gloves and got me to tie sponges to them using string. Once the gloves were on, he told me to dunk one in the bright pink and the other in the black, then acted out what he wanted me to do to the canvas. He wanted me to work my way across the big fifteen-foot-long canvas from right to left, thumping as I went, high up or low down, wherever I felt like. The main thing was not to stop. He slipped some goggles over my eyes and off I went. Thumping high, thumping low, left, right, right, right, left. The white of the canvas disappearing with every punch. The harder I hit, the bigger the splat. I was getting covered in paint with every punch as it splashed back at me. Forty seconds and thirty-five punches later I stepped back, wiped the paint from my goggles and looked at what I had created. As I took in the mess I had made, Ushio and Noriko applauded my efforts. They seemed happy, but I wasn’t convinced. To me it was very similar to the mess Suzanne makes over the kitchen worktop whenever she makes soup in the blender.

KARL: How’s that?

USHIO: Great!

NORIKO: Good, yes!

USHIO: Yeah! Masterpiece! Bang, bang, bang!

KARL: I don’t know, can I add another colour?

NORIKO: No. Finished. You shouldn’t think about the results. You cannot change the past.

KARL: Yeah . . . I don’t know if I like it, then.

NORIKO: We finish the work, we don’t think any more. After that the audience decide if it is good or bad.

It’s a different way of working. Instead of spending ages trying to make a masterpiece, make something quickly and then at least if people don’t like it, you haven’t wasted too much of your time. I enjoyed the process but didn’t like the end result. To me it looked like one of them pictures of a virus they show on the news when an epidemic breaks out, or the stains you get on hotel room walls in Spain where the last occupier had been kept busy killing mosquitoes. It was probably the most basic form of art, like the painted hand prints that kids make in their first year of school and then end up being stuck on the front of the fridge. They’re always pretty crap. You never get someone putting someone else’s kids’ artwork on their fridge door, do you? It’s because they look shit. I had made something but not something I was proud of. I could quite easily thump a piano with my fists and make a noise, but I doubt people would rush out to buy an album of it.

As the paint slowly dried on the canvas, I could also feel it drying on me and tightening my skin. I stood looking at what I had made while picking away at the paint on my arms. I used to like doing this at school when my hands got covered in Tipp-Ex. I got through quite a few bottles of correction fluid every month at school. The pages in my books were as brittle as poppadoms.

NORIKO: You can bring home . . . if you want?

KARL: I don’t know . . . I don’t know if it will go with the rest of the furniture.

NORIKO: You can just wrap it, keep it in loft for ten years.

KARL: I am not going to keep that.

NORIKO: If you didn’t keep, you would regret later. So maybe ten years later, your idea go to look at it going to be different, so just keep it. Ten years later, you will be surprised – ‘wow I made a big masterpiece’.

I couldn’t take it home and shove it in the loft anyway as it’s been converted into a bedroom. I’m sure the reason for more charity shops on the high streets these days is due to the fact that most people have converted their lofts, so they have less space to store crap.

Ushio strapped on some sponge and started smacking his arms and fists onto another canvas like Mr Miyagi’s epileptic brother. He used just black paint. It didn’t look too dissimilar to the one I had knocked out. It was funny to watch, as it’s not every day you see a man in his 80s wearing nothing but shorts and goggles whacking a canvas to shit. Maybe it’s more like performance art. I had a good day and enjoyed giving it a go, but just like the boxing I attempted when I was a kid, once was enough.

POLISHING A TURD

Art is something we like as it takes our mind off life’s daily grind. We have so much going on in our heads that it’s difficult to properly get away from it all. I find there are only a few things that help me clear my mind from the chaos: 1) cutting the lawn, 2) cleaning windows, 3) music, 4) rock climbing (I did it for the first time recently on a trip and when you are unclipping hooks from one rope to another, and your life depends on getting them in the correct order, it really makes you focus on the job in hand and you forget everything else), 5) standing in dog shit. No matter what is going on in your life, when you stand in some fresh dog shit and the smell hits you, everything has to stop while you find a stick to scrape the problem away from the tread in your trainers.

The only thing worse than having to do this is having to wipe it away from between your toes. I can still remember the feeling of this happening. I went to get some milk off the doorstep barefoot and our dog had defecated at the front door and I hadn’t seen it. It made me gag instantly. I don’t know if you’ve seen that film 127 Hours where a man gets his arm trapped under a boulder and the only way he can escape is by cutting it off. If you have, the noises he made and the expression on his face were similar to me wiping that shit from between my toes. No one else was up yet, so I wiped it off my feet and went back to bed, the plan being to act like I hadn’t seen it. Of course the only issue was that my bowl of cornflakes next to my bed and the milk already in the fridge and open were a giveaway, plus the fact that my footprint was in the turd, so a visit from Magnum P.I. wasn’t necessary to work out I’d already seen it and decided to leave it.

Rightly so, I was in the shit yet again.

Today I was going to have to beat those demons and come face to face with dog dirt one more time, as I was having a day out with a couple of lads known as the Sprinkle Brigade, who since 2007 have been creating art using dog poo. Their names were Jeremy and Jeff. I met them at the site where the idea came about.

JEREMY: Well, we’re called Sprinkle Brigade. We go around the city and we decorate the shit that people leave on the street. Because it’s a problem. No one does anything about it. So we figured we’ll do something to make it look a little bit more special to brighten up people’s day.

JEFF: Yeah. Take something that people hate, and make them laugh a little bit.

KARL: I suppose there aren’t many things left in life that get an immediate reaction like shit does.

JEFF: There’s comedy in there, but for the most part you’re right; it’s disgusting and if we can take something that people loathe and make it something they laugh at, we think that’s of value. We don’t think the world is gonna pick up their dog shit. There’s always gonna be people who leave it, and it’s always gonna be something that we all hate.

JEREMY: We’re very particular about the way we go about it. We don’t just walk up to each piece and say ‘oh, there’s one right there, we gotta decorate it’. Everything is really thought out. There are three principles to it: having a great idea, finding the perfect piece that suits the idea, and then giving it a really great name.

The plan was to go shopping first and buy some props that would be added to the poo to bring it to life and make it art. On the way to the shop we came across the first small pile of dog dirt. They stood and chatted while not taking their eyes off it, just like Blake the art critic looked at the art in the Museum of Modern Art.

JEFF: It’s a possibility but the size isn’t there. We could do something with it but it’s just . . . you know. It’s not jumping out at me.

KARL: How long would you say that one has been there?

JEFF: I think it’s newborn. That’s a newbie.

KARL: Is that from this morning, then?

JEFF: It’s got a brush of rain on it. Maybe like an hour of rain or something. So it could have come last night.

KARL: So that doesn’t excite you?

JEREMY: I think it’s a dud.

JEFF: If it’s fresh and it has a tacky ordure, you can just go straight with the sprinkles. But in a case like this, I know that if I put the sprinkles on there, then it’s not gonna stick. So, there is a little bit of a cheat we use, but it works.

JEREMY: It’s called Spray Mount.

KARL: Oh right, like a type of spray glue. It’s quite an expensive hobby this, then?

JEREMY: It gets a little pricey. Money is no object, though, when it comes to this.

KARL: Now the sprinkles are on it, do you take a photograph?

JEFF: I don’t think we necessarily need to photograph this one, cos this is a standard, a basic hit. Unless it’s like a cascade of shit, you know what I mean, like a real prize winner, then we might photograph it, cos it means something to us. But this one is just kind of routine. It just leaves a mark so when somebody comes around and sees it, they’ll know the Sprinkle Brigade has been here.

At this point, I wasn’t sure whether it was art just yet, but what I liked was that the sprinkles made it stand out on the pavement, which meant there was less chance of someone stepping in it. When I was a kid, standing in dog shit on the estate was something that happened around three to four times a week. I think I spent more time cleaning out the tread on my trainers than I spent cleaning my teeth. Thinking back, a popular toy back then that every kid had was stilts. It’s likely they came into fashion as a way of avoiding getting shit on your shoes. Honestly, it was everywhere. The local park had ‘Keep Off the Grass’ signs, but I don’t think this was an order, it was more of a warning, as it was like a minefield out there. Everyone goes on about Michael Jackson being the creator of the moonwalk, but he wasn’t, everyone round our way was walking backwards like that scraping shit off their shoes.

We went into a toy shop, and I got looking for props that could help turn dog muck into a piece of art. I followed Jeff and Jeremy around the place to get an idea of the sort of things they look for. Jeff picked up a plastic eagle.

KARL: So you’d just place that on the poo?

JEREMY: Yeah, kinda perched up on it like a wooden post.

KARL: Like a log?

JEREMY: Yeah . . . you know, like the big wooden logs that come up in the ocean. I’m really excited about that. I hope we can get a piece in a puddle, in the position that we want it. Like it’s almost like, in the ocean. Really romanticise it.

The first thing that grabbed my eye was a small wooden TV which must have been for a doll’s house.

JEFF: What are you thinking?

KARL: I’m thinking . . . shit coming out of the TV.

JEFF: Yeah . . .

KARL: And it would sort of be saying, you know, it’s the shit on telly, like ‘arghh, not this shit again’. We have a lot of repeats at home.

JEFF: Right. I think it’s true, and I think it’d be funny for people and they can relate to it. I think it’d be cool. I think you have one there.

JEREMY: So we need to find a piece of poo that is basically severed in half perfectly so it fits right up against the TV, you think?

KARL: Right. So it actually looks like it’s coming out. Let’s buy that, then. Oh, look, toy butterflies. Maybe something coming from an ugly poo, like a caterpillar to a beautiful butterfly.

JEFF: I like the idea of butterflies. People think of them as a beautiful thing, so there’s a contrast there which I think is kind of funny but . . .

KARL: It needs the ideal piece of excrement, though.

JEREMY: Yeah, unless it was one that looked like a cocoon and it was coming out of the cocoon, it might be too, you know . . .

JEFF: It might be too scientific.

KARL: It’s not easy, is it?

JEREMY: No. I mean, we go back and forth for weeks on a few ideas, until we finally get it right. Even then you’ll put in all the work and the time and do it and it’ll be kind of anticlimactic.

JEFF: We always said it’s like fishing. Some days you go out and then you might get scant or sometimes you might get something suitable to mount over the fireplace, so you just don’t know.

I then saw a tub of Plasticine and an idea hit me with the title for the piece coming instantly. We paid for the few props we had picked up, and off we went onto the streets of New York, a city that’s full of interesting things to do and yet here I was hunting down dog shit, the stuff I couldn’t get away from when growing up.

KARL: Because you’re around dog shit a lot, you wouldn’t know what type of dog has left that shit, would you? You’re not at that level?

JEFF: Well, that’s a heated debate. But the truth of it is we’ve seen small dogs lay out a beast, and we’ve seen big dogs lay out something small. So I don’t think there’s a way to match the shit with the species.

I asked this question as I had a mate called Simon who had a dog that you could link to the stool, as it ate anything that was in front of him. If you stood in some crap and there was a toy soldier in it, you knew it came from his dog. I suppose at least there was some kind of perk to standing in it. At least you got a toy. It was like a very early stage of the Kinder Egg.

Jeremy and Jeff got out a map that they had designed showing all the hotspots where people very rarely picked up their dog’s mess. I said their map was like a ‘shat nav’ system, but I don’t think they use the word ‘shat’ in the States so they didn’t know what I was going on about. To be honest, there was no need for a map as my nose could do the job. The place stank. Suddenly, everywhere I looked there were lumps of shite.

The place really did have a problem. New York is known as the city that never sleeps but round this part of town it was the city that never sweeps! One of the things that does my head in these days is when people walk into you cos they’re not watching where they’re going due to them reading an email or text on the move. Some people even read a book while walking from A to B. There was no way people could do anything but focus on where they were stepping in this neighbourhood.

It was annoying to think that there was a shovel hanging up in the Museum of Modern Art doing nothing. It was needed here.

KARL: And it’s definitely all dog?

JEREMY: Well, there have been some instances when it was human. You know it’s human if it’s up close against the wall. Because it’s physically impossible for a dog to press its ass against the wall.

KARL: So is that still game?

JEREMY: No, we stay away from that.

KARL: Fucking hell. What’s going on?! People are shitting on the streets.

I think this will end up being a problem in the UK as we seem to have sorted the dog shit issue at home by having loads of bins especially made for dog waste, but I’ve been in situations when I really need to go to the loo and there’s no public toilets around. I’ve been in loads of cafés and asked to use the loo, and they only let you use them if you buy something, which you don’t always want to do. It used to cost a penny. That’s where the saying ‘I’m off to spend a penny’ comes from. Now it may as well be ‘I’m off to buy a panini’, as that’s what you have to do. No wonder the country is becoming obese when you have to buy food to empty your bowels. I think human crap on the streets is going to be the new problem we’ll be facing at home.

Jeremy pulled a banana skin from his bag and edged the skin up close to a dog turd, so it looked like a brown banana.

JEREMY: To be very honest, I think this one is grossing me out a little bit. Some ideas don’t work. This one, I think, might be a little bit over the top for me. It could have been a great idea, but I think it’s . . . disgusting. It’s over the top.

JEFF: Don’t be so sure.

KARL: But if you call it ‘Pootassium’, because a banana is full of potassium, I think it takes away the harshness.

JEFF: That’s pretty good. I think Karl is right. Karl more than gets it . . . haha!

KARL: Are you getting enough pootassium?

JEREMY: Pootassium is really funny, it is really good. You saved it.

JEFF: I want to put that one up on Instagram.

I really wanted to get my idea started but was struggling to hunt down the right-shaped pieces I needed. No turd was the same, so I knew what I required must be out there. I even started to hang around a couple of dogs that looked like they were about to unload on the off chance they dropped off what I was looking for. I wouldn’t like to be a dog as I wouldn’t like to only be able to empty my guts when my owner takes me out. On top of that you have to do it while they stand there waiting. It puts me off when I go into the posh toilets in a restaurant where they have some bloke hanging about there waiting for you to come out and hand you a towel to dry your hands. I feel like I’m being timed. I always end up cutting it short.

I kept looking. Some were shaped like Twiglets, some like pretzels and others like walnuts. What I needed were a few loose pieces for my idea to work. As mad as this was, it felt like a lot more work than the boxing painting I had done with Ushio yesterday. While I was looking for the stools I required, Jeff and Jeremy had pulled out another prop. It was a pair of novelty 2015 New Year glasses and they were placing them on a dog poo that would act as a nose.

JEFF: Maybe. I mean it’s a little thin. So we’re gonna go right over the top here on this one. (getting camera steady) Then we’ll take a photo of it this way. And we’ll call it the ‘Happy New Year Shit Nose’.

JEREMY: Mainly we use iPhone cameras because the nicer cameras usually pick up too much of the detail, and when we print those out, it looks disgusting.

KARL: That one should be called ‘Happy Poo Year’.

JEFF: Happy Poo Year! Even better.

All my searching finally paid off. I found the droppings that would work for my piece at the back of a car park. Three small pieces, a few centimetres apart. I got out my Plasticine and rolled the first piece into a short stubby tail and stuck that down onto the tarmac a couple of centimetres away from one of the pieces of crap and then made another slightly thicker piece. I then borrowed some eyes from Jeremy’s craft box, which he carried with him. I stuck on the two eyes and stuck that down at the other end of the three pieces.

KARL: So, maybe the head coming out here. It’s not absolutely right but I think you can tell what I’m trying to make.

JEREMY: All of a sudden it kinda flows. It’s great. I think it’s working.

KARL: Yeah?

JEREMY: Oh boy . . . oh, it’s powerful.

KARL: So that’s it. This one is called ‘The Loch Mess Monster’.

The lads took photos of it. I’d got quite a bit of pleasure out of the day and was chuffed with what I’d created. Let me be clear here: it wasn’t something that I’d want to stick on the fireplace, but as art made out of a turd goes, I think I succeeded. I didn’t hang around to see what any passers-by thought of it, but I suppose as an artist you just put it out there and hope people like it.

As I left I’d been so busy looking at my art that I’d forgotten about my dangerous surroundings. I felt my foot slide. Oh shit.

BEAUTY FROM THE INSIDE

I’d been away for around a week and had been getting involved in some pretty odd art every day. So what came next didn’t seem too bizarre at the time. I think I’d become a bit immune to it all. I knew it was going to be a challenging day, and what made it harder was that I wasn’t allowed to eat for twenty-four hours, which is difficult as eating is what gets me through the hassles of the day. If something is annoying me, knowing that at some point soon I’ll be eating makes it easier to deal with. America is the worst place to be when you’re not able to eat, as you can’t avoid it – food is constantly in your face on billboards and on TV. The rest of the crew were eating, so I had to just sit and watch, and it’s never a quick activity in the States as the portions are massive. Food you didn’t even order gets brought to the table. Even when you ask for the bill it comes with fries.

You hear about some artists who die for their art. Well, the one I was about to meet dosen’t take it that far – she just gets sick. Literally. And the plan was for me to join her. But she didn’t want any food in the sick so this was why I was not allowed to eat. I’m rubbish at being sick. Loads of things can make me gag, but it very rarely follows through to full-blown eruption. I guess it’s like how some people are right-handed and others are left-handed; any badness tends to leave me via the other end rather than through the mouth. I’d honestly say that in my forty-three years of existence I think I’ve only been sick about nine or ten times. The last time was in 2010 during An Idiot Abroad 2, when I was staying in a cabin that stank of rotting fish while the boat rocked all over the shop. Another was during my first trip to India for An Idiot Abroad 1, where every hole in my body became an emergency exit after I’d eaten something dodgy. I was like a garden sprinkler! Before that I think it was mainly travel sickness if I had to sit in the back of a car.

Once when we were driving back to Manchester from a holiday in Wales, I couldn’t sit in the front as my dad’s mate was with us and he took that seat. It was a rainy day, so the heating had to be on to stop the windows steaming up, and my dad’s mate’s dogs were in the back with me and my mam, and they stank of damp. The night before, I’d been in the club house playing my mates at pool and drinking Britvic orange. I must have drunk about five pints of the stuff, so with that churning around in my belly, in the back of a hot car on the curved roads of Wales with damp dogs breathing in my face, we took a corner and ‘Lllllarrrrghhhhhllllllllllurggg’ (that’s not the name of the village in Wales, that’s the noise I made). Five pints of Britsick down me dad’s neck.

That was back around 1982. So I really didn’t know how today was going to go down . . . or come up.

I met the artist in a studio. It was a totally white room with a couple of canvases on the floor, next to quite a few cartons of soya milk and bottles of food dye, which she would mix and then drink before heaving up onto the canvas. Her name was Millie Brown.

KARL: How did you come up with this, then, Millie?

MILLIE: Well, basically my art collective were all asked to go to Berlin and take over this gallery space there, and everyone was doing different performances or showing their work in this gallery, and I’d never done performance art before and I wanted to use my body to paint, and came up with the idea of painting from the inside out. I wanted to create a performance that was really raw and human and, like elements of being uncontrollable, so I had this idea I wanted to do a rainbow. I wanted every single colour in the rainbow. I had never made myself sick before and I didn’t know if I could do it. I just got on stage and put my fingers down my throat, and did it. And I was like, either way, if it works or doesn’t work it’s gonna be an interesting performance.

KARL: So when did you last do this?

MILLIE: A couple of months ago in London. We were shooting an art film.

KARL: How was that?

MILLIE: It was good. I was shooting a film where it was like a Zar ritual, so a lot of the movements were me shaking my head around and around and around. It was an entire day, a good nine hours of me spinning round in circles having not eaten since the morning before.

KARL: What, while being sick?

MILLIE: Yeah, basically at the end of this Zar performance ritual I was sick. So it was a really long day of just sucking on sugar cubes to stop myself from fainting cos I was spinning around in circles for an entire day.

KARL: Was it worth all the hassle?

MILLIE: In the end, me actually being sick was cut from the film.

KARL: So it wasn’t worth it, then?

MILLIE: I mean, it’s always worth it, you know. Suffering for my art is part of what I do.

KARL: Why’s that important?

MILLIE: I mean, it’s not important to suffer necessarily, it just so happens that every performance that I do has an element of that suffering. I like to push my own mental and physical boundaries to get to that state of mind where it’s kind of a pure creative place. I feel like by putting your body through some element of suffering or discomfort you are able to reach that state even more easily.

KARL: Just doing as much as I’ve done today is pushing me . . . not having any food for twenty-four hours.

MILLIE: Well, I think a lot of the performance is about the actual element before you actually perform. It’s like a long kind of solitude performance that you do alone before you actually perform the piece.

As mad as the whole concept sounded, it had got my attention. If her thing was drawing with felt tip pens, let’s face it, I wouldn’t be visiting her. A lot of people think art has gone a bit mental these days. But I reckon it’s our own fault. We’re always looking for the next thing, and that pushes artists to come up with even madder ways of getting their work noticed.

Millie poured a pint of soya milk and added some purple food colouring. She got me to do the same. I went for red, and then I slowly drank it. For some reason I can’t neck back any drink. My throat doesn’t allow it. If I try, my throat goes into a sort of spasm where it locks for a few seconds, so I just took a few sips at a time.

Once Millie had drunk the full glass she crouched down and just splurted out a purple splat onto the canvas. It wasn’t too messy and she didn’t have to struggle to do it. It came out like soap out of a hand pump dispenser. It didn’t run down her chin or cause her make-up to run. She then moved around the canvas and released the rest of the purple soya milk like it was on tap. She didn’t have to give any force at all. I had a mate who could do this. Apparently it was because he drank so much fizzy pop. His stomach lining was knackered or something, so he could just force sick out on demand. He mainly used it as a defence mechanism; if anyone ever started on him he just threw up whatever he had been drinking, and it really confused them. He could double up as a fire extinguisher.

KARL: How do people react when they see you doing this?

MILLIE: Well, I think different pieces talk to different people, and we’re all unique in different ways, so not everything is going to appeal to us. Some people hate my work and some people love it. There’s not much of an in-between. I love creating art this way. A lot of my performances don’t involve vomit at all, and I’m always doing new work, but I just love this form of painting. It really means something to me and it’s something that I’ve done from the age of seventeen, so it’s like a part of me, I guess.

KARL: So how do I do it?

MILLIE: Use two fingers and start touching the back of your throat, and just keep doing that movement back and forth until you start to gag, then you keep pushing and pushing until its starts to come up.

I’ve never met anyone who was so into being sick. Art is all about doing something you love, and she loves being sick. Most people have to stop doing what they love when they are ill, but Millie doesn’t. In fact, she might create more than normal. I wiggled my two fingers about in the back of my throat, like I do when trying to grab a pound coin that has gone down the sofa. It was making me gag but nothing was coming up. It’s funny, really, as during this trip, especially during the Times Square performance, I found there was something inside me that made me want to perform, but my outside is normally the nervous bit. Yet here was a chance for my insides to show off, and they didn’t want to know!

It was an odd experience to have Millie and the director and cameraman watch me trying to be sick. It’s something that should be done in private.

KARL: You look like your weakest, don’t you, when you’re being sick?

MILLIE: I think that’s the beautiful part about the performance – it’s so vulnerable. It’s something that you would never normally do in public, and it’s strange cos when I’m actually sick, when I’m ill, I don’t want anyone around me, yet making myself sick, I don’t mind doing in front of hundreds of people. Somehow it’s very different to me.

KARL: Yeah, this feels strange to me. Strange, plus I’m under pressure.

MILLIE: You know, it’s not like a party trick, it’s not about it coming out easily. I think when there’s struggle that’s what makes it human. This is raw and human, and it doesn’t get more real. It can be disgusting, it can be beautiful, but it’s human. So, however your body reacts to it, if you struggle, if you have snot down your face, that’s all part of it.

I went from tickling my throat to scratching it like a scratchcard. And I was trying to force it out so much, it started to give me a bit of a headache. Millie said I should try bending over a bit more to help it out, but nothing would come. It’s a bit of a worry, really, cos if I ate something poisonous that I had to get out of my system quickly, I’d struggle to do it. Maybe this is the problem that the old woman who swallowed a fly had; she couldn’t sick it up so she had to swallow a spider to kill it.

I was doing little burps but nothing was coming back up. The director was asking me to keep going. Everyone was stood there gawping at me, but there was nothing they could do to help as I battled with my stubborn gut. If nothing else, it proved that it was a kind of performance art as they couldn’t take their eyes off me. I guess it’s similar to people rubbernecking at an accident on the road. We enjoy watching sick people. I mean, a night doesn’t go by when there isn’t some sort of hospital drama on the telly. You’ve got Casualty, Holby City, House, Quincy, St Elsewhere, The Young Doctors – the list is endless. I’m convinced this is why the NHS are saying they’ve not got enough hospital beds to cope with the demand, it’s cos all these TV dramas are using them!

Millie had now drunk another pint of soya milk. This time a beige-coloured vomit hit the canvas. She wasn’t happy, though, as the first colour she had spewed up had not had time to dry. She would normally leave it for a day or two before she even thought about adding a new colour, but cos we were there, she added a second colour and it just all mixed into the first colour and ended up looking like, well, sick. She decided not to waste the canvas so used some kitchen roll to wipe everything off. I decided to stop trying as my head was now banging.

KARL: Cheers for showing me what you do. Sorry I couldn’t do the business for you.

MILLIE: I think it’s kind of better that you didn’t, actually.

KARL: Why’s that, then?

MILLIE: Because it adds that uncomfortable, raw, human, weird tension. For me it came out instantly, but you struggled. It’s performance art and there are no rules to it, either. It’s not like you failed because you couldn’t vomit. The performance is what you make it, and I think that piece worked really well with the struggle that you added into it.

I was saying at the start how it would have been nice to have some art on my wall at home that had me in it, without it just being a straightforward photograph. This would have been ideal if I could have pulled it off. I’m not sure I’d want Millie’s sick on my wall, but if the vomit actually came out of a family member or loved one it makes more sense. You could do it with the whole family. It would be especially good if you are from a bit of an ugly family and you don’t want to have a photo on the wall reminding you how ugly you all are – just get everyone to be sick on the same canvas. Job done. Another thought: if someone is on their deathbed and they’re ill, having their final spew on a canvas is a good way to remember them. It’s no weirder than having their ashes on your mantelpiece, is it?

Once we’d cleaned up the art studio, we all went off to a diner where I had a foot-long hot dog and fries. Millie joined us but this time kept everything down. I gave myself a private show in my toilet that night. Like I said, with me, everything comes out the other end. It was like a Red Arrows display.

FINDING ART IN NATURE

I enjoyed this trip a lot. Even though I didn’t like all of the finished art I was involved in, I did get something out of being part of it and seeing how much the people who made it got out of it. Jamie the director wanted me to show him what my favourite art was. At first I was thinking of maybe a painting I like, or a building or a piece of design, but then I recalled seeing something on the telly that I really wanted to observe in real life. Some would argue that it isn’t really art, but to me it is. I’d say it’s better than any of the performance art that humans do. We headed to Shapwick Nature Reserve in Somerset, where, with some luck, I would witness a murmuration. A murmuration is the name given when a flock of hundreds or even thousands of starlings fly about together before settling down in the reeds for the evening. I’ve watched them on the telly and I’ve clicked on loads of videos of them on YouTube, and they are one of the few things in life that give me goosebumps. I don’t know what your body is telling you when you get goosebumps, but because it doesn’t happen often I’m guessing it’s when you’re witnessing something special.

The reason I like it is that no one is still quite sure why they go through this motion. In a world where almost everything has been answered in life and yet they haven’t come up with a solid answer to this activity, it makes it even more amazing. It’s been said that maybe they do it to protect themselves like shoals of fish do, but I’ve never understood why fish do that. I’ve watched nature programmes where they all bunch together and a whale comes along and gets a right mouthful. Okay, it doesn’t get them all, but it gets enough. I’m pretty sure if they all stayed alone the whale wouldn’t bother chasing any of them as it wouldn’t be worth his while. It’s the equivalent of me grabbing a handful of nuts from a bowl. I wouldn’t bother if there was only one.

The sea is another place I’ll go looking at weird stuff on YouTube. It blows my mind the peculiar stuff you get in the oceans. Just when you think you’ve seen all there is to see, you find something else. I saw a fish called the sheepshead fish, which I thought was a joke that someone had made up as it’s a fish with human teeth! When you’re near wifi, just google ‘sheepshead fish’. I’ve no idea who named it, as it looks bugger all like a sheep. It’s a normal-looking fish but it has the teeth of Miley Cyrus. They could make dentures for old people with them. It’s well weird.

It was a gamble dragging Jamie the director and a camera crew out to Somerset as there was no guarantee we would see a murmuration, and on top of that, there was a chance that even if we did, it might not be as amazing as it looked on the telly. This is the problem with TV coverage. It often shows the best version of something, and if you go and see the thing yourself it never lives up to it. Jamie the director said he wasn’t convinced that it was art, which I thought was a joke when you think we started this trip looking at a bloody shovel in the Museum of Modern Art!

We set off from London at around 7 a.m. It was a damp, grey day with rain forecast. It took about five hours to get there due to the traffic. All the way, I was worrying as I really wanted it to be good and yet the whole thing depended on the starlings showing up and putting on a good show.

We got there and got booted up as it was wet and muddy. It felt like a million miles away from where I started my trip in New York. A nice quiet bit of countryside with clear air. I had no idea if the drizzle would mean the starlings would be a no-show. Surely a drop of rain wouldn’t stop them; it’s not Wimbledon. We made our way closer to the water – this is the place they tend to fly around as there are fewer predators hanging around. There wasn’t a starling in the sky. Just one swan messing about in the water. We waited. And waited some more. It was like going to a Pete Doherty gig.

There was no guarantee it was going to happen. But that’s nature for you. Most things in the world these days are on demand, but nature isn’t one of them. I watch Springwatch live, and they always promise footage of all sorts of rare animals but never deliver, and end up filling the programme with live coverage of a box of baby owls.

I kept looking up thinking I could see a group of starlings in the distance, but it was just small clouds. The light was starting to go and so was my hope of seeing them. Due to us having another potential five-hour drive back to London, I could see Jamie the director was close to knocking it on the head and suggesting we should head back, when I saw a small dark patch in the sky. A bunch of starlings flew over, looking like a faint fingerprint. If I had to put a number on it I’d have said 200 starlings. We all legged it like kids who have just heard the chimes from an ice-cream van. It was hard to keep up, as there were trees all around so it wasn’t easy to track them. We stopped and looked up, and even more were coming in from different directions. This was it. It was happening. It was unbelievable. In minutes, what looked like around 20,000 starlings, maybe more, were throwing all sorts of shapes, the sort you get in a lava lamp, but at high speed. Breaking off into three groups and heading off in different directions before turning and joining back together. Similar to a tornado hurtling through the countryside with the noise to match. I wasn’t prepared for that. It reminded me of the first time I heard the crowd at Man United react to a goal from outside the ground when I was a kid. A noise that can only be produced by something in large numbers. A loud swooshing sound, mixed with the tweeting, as the starlings swooped into each other, but never collided.

The amount seemed to be growing all the time. How is this happening? Who’s in charge and leading this madness? The best show on earth and yet we were the only ones witnessing it. For free. It was even better than when I’ve seen it on YouTube.

Blake the art critic said he would stand and look at a painting for an hour, which I couldn’t understand, but I could easily watch this for longer. The only disappointing part was that I couldn’t, as this show was over within twenty-five minutes, with no encore. One minute they were darting about the sky and next it was like someone had turned on a big vacuum that sucked them into the ground where they all lay to rest for the night. I’ve visited the Seven Wonders of the World and this shits all over them (actually, they probably would). I’d say it’s definitely one of the things you have to see before you die. And it probably would be, if you were a worm.