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I DON'T know much
about art, but I know what makes me laugh. So Picasso painted a
picture of a woman with a fish perched on her head, and he
called it Woman With A Fish Hat. And that made me laugh.
Mark was in Safeway when I caught up with him. He was buying
breakfast cereal. I turned the corner of the aisle, and there he
was. The other shoppers were pointedly ignoring him. When they
looked, it was surreptitiously, out of the corners of their
eyes. I laughed when I saw him, and made some passing comment,
but he ignored me. He was in a sort of psychic bubble compounded
of concentration, embarrassment and extreme physical discomfort.
He was shopping.
He was also dressed in a rubber suit.
Mark's a performance artist, and this was his performance: going
shopping in a rubber suit. He had matt-black foam-rubber pads
around the elbows and knees, and a sort of foam-rubber
breast-plate, like a pair of pendulous breasts. His stomach was
distended and pointed, while a pair of foam-rubber buttocks hung
down from his behind. On his head was an oversized, sagging
brain-pan like an ant's head, while a chin-plate jutted like an
insect's mandibles. He looked like a sort of insectizoid alien.
And there was a balloon hanging from the back of his head, which
was attached to a tube so that when he breathed, this coloured
bag would pulse in and out like some obscene extension of his
brain.
The performance was called Neighbourhood Watch. The advance
publicity gave details of his estimated arrival in each shop and
all the items he would buy. The funniest part of the whole
venture was the way in which people tried to ignore him. An
insectizoid alien goes shopping in a rubber suit, and no one
notices.
He was waiting in the queue at the check-out counter. The
manager told the girl not to say anything. She did what she was
told, checking through all of the items. "That's £10.20," she
said. "Have you got the 20p?"
She was laughing pleasantly at him as he fished in his purse for
the coin. It was all so mundane. Except that he was leaving a
trail of sweat behind him as he lugged the heavy shopping bags
out of the supermarket.
A couple of kids passed him. "How do you wipe your arse?" they
asked.
"With my tongue," he said.
Later he was in a cafe eating an egg sandwich. A couple walked
passed the window, and one said: "Look at that! It's the buzzy-bee
man."
"No it's not," the other said, "it's an ant."
A woman asked what he was supposed to be.
"He's a man in a rubber suit, " I told her. "Something like
that."
"What's he promoting? He must be promoting something." She had a
child with her, who was staring through the window at Mark. The
woman clipped the boy around the ear. "Come 'ear," she said, and
dragged him away.
Mark's wife had brought their daughter down. When she saw him
she screamed delightedly and ran with her arms outstretched.
"Daddy!" she called, as if everything was normal, as if he
always dresses this way. Maybe he does. Who knows what artists
get up to in the privacy of their own homes?
Various people had come to see him. Some of them were taking
photographs. I overheard one of them observe, "he's always
trying to humiliate himself. We'll be tarring and feathering him
next week," as Mark tottered of through the town in the fine,
misty rain, almost slipping on the wet pavement, dripping with
sweat and glowing like a beacon.
Mark is also a sculptor.
Some years ago the council rebuilt the beach. This is the way of
our crazy era, that some people have the madness and the gall to
rebuild beaches. They dug up the old beach and then stuck down
huge blocks of plastic-netted hard-core, on top of which they
laid piles of grit and sand. The old beach used to go up and
down a lot between the groynes, and you'd have to clamber about
to get along. The new beach is a wide, flat desert, the upper
end scattered with a few scrubby plants.
In the process of rebuilding the beach, they replaced all the
old groynes. Some of the artists got permission - plus a small
commission - to build benches out of the groyne wood so that
people could sit down on the new, wide, flat beach. Sit-down
art. Art with a posterior motive. And Mark got one of these
commissions.
The result was extraordinary. Monstrous. A huge structure like a
barricade, so oversized that he had to add a platform to rest
your feet on. At one end he fitted a weird diver's helmet,
wormed about by writhing snakes of steel, like a submariner's
nightmare. And at the other end he cut a jagged hole with a
chainsaw.Bench made from old groynes
The hole was meant to remind us of the story of the little boy
and the dyke. Instead it just looked as if it had a hole in it.
But I was down there once and there was a four-year-old boy
climbing through the hole. His mother had to stand on the other
side to catch him. And once he'd gone through it once, he had to
go through it again.
And there's not a child in this town who hasn't sat on that
bench and, putting his head into the helmet, gone "Whoo!" just
to hear the echo. And the kids climbed over it like a climbing
frame. And teenagers gathered there in the evenings to conduct
their rituals. And adults congregated there on summer nights to
polish off bottles of red wine and to chat. It was an altogether
popular feature on an otherwise featureless, wide, flat beach.
AFTER the bench was built and placed - near a pub, so you could
sit on it and drink beer if you wanted - they built some new
houses. A courtyard development overlooking the sea. Very
expensive, very exclusive, all with private garages and burglar
alarms on the walls. And the people in the new houses didn't
like the bench. Why not? Because it was there. Because children
played on it. Because teenagers went there to share cigarettes
and to snog on it. Because adults liked to sit there on a summer
evening and pass the time. So the residents got up a petition to
have the bench removed. And you know what? The bench was
removed.
Never mind that thousands of people had enjoyed that bench. And
never mind that thousands of kids had put their heads in the
helmet and gone "Whoo!" just to hear the echo. The opinions of a
few outsiders have overridden the feelings of the town. Property
rules, OK?
I wonder what Picasso would make of it. Not a lot. He's dead.
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