The Late Hector Kipling

by David Thewlis

  Elvira Snow does something strange. A few years ago she set up a series of two-way mirrors and, in a notice at the entrance to the gallery, guaranteed that she was behind them, taking notes about you. Two months later the notes were published and that was all part of it. For the prize, so I hear, the room will be filled with cameras and microphones. Elvira guarantees she’ll be sat at home, conscientiously watching. She’s done this before at the Whitechapel, but this time, to make it a little more interesting for her audience, she’ll be screening the fruits of the Whitechapel exhibition as part of her Turner presentation, so that the viewer will be able to sample a version of what they will become; fully aware that at Elvira’s next show they will be the stars. I’m not sure about this. Is she taking the piss? It’s all a bit Dixon’s shop window if you ask me. Maybe if she had a camera trained on her at home, watching, then at least the voyeurism would be reciprocal. But as it is Elvira’s nowhere to be seen, which is typical of Elvira. She’s a bit of a ghoul and I don’t think Elvira Snow is her real name. Kirk claims that he knows someone who went to school with her in Newcastle and says that she’s really called Linda Clitheroe. And she drinks too much Campari, when everyone else is downing mojitos. And when she drinks too much Campari she gets opinionated, and her opinions stink. She’s the sort of artist who says things like ‘Drawing is dead’ and ‘Painting is dead’ and sculpture, sculpture’s dead as well. Well, you know what I say to Elvira? I say pretentious voyeuristic piss-taking conceptual installation is dead. But I don’t really mean it cos it’s obviously not, cos Elvira’s doing it and it’s up for the Prize. And I quite like it. At least I would like it if she followed my advice and put herself in there, cos as it is it smacks of Candid Camera, and that’s not art is it? Is it? I don’t know. It depends who says it I suppose. And it depends where it happens. In his second manifesto of Surrealism Andre Breton stated that the simplest surrealist act was to run into a crowded street with a loaded gun and open fire at random. Well, André me old son, it happens. It happens every few months these days, it seems. But is it art? Do we call it art? No, André, we don’t call it art. We call it mass murder and madness, or sometimes war. We don’t call it art cos the perpetrators are never artists, nor do they ever claim to be artists. Perhaps if an artist did it. Perhaps if it was done by an artist, in a gallery, maybe then we would call it art. And maybe not, because society has standards. Society sets itself limits. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way but it does. Doesn’t it?

  And then there’s Lenny Snook. Leonard Raymond Snook. The oldest of the bunch. Eighteen years out of Goldsmiths and only now making an impact. For most of his twenties he employed his ideas about art to subvert what he referred to as ‘the modern manners of society’. These pieces were conceived and implemented in conjunction with his colleague, compatriot, and fellow traveller, Hector Kipling. Hector Derek Kipling. During the nineties – at the expense of Kipling’s promising painting career – they lurched around London signing mundane and overlooked features which were, to their eyes, silent, yet vital, motifs of daily life. At least that’s how they chose to define their actions in an open letter to Farmer’s Weekly in the spring of 1993. (Farmer’s Weekly chose not to publish the letter.) With money gleaned from a compensation settlement following Snook’s father being torn apart at a Scottish air show, they commissioned a series of polished copper plaques upon which were engraved the titles of the piece – Dry Riser Inlet, for example – and their names, ‘Snook and Kipling’, or sometimes ‘Kipling and Snook’ – the billing was erratic and, according to rumour, often a spur to acrimony.

  They signed puddles and weeds, pub trapdoors and bus lanes. Later they signed buildings and roads. In 1998 they planned to sign London until their friend Kirk Church recalled to their attention the artist Piero Manzoni, an Italian who died the same year Kipling, Snook and Church were born. Piero Manzoni, much to the consternation of Kipling and Snook, had already signed the planet Earth. At this point Snook and Kipling put an end to all their signing nonsense, and went their separate ways. Kipling returned to his painting and, in the autumn of 2004, painted the acclaimed God Bolton, for which he won the BP Portrait Award. Meanwhile, Snook began to investigate conceptual, sometimes kinetic, installations. He impressed the critics with his one-man show at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where he displayed a limousine filled with blood, a deep white hole dug in the gallery floor and a Royal Scots Guard’s sentry box inhabited by a real, edible, cooked, slightly burned, seven-foot pork-and-sage sausage. (A new one was cooked every day.)

  At the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, he sectioned off a large white space with sepia glass and subjected the public to a robotic green coffin and a robotic black pram chasing each other around the room with a precise and consistent distance of fifteen feet between them.

  Hector Kipling – whose painting career was beginning to wane – was, allegedly, affronted by the exhibition of the pram piece, claiming that the concept had emerged from a quip he had made to Mr Snook during a meal at Yo Sushi! when, excited by the robotic drinks trolley, Kipling had declared: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if you did that with a coffin and a pram?’

  Kipling concedes that it was not his idea to paint the coffin green – to lend it the appearance of a predatory alligator – nor to title the piece Domesticated Goose Chase. In fact he claims that no further comment was passed upon his rather ‘offhand’ declaration. Both he and Snook counted up their coloured plates and went halves on the bill. Outside it was a bright and sunny day and the two friends walked to Hyde Park where they fed pickled ginger to some ducks.

  One year later, Leonard Raymond Snook was shortlisted for the Turner Prize.

  BOX ST, BOW, LONDON

  Eleni’s on the phone to her dad, Yiorgos. Yiorgos’s crying again. I’m playing with my hair trying to get it to look human. This terrible, clogged black hair I have. Like a chimp’s. I’m playing with my hair and trying to smoke without hands. My eyes flood with tears and I begin to choke.

  ‘O Thee mou,’ says Eleni, ‘kaimeni I mama.’

  I should just get it all shaved off. I should just get it shaved right down to a number three, or even a two. A one. I should just get it shaved.

  ‘Baba, ine endaksi, Baba, Baba.’

  I should just get it shaved, but Eleni says that it suits me long. She’s wrong. She’s so wrong.

  THE BOBO CAT CAFE, SOHO, LONDON

  The Bobo Cat Cafe is not a cafe at all, it’s a bar. There are no tables, no menus, no food, save for a few crude ashtrays filled with small damp nuts. The Bobo Cat Cafe’s carpet has cancer. A dark and artless basement bar on Bateman Street, midway between Frith and Dean. A room with no room. Kirk’s leaning against a peeling black pillar, papered with old postage stamps. He’s wearing his usual blue parka. Lenny’s propped up against a mess of red pipes, in his red leather coat, jacket, his ox-blood Birkenstocks crossed at the ankles and his pint held up as though he might put it down at any moment and clap. What would he be clapping? Well, not this bloke on the stage for a start. Not this fucking gimp. There’s a bloke up on the stage with a green baseball cap, bronze specs and a dirty moustache. Dirty Moustache I’ll call him. In his hand he caresses a scruffy brown notebook. He leans into the microphone. Close. Close so that his lips touch.

  ‘Infra red / Infra sound,’ he whispers, ‘Infra penny / Infra pound!’ and then he stops, steps back, pleased with himself, and turns the page. There are two pink-eyed blow monkeys in the corner, nodding at each other and clapping. Everyone turns to look at them. Dirty Moustache leans in again and shields his eyes against the light. A small salute to the Bobo Cat squalor. He looks ill. He looks lost. He looks like a benign, effeminate Stalin. ‘Here’s another one,’ he announces. ‘Another quickie.’

  Eleni didn’t fancy a poetry reading. She’s stayed at home to look through some old photographs. But Lenny thought it’d be a good idea if we got Kirk out of the house – out of the hovel – and so here we are. A Party Poetical Broadcast, they’ve
called it. Poetically Incorrect would have been more apposite.

  ‘This one,’ announces Dirty Moustache, ‘is called “Tide and Time Wait For Norman”.’

  There was this woman on before who did twelve poems about cows. Cow this, cow that. Cows in trouble, cows in debt. Cows with wigs, and blisters and boss eyes and socks. I don’t know why we’ve come. I really don’t. For Kirk? I don’t think so, Lenny. I really fucking doubt it, Len.

  The news is bad and Kirk has to go into hospital. Lenny’s decided to pay for him to have it done private cos he’s not a total cunt. I’m not a total cunt either and I don’t really want him to die.

  ‘And so I wandered around the streets,’ whispers Dirty Moustache, finishing off, ‘in a sarcastic dressing gown.’ He’s squinting at the page. ‘The Global Village Idiot / The Small Talk of the Town’.

  Silence.

  He closes his book, jumps down from the stage and trots off to the toilet, where he belongs. A small patter of applause, like passing rain on a plastic roof.

  Lenny and Kirk are in a huddle. I don’t know what they’re talking about, I’ve zoned out, I just catch snatches of it:

  ‘She said, “I always carry two umbrellas in case I lose one,”’ says Kirk. ‘I said, “You might as well carry eleven, in case you lose ten.”’

  I stay out of it.

  There’s a girl sitting on the stairs smoking a joint and peeling off an old poster with painted purple nails. I can’t keep my eyes off her. She’s wearing a little black dress and about twenty bracelets. Her hair’s all messed up, all black and in her eyes. Looks as though it’s been cut with a knife. Ten rings. A tattoo of a black crow on her white shoulder. Scuffed black boots. Maroon lips. She must be in her early twenties. She looks at no one. No one looks at her, apart from me. I can’t believe that the whole room isn’t looking at her. What’s the matter with everyone? Can’t they see her? She was there when we came in. We had to step around her. She didn’t look up. All this time she’s spoken to no one, just sat there smoking her joint and peeling off the poster with her purple nails. I can’t keep my eyes off her.

  ‘How much of yourself do you think you could eat before you pass out?’ says Lenny. He says it to Kirk and sniffs. I think they’ve done about half a gram each.

  ‘I dunno,’ says Kirk, ‘I suppose it depends on where you start.’

  ‘The order?’ says Lenny.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Kirk.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Lenny.

  ‘I mean fingers,’ says Kirk, ‘fingers seem like an obvious start.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Lenny, ‘the fingers.’

  ‘Exactly,’ says Kirk.

  Now there’s some other clown up on the stage taking us through his oeuvre. He’s been introduced as German Bernard and he’s drunk and small and sodden with sweat. In between poems he emits quiet, liquid groans through a closed mouth, squinting at each new page as though he’s never seen it before. It’s all whores and beer, like he’s read too much Bukowski and can’t quite get over it. ‘She dropped his dick in the ashtray / He shat out of his armpits / Manson in a Nastassia Kinski mask / A bulldog sodomizing Thatcher / Two flies French-kissing by the cabbage.’ That kind of thing.

  I look over at the girl. She’s finished peeling and now she’s straightening up her rings. She grinds out the joint with her boot and kicks it across the floor.

  ‘Soap, piss, mint and tea,’ says German Bernard, ‘I fry her up two eggs and carve my name on her knee.’

  She unties her boots and then ties them up again. By her side there’s a small blue bag. She goes into it and pulls out a phone. She’s frowning, staring at the display, going at the buttons like she’s playing a GameBoy. I reach into my pocket and turn on my own phone. There’s no logic to this, but I do it all the same.

  ‘It’d be like peeling a banana, and finding a sausage,’ says Kirk.

  ‘It’d be like leaning down to blow out a candle, and the candle blows out you,’ says Lenny.

  ‘The sound of a gnat landing on a horse,’ says German Bernard, and turns the page.

  She puts the phone to her ear and listens. Nothing. She takes it down and goes at it again. She shakes it and puts it back to her ear. She looks up and lets her eyes wander around the room. It’s the first time I really see her eyes. It’s the first time I’ve really seen anyone’s eyes. They move around the room like searchlights and I stand there, sucking in my cheeks and gut, waiting for them to land on me. It feels like a clock ticking, or a bomb in a film you can see counting down. ‘Seventeen, sixteen, fifteen,’ I’m thinking, ‘fourteen, thirteen, twelve,’ in glowing liquid crystal.

  ‘Hec,’ shouts Lenny.

  ‘Eh?’ I say, glancing over and glancing back.

  ‘Art strike,’ says Lenny. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What you on about?’ I say and she’s nearly onto me.

  ‘Artists striking.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About nothing,’ says Lenny, ‘Just striking for the sake of it. Art as strike. Strike as art. Art strike.’

  She looks at Lenny. Settles on Lenny. Lenny’s so wired and agitated that her gaze is arrested. On fucking Lenny. I turn to face him. I pull a fag from my pack and light it with affected grace, showing her my fat arty fingers, showing her I’m an artist. Blowing out the smoke. Showing her the way I do it. That’s if she’s even looking. Fuck you, Lenny. Fuck you for making me look away. Fuck you for making her look at you. Fuck you for being so tall and bald and thin and handsome. If I speak she’ll look at me. If I speak and look more interesting than him, then she’ll notice.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I say, not being more interesting than Lenny.

  ‘We organize every artist on the planet to go on strike as a communal, collaborative, conceptual piece.’

  ‘And strike about what?’ I’m not getting it.

  ‘About nothing!’

  ‘About nothing,’ says Kirk, ‘and that’s the point.’

  ‘That’s the piece,’ says Lenny.

  ‘Give me that joint,’ I say, and Lenny hands it to me. I look over. She’s looking! Her eyes are mainly on Lenny, but for a second she looks at me, and in that second, because I’m looking at her, and because Lenny’s not, she smiles, half smiles, quarter smiles, but it’s a smile, it’s a definite smile, starting at the mouth, the closed maroon mouth, and passing through the eyes, the bottle-green eyes. I think they’re green. I think it’s bottle. It’s the Bobo Cat Cafe, for fuck’s sake, and I’m bleary with smoke and up to my forehead in lager. I’m about fifteen feet away and there’s definitely something coming from the stairs.

  ‘Who’ll give a shit?’ I say, turning back to Lenny, confident, content, careful not to blow it.

  ‘Everyone’ll give a shit,’ says Lenny, ‘we don’t just get living artists to strike, we get the dead ones as well. We do it through the galleries, every fucking gallery in every fucking city, every fucking town and village. We get schools, community centres, hospitals, old people’s homes, asylums, prisons to take down their art. We get all art stopped. We get advertising executives to cut it out, we take down the billboards, dismantle public sculptures, cover the nation’s statues.’

  ‘Christo could do that,’ says Kirk.

  ‘No, he fucking couldn’t, Kirk. Christo’ll be on strike as well.’

  ‘Blind everybody,’ says Kirk.

  ‘No, not blind everybody,’ says Lenny, ‘keep it realistic, Kirk, not blind everybody.’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Kirk, and takes a sip of his pint.

  I can feel her eyes burning into me. Even if they’re not, I can feel them. Even if they’re burning into Lenny, I can feel them. She smiled. It was a definite smile. I take another toke on the joint.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘but you know what they did when the bin men went on strike? When the fire brigade and the cemetery workers went on strike?’

  ‘What?’ says Lenny, and I have him. I have him, cos he’s not thought of this one. He’s not thought of this one and no
w I’ll have her looking at me.

  ‘They sent in the troops,’ I say, ‘got the fucking army involved.’

  ‘Right,’ says Lenny.

  ‘Right,’ says Kirk.

  ‘So,’ I say. ‘So suppose, like you’re saying, artists go out on strike and the fucking troops are sent in. You’ve got the Royal Infantry doing installations, the TA hacking into cows and whining on about their chlamydia. You’ve got the Fifth Battalion painting spoons, Kirk,’ and I smile at Kirk cos he might be dying. ‘Sherpas and Gurkhas doing Zen rock gardens.’

  There’s a round of applause and the compère steps back onto the stage. ‘Cool stuff,’ he’s saying, ‘cool lines, brother.’

  I look around for the girl. She’s gone. I crouch to see if I can see her at the top of the stairs but it’s no good, she’s fucked off. What the fuck, what the fuck, and then: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome onto the stage our next poet, Rosa Flood.’ A few hands are put together.

  Rosa Flood jumps up onto the stage. My boots tighten around my feet.

  She’s the girl I’ve been staring at all night. She takes a swig of her vodka and lights up a fag. Fucking hell, she’s beautiful. She takes the microphone from its stand and slumps down against the curtain. She has no notebook. The room goes silent. Someone laughs. I look over, indignant. She holds the microphone close to her lips so that we can all hear her smoking.

  ‘Well, look at me . . .’ She sounds American. ‘Look at me stretched out upon this enamel slab / In a fabulous room / Imperfectly spliced / Like a smothered fish / My pipes / My bones / And every balloon of deep blue meat . . . removed / And my entire body filled / With puddles / And coughs / And old teeth / Well look at me / In the morning after that night we always talk about / Just look at me.’