my life as a artist
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cooking with shirt
Tuesday 27th January 2009 11:03 PM
Where the hell have I been? It's like I'm back from outer space, and you log onto my blog, and find me here with this sad look upon my type-face. Weren't you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye, did you think I'd make an apple crumble, did you think I'd lay down and die? Oh no, not I!
I have survived….a lively gig with the Travelling Libraries at North Dalton Village Hall, featuring a great showing for debutant guitarist Dave Reckoning and atmospheric unsolicited contributions from Eric the benign drunkard … a packed-out tribal affair at the delightful Cabaret Boom-Boom in Sheffield, nurtured by Mr Flip-Flap, Stu and butternut squash soup …and Northallerton Male Voice Choir seemed to enjoy my performance at their annual dinner last Saturday. I knew the average age of the audience was going to be about seventy, so I decided to do a set that was low on references to drugs and having sex with animals. This might sound a bit patronising and ageist, but bear in mind that their on-line newsletter describes how they don't just sing traditional stuff, but also do contemporary numbers like 'Alexander's rag-time band'.
The opening of the Damien Shirt exhibition at York University was a fabulous soar-away success. Damien sold two tins of Pornography and Degrading Images (in a rich and tasty tomato sauce) and five 'nothings' at £2.99 each, Hannah sold some postcards and I had the pleasure of getting slightly drunk. This week Damien's cooked up and canned three more flavours for his Completely Real Art Product range, 'Blasphemy and Outrage'(in a rich stigmata sauce), 'Crude Genitals and Coriander Soup' and 'Taxi in Fur Sauce'. Mm, tasty!
Posted 11:03 PM | 36 Comments | Permalink
damien shirt and friends
Friday 9th January 2009 10:58 PM
Monday 19th January sees the opening of my next exhibition at Langwith College at the University of York. I'm sharing the space with two other artists, Hannah West, who paints moody lake-district landscapes and a bloke called Damien Shirt who's one of those irritating conceptual minimalists. Damien feels a bit insecure about the whole thing, mainly because he doesn't exist, so we've called the show 'Damien Shirt and friends' and I've written him a biography.
'Damien Shirt was born in Selby, Yorkshire, in 1969 and left school in the mid-eighties to work in the family fishmonger business in the town centre. His early artistic interests were focussed solely on music, taking a keen interest in all things percussive, and taking full advantage of the swinging Selby scene, Damien soon joined the moderately successful local 'new age romantic' group, 'The Quiche'.
In 1990, soon after moving to London on the promise of a record deal, the band split and Damien found himself living in a bed-sit in Ladbroke Grove and signing on the dole. Plagued by insecurity and feelings of worthlessness, Damien enrolled at the London College of Accountancy, seeking a broad-based qualification that he hoped could lead him into being a chartered accountant, auditor or maybe even a business analyst.
In 2000, having qualified and built up a successful business practice in corporate finance, Damien found himself plagued by security and feelings of worthlessness, and resolved to find a new direction. Inspired by the Tate gallery's recent acquisition of a tin of excrement for £22,300, Damien decided to become an artist.
Only two weeks after making the decision, he had his first major exhibition at the White Cube gallery in Hoxton, followed two weeks later by his first major retrospective at the same gallery. Surfing the recent Tate-inspired wave of public hunger for human bodily waste, the exhibition was entitled 'Wee-Wee', and consisted of two dozen twenty-millilitre sterilised plastic specimen bottles containing urine samples collected from various celebrities, including Janet Street-Porter, Sting and Virginia Bottomley. George Michael's early purchase of Janet Street-Porter's thimbleful for £12.99 served as a clarion call for good taste and discernment everywhere, and ensured the exhibition's subsequent sell-out to the tune of over £500.
Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, said about the exhibition,
'Shirt's work is an examination of the processes of life and death and the ironies, falsehoods and desires that we mobilise to negotiate our own alienation and mortality, and yet in a more direct and compelling way, it's about wee-wee.'
Damien's continued his explorations into futility, and celebrity extracts, with 'Spit' in 2002, followed by 'Toenails' and 'Earwax' in 2003. Charles Saatchi said of Damien's 2005 show 'Dandruff',
'The implied human presence in the work gives one an overwhelming feeling of loss, emptiness and betrayal, and yet there is also hope and redemption in the quiet self-containment of the specimen bottles, and somewhere in there is an underlying encouragement to practice good scalp hygiene.'
Following a rapturous reception to 'Dandruff', Damien moved home and studio to the remote Yorkshire village of Riccal, where he has been working on new pieces for his much-anticipated show at York University, his first for over three years.'
His non-existence is proving more of a problem than we first anticipated and I've had to do some of his exhibits for him. Today I've prepared mainly tinned stuff, like 'adorable kitten's pineal glands in a rich tomato sauce' and 'pornography and degrading images in a rich tomato sauce'. Apparently some of Piero Manzoni's fabulously expensive tins of excrement were opened recently and found to contain plaster of paris. I don't know what they'll find in Damien's, but I'm sure it'll be in a rich tomato sauce.
Posted 10:58 PM | 21 Comments | Permalink
power to the people
Thursday 1st January 2009 10:24 PM
This week me and Mark the farmer have been putting the finishing touches to a free-energy machine that we've built in the field next door to Jimmy the donkey and Molly the pony. It's a two-hundred-foot tall wooden tower supporting a fifty-five ton copper dome, and it's got iron legs that penetrate 300 feet underground. Farmers aren't often given to whimsical fancies, and when they build structures like barns and chicken coops, form usually follows function, so typically we've made no attempt to disguise the fact that it looks like a huge tumescent phallus rising from an apparently green pubis. There was a guy from the council sniffing round, who had an obvious and unsavoury interest in unauthorised erections, but Mark put him off the scent by telling him it was a very rare-breed chicken coop.
We found most of the stuff we needed to build it at the scrap-yard in Murton, and my Mum got the fifty-five ton copper dome in an all-in deal with some 'Friends' videos and a foot-spa at the car-boot sale in Rufforth. We got Mrs Abercrombie from next door, a keen gardener, to dig the footings for the three-hundred-foot legs and asked her to keep her eyes candidly peeled for telluric currents, and even though she thought we were giving her the recipe for a Dundee cake, she made a really good job of it.
The idea is that the dome vibrates with the telluric currents of the earth, picks up static electricity from the ionosphere, and then transmits it in wireless form. It was a bit tricky doing the sparky stuff, knowing that the earth was a charged body but not knowing its self-capacitance, but Mrs Abercrombie, using all her W.I. experience and a damp tea-towel, estimated it to be about 710 microfarads, so we went with that.
While not exactly free energy, it's certainly very cheap. We've found the ionosphere that surrounds the earth to be an inexhaustible storehouse of free energy, and we managed to pay off Mrs Abercrombie with a chocolate orange. We've contacted all the major power companies to tell them about it, but because it's free energy were producing, and can't be metered, there's no profit in it, so they're not interested. The bloke from N-Power freely admitted that it wasn't just the money thing, but it was also that free energy is a threat to the oil-based centralisation of the ruling elite, corporate power structure, and rather patronisingly recommended that we put it in for a prize at our next local craft show. It'd certainly give old Harry's bird-tables a run for their money.
Posted 10:24 PM | 2 Comments | Permalink
