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Morning, and you dug about loudly in the heavily screwed-up tin-foil pouch, fingering its contents, but still not finding the crusty balls of bread into which you had needled hot jam a few days before. You often tried to recreate doughnuts, didn’t you, you moron. Since they had withdrawn funding for the field it had become increasingly difficult to secure any meaningful support for activities which could not be defined, and you dined out on this for months, enjoying the way it made your mouth feel, each ulcer ticking and clicking, singing like a gathering of barnacles on an exposed rock in the mind of Lewis Carroll. You thought the morning had come to soon, that, like bad bread, the sun had risen too quickly and therefore the day would be close and congealed, undercooked in the centre, hard and crusted at each end and with a not so desirable crumb or flake. You gathered your thoughts and thickly glooped into the day like a wrong onion, bruised and layered. The sheen of the igneous outcrop had conjured a real aroma overnight, of wet slapped fart of cold bisto, the sheen had lustred into a golden grey, goose fat sort of scab and although sufficiently hooked, you wondered if this savoury slime was hindering progress. You schemed to spit wads of tod from your mouth to water down the over thickened gravy. As you heaved your distended abdomen like it was a modernist sculpture trying to breath its first breath, you noticed a small opening in the sandstone around your knee. Not nostril so much as a whole from an old piercing which had once housed a daring spacer disk, removed at the joyous offer of a menial job, stripped of any sheen so as to become grey and unwanted. Your mind poached in a vinegared academia, could not fathom the unexplained stones on the beach, you’d have liked to remove them all and see what was truly the beach underneath, but this noose slinging had to take priority over all other explication projects. You had boiled two eggs this morning, suspended 30 feet in the air and you dropped a drip of boiling water on some foliage below which had scalded a patterned, proto-language into a large leaf. The Milton steriliser tablet which you had used to un-gravy the slick water to boil eggs, gave you a very sudden idea, like a smack on the forehead with an unsliced slab of cold-cut. You remembered that guy who wandered onto a train carriage and shouted; ‘everybody look forward to the Krismus, your cooked meats etc etc?’. Then you slathered more rope oil onto the noose and turned to slinging again.
Before it all ended up like this, I was a labourer, an art handler to be precise, which looking back, seems less absurd now than it did then. My belief in the potential of art to change anything had waned seriously and I had turned back to music. I couldn’t find an overview of art that wasn’t in some way over-inflated, upsold, exaggerated, most of the good stuff existed in bubbles of ever decreasing size as the universities churned out heavily indebted students obsessed with the conservative arts, and watered down any chance of real cut and thrust. I found the implications of the art market too painful to contemplate and so I started to ignore anything made on a large budget. As an art handler I would regularly visit the houses of the extremely wealthy and discover works which formed the joys of my youth. Now sad, hostages to a world they were never intended for, shut away, muzzled, silenced. My biggest disappointment was that some of my favourite artist were implicated in this stale and seedy uroboros. Extraordinary works of great capacity for political and social change, hung as status symbols by people who would never, ever experience the conditions which led to their production. These palatial abodes took on the feel of great hunting lodges, the heads of previously wild artworks, decapitated and hung on the walls like trophies. It always struck me how, like wild animals, if the only traces of artistic wilderness were to be found on the walls of the rich then they were simultaneously removed from the public realm, depriving the poor of culture. A doubled castration. My wealthy clients often employed art consultants, I always thought these people were like taxidermists or whatever you call the people you employ to behead and mount your kill after the big hunt. Very often I felt I could actually smell blood in these art mega-mansions. The level of uncertainty amongst the wealthy art owners, was always remarkable, they often behaved like a child receiving a present; ‘Oh, I love it, thank you so much, just what I wanted….what is it?’. Their lack of understanding for even the physical capabilities of those who assisted in their wonderful adventures was the most astonishing thing. I was once asked to hold a large work up on a wall above a staircase so the client could see how they felt about how it looked. Run of the mill stuff, however this work consisted of 16 large individual frames which I had laid out on the floor. I explained the problems with the request but was met with a strange disbelief which I thought verged on madness. ‘So your saying you can’t hold it up for me?....I need to see it before I decide…’. I was perplexed by the reaction and at first wondered if my relative lack of experience had led me to miss something, I racked my brains but just could not think of a way to do it. On the way home that day a few things started to make more sense to me. This extremely wealthy client had immediately requested their private jet to be readied as soon as we had finished, needing to get to Milan as soon as possible. There was a universe to which this person belonged, where anything is possible, literally anything and it was not regular to have to think about the individual physical limits of those lubricating life for you. How many hands and arms a servant has, is not something they want to have to think about, after all they are paying, whatever they want to happen is the thing that should happen and the idea of human physical limits is an inconvenience which had clearly been forgotten many years ago.
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