The Late Hector Kipling (9 page)

‘What you gonna do?’ I say.

‘I don’t know. Papa says we’ll see how she is tomorrow.’

‘Do you want to go?’

‘Do you want me to go?’

‘No,’ I say, and then, ‘Yes,’ and then, ‘I mean, do whatever you need to do love.’

Eleni reaches for my fags and takes a long time taking one out. She clicks and fails with the lighter. Clicks and fails, clicks and fails, as though she’s never used a lighter before. ‘I think maybe you need anyway some space,’ she says as she finally gets it going.

‘I’ve got space,’ I say, sweeping my hand around the room. ‘How much more space could I have?’

‘But I am in it,’ says Eleni, and stares at the floor.

‘But I want you to be in it.’

‘You have a lot of pressure. The exhibition, the broken painting. The new self-portrait.’ She stares at the empty canvas over in the corner of the room.

‘Eleni, this isn’t about me and my pressure. It’s about whether you need to be with your mother.’

‘We’ll see.’ And she walks off into the bedroom. I follow her.

‘What’s the matter, love?’

‘I’m getting on your nerves.’

‘You’re not.’

‘Yes.’ She pulls back the blue sheets and climbs onto the bed.

‘You’re not getting on my nerves.’

‘You’ve been impatient of me.’ She pulls the sheets over her head. She’s gone. She’s disappeared.

‘Impatient
with
you.’

‘Yes,
with
me,’ she says, appearing for a second. And then. ‘No.’ I sit on the edge of the bed and stroke what I think is her shoulder. ‘I know, Hector, I can feel it.’

‘Eleni, love,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry about your mum . . .’

I can hear her sobbing beneath the sheets. I gather her up. A tiny blue bundle. I hold her tight, tight enough to break her. How simple it would be right now to break her, to love her so hard she snaps. To crush her. It’s an easy thing to bring horror into a room.

‘I’ve just been tense,’ I say.

‘With me.’

‘No, no, not with you. I’ve got a lot on my plate.’

‘Your plate?’ she says. It’s not sarcastic. It’s perplexed. Confused by the idiom.

‘No, no,’ I say, and ease her beautiful Greek face from the sheets. ‘It’s got nothing to do with plates. It’s Kirk and . . . and I don’t know . . . I’m just all messed up.’

Brilliant, this. Quite fucking brilliant the way I’ve just made it all about me. Like her mother’s just fine. Like it’s really me who’s splattered with hot fat. Like it’s really me who should be smothered in bandages. Eleni burrows back beneath the covers and I can hear her breathing. I sit for a long time and listen.

I walk out into the studio and look at the canvas. There it is, all giant and white, like the fucking Antarctic. Like I should just stick a fucking
flag into the middle of it. I feel like I’m in a film about a struggling artist who keeps getting up at all hours of the night to look at his big, blank, empty canvas. And in a way I am. Except that I’m not struggling. I’m Hector Kipling. I might be getting up at all hours of the night to look at my big, blank, empty canvas, but I am not fucking struggling.

I climb into bed. Eleni’s almost asleep, I can hear her breathing on the edge of a dream. I touch her thighs. I want to fuck her. She eases me away. Gentle, slow. Almost not at all. I really can’t blame her. Her mother’s unconscious in a Cretan bed smeared with Vaseline, what am I thinking of? I roll over, push my face into the pillow, listen to my heartbeat for an hour and then fall asleep. I dream. I remember dreaming. I dream of fucking Sofia, Eleni’s scalded mother, in a strange bath. We’re tiny and naked, in a strange bath filled up to the top with cold green, mild green, Fairy Liquid.

Monday’s come round again and I’m with Bianca. We’re sat about five feet apart and she gently pushes over the tissues with her foot, her toes on the box, like she’s touching a landmine.

‘So,’ she says, ‘what’s going on?’

I look her in the eyes. She has these deep-set coral eyes.

‘I don’t know where to begin,’ I say.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘that’s a beginning in itself.’ When she listens she strokes her neck.

I begin to talk. She listens. She strokes her neck.

‘Up to the age of twenty-four,’ I say, ‘I’d never had a bird shit on me. (Then, one day, when I was twenty-four, I was shat on twice, the same day, by two different birds. Once by a pigeon outside Euston Station, the second time in Blackpool by a seagull hovering over the Pleasure Beach.’

‘I see,’ she says, her long fingers caressing her throat.

‘So,’ I say, ‘what do you suppose that means?’

TURNER PRIZE, SHORTLISTED ARTISTS

Archie March, for his solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery and his poignant contribution to
Assassin
at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in which he displayed a perceptive and uncompromising dedication to exploring the borders of the subconscious.

Kim Large, for her inventive portrayals of domestic alienation, utilizing materials both unexpected and difficult, as seen at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Elvira Snow, for the presentation of her work at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and for her solo exhibition at the Lisson Gallery, London, and for her contribution to several group shows, including
Aggggghhhh
at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and
My Daddy Gone Crazy
at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

Lenny Snook, for his outstanding solo exhibition,
Berserkr
, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and for his contribution to the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh.

Archie March. Just five years out of St Martins and he’s covered a football pitch in Berlin with hexagonal black and white football leather. On the centre spot sits a ball. The ball is made of mud and grass. And that’s it.
Football Crazy,
he calls it. He’s going to have photos of it at the Tate and maybe a scale model. He’s going to have a dartboard of bone and pork. There will be a glass pool table with glass balls and glass cues. There will be a kinetic sculpture of blue boxing gloves boxing skulls, and an entire wall of leopardskin cricket pads. A looped tape will chant ‘He’s strange, he’s weird, he wears a goatee beard, Archie March, Archie March!’ The whole thing will be called
Sports Illustrated,
and everyone in the know expects it to win. It’s all about being accessible; bringing
the opposing worlds of sport and art into a harmonious unity. Art for the common man. And funny and deep, I suppose, or so I’m told.

Kim Large fills baths with paint and lines them up in six rows of three. Eighteen baths plumbed up to run paint from the taps and the plugs open so it empties at exactly the same rate as it fills. In Tokyo she did it with white paint, in New York, black. For the prize she’s going to use eighteen different colours. She calls the baths ‘fountains’ as a homage to Duchamp. And that’s about it. Sometimes she does it with sinks and once, in Amsterdam, she did it with toilets, filling and flushing, filling and flushing. I like it. She never makes any claims as to what it all means other than it looks quite beautiful, and I like that. And I like her. In fact I quite fancy her. She’s twenty-eight and looks a lot like Ingrid Bergman. Eleni knows that I quite fancy her cos I told her and I know that she’s cool about that kind of thing. I love Eleni. I don’t love Kim Large, but I do quite fancy her and I like her painty baths and I wish that I’d thought of it cos it’s silly and pretty and smelly and odd.

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, w hen 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