On my first interview commission for a newspaper,
I had to speak to a 'live artist' (ie. performance artist, although I was curtly reprimanded for using that apparently outdated name for fucking about an stage in front of loads of people who pretend not to be freaked out/weirdos/bored). We got on alright though, and after half an hours' chat he invited me to go and see his show the following week. Which - although I'll never know quite why - I did. Alone.

Anyway, he personally greeted me when I arrived 15 minutes late - he'd delayed the start of the show to wait until I turned up, fuck knows what he'd have done if I'd decided not to come - announced me to the rest of the tiiiiiny room, sat me down front row, centre stage (people who'd actually turned up on time had to move, which was just excruciating - Alan fucking Partridge eat your heart out...), and began the show.

Over the next two hours, he layed out various bits of paper on the floor, jumping from one to the next and screaming something about lost children as he did so. Then he cried for a bit, cut his trousers off with knives, smoked 6 cigarettes in a row in absolute stony silence (that took nearly half an hour), threw some weird shapes in front of a slow motion video of a live ram being decapitated in a garage, and cried again. Then the house lights came up.

I looked around, and everyone except me, a fat guy with his hands down his pants and a sleeping woman had left. "Christ", I thought..."well, it's finished...".

Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. For the big finale, I had to go up onstage and help him put a tourniquet on and stuff a fucking drip into his arm with a special video camera attached so that he could perform a 'live bloodletting'. When it was over, there was blood everywhere, about thirteen failed puncture wounds in his arm, the sleeping woman had woken up and left in horror, and me and the fat pocket puller were each handed a bag of this guy's blood so that we could 'feel how warm it was' while he told us a story about falling off a cliff, and cried a bit more.

In the words of Vulva in Spaced: "It's not finished...it's finished."

I went for a drink with him in the bar afterwards. I thought it seemed like the polite thing to do. He had a pint of Guiness. I had red wine, and regretted it instantly. I still had blood on my leg.

Turns out he was a dead nice bloke, and now I regularly go and watch him chew his own feet off and stuff in public. Top stuff, you cocking nutbag! :)

/LONGER!
( grey kid is breakdancing to save a community centre, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 15:43, Reply)