More Moaning. Karl Pilkington

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      I met the artist in a studio. It was a totally white room with a couple of canvases on the floor, next to quite a few cartons of soya milk and bottles of food dye, which she would mix and then drink before heaving up onto the canvas. Her name was Millie Brown.

      KARL: How did you come up with this, then, Millie?

      MILLIE: Well, basically my art collective were all asked to go to Berlin and take over this gallery space there, and everyone was doing different performances or showing their work in this gallery, and I’d never done performance art before and I wanted to use my body to paint, and came up with the idea of painting from the inside out. I wanted to create a performance that was really raw and human and, like elements of being uncontrollable, so I had this idea I wanted to do a rainbow. I wanted every single colour in the rainbow. I had never made myself sick before and I didn’t know if I could do it. I just got on stage and put my fingers down my throat, and did it. And I was like, either way, if it works or doesn’t work it’s gonna be an interesting performance.

      KARL: So when did you last do this?

      MILLIE: A couple of months ago in London. We were shooting an art film.

      KARL: How was that?

      MILLIE: It was good. I was shooting a film where it was like a Zar ritual, so a lot of the movements were me shaking my head around and around and around. It was an entire day, a good nine hours of me spinning round in circles having not eaten since the morning before.

      KARL: What, while being sick?

      MILLIE: Yeah, basically at the end of this Zar performance ritual I was sick. So it was a really long day of just sucking on sugar cubes to stop myself from fainting cos I was spinning around in circles for an entire day.

      KARL: Was it worth all the hassle?

      MILLIE: In the end, me actually being sick was cut from the film.

      KARL: So it wasn’t worth it, then?

      MILLIE: I mean, it’s always worth it, you know. Suffering for my art is part of what I do.

      KARL: Why’s that important?

      MILLIE: I mean, it’s not important to suffer necessarily, it just so happens that every performance that I do has an element of that suffering. I like to push my own mental and physical boundaries to get to that state of mind where it’s kind of a pure creative place. I feel like by putting your body through some element of suffering or discomfort you are able to reach that state even more easily.

      KARL: Just doing as much as I’ve done today is pushing me . . . not having any food for twenty-four hours.

      MILLIE: Well, I think a lot of the performance is about the actual element before you actually perform. It’s like a long kind of solitude performance that you do alone before you actually perform the piece.

      As mad as the whole concept sounded, it had got my attention. If her thing was drawing with felt tip pens, let’s face it, I wouldn’t be visiting her. A lot of people think art has gone a bit mental these days. But I reckon it’s our own fault. We’re always looking for the next thing, and that pushes artists to come up with even madder ways of getting their work noticed.

      Millie poured a pint of soya milk and added some purple food colouring. She got me to do the same. I went for red, and then I slowly drank it. For some reason I can’t neck back any drink. My throat doesn’t allow it. If I try, my throat goes into a sort of spasm where it locks for a few seconds, so I just took a few sips at a time.

      Once Millie had drunk the full glass she crouched down and just splurted out a purple splat onto the canvas. It wasn’t too messy and she didn’t have to struggle to do it. It came out like soap out of a hand pump dispenser. It didn’t run down her chin or cause her make-up to run. She then moved around the canvas and released the rest of the purple soya milk like it was on tap. She didn’t have to give any force at all. I had a mate who could do this. Apparently it was because he drank so much fizzy pop. His stomach lining was knackered or something, so he could just force sick out on demand. He mainly used it as a defence mechanism; if anyone ever started on him he just threw up whatever he had been drinking, and it really confused them. He could double up as a fire extinguisher.

      KARL: How do people react when they see you doing this?

      MILLIE: Well, I think different pieces talk to different people, and we’re all unique in different ways, so not everything is going to appeal to us. Some people hate my work and some people love it. There’s not much of an in-between. I love creating art this way. A lot of my performances don’t involve vomit at all, and I’m always doing new work, but I just love this form of painting. It really means something to me and it’s something that I’ve done from the age of seventeen, so it’s like a part of me, I guess.

      KARL: So how do I do it?

      MILLIE: Use two fingers and start touching the back of your throat, and just keep doing that movement back and forth until you start to gag, then you keep pushing and pushing until its starts to come up.

      I’ve never met anyone who was so into being sick. Art is all about doing something you love, and she loves being sick. Most people have to stop doing what they love when they are ill, but Millie doesn’t. In fact, she might create more than normal. I wiggled my two fingers about in the back of my throat, like I do when trying to grab a pound coin that has gone down the sofa. It was making me gag but nothing was coming up. It’s funny, really, as during this trip, especially during the Times Square performance, I found there was something inside me that made me want to perform, but my outside is normally the nervous bit. Yet here was a chance for my insides to show off, and they didn’t want to know!