More Moaning. Karl Pilkington

Чтение книги онлайн.

      We went back inside and painted some cardboard signs with the word ‘SLOW’ to use during our performance.

      KARL: What about money and stuff?

      MATTHEW: You know . . . I perform when I can and lately I haven’t been holding out the bucket. I don’t ask for it. I let them give it to me, out of love, you know? Cos if I’m focused on making a certain amount of money, I’m not happy. I do all these great performances, I make a lot of people laugh, but then I’m like, oh, but I only made ten dollars. You know, today’s typical person, if they don’t make a certain amount of money they feel bad about whatever art they do. That’s why art and money don’t really work together.

      I was confident. That was until he told me we might not be able to do this in Central Park as it was starting to get dark, and suggested Times Square instead. The idea of that made me nervous and I started to shake. Though that could just have been cos I was stood on Matthew’s roof on a cold day in December in just a pair of green underpants, and I had less hair on my body than normal due to being shaved at Trina’s body-painting session.

      We headed off to Times Square to do our thing. In a way there was no better place to spread the message of ‘slow down’ as it’s the most hectic place in New York. Thousands of people filled the streets. My heart was pounding like I’d eaten a full tub of cinnamon. Matthew had nothing to fear, he does this day after day. He doesn’t even have to do anything, he just looks funny. He said I looked funny too in my costume of green pants, socks and trainers, and my back brace. The back brace wasn’t part of the costume, though. I need it due to my bad back. I felt weak as I didn’t have his hair and beard. I can’t imagine he would look as funny or be as funny without the hair and beard. I’ve grown a beard now and again, but once it gets quite long Suzanne says I need to shave it as it doesn’t work with a bald head. She says I look like a shuttlecock. To finish my look off, I borrowed his motorcycle helmet and a pair of shades. I’ll be honest, I was shitting it. It was easy earlier on his roof when no one else was watching. We found our spot in Times Square and it happened. We did our slow-motion walking and added slow talking to it too. It’s hard to explain now, but I think it worked. We improvised for around thirty to forty minutes. Crowds of people surrounded us, laughed and took photos as we told them to slow down in their busy lives. The fact that people stopped and watched means the message worked.

      I got a proper buzz from it, probably more than I’ve ever got from anything else I’ve done. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be getting invited to perform on the Royal Variety Show any time soon, but I thought the result was pretty good for something I’d not done before. The only problem I have with it as an art is that it’s now gone. If people missed it, they missed it. Matthew has nothing to show for that night’s work, and he will just have to start all over again tomorrow. He’s like a council worker with a leaf blower – his work is never done.

      I couldn’t get to sleep for a few hours that night due to the adrenaline rush that I got. I sat in bed and googled ‘performance art’ on the internet to see if what I had done really counted as that. One definition I found said that ‘performance art usually consists of four elements: time, space, the performer’s body, and a relationship between audience and performer’. We’d ticked all those boxes. Now every year when I see Times Square on the TV for the New Year celebrations I can say ‘I’ve played there’.

      That’s not bad, is it?

      PAINTING A MASTERPIECE

      My performance with Matthew was all about slowing things down. The next day I was due to meet an artist who does the opposite and creates artworks in record time. It’s easy to think that stuff that doesn’t take time to do is no good, but for art to be of any quality does it have to take years in the making? The ceiling Michelangelo worked on in the Sistine Chapel took him almost five years to complete. I’ve seen it and it is pretty good, but I think it’s a bit daft to have a fancy piece of artwork in a building where people spend most of the time with their eyes shut praying.

      Recently, critics seemed to go mad over the film Boyhood, the main reason being it took twelve years to make and the director stuck with the same cast over that time so you watched them age in the film. This fact seemed to take over from the storyline, and everyone just talked about how it was interesting to see the cast age. I watched it with Suzanne with her going on like ‘Oh, look, hasn’t he grown’ and ‘That hair suits him more than his last style’. It was more like going through a sodding photo album than watching a film. I didn’t understand all the fuss. William Roache has been playing the part of Ken Barlow in Coronation Street for fifty years and the critics don’t go on about him.

      The artist I was going to meet up with was called Ushio Shinohara, a well-known Japanese painter (to those in the know). As soon as I entered his home/studio in Dumbo (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass), the art district of New York, I could smell that familiar, chalky, damp smell of artists’ paint. I recognise it even though I’m not around it much. Elephant shit is another smell like that. Ushio introduced himself. He was a small man, eighty-three years old with white fluffy hair, similar to my auntie Nora’s, but unlike her, he had it in a flat Mohican. His hands were covered in so many specks of colour that when he put out his hand to shake mine I thought he was offering me some Skittles. I tried having a chat about his art but didn’t get anywhere, as although he had been living in New York for almost fifty years, his accent was still strong and with my northern accent we couldn’t make much sense of each other. I like being around people and having company, but I don’t always want to chat so I quite like meeting people who can’t speak English as it gets rid of all the small talk. Han Solo had it right knocking about with Chewbacca – someone to watch his back and help him out without having to discuss what he got up to over the weekend.

      The fact that Ushio couldn’t understand me didn’t matter anyway, as it was the art that was going to join us together. He got me to help mix up some paint so I could have a go trying out his painting technique. Only two colours were mixed: black and the brightest pink I have ever seen. The sort of pink that you only see in alcopops.

      His wife Noriko appeared, a grey-haired trendy-looking woman, who handed me some boxer shorts to pop on. Not boxer shorts as in underpants, but actual shorts that a boxer wears to fight in. I always wanted a pair of these when I СКАЧАТЬ