More Moaning. Karl Pilkington
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Название: More Moaning

Автор: Karl Pilkington

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Книги о Путешествиях

Серия:

isbn: 9781782117322

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ wouldn’t keep up. After getting battered by a lad called Leeroy and hitting the canvas, my mam was right, I jacked it in. Today I’d be hitting the canvas again, but with my fists dipped in paint rather than my head. This was Ushio’s technique of getting paint on the canvas. He started doing it in 1958 and has done thousands of huge paintings this way. It looked like he still had most of them rolled up and stacked in virtually every available space in his studio like some sort of carpet warehouse. He handed me a pair of boxing gloves and got me to tie sponges to them using string. Once the gloves were on, he told me to dunk one in the bright pink and the other in the black, then acted out what he wanted me to do to the canvas. He wanted me to work my way across the big fifteen-foot-long canvas from right to left, thumping as I went, high up or low down, wherever I felt like. The main thing was not to stop. He slipped some goggles over my eyes and off I went. Thumping high, thumping low, left, right, right, right, left. The white of the canvas disappearing with every punch. The harder I hit, the bigger the splat. I was getting covered in paint with every punch as it splashed back at me. Forty seconds and thirty-five punches later I stepped back, wiped the paint from my goggles and looked at what I had created. As I took in the mess I had made, Ushio and Noriko applauded my efforts. They seemed happy, but I wasn’t convinced. To me it was very similar to the mess Suzanne makes over the kitchen worktop whenever she makes soup in the blender.

      KARL: How’s that?

      USHIO: Great!

      NORIKO: Good, yes!

      USHIO: Yeah! Masterpiece! Bang, bang, bang!

      KARL: I don’t know, can I add another colour?

      NORIKO: No. Finished. You shouldn’t think about the results. You cannot change the past.

      KARL: Yeah . . . I don’t know if I like it, then.

      NORIKO: We finish the work, we don’t think any more. After that the audience decide if it is good or bad.

      It’s a different way of working. Instead of spending ages trying to make a masterpiece, make something quickly and then at least if people don’t like it, you haven’t wasted too much of your time. I enjoyed the process but didn’t like the end result. To me it looked like one of them pictures of a virus they show on the news when an epidemic breaks out, or the stains you get on hotel room walls in Spain where the last occupier had been kept busy killing mosquitoes. It was probably the most basic form of art, like the painted hand prints that kids make in their first year of school and then end up being stuck on the front of the fridge. They’re always pretty crap. You never get someone putting someone else’s kids’ artwork on their fridge door, do you? It’s because they look shit. I had made something but not something I was proud of. I could quite easily thump a piano with my fists and make a noise, but I doubt people would rush out to buy an album of it.

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      As the paint slowly dried on the canvas, I could also feel it drying on me and tightening my skin. I stood looking at what I had made while picking away at the paint on my arms. I used to like doing this at school when my hands got covered in Tipp-Ex. I got through quite a few bottles of correction fluid every month at school. The pages in my books were as brittle as poppadoms.

      NORIKO: You can bring home . . . if you want?

      KARL: I don’t know . . . I don’t know if it will go with the rest of the furniture.

      NORIKO: You can just wrap it, keep it in loft for ten years.

      KARL: I am not going to keep that.

      NORIKO: If you didn’t keep, you would regret later. So maybe ten years later, your idea go to look at it going to be different, so just keep it. Ten years later, you will be surprised – ‘wow I made a big masterpiece’.

      I couldn’t take it home and shove it in the loft anyway as it’s been converted into a bedroom. I’m sure the reason for more charity shops on the high streets these days is due to the fact that most people have converted their lofts, so they have less space to store crap.

      Ushio strapped on some sponge and started smacking his arms and fists onto another canvas like Mr Miyagi’s epileptic brother. He used just black paint. It didn’t look too dissimilar to the one I had knocked out. It was funny to watch, as it’s not every day you see a man in his 80s wearing nothing but shorts and goggles whacking a canvas to shit. Maybe it’s more like performance art. I had a good day and enjoyed giving it a go, but just like the boxing I attempted when I was a kid, once was enough.

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      POLISHING A TURD

      Art is something we like as it takes our mind off life’s daily grind. We have so much going on in our heads that it’s difficult to properly get away from it all. I find there are only a few things that help me clear my mind from the chaos: 1) cutting the lawn, 2) cleaning windows, 3) music, 4) rock climbing (I did it for the first time recently on a trip and when you are unclipping hooks from one rope to another, and your life depends on getting them in the correct order, it really makes you focus on the job in hand and you forget everything else), 5) standing in dog shit. No matter what is going on in your life, when you stand in some fresh dog shit and the smell hits you, everything has to stop while you find a stick to scrape the problem away from the tread in your trainers.

      The only thing worse than having to do this is having to wipe it away from between your toes. I can still remember the feeling of this happening. I went to get some milk off the doorstep barefoot and our dog had defecated at the front door and I hadn’t seen it. It made me gag instantly. I don’t know if you’ve seen that film 127 Hours where a man gets his arm trapped under a boulder and the only way he can escape is by cutting it off. If you have, the noises he made and the expression on his face were similar to me wiping that shit from between my toes. No one else was up yet, so I wiped it off my feet and went back to bed, the plan being to act like I hadn’t seen it. Of course the only issue was that my bowl of cornflakes next to my bed and the milk already in the fridge and open were a giveaway, plus the fact that my footprint was in the turd, so a visit from Magnum P.I. wasn’t necessary to work out I’d already seen it and decided to leave it.

      Rightly so, I was in the shit yet again.

      Today I was going to have to beat those demons and come face to face with dog dirt one more time, as I was having a day out with a couple of lads known as the Sprinkle Brigade, who since 2007 have been creating art using dog poo. Their names were Jeremy and Jeff. I met them at the site where the idea came about.

      JEREMY: Well, we’re called Sprinkle Brigade. We go around the city and we decorate the shit that people leave on the street. Because it’s a problem. No one does anything about it. So we figured we’ll do something to make it look a little bit more special to brighten up people’s day.

      JEFF: Yeah. Take something that people hate, and make them laugh a little bit.

      KARL: I suppose there aren’t many things left in life that get an immediate reaction like shit does.

      JEFF: There’s comedy in there, but for the most part you’re right; it’s disgusting and if we can take something that people loathe and make it something they laugh at, we think that’s of value. We don’t think the world is gonna pick up their dog shit. There’s always gonna be people who leave it, and it’s always gonna be something that we all hate.

      JEREMY: СКАЧАТЬ