And now, who has heard of Kerry Trengrove? Maybe five other people.
Or this other artist, Stuart Brisley. He was the performance artist in the 70s. He got this bath and he filled it full of offal and he lay in it. Another time he went on the roof of the Hayward Gallery, and he had himself strung up, naked, upside down. First he covered himself in this thick clay mud — his work always had this painterly quality — and then he had himself strung up, and it was already autumn so it was quite cold, and someone stood on the ground with a hose and hosed him down — cleansed him.
But he is in books. You can read about him in books. So there is a record. That is why records are so important. You need someone to be there, to be a witness.
But all that expressiveness, that confessionality, that exhibitionism, that plastering of more meaning on the world, maybe you want to leave that, maybe you just do.
But then maybe you think of the paintings going in a skip. Maybe you think if someone wants to be a witness for this kind of covert exhibitionism then the paintings will not go in the skip.
This was this very bad time when the National Gallery was quite keen on plastering meaning on its collections, so once a year they would have an exhibition and a big banner outside the National Gallery that said Making and Meaning, and if she would take a bus through Trafalgar Square she would want to vomit, the buses through Trafalgar Square should have art sickness bags during the Making and Meaning Season but they didn’t.
And now here was Adalberto with this idea that he was a curative genius and if other people got that idea all the gallerists would be doing it.
But maybe you don’t see this, if you have done something you were never going to do again and somebody asks you to do something else you would not really do it is easy to go down that road.
Adalberto said if she was not menstruating they would just take a blood sample with a syringe but it would not be so good. He said they were going to have to use someone else for the breast milk which was not so good.
Sometimes the fact that something is easy seduces you. It is not like making a buttonhole or a pleat, the body is producing these fluids and solids and it is so simple to collect them.
Adalberto took her to this gym as a guest member, what a production. Men today have these bodies that you never used to see, they are pouring these hours into the body, if you look at Jim Morrison that is the type of body that men used to have and a man with a body like Anthony Quinn in La Strada would be really embarrassing because it would be really over the top, but today nobody would want a body like Anthony Quinn because it would not be buff. Compared to what men have nowadays that would be nothing, and here was Adalberto with one of these bodies, and he was saying she must wear 3 sweatshirts and 2 pairs of sweatpants and run on a treadmill but it was not practical to run because she had been poor for so long. So he said OK, and he punched this button until the track was quite steep. He had brought this motorcycle helmet that he put on her head. It had a little rubber cup where the chin strap was and he said he would be back in 15 minutes.
It took about an hour to collect the sweat.
He said she could use an onion for the tears.
He said if he gave her a cup she could spit into it.
He said maybe she could get really drunk so they could get the vomit.
If you have never been there you think it is easy to walk away.
She went to New York for the show. She flew first class. They put her up at this posh hotel called Morgan’s.
When she saw the show it was not as bad as she thought. On one side of the room, on one long wall, were the suits. On the facing wall there were these tiny shelves, maybe 4 cm by 4 cm, in aluminium, and on each shelf was a glass container with thick sides flush with the edges of the shelf, and in this container would be the piss or the sweat or the blood, so it did have its beauty. It was good that there was this vast space between the work of art and the frame, you know when something is curated there is this mania for attaching things to it, words, facts, there will be a little card on the wall and people will go anxiously to the card to avail themselves of its wisdom and return to the work of art with the little trophy, these words that were on the card, and sometimes you will see people hunting manically for the card —
So there was a boldness about this space that was good, and it was good having the works of art on one wall somehow, and the numbers were by the glass jars on the opposite wall and there was nothing on the wall with the works of art at all. So that was quite clever and mischievous.
Maybe if you are making art that is a thing, maybe if that thinginess is what you immerse yourself in, if you spend all that time away from about, if you are never attaching, maybe you are lost to words after a while, then someone comes along who is really good at manipulating and you can’t make words push for you.
But maybe it is just that Italians are slippery. In the War the Nazis would send directives to the Italians about extraditing Jews and they could not get them to cooperate. The Italians could not get excited about it and if they are not excited about it they are not going to do it but if they are excited about it you can’t stop them.
The papers had said that Prada had bought out the show for $1 million. Maybe it wasn’t true. She would rehearse things to say to Adalberto but he was quite hard to pin down.
Then one day it was in the papers that an artist had had him declared bankrupt. If someone doesn’t pay you this is something you can do, have them declared bankrupt. This artist had been quite clever, she had a contract and that was what made it possible to recover the debt. But all the other artists he owed money did not have contracts. There was nothing on paper to give them a right. And anyway he was a limited company.
So the £45,000 was all that was left from the 20 suits, and some of it had to go to the Inland Revenue. So the only thing was to do a show while that excitement was still in the air.
This was really tricky because Serge did not want to be abandoned but he felt somehow he had been left with the less interesting work, it poisoned his interest in the painting. Serge wanted her to make some more suits for the London gallery. He was desperate to be cutting edge. If he would show suits all the bigwigs in London would come because they did not see them in Milan and New York. But it had been happening for so long that a lot of the paintings were really really dry. So she said he could show one suit if he would do a show for the paintings, but it would not be for sale.
So Serge had this show. And naturally now he nominated her for the Turner. Anybody can make a nomination but because of Adalberto she made the shortlist. They invited her to submit a piece, and sometimes you get disgusted. You keep thinking the tide will turn and painting will stop being unfashionable and then it would be exciting to be shortlisted for the Turner. But the Turner selects these things that are exciting for people who don’t know anything about art. In art school there is someone in every year doing minimalism, or conceptualism, and then the Turner will pick somebody who is doing what people do in their first year of art school, so it is kind of disgusting to get selected. So then Serge was saying I’m not saying another word. My lips are sealed. You know what I think, but I’m not putting any pressure on you, because it’s absolutely your decision.