The painter laid out sheets of paper on the floor of his studio, and he put sheets of paper on the floor from the bathroom to the studio, and on the floor of the bathroom. Then he went to the bathroom and put a video camera on a stand. He started it, and he got into the bath. He sat down in the blood, hands on the rim of the bath, and then he lay down, and he took his hands off the rim, and he turned his legs sideways until he was entirely beneath the surface. He said later that he opened his eyes, but it was not as red as he had hoped. It was not as red as he had expected.
Then he sat up, and blood streamed from his hair and down his face, and he opened his eyes facing the camera.
He stood up, and he stepped out of the bath, and he walked over the paper to his studio, and he lay down now on one piece of paper and now on another. The marks on the last sheets of paper were few and light, because most of the blood had come off and the rest had begun to dry.
When the sheets of paper had dried he put them away and put more down. He returned to the bathroom and took off the bloody clothes and dropped them to the floor, and he got into the bath again. He went through the same procedure.
He did this again and again until there was only a little puddle of blood in the bath. He scooped what he could into a cup and put it on the edge of the tub, and then he ran water and filled the bath to the brim and got into the water, and now the camera recorded his bloody body lying at the bottom of the clear water.
Then he got out and walked over the paper and lay on the paper.
He went back to the bath and let out the water and filled it again and got in it again.
When all the blood had been washed away he filled the bath one more time with clear water, and into it he poured the cup of blood.
Then he let out the bloody water, and he sold the first set of bloody canvas for £150,000. It was called Let Brown = Red.
He had been pretty well known before, which was why the new departure sold for £150,000, and when Let Brown = Red sold for £150,000 people became very interested in the other pieces, which had other interesting titles, and all of them sold for even more. The general consensus at the end of the day was that the most interesting pieces were the later ones, when the blood was drying, or when it was diluted with water, but there were two camps, and some liked the bold crude earlier pieces better. Everyone liked the photocollage of the bath which went for £250,000 and the video installation. The paintings all had interesting names, and nothing was called Bloodbath or This is Not Red because he was too clever to be obvious. And later when he was interviewed he said that all the colours around us were dead, but with blood it was easier to see, and that sometimes you had to risk banality to be clear. Then he said everyone remembered the colour of blood when they saw brown, but that no one remembered any other colour when they saw any other colour. And then he filled a bathtub with blue paint and he did the same thing and he called it Let Blue = Blue.
Let Blue = Blue was felt to be more subtle and poignant than Let Brown = Red, and it was also the kind of thing some people felt more comfortable installing in a domestic setting. Individual pieces sold for about £100,000, and an anonymous American buyer bought a complete set for £750,000, and the painter was now very rich.
What people expected, obviously, was that he would now do something similar with white, maybe a white canvas with nothing on it which was not painted but just entitled, the title would obviously be Let White = White. He now had the stature where he could do something like this. That is, it was something anybody could do, but he could do it and get upwards of £100,000 for it. He was not someone who liked the obvious, however, and for many years refused to produce this inevitable work. Instead he tried to look for other colours: he was now rich enough so that he could afford drugs however expensive, and he did LSD mainly and some others that brought colours to life again. It would not exactly be true to say they stopped him working, since work was not exactly what was needed to produce Let White = White, or even the sly Untitled which a few people had predicted. He went to the States and people made jokes, they said he would be politically engaged now, he would paint Let Black = White and it would be very exciting. Instead he did a lot of cocaine because he said he needed to see the world the way the people who could afford to buy his paintings saw his paintings, and he was arrested and charged with attempted bribery, as well as possession, because he had told the policewoman on duty she could make a lot of money if she quietly made off with his fingerprints and mugshot.
The fact was that after Let Blue = Blue did so well he had sent a little piece to the Boatman. He had dipped his thumb in blue paint and put the thumb print on a piece of rough paper. Then he had drawn 50cc of blood from his arm with one of those needles they use for blood samples, and he had dipped a pen in it and written at the bottom, Let Blue = Blue. With it he sent a postcard saying You brought me up too soon. Now the piece was small, but it was absolutely unique. The Boatman did not like it as well as Picasso in his Blue Period, so he sold it for £100,000, and with that he bought a small yacht of his own and eventually a bathysphere, so that he was able to go into the pocket of blue whenever he liked.
The painter never saw blue again.
Sibylla took me with her when she went to see Let Brown = Red at the South Bank Gallery, but I was too young to appreciate it. Then when I was about eight we saw Let Blue = Blue at the Serpentine in 1995. Sibylla thought Let Brown = Red and Let Blue = Blue should be the Nativity and Crucifixion of the next half century and that it would receive better treatment by later artists. I was able to appreciate it now but he was still not my favourite painter.
But now I remembered that he had sent something to the Boatman, and I remembered especially the way he had insisted the Boatman should see for himself, and I remembered the way he had walked for miles into the white. I thought that if I asked for money to go through the Andes by mule I might get it.
The painter had had a studio in an old warehouse on Butler’s Wharf across from Tower Bridge. Then the site was redeveloped—this was before he had started making millions of pounds out of the death of colour. So he had moved to an old factory off the Commercial Road, and he had found the bathtub in a skip and had taken it there and plumbed it in himself. Then the property market fell through just as Let Brown = Red came out, and by the time of Let Blue = Blue repossessions were falling thick and fast. So now the painter was able to buy a whole warehouse off Brick Lane which a developer had been planning to develop. This was where the painter went when he came to London, although most of the time he lived in New York. Sometimes he flew to South Africa or Polynesia, but it never seemed to help.
I had read that he was back in London for a retrospective of his work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.
I took the Circle Line to Liverpool Street and ascended to the street.
First I went to the exhibition to be on the safe side. It was one with an entry fee—that was how big he was, and that was how fast things were in the art world. He had been exciting and promising at St. Martin’s and in his early twenties, but if he had not done Let Brown = Red when he was 27 he would now have been disappointing and forgotten, and because he had they were already doing a retrospective and comparing him to Yves Klein.