KARL: So, maybe the head coming out here. It’s not absolutely right but I think you can tell what I’m trying to make.
JEREMY: All of a sudden it kinda flows. It’s great. I think it’s working.
KARL: Yeah?
JEREMY: Oh boy . . . oh, it’s powerful.
KARL: So that’s it. This one is called ‘The Loch Mess Monster’.
The lads took photos of it. I’d got quite a bit of pleasure out of the day and was chuffed with what I’d created. Let me be clear here: it wasn’t something that I’d want to stick on the fireplace, but as art made out of a turd goes, I think I succeeded. I didn’t hang around to see what any passers-by thought of it, but I suppose as an artist you just put it out there and hope people like it.
As I left I’d been so busy looking at my art that I’d forgotten about my dangerous surroundings. I felt my foot slide. Oh shit.
BEAUTY FROM THE INSIDE
I’d been away for around a week and had been getting involved in some pretty odd art every day. So what came next didn’t seem too bizarre at the time. I think I’d become a bit immune to it all. I knew it was going to be a challenging day, and what made it harder was that I wasn’t allowed to eat for twenty-four hours, which is difficult as eating is what gets me through the hassles of the day. If something is annoying me, knowing that at some point soon I’ll be eating makes it easier to deal with. America is the worst place to be when you’re not able to eat, as you can’t avoid it – food is constantly in your face on billboards and on TV. The rest of the crew were eating, so I had to just sit and watch, and it’s never a quick activity in the States as the portions are massive. Food you didn’t even order gets brought to the table. Even when you ask for the bill it comes with fries.
You hear about some artists who die for their art. Well, the one I was about to meet dosen’t take it that far – she just gets sick. Literally. And the plan was for me to join her. But she didn’t want any food in the sick so this was why I was not allowed to eat. I’m rubbish at being sick. Loads of things can make me gag, but it very rarely follows through to full-blown eruption. I guess it’s like how some people are right-handed and others are left-handed; any badness tends to leave me via the other end rather than through the mouth. I’d honestly say that in my forty-three years of existence I think I’ve only been sick about nine or ten times. The last time was in 2010 during An Idiot Abroad 2, when I was staying in a cabin that stank of rotting fish while the boat rocked all over the shop. Another was during my first trip to India for An Idiot Abroad 1, where every hole in my body became an emergency exit after I’d eaten something dodgy. I was like a garden sprinkler! Before that I think it was mainly travel sickness if I had to sit in the back of a car.
Once when we were driving back to Manchester from a holiday in Wales, I couldn’t sit in the front as my dad’s mate was with us and he took that seat. It was a rainy day, so the heating had to be on to stop the windows steaming up, and my dad’s mate’s dogs were in the back with me and my mam, and they stank of damp. The night before, I’d been in the club house playing my mates at pool and drinking Britvic orange. I must have drunk about five pints of the stuff, so with that churning around in my belly, in the back of a hot car on the curved roads of Wales with damp dogs breathing in my face, we took a corner and ‘Lllllarrrrghhhhhllllllllllurggg’ (that’s not the name of the village in Wales, that’s the noise I made). Five pints of Britsick down me dad’s neck.
That was back around 1982. So I really didn’t know how today was going to go down . . . or come up.
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