DRAWN BLOOD

Terrible thing that happened. Awful. Appalling. I really think it was appalling. But I feel it would be correct to point out that they did draw some very racist things. They did. Very racist. But it is appalling what happened to the racists. What happened to the racists is an undoubted tragedy and a crime and all that, sure, but the racists drew racist things so, ...you know. What do you mean you don't know? I just think it should be pointed out at this juncture that the dead racists did racist drawings. This is the ideal juncture to point this out because surely this is the matter at stake here or at least should be. I'm simply saying that it's terrible that the racists were murdered but she was out all by herself in a very short skirt they did do drawings that were racist. In fact, they were so racist that they even did racist drawings of other racists. These people had no limits. They even insulted their own. That's how racist they were. 

It is my duty, it's all our duty, to be offended by the racist drawings these racists drew and to keep expressing how offended we are by the racist drawings these racists drew until all anyone remembers is how racist these drawers were and not that they were murdered at all.

In summary: RACISM!

EDWARD BURRA

A landscape, like one from a dream. Sparse with pylons and clumps of trees. Beautiful but asleep. A silent road cuts through it but where does it lead? Far, far off to somewhere that can't be seen. And you've no choice but to travel it, to follow its twilight track. You'll cross over the horizon and you won't be coming back.

PAINT PISSED

It seemed to me that troglodytes painted the things they saw to better understand them. If they saw some kind of massive elk or boar in the forest they'd go home and paint it on the wall of their cave. Reducing the animal to a simple image might've made it comprehensible to a troglodyte's rudimentary cognitive abilities. That was my theory anyway. You see, I too found the world outside my flat to be an incomprehensible place and that's why I thought cave painting might be of similar benefit to me. As I said to the nervous looking girl who sold me the poster paints down the pound shop, 'maybe it is the purpose of art to make sense of reality'.

I decided I'd go out and do whatever it is I do all day and then come home and paint what I saw on my walls. Rather than sabre-tooth tigers and mammoths, I covered the walls of my flat with depictions of suburban life - things like bent bus stops, crumpled bags of Tayto, an umbrella I saw stuffed down a drain and a schoolgirl that gave me the spaz face from the window of a passing SUV.

However, I started noticing how the bulk of my work related to the gigantic shopping centre that towered over the leafy streets of my timid village. Almost all of the images were nothing more than replicated brand logos - Harvey Nichols, H&M, HMV, Hollister, House of Fraser, Little Hitler's Haute Hut - all the well known names. I realised that my environment was thoroughly colonised. A few questions occurred to me. Were these logos art? In my attempt to make art that recorded life, was I merely making art that was a record of other art? Was the ultimate aim of art, from its inception to now, to replace reality entirely? Is art the creator of reality and not its reflector? Trees, clouds, animals, even people (genuine living people, not people on billboards or people who may as well be on billboards) didn't really get a look in. My surroundings were a prescribed range of aspirations and aesthetic ideals. I found it all a bit alarming. In fact, I found it fucking shocking.

There was only one thing for it. With resolute determination, I decided to get pissed out of my mind. Booze had provided great succor to those before me who had lost their environments to colonial forces. Many Australian Aborigines and members of native American tribes spend their time staggering about the place in piss stained slacks so ...when in Rome.

I went to the pub.

I found Professor Isaac Delahunty sitting up at the bar. I was delighted. He was just the man to confide in. Isaac had been the head of an anthropology department before the university closed it down to fund more vocational pursuits. These days, Isaac could be found drinking away his redundancy as he scribbled notes for a study he claimed to be making on the life of the suburban sop (a study that I suspect will never be completed). Isaac jokingly referred to himself as as an anthropolopissed but he was the only one who laughed at this little joke. His was a terrible wounded laugh.

I told Isaac what I had been up to and what it had got me to thinking and he told me something astonishing. Isaac said that the troglodytes of yore weren't painting what they saw but actually painting what they wanted to see. Isaac said that the troglodytes were the 'ne plus ultra of solipsism' (he spoke in that fancy way you'd expect of an academic, albeit with a slight slur) in that they thought the world did not exist until they witnessed it and that the world was influenced by their expectations. That's why they only painted animals. They were painting what they hoped to catch for dinner. By meditating on it, the troglodytes believed they were bringing the creature into being. 'Why didn't they just paint the thing ready cooked and save themselves the bother of having to go out and kill it?' I asked. Isaac shrugged and said 'they may have been the precursors of those that theorised the Observer Effect but that doesn't mean they weren't a bunch of dopes. I mean they lived in caves for fuck's sake'.

I thought about what Isaac had told me and, after about fifteen pots of porter, I made it my business to go home and fashion a new reality, one free of consumerist colonisation. I staggered back to my place and on all the walls of my flat, every inch, I painted a jungle. A wild jungle, overrun with all sorts of exotic creatures from past, present and God knows when. I was working away for hours, accompanied by Krautrock classics on shuffle and several bags of carry out. I worked fast. I was in a frenzy. I eventually collapsed.

I woke up hours later and saw what I had done. It was quite a sight but it beat what was there before. My head hurt though. It was all a bit hard to take in so I got to my feet and left my place in search of Solpadeine and a breakfast roll. Once I was on the road I was, well, how should I put this? Taken aback? Shocked? Absolutely fucking traumatised? I think the latter sums it up best. Yes, once I was on the road I was absolutely fucking traumatised to see every inch of my suburban village tangled up in vines. I could hear the screeching calls of monkeys and the distant roar of lions. Pterodactyls wheeled in the sky above me and a couple of Triceratops were fucking outside Spar. When I reached the shopping centre I saw a pack of jackals chasing a zebra down an escalator and a Siberian god-bear futilely trying on a pair of slim fit chinos. There were people around of course but they were in pieces, scattered limbs and organs.

I felt bad. I could have painted an equitable Anarchistic society living in peaceable harmony but in my drunken state I had opted to create this feral barbarity. Many people had lost their lives. The army were probably on the way and the whole thing was bound to end in an appalling conflagration. I'd be lucky to survive myself. Worst of all though, the most tragic thing about the entire scenario to me, was how badly rendered everything was. It all looked like it was painted by a demented child. If this was to be the end of what passed for civilisation, it could at least have looked nice. All the creatures had bandy limbs and lumpy heads. The vines were scribbly and unimpressive. You couldn't even tell what a lot of the stuff was supposed to be. At one stage, I was chased down the road by something that looked like an enormous lobster crossed with an elaborate mathematical equation performed by Jackson Pollock. It all looked completely crap and it was all my fault. It all just amounted to so much sigil bullshit. Even the pub had been destroyed by, ...well I'm not sure really. They looked like musical notes, octave clefs I think, covered in fur and with fangs. Who knows what they were meant to be. Beats me, ...I never could paint pissed.

'DEAD BODIES and CARDBOARD'

All the poets decided to write poetry about the telly. They decided to write poems about the telly and keep them short. 'Keep the writing as short as fuckin possible lads,' decreed a leading laureate and a new movement in verse was born. The poets thought people might like their new stuff because it was a bit shit and empty and people love shit empty things.

Don't you though? You do. You do indeed you hopeless shower of...

.....aaannyway, the poets justified their efforts to no longer make an effort by citing Wolves by Louis MacNeice – where the poet chooses to no longer dwell on the ineffable and inevitable and instead joins the rest of humanity, hand in hand, in a circle of frivolity, protected against encroaching fear and infinite mystery.

Do you follow me? Are you still with me? I hope mentioning a poem didn't send you running back to TMZ, you cognitively subpar f...

...soooo, the poets wrote poems about what happened on TV and labelled them with hashtags and poetry became a big hit again. The poets were called the voices of their generation and they got on the covers of glossy magazines and were seen on the town with breast implantees and debonair industrialists. Dermot O'Leary wrote the introduction to a collection of their greatest works. It was called #Reality and here's the eponymous entry...

#Reality

LOL, did you see it?

It was on TV!

WTF happened, like.

I'm glad it wasn't me.

People loved the poems while they were reading them. Once they were finished reading them they forgot all about them. Instantly, in that wilfully anencephalic way that was de rigueur at the time. No memory whatsoever of ever having read ...'like whatever'. 

'Did I retweet that? I don't remember.'

Are you still reading? Good, stick with me now. I can't promise it'll be worth it but we'll get to the end soon enough.

Where was I? Oh yeah, after a while the cultural world became a kind of vapor that floated and faded over the graves of a generation that never testified to its times and left the future with no past to learn from. The only thing bequeathed to the future was footage of things once thought to have mattered but never did ...at all ...not even one tiny fucking bit.

To conclude...

...it was Bill Oddie's schizophrenic mother who said: 'television is all dead bodies and cardboard' and she was quite right. Schizophrenics find it hard to infer anything from the cadaverous pretence of the telly. All I see myself, when I turn the thing on, is false smiles, dead eyes and fake sets. All I see is dead bodies and cardboard.

#DeadBodiesAndCardboard

Dead Bodies and Cardboard

Tonight at 8pm

and straight after it,

once you're done tweeting about it,

you can switch channels

and watch Dead Bodies and Cardboard again.

Ok, we're done here. Return to your beloved telly.

MY LITTLE PIECE OF PRIZE WINNING ART

I entered the Fasinex® Liver Fluke Drench Art Prize for 2013 with a piece of art that no one was allowed to see. No one, not even the judges, knew what my entry was. They didn't know if it was a painting, a sculpture, a musical composition, a dance performance, a film, an installation or whatever else it could be and I wasn't saying. The idea was that I would only reveal my piece once it had won the prize and that if something else won the prize then no one would ever see my piece and be forever unsure if the right decision had been made.

I thought this was very clever. I imagined it would throw the judges into a quandary, wondering if they were making the right decision. What if they chose another piece and mine was better? They would forever wonder if they had been fools. I imagined this would haunt whoever beat me for the prize too. I could imagine the winner sitting at home, regarding their prize and wondering if it was really deserved. I could imagine the niggling the winner would feel for the rest of their lives. Winning the coveted Fasinex® Liver Fluke Drench Art Prize would be the crowning achievement of any career. Imagine the persistent gnawing that the prize might not be rightfully yours.

My mystery piece created quite a buzz. People speculated in the press and online as to what it might be. Someone suggested that my piece might even be the prize itself, which would be very clever in a reflexive interrogation of the very process itself type of way. Others said that the excitement generated by my stunt might be the art itself and that, if this was the case, my piece deserved to win because I had really got people thinking. 'Thinking about what?' others asked. 'Nothing', they were told. Yes, I had everyone thinking about nothing and this act in itself raised important questions – What is nothing? Why are we thinking about it? Do we think about nothing in other ways? Do we think about nothing a lot? Should we be thinking about other things? What other things should we be thinking about? Is there even a point in thinking? If there is a point in thinking, what is the point in thinking and if there is a point in thinking why haven't we thought of it before? 

Oh, I had sent the art world into a right cognitive whirlpool and no mistake.

But no, my art piece wasn't 'nothing' and it wasn't the prize itself. It was something else and this something else won.

The day came when, in front a celebrity audience that included the likes of Matthew Collings and Don Conroy, the esteemed President of the Irish Farmers' Association handed the Fasinex® Liver Fluke Drench Art Prize to me. I gave an acceptance speech, talking about how art has dominated my life since the day I decided to expand my investment portfolio and speaking of how my journey had brought me to this moment, receiving such a coveted prize from as venerable a man as the President of the Irish Farmers' Association. I wept a little too, I don't mind admitting. Then someone shouted up from the audience - it may have been Collings, it may have been Conroy, it might've even been Mary from Anything Goes. Whoever it was that shouted out, they got a chant going and the chant was this: 'show your art, show your art, show your art'. So I did what they demanded. After months of build up the crowd were extremely tense, all staring up in expectation, eyes wide and mouths a little open. I reached out and pulled back the curtain that obscured my piece. My art was revealed and those assembled were finally unburdened of their curiosity.

'But what was your piece?' 'What was it Mr. Fugger?' 'Tell us now for fuck's sake like!', I hear you, my readers and acolytes, insist from the other side of cyber space. Well, I'll tell you what my art piece was. I won't keep you in suspense any longer. To drag this out any more would be taking the piss and, as regular visitors to fugtheworld well know, I'm not one for piss taking. I'm not one to tease. I'll tell you what my piece was now before this gets irritating, perhaps even cruel. I'll tell you what my art was now before you get pissed off and just start speed reading to the end of this blog post to find out. So, without further ado, I will inform you what my art piece was. It was this – it was a laptop set on a plinth and on the screen of the laptop was a live webcast and the webcast was of you, yes you, you there, right now, at this very moment, sitting, reading a blog post called 'My Little Piece of Prize Winning Art'.

Nobody knew who you were or understood the significance of your being there. Everyone got a bit passionate. A bit angry. They came over all French and wine glasses were flung at the stage. I had to grab the laptop and flee but I'm safe now and I have you here with me. I'm looking at you as you read this very blog post. You, yes you, my little piece of prize winning art.

(There was a generous cash prize too but if you think I should share it with you you can piss off. You were all my idea.)

BEN WEST

The painting above is called The Treaty of Penn with the Indians. Click to enlarge and have a proper look at it. It's wonderful. It depicts the coming together of early Anglo settlers with indigenous types in North America. The painting was done by the artist Benjamin West, who claimed he was taught how to paint with pigments by natives. Ben's is a wonderful origin story. It's like the origin story of a comic superhero. Ben was an American art superhero in a way. I love his surname too. You can't get much better than West can you? It's tremendously Occidental. Ben West, The Man Who Painted America. Sounds like a comic doesn't it? So much history does really. It's all just an exciting story.

The painting is almost like the cover of a comic too. The United States #2 - $1. Have you noticed the way the focus is on the linen or whatever it is that the genuflecting trader is offering the injuns? It's central to the composition. The light falls upon the offering. This is the first act of trade, the thing that civilised and defined North America. The way the roll of material is portrayed puts me in mind of the infant Christ in Ruebens' Adoration of the Shepherds. Have a gander at the detail below and see if you agree.

Christ means 'saviour'. The first superhero, Christ, saved us all just as trade saved North America. That's the story of Ben's comic cover, I mean the painting. The linen is trade in its infancy just like Christ is an infant in the Adoration. It's a good story. We like our stories don't we?

People are still telling this story today, evangelising about it, going from door to door, or at least from plush resort to plush resort, in various parts of the world. Have you heard the story? It's like the story involving the twelve apostles but it's a newer story involving the G8. It's a good story. A satisfying myth. It could be the story in the comic with Ben's painting on the cover featuring the baby Jesus like linen. The only difference between the baby Jesus and the linen being that the baby Jesus wasn't purposefully riddled with a genocidal dose of fuckin smallpox. LOL!

WHY BOTHER?

(pictured above: waiting for me to call)

I’m working on a new play. It concerns a naked woman in a wheelie bin. She pops out occasionally and shouts ‘feck the cosmos’ at the audience. Feck the Cosmos is the name of the play as well as the only three words spoken for the entire production. I think it’s going to be a hit. I think it’s going to put me in the limelight. That’s why I find myself contemplating the impression I’d like to make as an artist and a public personality.

I’d like to be seen as a gritty nihilistic sort, a misanthrope whose anti-social ways are tolerated because he is so highly regarded. I’d be known as a drinker too but not the type that has an Africa shaped piss stain on the crotch of his pants. I’d like to be the louche sort. Pissed in an elegantly witty way. Suavely inebriated. Like a non-bowsie Brendan Behan. Brendan Behan but dapper. A kind of Brendan Behan meets Bryan Ferry if that’s possible to imagine. I’d be debonair but also down at heel, earthy, genuine. I’d also like be known as a convention breaker. I’d be a source of both great worry and fascination at social functions. I’d know no airs and graces and wouldn’t suffer fools gladly. Oh, and I’d like to punch a critic at some stage. I’d punch a snivelling little critic on the jaw and roughly take his willing spouse on the same night, and in his bed.

It would be great to leave many lovers in my wake. I can imagine it, a trail of dishevelled and heartbroken debris wailing the words: ‘I can’t live without him!’ I would be the dirty secret of the rich and famous. Famous husbands would look at famous wives and know these wives are thinking of me, minds unmoored and blissfully adrift in the memory of the devastating things I did to them. Sassy female journalists would attempt to catch me out in interviews but instead they would meet my penetrating gaze and struggle for words. They would buckle and moisten and awaken in a hotel room the following day, too late to get their copy in for the next edition and unable to find their knickers.

I’d like to be seen as a philosopher also, a grim sort. A dispenser of uncomfortable yet irrefutable truths. I’d talk of ‘The Cosmic Jax', an existential bowl in which we all float about like pieces of shit. I’d describe Nietzsche as ‘a syphilitic gobshite’ and an ‘optimist’. ‘The Abyss my arse’, I’d say, ‘the Abyss is a holiday camp compared to The Cosmic Jax’. Pundits would gasp but know that I am correct. Leaders of religious faiths would step down upon hearing my words, declaring they simply can’t continue in their sham beliefs.

I’d also very much like it if I was still a point of discussion, study, and debate years after my death. I’d like my identity to become increasingly enigmatic as centuries pass. I’d like future generations to wonder if I ever even existed or if I was an aggregation of other people or maybe a woman or a child or a visitor from another dimension or maybe just a frequency, a sound, a hum, or a buzz with a faint crackling voice lost within it. An eerie broadcast that can only be heard on shortwave radio in the dead of night. I’d like people to theorise all these things before finally concluding that I must have been God and treating my works as holy texts. I can see it now, women kneeling and whispering praise as their fingers glide over the words I have written, transfixed by the pages before them, doe eyed and adoring.

This is the impression I would like to make. This is how I would like to be regarded and eventually remembered. It’s not too much to ask. I feel it is my due. I feel it merits my worth as an artist. My work is good. No, it is astonishing. I am without peer and should be venerated. Why else would I write? Why else would I make art? Why bother? What would be the point? It’s not like I have anything to say.

FLOGGING SH1T£

When I was a kid, we made money collecting empty bottles and returning them to the supermarket. You’d make enough for a 2000AD comic and maybe a choc-ice. My brothers were a step ahead though. They used gather up any useless old shite they could find and sell it to modern art collectors for several grand.

I remember we had this old record player with a wobbly turntable so my brothers glued an ornamental clog my mam picked up in Holland to it and headed off to the Hugh Lane Gallery. When they got there they plugged in the record player and the little clog began to revolve in an undulating fashion. They told the curator the record player/clog was a ‘piece’ called I Can Hear Them On The Stairs and was inspired by The Diary of Anne Frank. The curator got very excited and gave the lads 17 grand. When they got home they found Mam a bit narked about the missing clog so cheered her up by paying off the mortgage.

I remember deciding to try it. I was a novice though. Being younger, I had a narrower frame of reference than my brothers and so found ‘flogging shite’ (as we called it) difficult. I did have one success though when I scooped up a load of golf balls from the bottom of a boating lake near the local pitch and putt course. I put the golf balls in a laundry basket I pinched from the house and carried them up to the Hugh Lane. I told the curator the basket of balls was a piece called Amazing Grace. When she asked me why the piece was called Amazing Grace, I smiled smugly and said the golf balls ‘once were lost but now are found’. Pretty clever I thought.

My confidence deflated when the curator gave me a sceptical look and sighed. I knew I had to come up with something better if I was to make the cash I needed for a swimming pool I was planning to install in the garden. Sudden inspiration struck, from who knows where, and I found myself telling the curator that my work was ‘a bespoke retro-flexive analogism re: the betrayal of objects by the unconscionable neglect of both distance and time’. The curator liked that and forked over enough cash for both a pool and a waterslide. I was fairly fucking delighted I must say.

I never made another sale after that and, once they were financially secure for the rest of their lives, my brothers gave up ‘flogging shite’ too. I hear a new crowd has gotten in on the act since. Apparently there’s this English girl called Tracy Emin who’s been sorted for 2000AD and choc-ice money for around twenty years now. Good on her I suppose.

Oh, the wittiness, . . .the awful bloody wittiness of it all.