Out-and-Outliars;The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap. (Chapter 3, Part 1)

The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap, Part 1

         

                             “YOUR PAINTINGS ARE STUCK UP,

                 YOU ARE STUCK UP – STUCK UP,

                              STUCK UP, STUCK UP”  former girlfriend of stuck up Anthony Christ-Jones.

In 2010 Tate Britain exhibited the works of the Nigerian/British artist and 1998 Turner Prize winner, an affable man named Chris Ofili.

The Tate Britain show featured, among the artist’s many phenomenally successful works, a piece called The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars. Created in 1998 The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars is an 293.x 400cm paper collage incorporating oil paint, glitter, polyester resin and elephant dung on linen, featuring the faces of over a dozen negro stars encased in...well black stars. These avatars of ebonic success surround a gigantic black shamanic figure, presumably the artist himself. Like all his other works in the Tate Britain exhibition its frame rises up from the gallery floor mounted on the shoulders of a giant dung heap. Elephant dung to be precise, two dried dollops of it to be exact. Of the many visitors among the artistic crowd  who snorted and sniffed their way around the exhibit, suffering in silent scorn the adverse fact that an ex-colonial subject could be uppity enough to pass them, two self-entitled artists who themselves had preternatural expectations on who should pass examination entries into the best art schools in the land and who should not, declared that according to their artistic standards, Chris Ofili’s work on display before them was ‘superbly under-qualified to call itself art’.

One  night in 1999, a mere few weeks after Chris Ofili was announced as the first ever black winner of the Turner Prize a fierce opposition of Stuck-up Artists formed a mob outside the gallery. “We are inheritors of the English Old School of Painters, Mr Ofili isn’t!” The smarted crowd shouted as the camera zeroed in from a panorama of the disgruntled and Stuck Up Artists assembled to a huge poster of a fresh-faced dark-skinned physically robust man in his twenties. ‘The average Englishman will not accept this person’s artistic kudos in a hundred years’, a representative of the Stuck-Up Artists announced. In 2010, it was two founders of this same group, Tabitha Galsworthy and Anthony Christ-Jones, who stood before The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars.

Anthony Christ-Jones stepped forward from the mob, “ The intelligentsia, who have not felt the need to leave the hallowed confines of the Chelsea Art’s Club since the death of Gainsborough,  will not think highly or well of The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars.” The Turner organizer Sir Nicholas Serota looked at Christ-Jones as if Christ-Jones were shit and he, Serota were cleaning fluid.

“Indeed, I think it could herald culture’s demise”. Christ-Jones went on with genuine disgust. Having a high Ideation Quotient (IQ, having an ingrained and specifically  high-minded idea of oneself as a member of a cultural elite). “There’s tradition, and now these people... “ He stepped back into the mob, the jealousy in his countenance visibly evident. “ We, the cultured elite can not continue to accept this ridicule...This definitely has to be stopped!”

Since the late nineteen-nineties Chris Ofili, hugely famous where the Stuck-ups are hugely not, has come to represent everything that is genuinely adored in Britain about out-and-out liars. He alone, and not the Stuck-ups, is feted in the media. Again, a documentary about his work won international prizes where a self-made film of the Stuck-ups vanished into obscurity; the critic who precipitated its swift demise described the point of the film and the Stuck-ups as ‘a morose error’.

You don’t need to be a telepath to know that, when tested, the results of Ofili’s Ideation Quotient is within the boundaries of humble whereas  those of the Stuck-ups are quite frankly stuck right up there...too high up, indeed, to be measured, actually.

The Ideation Quotient test (IQ:: People who see themselves especially and uniquely too smart for...well, other people) asks some pretty strange questions. “Were you  speaking elaborate sentences at the age of six weeks? Were you able to discern the cultural inferiority of Radio 3 over Radio 4 when you were three years old? At four years of age did you ask your grandparents, and parents why they failed to treat you like a deity? Do you remember the utter disappointment at being totally misunderstood?

The Old School thought that if this foreigner, ‘who’s father couldn’t even speak our language properly’, can walk in with his scant knowledge, after they had studied all there is to know about art, and instruct us on the subject with work one would find in a child’s exercise book then they all might as well be plebs. “Where would Bertrand Russell be if he has been super-ceded intellectually by that mulatto javeler Fatima Whitbread ? We’d have the Principia Tapioca! They bellowed“. Chris Offili took this all in his stride; their rants were the perfect opportunity for him to take a nap.

“He could nap for hours” A ‘brother’ remarked. “through long lectures at art school  He napped through the French painters, then the Russian art movement he napped through the lesson of some pretty wise teachers who nevertheless became his friend; he first learned to nap in church”.

A second ‘bro’ called Steve said “See it, when Christopher was a young teenager, he would smear photographs in excrement and call it art. What began as a joke he made a career out of that could compare to Andy Warhol’s in both attitude and success. Bam, a man who had napped his way through school, dosed fitfully through exams was famous in half the time it takes through tireless hard work from semester to semester. To him it was hilarious. Nobody realized and when they did there was nothing they could do about it.

Now on the stage of Tate Britain on the evening of The Turner Prize. Chris Ofili, positively narcoleptic, approached the microphone his eyes drooping with the desire to take yet another nap, his voice barely audible, the room of cut glass chandeliers and equally cut-glass accents,  spun like a whirly-gig, an exotic topiary, or like a gallery of ancient and modern portraits seeking to arrange itself in some begrudged new hierarchy shuffling forward and doubling back and colliding all set in motion by the arrival of this black conductor above them about  to be crowned king.

“Um, ah”, The crowd, having decided that a colonial slave trader attitude was the only one they found they possessed in their  armoury, studied their gilded invitation cards incredulously. Sir Nicohlas Serota, who resisted the urge to hug himself in Semitic glee at some private and mischievious secret, still running with the slave block theme, held the turner prize winning money £12-000, aloft. “ We all know the integrity of art and that art has no price.” Serota annouced. Offili seemed to be momentarily weighing up the Serotas sagacious comment but, actually he was merely steadying himself as deep wave of fatigue was causing him to sway dramatically. The three-tiered chandeliers and the prisms emanating from the gigantic diamond earrings on loan began to whorl around the room as though the party below had been instinctively and simultaneously stirred into motion by an ancient rumour that would they feel less culturally at odds among the Henry Moore’s next door and were leaving through conflicting exits en masse...which in fact they actually were.  Allowing Sir Serota to raise his hand in the air like a prize boxer and just before entering the REM stage of his nap Chris Ofili shouted out at the top of his voice and to a now totally empty hall. “Money! Money! Where’s my money?!”.