The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap (Chapter 3, Part 3)

                                                                              3.

On December 6, 2006 The Stuck-up Artists reached new fits of apoplectic peak at Tate Britain’s £705.000 purchase of the glitter and dung Turner Prize winning Nigerian/British artist Chris Ofili’s thirteen paintings of a Macaque-crested monkey, named Floy. Entitled ‘The Upper Room’- due to the fact that an exact replica of Floy’s room on the upper-most floor of Silly Home Valley for the Insane had to be copied and rebuilt in an upper wing of the Tate before Floy would consent to pose as his recent alter-ego, Lord Raven, (a defunct English aristocrat complete with faded grandiose surroundings, hanging by an old Etonian tie above a camp bed littered with Y-fronts, cheap gin and genealogies) - the collection would be the gallery’s proud new acquisition.

The Stuck-ups, who had had to get buses to the demo, were incensed. They donned monkey masks and threw dung at anyone entering; this had the curious effect of turning the staunchly anti-conceptual-art protestors into...well, conceptual art. We might try to fathom the mystery as to what it was exactly in the thirteen portraits of the real-life Lord Raven that so offended the Stuck-up artists.

A: The portrayal of Lord Raven, an establishment figure in sad alcoholic demise, by a monkey.

B: The elevation of Chris Ofili to giddier heights of fame through the Tate’s £705-000 purchase of a work of art the Stuck-ups deemed lacking in artistic merit.

C: The fact that The Upper Room also happened to be a reconstruction of the interior of The Chelsea Arts Club down to the very beam from which Lord Raven aka Floy swung.

D: The raw truth that since the closing-down sale that was the British Empire Raven’s end was the likely end for those trained to administrate colonies that no longer existed.

E:  Unalloyed envy.

F: The original and brilliant use of elephant dung the Stuck-up artists wish they had thought of first (See option E).

G: Floy’s refusal to relinquish the Eton tie on loan to the gallery.

H: All of the above.

The fact that the right reply is B, I am forced to admit to not having a clue why. I figure you haven’t a clue what I am talking about either. Chris Ofili does not have a clue either; neither does he need to, endowed as he is with such rare artistic brilliance. Being such a humble, kind man he would be puzzled as to why anyone would be mean enough to harbor grudges that fell into any of the above categories.

In the ensuing years Stuck-up founders Tabitha Galsworthy and Anthony Christ-Jones have put a great deal of effort into undermining both Ofili’s and Floy’s involvement in The Upper Room, discrediting them both as originators of the work through the same small-minded logic that still seeks to discredit both Shakespeare his works because he lacked a university education and Barack Obama his autobiographies because...? They sought to prove the deceased real-life Lord Raven as the only possible fit for a Success Ideation Quotient the Stuck-ups could handle. As Lord Raven lacked the advantage of being able to defend himself this – in the eyes of the Stuck-ups- gave them an advantage elevating his Ideation Quotient in the eyes of the public to Above Reasonable Doubt. Basically the more dead you are the easier it is to make up lies about you-whether you like it or not-and raise your name on the shoulders of other people’s giant dung heaps to everlasting fame.

There is indeed a huge gulf between God-like Ideation Quotient one can aspire to  while still on earth and that which can be attained when dead; the Dictator Ideation Quotient is actually an opaque glass ceiling of limitation that is only shattered once you have been hunted down and executed; the Rarity Ideation Quotient,-your transformation into actual ether- surreally, increases your real-world value.

Indeed there is no point in being a catch when you are dead. The chasm between real success and imagined success depends indeed on your Ideation Quotient. As the late and great queen Quentin Crisp pronounced, “ If you imagine you are a victim, then victim will be your style! If you imagine you are undeserving of success when you get there then ingratiating sycophant, my dears, will also be your style! “.

“There is no point in climbing on the shoulders of the unsuccessful or moderately successful to accelerate your rise”. The  psychopathically ambitious British financial rogue-trader Nick Leeson said in evidence at his hearing “Blue-Sky-thinking is all well and good but Blue-sky can be experienced very close to the ground and one is in fear of rubbing shoulders with the ‘Gormless,’ or those ‘Without-Sky, your Honour. I sought out friendships and connections with Jet-Stream-Thinkers to raise my profile and help my plan mature to its ultimate aim of reaching those who breathe the rarefied air of Outer-Orbit-Thinking”.

“Those who attain giddy heights tend to become a little light headed”, said the Judge as he sentenced Leeson and a whole raft of bankers to twenty years of solitary confinement to limit their contact with any sky whatsoever, metaphorical or real.

Science: Giants tend to imagine themselves to be well over six foot, if they are not do they have a realistic chance of entering the professions ?We don’t suppose so. The requirement of being a giant is six times six feet, thirty-six feet to be a serious player, though those giants who are, say, fifty or sixty feet tall have the best views of all. Those below a particular height should really and truely stop muttering incessantly in the back of New York cabs and anywhere else for that matter. “I could’ve been a contender”. This disgruntled world-view has become automatic in those who seek to promote intelligence over height.

That the Stuck-up artist Anthony Christ-Jones had a higher opinion of himself on the day of the Tate’s purchase of The Upper Room by Chris Ofili, is clear.  Christ-Jones took bitter umbrage that as a trustee of the Tate, Ofili should benefit from in-house financial advantages while the Stuck-ups were at pains to sell a painting at Portobello Road market at a 30% discount let alone get the whole cannon of work  accepted by the Tate for free; The idea that Ofili could be 30.000%  richer than Christ-Jones was ridiculous.  All that can be said is that, like the hardening process of the elephant dung with the use of a hairdryer, but in reverse; as we shall see, the winds of a thousand solar flairs would not be enough to soften a constipated Anthony-Christ-Jones.

I am of the opinion that an individuals’ Ideation Quotient towards an institution can be brought to a tipping point. I once again challenge you to deny that the Turner prize winners, one and all attain a decent score on the Imagination Ideation Quotient, and the Turner accolade proved the fact that, perfect examination results at art college, corporate sponsorship and interstellar fame notwithstanding, there was no pooper-scooper large enough to eradicate them from Christ-Jones tormented inner landscape.

Let’s peruse the list here-below of the first fifteen Turner Prize winners since 1984 and meditate on the mendacious demise of the underachievers omitted.

Malcolm Merling

Howard Hodgkin

Gilbert and George

Richard Deacon

Tony Cragg

Richard Long

Anish Kapoor

Grenville  Davey

Rachel Whitbread

Antony Gormley

Damien Hirst

Douglas Gordon

Gillian Waring

Chris Ofili

Steve MacQueen

The last name on the list, Steve MacQueen an artist of African decent and consecutive 1999 Turner Prize winner after Ofili, was another brutal kick to an already agitated hornets nest and the Stuck-ups proverbial wings beat like the fans a thousand Southern belles on the verandas of a thousand plantations at the news of emancipation. That same year, one coup de grace of many coups de grace  was the emergence and pre-eminence of Christ-Jones ex-girlfriend into the public eye with her installation My Fucked-Up Head.

Here are the rest of the Turner Prize winners which includes the cross-dressing artist from Pottersbarn, Graceful Perrier for his site-specific installations of National Heritage Blue Plagues sign-posting the residences of all nineteen former Turner Prize winners; a curiously innovative, if annihilating concept, as the plaques are traditionally awarded twenty years after death.

Wolfgang Tilmans

Martin Creed

Keith Tyson

Graceful Perrier

Jeremy Deller

Simon Starling

Tomma Abts

Mark Wallinger

Mark Leckey

Richard Wright

Susan Philipsz

Martin Boyce

Apparently, to win the Turner Prize a sense of entitlement is not enough, and those smarting at the entrance of the Tate Britain year on and year out worshiping Our Lady of Universal Ill-will, know this all too well.

The idea of creating a repeating triptych of thirteen differently coloured simians around the unressurrectible central patriarch Lord Raven was influenced by an admixture of the biography of the real-life Lord Raven written by his social worker, the lugubrious poem The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe and the various shady intentions of family members in the famous Last Supper film Festen. These three works, a biography, a poem and a film were the only entertainments allowed Floy in the upper room of Silly Home Valley for the Creatively Unhinged.

For years The Raven, the complete antithesis to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, promised Floy the curiously comforting prospect of a unending void of nothingness after death, the biography the means to get there, and Festen allowed him respite from the grim past time of contemplating...well, nothingness. He re-enacted each of the thirteen characters with the use of variously coloured light bulbs strangely allowed by his carers.

His psychiatrist Abel Blumental condoned the practise as a form of Gestalt; the identification with thirteen different personas with the use of a lottery of ambient lighting was seen as a welcome distraction from Floy’s previous obsession. As long as he was prevented from re-enacting the final moment of the adventurous Lord Raven’s  grandiose demise, the therapy might work. Somewhere in the midst of his research began Floy writing and re-writing the sentence, “Your paintings are stuck up, You are stuck up - Stuck up, Stuck up, Stuck up”, on the walls of his room with coloured crayon.

The Midwychians, those midheaven albino extra-terrestrials who taught Floy binary code were, it appears, once again in contact; they had traced him after scouring America’s loftiest educational institutions recruiting a few more socially anorectic types along the way. Their presence in Floy’s addled brain first manifested itself as background white-noise until he, once again was able to receive every TV and Radio station and Broadband within a phenomenally wide radius; He had joined the sociopathic hive mind, and the voices of those races accidently abducted from loving family backgrounds who lived together, if somewhat noisily, could be heard distinctly crying for home above those malevolent races who shove their children into private schools at seven and their old into homes, who droned, “There are only so many hours in a day,” incessantly. Through this din Anthony Christ-Jones’ ex girlfriend’s now legendary rant “Your paintings are stuck up…” traced an enervating leitmotiv through Floy’s days and nights; no space was left uncrayoned. Somewhere a deluded mixed-race statistician was insidiously promoting the pernicious doctrine of Popular Eugenics and Gilded Spawn while a Nigerian/British artist and a Macaque Crested Monkey were beating a path to each other’s door.