I'll Give You a Shout.

Had a lot of fun with Robin Ince at our preview of Pointless Anger, Righteous Ire. We had an hour to talk about things that make us furious. It should go without saying that an hour was simply not enough. Even our Top 10 Things That Annoy Us Today list had 12 things in it and we only talked about 4 of them because we kept remembering more things that upset us. Thanks to everyone who came to it. We have a few more previews and then we'll be performing it at the Edinburgh Fringe at The GRV from the 6th-18th August.

This is something I wrote for the show last night. I think I even got round to actually saying some of it. This was in the My Angry Hero section. It's been a while since I read about this man but I think I've got my very basic story right. If not, let me know. I realise I'm cheating in this blog by just cutting and pasting something but, you know, fuck off. This is free. Enjoy:

MANZONI.

Do you like art? I love art. I’m happy to say that I’m fortunate enough to have a collection of incredibly beautiful paintings on my phone. Banksy. All that shit. Brilliant ringtone too. I KEEL YOU! Very funny.

I think it’s safe to say that all art before the 1950’s was fucking shit. They should just get rid of it. It’s all pictures of fruit or pictures of God or pictures of God eating fruit. I like the one with the banana. That was cheeky. But really all art was terrible and all artists were wankers and the art world was dead. Before the 50’s, nothing had happened in art since before cave paintings when people used to make statues out of mammoth tusks and man-dung. Some of us had moved on from then. I’m talking to you, Emin.

But luckily in the 1950’s a man would come along and save us. Piero Manzoni made incredible art. He did amazing paintings of silhouettes of things like scissors and pliers and very quickly became the Italian art version of our very own Morph. Brilliantly, he was angry. He hated the art world. Why would he not? It’s pretentious, elitist and apparently even Timmy fucking Mallett can do it. So he used that anger wisely. He started selling toot to some of the very best galleries in the world. Canvases painted white. Not just one of them. A whole collection of completely white canvases. The reviews? INCREDIBLE!

Balls.

He drew really basic line drawings with a twist. He rolled them up and put them in a tube, sealed the tube and then signed it. If you opened it and looked at the painting it would be RUINED! The reviews? MAGNIFICENT!

For fuck’s sake.

He blew up balloons, sold them and called the collection “Artist’s Breath”. The reviews? THAT IS THE BOMB!

Tittybits!

Right. He sold eggs with his thumb print on it, boxes that if you stood on them then you were art and even painted bread. He could do nothing wrong and all the art world loved him.

Except for one reviewer.

One of Italy’s art glitterati got bored of Manzoni and complained that galleries would buy ANYTHING that he made no matter what it was. He could sell his own shit for it’s weight in gold.

My favourite piece of art that Piero Manzoni ever created was his collection known as The Artist’s Shit. This beautiful man, a cross between Picasso and Beadle, put his own shit into 99 30gr tins and sold them to galleries in accordance with the daily exchange rates for gold.

I’d like to see Timmy Mallett do that. I would hate to see Timmy Mallett do that.



I'm really looking forward to getting angry with Robin on this show. I've only been awake about 20 minutes but this article, that I saw via Paul Sinha's link, has made me angrier than I should be at this time. Janet Street-Porter really is an incredible cunt. I don't have time to write about it now so please leave a comment for me so I don't have to write about it. Thanks: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1278510/Depression-Its-just-new-trendy-illness.html

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