Factual Nonsense: The art and death of Joshua Compston

Foreword

I am essentially prepared to be a martyr. A dose of wild reason/Factual Nonsense must now be ushered  in…

It was one sleepy Sunday afternoon, sitting in Joshua Compston’s bedroom by the Thames in leafy Chiswick, when he dropped the bombshell, I am going to move to the East End and start a gallery to revolutionise the lives of the working classes, he announced with great aplomb.

Now, Shoreditch in those days was the antithesis of what Joshua saw as the middle class consumerism and aesthetic corruption that riddled the whole of West London. The entire country was just coming out of another recession in the early 1990s, suffering a tremendous hangover from a major property crash. Shoreditch seemed a dilapidated and unpopulated place, but to Joshua it was an undiscovered country. He settled on a former factory in the then run-down backwater called Charlotte Road, where even the local pub, The Bricklayers Arms, was closed at weekends due to the lack of punters. It was quite an unremarkable street, where the most remarkable things were destined to happen. Joshua called his gallery ‘Factual Nonsense’.

Joshua was an unusual child with an overwhelming rage against everything outside himself, yet whilst still a schoolboy aspired to own a gallery to improve people’s lives through art, much to the derision of his school teachers who would admonish him for thinking it could be so simple. Yet he did it. Joshua’s gallery ‘Factual Nonsense’ (FN) was quite unlike any other. Called a ‘crazy powerhouse of ideas’, it was a cultural think-tank located in a then run-down East End area that would later become a cohesive and creative hub (since rebranded as ‘Silicon Roundabout’). Joshua was the driving force that turned the area’s fortunes and reputation around. Under the auspices of his FN banner, he held some of the most important and influential public art events of the late 20th century.

The first of these was an anarchic swipe at the notion of a traditional village fete called ‘A Fete Worse than Death’, with some of the biggest yet still then unknown stars of the art world, including Damien Hirst and Angus Fairhurst, who famously dressed as clowns producing the first spin paintings at the fete (for sale at the princely sum of £1). Whilst Hirst’s spin machine has, from lowly beginnings at the fete, gone on to appear recently at the World Economic Forum, a billionaire’s playground, creating spin paintings for rich oligarch’s wives as entertainment, Joshua was to die alone, poverty stricken, back in 1996 on the cusp of international fame. He never reaped the rewards that were to come from the economic upturn and Charles Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition.

His death was a marker for the beginning of an era of international fame and success for his contemporaries and the end of the ‘classic’ avant-garde.

Joshua was a classic avant-garde character who disliked the public as it was and hoped that a new public would come, that it would form itself and come into being because he had conceived of it. The spawning of the creative melting pot which is now Hoxton and Old Street’s rebranding as ‘Silicon Roundabout’ stands as a lasting testament that a new ‘public’ did come in his wake. What distinguished Joshua as a classic avant garde-ist was that he believed his failure was also the failure of society and that he had a special responsibility for something bigger than himself. He took personal risks which underscored his ability to foresee future developments, that he had foretold, and the huge responsibility he felt before his death.

A few years ago I was with Joshua’s mother Bronwen at the graveside of her husband, Joshua’s stepfather George. A bleak, cold occasion, Bronwen surveyed the graveyard pointing in the direction of Joshua’s grave a few plots up, exclaiming she could accept the death of her husband but not accept that her son had been buried and forgotten. Life had dealt Bronwen a cruel hand and the injustice of it all made me determined to do what I could to correct the situation. There are many friends of Joshua’s who are more able to write about him than me, but after four years of trying to get them to take over the project, I was left with a series of false starts, half-hearted platitudes and total inertia. Recently, after the untimely deaths of two of Joshua’s key collaborators, Piers Wardle and Tom Shaw, I decided that if no one else was going to do it then I would have to get on with the book myself before any more of us died.

Not being a writer, rather a visual artist by trade, I was left with the question of how to go about writing about my former artistic sparring partner. Joshua was such a multi-faceted character who meant different things to different people. My Joshua was not quite the same as other people’s Joshua; it would be all but impossible to bring this across if I wrote a standard biography written from the singular fixed viewpoint of ‘the author’. To circumvent this; I decided to conduct a series of interviews with a wide cross section of his former friends and colleagues, hoping that this would bring to life his multi-faceted and contradictory nature. The interviewees and their responses were then numbered and coded, allowing me to physically cut all the interviews and follow the chronology without worrying who said what, working blind to who was famous and who was not no weight was given to the rank or status of the interviewee.

Through this more egalitarian form of editing the text took on the form of a huge physical collage with paper, words, statements and declarations pasted on huge thirty metre rolls of paper hanging from my ceiling, across the walls and unwinding on the floor, looking like an installation that Joshua might have exhibited himself at Factual Nonsense. It did occur to me one day whilst on the floor editing that he would have enjoyed the sight of me toiling on my hands and knees in my studio, bowed down, at work in his memory. It would have appealed to his messiah complex.

I am grateful to Joshua’s mother Bronwen Lenton for allowing me access to Joshua’s diaries for reference and publication in this book. The Compston estate has retained no veto over the text. Publication of the full interviews verbatim will not be possible for some years due to the English laws of libel. Some phrases have been omitted, not because they are libellous, but because I have concluded that their publication would be intolerably offensive or distressing to living persons or surviving relations of the recently dead. I have tried to distinguish between passages capable in my opinion of causing lasting distress, and those – again in my opinion – likely to cause temporary embarrassment, irritation or anger. Removal of all disparaging remarks would have distorted the text unduly. In some places, instead of cutting out libellous or offensive passages altogether, I have replaced the name with a dash. Those people who have been singled out for an amount of criticism by the interviewees have done so of their own volition and this does not in any way reflect my thoughts or input.

My guns are directed at the banality of modern culture; it needs to be massively reinvented.

Joshua loved text and words. He loved to communicate through notes, letters and posters, but he died just before the communication explosion of the digital age took hold. With the advent of mobile phones, texts and emails who knows what he would have come up with. He left a huge body of writing behind him. A prolific letter writer and workaholic anxious for a world depopulated of commercial expedient ugliness and repopulated by artistic beauty, he had a global vision unrealised, a romantic, dying on the precipice of the Internet age. And yet, for someone who did not learn to read and write until the age of ten, he achieved an enormous amount. The last of the great manifesto writers and always ahead of the game, he predicted the resurrection of the manifesto form by almost two decades. His own proclamations were at best iconoclastic, hubristic and utopian.

Joshua realised that capitalism had co-opted the manifesto’s language by osmosis. They had become mission statements and corporate slogans, hence his unrealised banner project, erecting huge 20 x 20 metre banners across London carrying ‘aggressive’ and ‘idealist’ slogans on the front and conventional advertising on the back, manifesto as viral marketing.

I desire nothing less than a vicious volte-face of the ‘art world’ and the time when people awake and start to destroy all the forms of compromise that surround them.

It is amazing how many of Joshua’s ideas come up over the years paraphrased and regurgitated by others. Hans Ulrich Olbrist’s manifesto marathon, held at the Serpentine, was pure vintage Compston. With even an appearance by his old friends Gilbert and George, it felt like a watered down Factual Nonsense event. Constantly sparking ideas and more talented than many of his contemporaries, if he had lived he would have been formidable. Although he despised their post-modern hang-ups of self-contradiction, obligatory cynicism and knowing doubt.

By nature, a very mischievous character, Joshua courted controversy whilst demanding the unconditional love of others. I have deliberately left the inherent contradictions of the recollections about Joshua in the book. The evidence is in hand, it is up to you, the reader, to sit and draw your own conclusions. Martyr? Fraud? Hero? Possibly all three.

Joshua made his presence known wherever he went. He amassed friends and associates like a voracious butterfly collector. He knew so many people it became impossible to fit everyone of note in the book without the text becoming incredibly unwieldy. Of the notable but numerous people I did not include was his last girlfriend Olga, an enigmatic, highly sexed beautiful Russian with whom he had a passionate relationship. The first time she met Joshua’s sister, Emily, she stuck her tongue in Emily’s ear, purred and said I always wanted to fuck brother and sister. Alas poor Olga never quite got over Joshua’s death and was eventually found washed up on the shores of the Thames as a bloated cadaver. For those living who I interviewed but was unable to include, I apologise profusely.

I give so much and get so little in return.

Of course there is another book here, amidst all these interviews. That would be the story of how I had to find, coerce, subvert and on occasion emotionally blackmail people who refused to talk into talking. Towards the end, Joshua became used to being shunned and, feeling discarded, he would often say,I am like an aircraft carrier people land on me then take off. If no man is an island, Joshua was the next best thing, an aircraft carrier that could reposition itself amid the choppy cultural seas of the 1990s. With his immaculate white suit and shock of blonde hair, he was reminiscent of the Klaus Kinski character in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, wanting to bring culture to the jungle, considered laughable and mad by many but motivated by the ‘noblest of intentions’, his task as herculean as hauling a boat over a mountain in hostile territory.

He will to some extent always remain an enigma. Many believe he did not take his own life, although there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Through the course of the interviews, one felt that some could not contemplate that he committed suicide, that their insistence on it all being a terrible mistake salved their conscience. Inevitably conspiracy theories as to his death abound and myths have been woven in the shadow of his demise. The last time I spoke to him was on the telephone. In the background I could hear Pulp’s pop anthem ‘Common People’ playing, the lyrics holding a strange resonance for what had passed, and what was to come. The night he died he had been to see the exhibition of another who had died tragically young, Jean Michel-Basquait at the Serpentine gallery, and was reading Irving Welsh’s Trainspotting. When news of his death was released, many in the art world thought it was another of his ‘stunts’ and that he would inevitably pop up somewhere. For months after he died, people kept saying they had seen him, caught glimpses of him out of the corner of their eye at art openings, fleeting views of him disappearing round corners, and melded mirages of him marching down Shaftesbury Avenue to his beloved Colony Room Club for drinks.

Purists might be worried but the end game is more important. Art should be as multitudinous and kaleidoscopic as possible.

Art as a dynamo for urban regeneration was Joshua’s ultimate aim, but unfortunately he did not live to see his ideas put into practice. Had he lived, his plans for the 1996 fete event were to be much more focused on (one of) Joshua’s grand plans: the revival of the English High Street as a nation of joyous shopkeepers (how prescient that seems now as the notion of the High Street is dying on the vine). He surveyed sites in Southwark, Clerkenwell and Kings Cross as potential locations to hold the next fete as a collaboration between Factual Nonsense and the now unsurprisingly defunct, ‘Death Cigarettes’ company. He was receiving hundreds of letters and applications to appear at the fete from artists all around the world, as well as bags full of letters from people pleading to be interns at his gallery, wanting to bathe in the reflected glow of his infamy, yet blissfully ignorant of the perilous state of both his mind and finances. He had also been planning an exhibition of artist designed coffins called ‘An exhibition about death’, before he himself succumbed. This is no ordinary tale; it’s the compelling story of a young man who wanted to change the world. True? Yes. Nonsense? Maybe. Factual Nonsense? Absolutely.

Darren Coffield

Introduction

MAUREEN PALEY When we speak about the avant-garde, it literally means those who come before the battle or those finding the territory and staking out the territory before the great battle. They often fall in order to make way for the others. And so it’s a very strange thing the term really does mean coming before and the avant-garde is often in danger.

JAY JOPLING I remember before he died he contacted me about an exhibition on death. He wanted some of my artists to get involved with an exhibition of artist designed coffins he was trying to put together. I liked the idea. The next thing I knew, I was carrying his.

GARY HUME I mean, the grief of his death is not only the fact that he’s died, but the fact that his type of visionary and anarchism died with it. And there was no one else who could take his place to show that there is an alternative to just simple capitalism.

DARREN COFFIELD If you look at what he did and wrote, he had an amazing dousing instinct for how the art world was to change in the decades to come. He had an unnerving antenna, like J.G. Ballard.

RICHARD LILLEY Ah yes. It’s true, that’s very striking isn’t it? He was a remarkably charismatic man. At the time there were people who weren’t loyal to him and there were quite a lot of people, I think, who let him down very badly. I think he was probably an easy person to let down because he was so difficult. And obviously subsequently he was clearly a very, very extraordinary person. I remember his mother saying – and I didn’t agree with her at all at the time – He’s just going to be a footnote to the history of the YBAs. And I thought, I don’t think he is just going to be a footnote. I think it’s going to be much more than that.

WILLIAM LING Joshua brought a kind of energy. The whole YBA thing was about how to become a career artist. Everything is understated, if you look at those catalogues they produced; Gambler, Freeze, Modern Medicine, it’s all so tasteful. It seems to me their tutors taught these students that you can make crazy art but you need to package it. They did it very successfully, then Joshua’s product blew it out of the water. The idea of Factual Nonsense seems to be the antithesis of the YBAs.

CLEMENTINE DELISS Yeah but you know if there were a few more curators who would name their single-mindedness we would be far better off. Most of the curators who go to courses in Britain or elsewhere today are not encouraged to have their own singular character. And what Joshua could do, which was remarkable, and which belongs to the position of a curator, is that he could dialog with artists. And you can’t be a good curator unless you dialog with artists, unless you know how to have a conversation with people and unless you go and visit them or you’re in a two-way conversation with an artist, otherwise you’re just an organiser of an exhibition and Joshua wasn’t like that. He had brilliant forethoughts and visions and the manic ambitious obsession to do something in a particular way.

TOM SHAW He wanted to be the head of an enormous art movement, but in the end he had no idea how to make or cope with money. He didn’t realise that when you’re young the world will give you a lot of rope to do your own thing, but after a while the world of money gets hold of you and won’t let go. He was a generous and honest nutcase operating in a smug, elitist and dishonest world.

CEDRIC CHRISTIE It was like he was driving this big bus and everyone was on it for the ride but when it came to park it everyone got off and left him to find the money for the meter. I mean they had all had a great journey but they weren’t going to pay the fare.

MAX WIGRAM You know the phrase don’t bite the hand that feeds you? Joshua never really understood that one. He wanted to do things his own way. And as a result it was all pretty tragic. It depends which way you look at it. Either you look at Joshua as tragic or the rest of the world as tragic. It depends on which side of the bed I get out on in the morning because I know what he means. I mean Marc Quinn, which is the bigger tragedy? Joshua or Marc Quinn? To me it’s Marc Quinn. Why anybody buys Marc Quinn I have got no idea at all. Is that success… is that better? I don’t know.

FRED MANN But I suppose what’s the last word on that? The problem is that when people die, not just Joshua, everybody remembers them differently, and everybody thinks that their memory’s the right one and the most important one, and that’s never true.

ANDREW WILSON He had really bad times, the worst of times, he died and then it was lift-off for a lot of people.

1. Foundation

SAM TAYLOR-WOOD I knew in Joshua’s lifetime that he was going to become this sort of fascinating figure posthumously. I knew that he was always going to be the dandy romantic of that time as well. And I think he knew that too.

DARREN COFFIELD The first time I saw him, he was sitting on the steps at Camberwell School of Art on the first day of term wearing a tweed three-piece suit and his grandmother’s mink coat. I admired his balls for wearing the fur coat, we obviously had similar sartorial tastes, he seemed at first glance to be the only person of any interest or note on the entire course. He sat pretending to read Ulysses. He was using the book as both a sign and a social foil. He was obviously checking everybody out from the corner of his eye. He seemed a bit wary of me. He was shy but at the same time quite fearless, a strange combination. I would go out to lunch and every day come back to find him sitting in my chair, smoking in my studio space, contemplating my paintings. He would just sit there saying nothing for about five minutes after my arrival, then suddenly get up without saying a word and walk out. This went on for the whole first term.

TABITHA POTTS A lot of people were pretending to be from a sort of working class background or there was a lot of class stuff going on. Josh was A: not ashamed of being intellectual, and B: not ashamed of being posh, which made him stand out from the other students, and he was a very flamboyant person. A lot of art students might be doing a lot of stuff in their work, but they won’t necessarily have terribly flamboyant personalities and Josh was not ashamed to stand out from the crowd.

CHLOE RUTHVEN Camberwell was a brilliant course. I remember being surprised by how many posh people were there. It seemed to me that there were all these public schoolboys who were doing the foundation for something else. A few people were going to do it before they went on to university. I think it’s probably the best art education I’ve ever had, in terms of, it was brilliantly structured and I thought that the tutors and everybody was really fired up. I remember Josh there really clearly he stuck out as being pompous, self-important, irritating and kind of a bit laughable and clearly something endearing there somewhere but it was really difficult to get a hold of. The thing that really sticks out in my mind is him, in a black gown and mortarboard, persuading the tutors to let him give a lecture on the Victorian sewage system. He stood up on the platform and the audience were in ripped-up denim shorts with tights and boots with splatted paint all over and there he was, delivering this lecture in a black hat and gown. I don’t know how good the lecture was because I wasn’t listening to what he was saying; I was just very aware of the delivery style which was just quite astonishing and it was so extreme and so far out as some pompous public schoolboy on stage that it had a subversive element to it. It was very memorable.

SUSANNAH LOVIS At his eighteenth birthday party, he went into a sulk and locked himself in his bedroom. All his friends were in the garden and I remember going upstairs, saying, Come on, it’s your party, and then he unlocked his bedroom door and invited me in and showed me his picture of dead birds which I thought was quite extraordinary.

TABITHA POTTS The work I remember him doing was the strange sort of canvases with dead birds stuck on them and lots of little skeletons, very black and dark.

SEBASTIAN WRONG It was a strong piece. It profoundly shocked my grandmother when she came to the final show. I have a strong memory of her reaction to his dead bird picture.

DARREN COFFIELD He was walking around Camberwell with a massive drum of pig fat which stank to high heaven. He would mix the fat with pigments and create these really toxic paintings that gave off noxious fumes. He would have to varnish them to stem the smell. I remember visiting him at home and being totally dumbfounded at the exceptional body of work he had created. He had some sculptures made out of animal tissue that were suspended in formaldehyde for example I remember he had taken a goose’s thorax and left it suspended in a the shape of a crucifix.

BRONWEN LENTON It was too early for people to actually understand. And of course now bad taste like that is in, it was cultivated and the norm ten years or so afterwards. He was doing his own sort of funny installations like filling up his cage, like a sort of old rat cage. He was fascinated by life and death; he was putting things in formaldehyde. He was doing that from about thirteen or fourteen onwards. Yeah, there were sort of geese necks and God knows what. So, I mean, when did we even hear of Damien Hirst? It was it was the early 1990s wasn’t it? He certainly wasn’t a copy. No, he was before…

JOSHUA COMPSTON The art in me is destroying the art in me? The good in me is the bad in me? We shall see. I can so easily see the article in the paper telling the old granny in her council house that yet another student has committed suicide. Why am I so fascinated by death and decay? Because it’s the butt end of existence. When I helped to deal with a corpse on Saturday night (time of death about 7.20pm), I knew that the man had a soul and his body was irrelevant. Where is the soul of man? Why do I find everything so deficient? If I can procure a corpse I will put it into a glass case of formaldehyde and stopper it. By the work will be a sign saying ‘Life is more’. And it is. But where?

DARREN COFFIELD His room was stuffed with dead animals, bird skeletons even the pelt of a leopard from which he would create the most extraordinary pieces. When he found out that my father worked at Smithfield meat market, he started haranguing me to procure a hundred dead pig’s eyes for a formaldehyde sculpture he wanted to make. This was all just before any of these ideas came into vogue. There was another guy who I think was called Rick Gibson who freeze dried human  body  parts, so  they  would  not  rot, and  was  struck  off  the  teachers  training  course  at Goldsmiths back in 1987. He freeze dried human arms and legs as well as foetuses and put them on show in a gallery at The Cut, Waterloo. Which was then raided by the police and the body parts confiscated. There was a big noise made about it in the press since nobody knew where the dead body parts came from. That was around the period when Damien Hirst was studying at Goldsmiths.

CHRISTOPHER COMPSTON I think for a while he (my son) thought that he was England’s answer to Michelangelo. Caroline, my wife, who knows much more about painting than I do, did point out that perhaps he wasn’t England’s answer to Michelangelo and I agreed with her and it was a great relief when he realized that he wasn’t a painter.

DARREN COFFIELD It’s a pity he did not keep up that rich vein of work he had begun, with hindsight there was a kind of Zeitgeist moment there that he turned his back on artistically. He was not very skilled at making things but then nor were many of his contemporaries, they paid other people to make the work for them.

JEREMY COOPER He used to come and talk to me about all the decisions like Camberwell. I remember talking ages about Camberwell about whether he should go. I wondered how dextrous he was in terms of art production, and actually as it turns out not very [laughs]. I would have thought a foundation course at Camberwell is a good thing to do. But he hated it, well as you know…

ZEBEDEE HELM He was incredibly strange, and pretty much everyone at Camberwell detested him. He was hated. Because he was weird and because of the way he behaved, he stood out like a sore thumb. He wore 1930s tweed trousers that go right up to your armpits with little braces that go over the top of them, like Rupert the Bear, and then beautiful shirts that were about 40 years old and frayed at the collars with waistcoats, and brogue shoes, and he used to walk with his feet facing outwards like a duck, and he always had those little horseshoes on the bottoms. Other people were wearing ripped jeans, t-shirts, trainers… nothing like him at all.

DAVID HAYLES So people hated him on sight, but do you think it caused him pain to see people with their shirts hanging out?

ZEBEDEE HELM He loved standing out. If everyone dressed like him he’d have been devastated. He’d have gone out and bought leather jackets and things. When his clothes were really falling apart – he’d have them repaired in contradictory fabrics – he’d have things lined in ridiculously inappropriate materials. He was quite cunning about acquiring clothing. I remember him taking me once to some secondhand shop at the bottom of the Kings Road, saying, I’ve found this green suede jacket that is so you! I tried it on, and he said, That looks so fantastic, you must buy it, so I wrote a cheque for £60 which in those days was a lot of money, and it wasn’t secondhand, it was new. I went home and my mum said, What are you doing wearing that jacket? It is much too small for you. I went back to Josh and said, That jacket is too small, and he said, I know it is, it’s for me!

JEREMY COOPER Joshua was very gifted, yes. I think he was very intelligent and very knowledgeable about certain areas but by choice, but that’s what good knowledge is really. I think he was extraordinarily frustrated as a young person. I mean you must know that…?

DARREN COFFIELD Well that’s why we got on so well was that we were both very discontented young men, however the main difference between us was that Joshua was mentally scarred, quite damaged; he would self-harm. He always wore shirts with the sleeves down to hide the infected lacerations that he self-inflicted all the way up the inside of both of his arms. He would cause himself incredible physical pain through self-mutilation, as if to lance the mental pain. It was no cure, though it seemed to offer him some temporary release. He would also burn himself with cigarettes, holding perfectly still without a flicker of emotion, almost entranced in pain. It was really distressing to watch someone self-harming like that. I would spend hours talking to him trying to help him. If I caught him in the act, I would try and snatch the knife off him, which usually lead to extremely physically violent arguments as he fought me to regain the knife. It got so bad I remember travelling to Chiswick to check on him at weekends for a period of months when the doctors put him on anti-depressants.

JEREMY COOPER He told me lots about his past as well. And that obviously had gone on from very early times… The anger, he was a very contradictory person. I think it was extremely difficult being Joshua because of the contradictions really.

ZEBEDEE HELM I don’t think he was bi-polar – I’m not a doctor, but I think if you have the manic depression it is long periods of misery and joy, and he was all over the place all the time. Certainly he had a very dark yet hysterical atmosphere about him and that is what I miss most about Josh – as soon as you entered into his company, it was like going through a portal into a different world – everything was different and he would bring out a different side of your character. He said to me he wasn’t really interested in the present. All he was really interested in was the past and the future. He had no fear about things because the present is nothing. That’s maybe partly why he took drugs, because he was so numb, he felt nothing. No one could really shove so many drugs down their throat to so little effect like Josh.

DAVID HAYLES That’s what I found quite terrifying, quite dark about him, was because he’d take these drugs and feel nothing. You’d do the same amount or maybe less, and then the whisky… Most people take drugs and sit in a room and stare at something, but he’d go out, cause trouble. I remember a Sunday night, going out with a ghetto blaster playing Van Morrison; we’d done some acid tabs, walking along at 2 in the morning. I was freaking out, Josh was having a lovely time, saying, Oh I can’t feel a thing! And he probably couldn’t.

DARREN COFFIELD He kept an old jar of cyanide crystals in his bedroom. They were in a kind of Dickensian chemist bottle. At particular moments of high drama, he would hold one hovering above the tip of his tongue and threaten to swallow. Unfortunately sometimes when he was being a real pain I would tell him to stop the idle threats and get on with it.

ZEBEDEE HELM Do you remember his feet? He had the most extraordinary feet. He’d try and fit them into these beautiful Edwardian shoes, these massive wedge-shaped feet with tiny nails overwhelmed by these great folds of pigskin flesh, the nails pointing in all different directions. His feet were like his handwriting!

DAVID HAYLES I was reading about graphology today and I think someone reading Josh’s writing would think, This guy should be locked in a padded cell immediately.

ZEBEDEE HELM Half his words looked like they were crossed out even though they weren’t. Most of the letters looked like swastikas. It was like he came from the 1930s – the manifestos, his clothes, his political leanings, his haircut – his whole aura. Like he’d been plucked out of the 1930s and put into the 1980s.

DARREN COFFIELD At Camberwell, he realised that best action is direct action. Hence his performance with Adam Maynard on the steps of the Tate Gallery.

ADAM MAYNARD He wanted to make the point that art in a sense was all around us, that interesting and stimulating things were everywhere and not just within the prescribed confines of the gallery space. We climbed inside old Royal Mail sackcloth bags and lay on the steps in front of the Tate. The slogan: ‘Art=bread=life’ was scrawled by Josh in red chalk on the step next to us. I think we stayed in there as long as we possibly could. When we could no longer bear it, we would hop off and go and have a ciggie around the corner and then go back and do it again. It was really absurd and funny.

JOSHUA COMPSTON It is apt to recall my own personal demonstration on the steps of the Tate Gallery, Milbank, and the public’s reaction. At the Tate and other fine art galleries, people often visit solely for ephemeral reasons and not from a desire to improve their perceptions. With the idea of spiking their impressions, I presented a ‘performance’ in December last year: a friend and myself parcelled our bodies in yards of hessian, helped by a third, hidden from public view. We then sprung from out of sight into sight onto the public steps to gasps and wide-shocked eyes. Nervous laughs were the initial reaction from the public that I could spy, but they could not see me. Thus when we laid down upon the steps and remained motionless, no one knew if these soft sculptures were human or simply organic arrangements of sackcloth by Oldenburg.

It was at this time that the closeted excitement began and our third member, our public relations officer, Mr Stuart Finlator, is to be commended on the way he patiently explained to the growing crowd the idea behind the performance. Once enough bewildered people had accumulated, he thundered out the idea that we wished to encourage art between factory and street, canteen and restaurant and to destroy the presumption that art has only one place: within the confines of galleries. Our audience understood and began to commend us, wrapped as hessian parcels, praising their elegance, their effective formal clarity and relationship with the neo-classical façade of the Tate; also our bravery! A few doddery gentlemen shouted towards the inanimate sack bundles, enunciating as if to a foreign mute, how glad they were to see a demonstration in sculptural form, rather than a bellicose uncouth student with foul mouth. Peeping out, it seemed that even the Laura Ashley advertisements smiled with benign amusement.

However, even if we did remain unmolested, the civil servants of the Tate soon saw to it that we were unceremoniously rolled down each step in turn to our second pitch upon the pavement in front of the parked tea and snacks van.

The Japanese started to arrive and were warily fascinated: expensive cameras clicked every second. Some school children swore the worst words they could muster and kicked us – this was the one isolated incident of negative public response. The Americans made the most exuberant and encouraging comments. Who are these guys? Do you have a card? This is the best piece of performance art I have ever seen, proclaimed one casually dressed Californian addressing himself to whichever end he thought was my head. My feet thanked him.

The comments continued until late afternoon when we decided to reveal to those in doubt that the sacking did contain humans: we potato sacked to the benches, unrolled swiftly whilst the cameras shot our hot faces. The leaden air was fresh after hours of enclosure. The tea and snacks owner gave us gratis tea as we had swelled his clientele.

After washing in the Tate’s basement, we left, saddened that only a fraction of the population had been moved, but at least we were secure in the knowledge that the public could be salvaged from indifference.

DAVID TABORN One of the good things, even at those early stages with Joshua, was that we had very heartfelt discussions not just about aesthetics, but about approaches to defining what an art object might be. So something like wrapping himself up was a mixture of anthropomorphizing a Christo with a Joseph Beuys performance but also cocking a snook at the brand of philistinism which was prevalent on television art shows at the time.

DAVID HAYLES If I introduced him to people, I felt he would wind people up as a test to see if they took it the right way. But then he never got beyond that because he’d rub them right up the wrong way and then they’d want nothing more to do with him.

ZEBEDEE HELM Like at art school – no one wanted anything to do with him. He was absolutely determined to make himself and every moment everyone spent with him memorable. If it were a boring party he would make it interesting. He would either jump off the stairs or break something or precipitate some sort of happening. He would always make things happen.

DAVID HAYLES It would be a flashpoint. Sometimes it would be obvious – he’d say we have to dress as sheiks and go and play pinball at the Café Rouge. I would say why? But that would be the biggest insult. One time we went to get fish and chips and he started a fight in the fish