Annoyance art

George Wyllie and his Robins

One reason I like learning about art from my student son, rather than the experts, is that I can understand what he says. Mostly. 

Art critics seem to favour a style that packs the least meaning into the most words. You get the same thing with French intellectuals, as I've mentioned before.  

It's called obfuscation. It's not big and it's not clever. It just sounds that way if you're easily impressed, as some of them even admit themselves.

So when the lad starts talking about relational aesthetics, which I've never heard of, I try to concentrate, but it's not easy with my sis fussing around and offering us heaped dishes of the food she's spent the past week preparing for our first dinner at her place with Dug and Linda.

"Relational aesthetics is the idea that art has to engage with people," Dug says. "It was supposed to be a move away from elitism. Goes back to a guy called Bourriaud in the 1990s, who saw artists as facilitators and art as information exchanged between artist and viewers."

"Do you want some of this," my sis asks, offering him a huge dish of golden meringue. 

"Yes please," he says and she drops a lorry-load on to his plate. 

"So I'm like, I don't think so," he says. "Why can't art be about annoying people?"

I laugh and he says, "No, seriously."

"You mean making people think?" my sis says.

"No I mean making them annoyed," he says.

"Oh, right," she says, dubiously. 

"Winding them up," he says. "I think a lot of good artists are slightly piss-takers, you know? Kinda wind-up merchants."

"Would you like toffee ice-cream with that?" my sis says. "Or chocolate sauce?"

"Both please," he says, and the same it's nice-to-be-appreciated smile appears on her face that I used to see on my mum's, when I scoffed everything she put on my plate and went back for more.

"People like George Wyllie and Ian Hamilton Findlay," he says. "They've all got that gleam in their eye."

"George Wyllie?" I say. "Surely not. I used to see his stuff in schools. He was child-friendly. Started out as an engineer and only got into sculpture in his 50s. Teachers liked him."

"The Arts Council hated him," he tells me. "He didn't conform to their ideas about art."

"Ice cream or chocolate sauce?" my sis says, hovering over my plate.

"I'm trying to cut down," I say. "I've put on weight since the operation."

"That's neither, then?" She starts to walk away.

"Both please," I say and she looks smug.

"Could you two put each other down for five minutes?" I tell the young couple, since they're holding hands again and looking into each other's eyes. 

"You mean when the old people are around?" Linda says. "Don't be so Victorian, Douglas!"

"Nothing wrong with the Victorians," I tell her. "They had standards. People knew their place in those days. Women did what they were told and weren't allowed to express opinions when the men were eating."

Silence falls. A dog barks in the distance. The wind moans in the old chimney, left over from the days of coal. Linda stares at me through narrowed eyes and I sense my sis standing behind me holding something heavy. 

"See that's exactly what I'm talking about," my son says, breaking the tension, and I make a mental note to buy him a beer at the first opportunity. "You took a little grain of truth, combined it with a load of bollocks and managed to get on everybody's tits. 

"We'll make an artist of you yet." 

We have ways of making you wince

Jürgen Goertz sculpture at Berlin Hauptbahnhof 

When Al catches sight of me in the mirror that lines one wall of the gym, so you can admire your own gorgeous body as you pump iron, he grins, turns quickly, extends his right hand to shake mine and grasps my shoulder firmly with his left.

"Good to see you, man," he says. "You don't look bad for someone who's had all his internal organs removed."

"They left a couple," I say, reaching for my shirt buttons. "Heart, lungs, giant brain. Can I show you my war wounds?"

"Put them away," he says. "C'mon, I'll buy you a beer."

"How did you get on with the Germans then?" he says, when we're comfortably seated at the little table by the fire in the Burnbrae Hotel. 

"I liked them," I say. "Only spoke to 50 or so, mind you, out of 80 million. So it's maybe a daft thing to say."

"You never been there before?" he says. 

"Walked across the Rhine in Strasbourg once," I say. "But my only other experience of Germans en masse is groups of research physicists over the years - who are pretty much physicists, wherever they come from. So I went there speaking not a word of German and had to start every conversation with, 'Do you speak English?'"

"That's just rude in someone else's country," Al says, ordering the macaroni cheese from the white-smocked waiter, while I go for a light, do-it-yourself lunch of chips and green veg, and instantly regret it when the aroma of roasted cheese wafts towards me from the next table.

"Wouldn't have done it if I'd had more time to prepare," I say. "But virtually everyone I spoke to was smiley and helpful." 

"And efficient?" he says.

"Not so much," I say. "Went for two trains when I was there. One never appeared and the other was 15 minutes late." 

"So are you back to work now?" he says.

"Doing a bit but I get tired. So I'm pottering around the house, fixing things. Got a man coming to put blinds on my big front window. Those vertical, fabric jobs. Thought they might help keep the heat in, but the ones he showed me were kinda thin and flimsy."

His macaroni arrives, all brown and sizzling, and my mouth starts to water. "I'm sure you can get thermal blinds," he says. "Made of the same material they use for thermal underwear." 

He shoves a large forkful into his mouth and goes "Mmmm" with obvious pleasure while I study my stringy beans with far less. "Or," he says, waggling his empty fork at me. "You could just staple several sets of long johns to the outside of your curtains. That would be cosy in the winter.

"I did tell you about my own wee problem in the groinal region?" he adds. 

"The expanding testicles?"

"Testicle," he says. "Just the one. It would have been less frightening, the first time, if it was both. Well it's back."

"You don't seem bothered," I say. 

"Fear comes from ignorance," he says. "I know what it is now. Fluid retention - hydrocele. It's harmless."

"You not getting any treatment then?" I say.

"I could but I'm in no hurry. They use a big needle and a syringe to suck the fluid out." 

I wince. "Exactly," he says. "So I figure I'll leave it alone until it starts to get in the way."

"In the way of what?" I say.

"Traffic," he says.

The sounds of the city sifting through trees

Started thinking last week about people I haven't seen for a while and would like to, and Bob came top of the list, and wouldn't you know it the very next day I got an email from the man. 

You could have knocked me down with a feather, as my old granny used to say, although most of the time I knew my granny she was younger than I am now, which isn't all that old but seemed ancient to me then. Perspectives eh? 

Where was I? 

Yeah, I lost touch with Bob after the two of us and Iain went to a Dylan concert at Stirling Castle about ten years ago. I hadn't seen him for ages before that though, which was puzzling, because at university we were close. Suffered the stresses of a final year of theoretical physics in a flat together. Played poker, talked about life, music, women, football.  

Like me Bob was a big Scotland fan, scarred for life by some of their dreadful performances, like the 1975 game against England, when the teams were evenly matched outfield, but every England shot went past our gormless goalkeeper Stewart Kennedy for a 5-1 thrashing. 

Bob was one of those guys you imagine you'll be friends for life with, but life kinda gets in the way. His decision to set up home in the same street as my ex-wife, and well within the blast damage radius, restricted my access to him. Inverallan Drive is one of those places, like Kabul and Baghdad, that I'd need an Iron Man suit and a large life insurance policy to enter these days.  

Bob was a tall, good-looking guy, with a serious style of speaking that held your attention, punctuated by flashes of humour that were all the funnier for their origins in a brain that thought deeply about life, people and quantum mechanics.

In our final year at university Bob and I were sent away for a week of nuclear physics at the Scottish Universities Research and Reactor Centre, where we shared a room with another classmate called John, a nice enough guy but more middle-class than we were. His chat was peppered with strange concepts like money, flushing toilets, three meals a day and babysitters.

Not only had John been looked after by a string of these as a teenager, he told us, as we sat on our beds in the cramped accommodation, rather too close for working-class comfort to this long-haired, well-manicured, slightly-scented guy. But he had seduced every babysitter but one. She was only resistant to his manly charms, he reckoned, because she was a nervous, highly-strung sort of person. 

"If I unzipped my jeans she would run a mile," he told us, and I had no idea how to respond. Bob did. 

"So would we," he said.

I am really looking forward to meeting up with young Bob again, particularly as he seems to have retained his sense of humour in the face of life's tendency to toss large lumps of shite at good guys.

"What stage are you at in your recuperation?" he asks in his email. "Are you fully oot and aboot? How's the wayward leg? I broke my ankle two years ago, having sprained it painfully earlier in the day and tried the drinking-lots-of-whisky pain relief therapy.

"I then got up in the middle of the night for a piss and took a header down the stairs. Still managed the piss, only I was inverted at the time. Took two ambulance crews to dislodge me and get me on to a stretcher. Not my finest hour, I can tell you."

Nice one, Bob. I'll see you soon, I hope.

Accentuate the positive

I can never quite place Joanne's accent. It has a nomadic feel to it and a slight sense of strain, like a hat a half size too small for her. Nothing as obvious as the public school politician's glottal stop. Just a sense of something external and artificial. 

It makes me slightly uncomfortable around her. Your speech is such a huge part of your identity that discarding it seems like putting others' opinions ahead of your sense of self, like changing your name when you get married, which I wouldn't do either, so don't ask me to.

"Where are you from?" I say, over a cappuccino and rocky road in the College Club at the Uni. "Originally, I mean."

She hesitates as if unsure herself at this stage in her life. "Cornwall," she says. "I 'ated school. My love as a girl were 'orses."

"That explains it, I guess," I say. 

"What?" she says. 

"The feeling I get sometimes that you're not quite the genuine article."

It sounds harsher than I meant and her face tells me she thinks so too. "Listen, Mister Authentic," she snaps. "We're all actors, even you."

"I worked in England for years," I say, dragged into a disagreement I didn't intend, but forced to defend my corner. "I never lost my accent. Moderated it slightly, I guess. But that was so they could understand me. Not so they'd accept me as one of their own."

"That's fine with your accent," she says. "To English ears Scots sounds classless and attractive. I bet when you were down there you got daft women in pubs going, 'Oo, I just love your Scottish accent.' Didn't you?'"

"No, what I got was, 'I have no idea what you just said to me and take your hand off my leg, you pervert.'"

"Well if you can't get women in England with a Scots accent you must be an idiot," she says.

"Never mind me," I say. "We're not talking about me. We're talking about you disowning your background and becoming a big phoney, just so people will accept you."

"Oh, for heaven's sake," she says. "Grow up. If you want to get taken seriously there are some accents, even nowadays, that you can't speak with. West Country is one of them. We sound like yokels even to ourselves."

I spoon cinnamon froth from my coffee into my mouth, lean back in the armchair and wait for the tension to ease. Joanne is quick to get annoyed with me, but she comes down just as fast. She doesn't hold a grudge. Which is unusual in women, I find. Most love nursing their wrath to keep it warm. 

I try a smile and there's a flicker of response, so I relax. "How's the decision-theory manhunting going?" I say. 

"I'll have tell you next time," she says, placing her empty cup soundlessly in the saucer and brushing a crumb from the side of her lips. "I've got a lecture to give now."

She stands up and I wait for the parting shot. "Why would you want folk to pigeonhole you, as soon as you open your mouth anyway?" she says. "If you say two words to a stranger in Scotland they've got you down as working-class Ayrshire, with middle-class aspirations." 

She bends down fast and swoops up the last piece of chocolate biscuit that I was really looking forward to. 

"Which failed," she says, and disappears through the door for another week.

Double act

"It's called The Butterfly and the Pig," my son says, when he returns to the table in the Bath Street basement restaurant we've wandered into out of the rain.

"What is?" I say.

"This place," he says. "The toilet has fancy green tiles of a pig nosing a butterfly, to remind you." 

I can make no sense of this so ignore it for the moment. "So how are you doing?" I say. "I've not seen you since you started back at Art School."

"Awright, thanks" he says. "I'm kinda re-motivated. There's more happening this year and they've got good guys in, to tutor us. Real artists." 

"Like who?" I say and the question presses the little button in his head marked 'gibberish generator', which used to drive me nuts when he was a boy and I was trying to figure out what his problem was, so I could help him. Too many questions would always push that button. It's one reason he was never a huge favourite with teachers. That and the fact that he used to accidentally set his head on fire.

"We're getting all these projects from guys from you know the sort of last crowd that were do you remember Glasgow artists that were doing good?" he says.

"Who were they?" I say, hanging on to his train of thought by my fingertips.

"Various people," he says.

"What were they called?" I say.

"Different things," he says.

"Did their group have a name?" I say.

"You mean like Young British Artists down in London?" he says.

"Yes," I say.

"No," he says, and I take a deep breath. 

About this point is where people with less self-control than me would chew a leg off the table and start hitting him with it. Not me. I remain cool, laid-back, imperturbable.

"What the **** are you talking about then?" I shout, grabbing him by his jacket lapels and trying to shake him until he rattles, while the maddening little smile I've known since he was three plays around his lips. 

Pointless of course, as he has bigger muscles than me and much more mass. See, he is a sculpture student at Glasgow Art School, an excellent photographer and a competent drawer and painter. But the art he really excels at, the one for which he would easily win the Turner Prize, if there were one, is getting on your tits. 

I have never seen anyone in remotely the same class at turning civilised intelligent people into screaming, slavering, homicidally quivering lumps of apoplectically inarticulate jelly. 

He does it deliberately. He thinks it's funny. It all began when he was a dyslexic, sensitive wee guy, bullied by a cruel teacher called Mrs Gary. But all his teachers since, as well as several of his parents, have been paid back in spades. He has elevated extreme annoyingness to an artform.

"You got me wrong this time," he says, pulling my hands off and placing me gently back in my chair. "I am trying to remember but it's not coming to me."

"Fair enough," I say, not entirely convinced, but wanting to get back to friendly relations. "Do you know why this place is called the Butterfly and the Pig?"

"That I do remember," he says. "The waiter told me last time I was here. Guy that owns the place has a son who had a girlfriend who treated him badly. She was the butterfly, flitting and fluttering around, and he was the pig, lumbering after her."

"That's unflattering," I say. "How would you like it if I named a restaurant after you and Linda?"

"What did you have in mind?" he says suspiciously. "Dumb and Dumber?"

"No, no," I say. "Something that reflects your respective talents, as constructor and musician. How about The Dam-Building Beaver and the Malabar Thrush?"

"Cool," he says. "I'll start making the tiles for the bathroom when I get back to art school."