Now I think I get modern art, not like those ponces that stand in art galleries thoughtfully articulating the significance for the world of a huge blue wall but I appreciate it for its simplicity.
My life’s chaotic the worlds so confused its spinning. But when I’m here looking at this framed picture of Campbell’s black bean soup immortalized by Andy Warhol feel calm, something makes sense, there’s beauty in that image. There’s no hyperbole in its form it simply alludes to existence. Modern art makes the little man feel part of something.
It’s always been the small things that fascinate me and pass the unobservant eye. They are the small prints I’ve left on life’s canvas, situations I’ve created that’s my modern art.
I admit to being captured by a piece of chewing gum I’ve thrown to the floor and discarded. I’ve thought of the implications of my menial act. Will some individual I’ve never met be caught up in what I’ve done. I imagine some poor fucker having an unlucky day stepping out their flat in their brand new converse high tops that still are sweating out that clean plastic smell treading on my gum and then realized with angry resignation they are indeed unlucky that day. a person I’ve never met taking a few precious minutes out their existence thinking of me and my act with anger, the vulgar and selfish individual that’s ruined their new shoes.
”If I disappeared tomorrow, if my life was blown away, all that’s left is my chewing gum, covered in my DNA” Put that in a frame!!
When I asked Puke the designer from DeathbyCutie what inspires him I’m not surprised to hear its modern art! To him its all about turning images awol.
DeathbyCutie designs are refreshingly simple yet alluring evocative. Take their phone box hooded design.
It’s a Quintessentially English motif, the red phone box standing proudly and regally on the corner of a village green. Yet the amusing irony comes when you actually find yourself in a desperate enough situation to use one, upon stepping inside your hit with the pungent smell of piss and it’s bawdily wallpapered for callers in cards that feature experimental transsexuals and barely legal Russian prostitutes.
Is that what deathbycutie are trying to say nothing is what it seems, or do they just think it looks fucking coool maaan. It doesn’t matter, When I think of a phone box I become a significant part of that image. It’s me standing there aged three leaning back on the glass while my mother makes her call and falling out the other side because the glass has been smashed through by some angry little rebels without a cause or a GCSE.
I think of being underage and looking desperately young huddled in a phone box with my friends saving face, planning which nightclub to try and sneak into next.
I think of those few times my life fells such a disaster I’ve run into a phone box for sanctuary and made a reverse charge call and been humiliated when the operator has come back on the line and told me no my mother will not accept the charges and pay for the call, she knows me too well!
I think of the end of a big gay night out with a flamboyant amorous guy friend. I can smell our gravy chips covered in cheese and remember how hungrily we ate them inside that little box and how grateful I was we were to be inside away from the bitter northern wind of fucking July.
And it makes me smile wearing the phone box emblazoned across my chest…..THIS IS ENGLAND.
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