Yes, so I want to say thank you so much for inviting me to come. I'm very honoured to be here and after 30 years or so I'm a little surprised. In deciding what I thought I should do tonight. I kind of assumed that the worst idea would be to do a sort of a kind of lamentable, anguished slideshow of past work, in which case I'd try and knit together some semblance of memory and kind of like hacknade anecdotes to somehow suture 30 years of artworks together
and impress you and wow you with a kind of a kind of a backward-looking confessional of works and um you know uh you know and I kind of realize against the usual artist overview the usual linear slideshow with a cringing narrative of apologies and I like hunching over but I can I can yeah and now you've right I was just right in my stride but you know, whatever, I'll start again. No, no, no, no. So, you know, so this idea of sort of thinking, well, you know, what am I supposed to do? Why am I supposed to account for this stuff? 30 years of it, which, you know, a percentage of it I won't even recognize given that I'm 53 and dementia's kind of setting in. So, you know, and also the other thing is
that given the presence of Parveen Adams, the idea of sort of somehow kind of bearing my soul to you in terms of some first order explanation of the work would kind of somehow lead towards some confessional... She might misconstrue it as some kind of confessional apology, in which case I'd find myself in much deeper shit than normal, because we know what she's capable of. You know, in a nice way. So, I mean, I have to say that I, you know, knowing that I was coming here and my kind of excitement about being here at this place is one thing, but my excitement is really embodied by the fact that I will at some point
be sitting there with Parveen discussing my work, which is... So this is the kind of preamble, you know, the apparent 25 or 30 minutes that I'm supposed to kind of give some kind of account for what I've been doing for 30 years, which even as I'm looking at these things, it seems. Yeah. You know, that's going to be tricky. So, you know, I'm providing you with some images which are, you know, that you can look at that might be relatively entertaining, given the fact that we're moving from the age of entertainment into the age of light entertainment. So this should be, you know, you should gaze at these things lovingly, you know, before we get on to the kind of psychoanalytic vivisection that's to come. Um, so, uh, and I'm really, um, the problem is I can't guarantee any kind of real sort
of, you know, entertainment for you here, nor any kind of, um, tormented romantic sense of sort of, you know, kind of existential angst, in which case you might feel sorry for me. There's none of that. Um, so what I'm going to do is on one hand provide pictures, which you can look at and be slightly mesmerized by in a kind of sort of slightly, you know, disinterested way. And then I'm going to read from my new novel, actually, which could sound like it could be exciting, but it's really not. It's the first public airing of this thing, so there's no guarantee that it's going to be pleasant for you to hear or pleasant for me to read. But in terms of... I can't see through these glasses. Yeah. So, again, you know, so what I'd like to do is I would like to kind of somehow compress the 25 or 30 minutes to kind of maybe 10 minutes,
just based upon a consolidation of your boredom and my reluctance to keep reading against the groans and sides which I anticipate will happen, to then somehow get to the point at which me and Parveen will sit there and then we'll have a conversation. That's the point of me being here. My monologue is kind of just a monologue. It's kind of an apologetic kind of preamble, a kind of piece of autobiographical chaos, but without anecdotes because I have quite cleverly avoided talking about myself. So this is my new novel. It's called American Psycho. Revised. by Brittany Easton Ellis. And you have to apologize.
It's very new to me too, so you have to apologize for my, you know, I might get tongue-tied. So anyway, yeah, American Psycho revised by Brittany Easton Ellis. And the kind of first text, the first kind of quote is, the psychotic lapses back into nature, and that's Adorno. So the wellness is next to godliness, is scrawled in washed-out rainbow lettering on the side of the chemical bank near the corner of 11th and 1st and is large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothea Price notices the words of a bus pull up, the advertisement for La Miserable on the side blocking her view. But Price, who is with client Earth and 26, politely requests the driver to turn the radio down,
a smouldering female acoustic version of Walk on the Wild Side on WFUV, and the driver, white, American, moonlighting on Uber to fund some harebrained start-up, utilising the intimacy of his Prius as a network interface does so. I'm mindful, Price is saying. I'm creative. I'm young, principled, compassionate, thoughtful. In essence, what I'm saying is that society cannot afford to lose an influencer like me. I'm relevant. The price calms down, continues to stare out the cab's window, probably at the word love, sprayed in red graffiti on the side of a planet organic on 7th and 4th. I mean, the fact remains that sadly not everyone cares about the planet, and that's why what we do is so important. I love my job, you love yours, but where do we go from here? Back to Los Angeles because it's cleaner,
it's not really an option. I didn't transfer from UCLA to Stanford to put up with this indifference. I mean, am I alone in thinking we're actually changing the world here? Like in a movie, another bus appears, another poster for Les Miserables replaces the word. Not the same bus, because someone has written the word occupy over Eponine's face. Timothea blurts out, we have a commune set up here. I advise on radical environmental policy regulations for climate change. We're establishing a drop-in hub in the Hamptons, for Christ's sakes. vicarious traumatization blame compassion compassion fatigue i say oh would you mind turning that down a little she says but distractedly to the driver and all the women of color go do do do do do do do still billowing from the radio sure i can do that for you maybe
the driver says timothea thanks him and continues i could stay living in the city if they just installed aromatherapy grouch convention grouch prevention sprays in the cabs maybe the witch hazel or lavender. Her voice softens even more here. Either or, I don't mind. She unplugs her Apple earbuds, verging on complaint. I hate to complain. I really do about the trash, the unrecycled garbage, the poverty and disease, about how toxic this city is. And you know, and I know that it's a sty. She continues talking as she opens her new Maharishi rollaway backpack she got from the official Maharishi website. She places the buds in their case alongside her humble 5S with its shattered screen. She had an iPhone X but returned it because she was weirded out by facial recognition.
Anne retrieves a copy of today's free newspaper shoved in the footwell. In one issue, she says, let's see here, oestrogen compound synthesizers detected in drinking water, airborne pollution at an all-time high, men going their own way celibacy rally, weird genetic mutations that alt-right. She flips through the pages excitedly. baseball players suffer HIV denialism, too many electric cars and not enough hookups, gridlock, the homeless, various domestic terrorists, asthmatics dropping like flies in the streets, regretful surrogate mothers, the tragic real-life death of an actor killed off in the script of a popular soap opera, immigrants who broke into a zoo to eat various animals alive, the big question, mass extinction or eco-fascism.
And the joke is, the punchline is, it's not just in this city, it's everywhere, it sucks. Wait, more alt-right, gridlock, gridlock, baby sellers, black market babies, HIV babies, baby junkers, Sackler Gallery collapses on baby, maniac baby, gridlock, opiate art museum collapses. Her voice stops. She takes in a breath and then says, her slightly crazed eyes fixed on a beggar at the corner of second and fifth. That's the 24th one I've seen today. I've kept count. Then she asks without looking over, why aren't you wearing your cute army surplus shirt with those grey pants? I shrug. Price tells me she's wearing a Maharishi upcycled M51 kimono rib jacket, a Maharishi White Eagle Tore silk jumpsuit, and Maharishi Nike Air Max.
There's a moderately interesting story in the post concerning two people who disappeared at a party aboard a Greenpeace yacht while the boat was circling the island. Her residue of spattered blood and three smashed veggie wear champagne glasses are the only clues. Foul play is suspected, and police think that perhaps a machete was the killer's weapon because of certain grooves and indentations found on the deck. No bodies have been found. There are no suspects. Price began her monologue today over lunch, and then brought it up, her monologue, not her lunch, again during Pilates, and continued ranting over drinks at Harriet's, where she'd gone on over vodka and lime, much more interestingly about the Fisher debacle that Paula Owen is handling, which concerns the illegal disposal of hormone-disrupting chemicals.
Price will not calm down. Diseases, she exclaims, have faced tenses with pain. There's this insane theory going around that if you can catch meningitis from a vaccination, then having sex with someone who is vaccinated means you can catch anything, whether it's a virus per se, Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy, hemophilia, leukemia, anorexia, diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, dyslexia for Christ's sakes. They're saying you can get dyslexia from a penis. I'm not sure but I don't think dyslexia is a virus I say. Oh I know that, they know that. It's a popular scare tactic. Outside this cab on the sidewalks pigeons pecked at pieces of diced tofu in front of what used to be grazed papaya while a trans parade and its chaperone police car cruise
the wrong way down a one-way street. And the sky is immense and blue, and in an Uber that's stopped in traffic across from this one, a woman who looks a lot like Louisa Caruvas waves over at Timothea, and when Timothea doesn't return the wave, the woman, straight brunette hair with a short French plait, cool geek glasses, realizes it's not who she thought it was, and looks back at her own discarded copy of USA Today. Panning down to the sidewalk, there's an old homeless bag man holding a bunting flag, and he waves it at the pigeons who ignore it as they continue to take turns to peck at the remains of the tofu. And the police car disappears into an automated car wash. But then, when you just come to the point when your reaction to the times is one of total and sheer acceptance, when your body has become somehow tuned into the insanity,
and you reach that point where it all makes sense, when it clicks, we get some poor homeless nonsuch who's making a stand and actually wants, listen to me, Patricia, wants to be out on the streets. This, those streets, see, those. She points. And we have a mayor who won't listen to him, a mayor who won't let this poor soul exert his rights. Holy Christ, let the poor soul, poor soul stay on the street if he wants. Let him be, let him live outside this man-made goddamn misery. And look, you're back where you started, contradicted, fucked. Number 24, no, 25. Who's going to be at Evelyn's? Wait, let me guess. She holds up a hand attached to worried, close-bitten fingernails, Ashley, Courtney, Maldwin, Martin, Charles. Am I right so far? Maybe one of Evelyn's
banker friends from, oh my god, the East Village. You know the type, the ones who make compensation to the planet by asking Evelyn if she has a nice free range dry Chardonnay. She puts a hand over her forehead and shuts her eyes and now she mutters, jaw clenched, I'm leaving. I'm dumping Meredith. He's essentially daring me to like him. I'm gone. Why did it take me so long to realise that he has all the personality of a goddamn game show host. 26, 27. I mean, I tell him I'm hypersensitive. I told him I was still freaked out by Fukushima. I can feel the radiation in my bones. I can feel their pain, their loss. What more does he want? I'm ethical, active. I mean, I'm determined to make a difference. I'm optimistic about the future, about tackling mass extinction. I mean, aren't you?
I say, sure, every mushroom cloud has a silver lining. and all I get is shit from him. 28, 29, holy shit, it's a goddamn city of the damned, I tell you. She stops suddenly as if exhausted by the burden of compassion and turning away from another advertisement, remembering something important. Says, did you read about the priest from that Catholic school? He raped two teenage boys, depraved pig. Shocking, really shocking. Price waits for a reaction. There's none. Suddenly, Upper West Side. it's cold for April and Price walks briskly down the street towards Evelyn's brownstone whistling no woman no cry the heat from her mouth creating smoky white dreadlock plumes of steam and swinging her Maharishi rollaway backpack
a figure with straight brunette hair a short French plait and cool geek glasses approaches in the distance wearing a Maharishi Roshitushi geisha print cotton gabardine shirt with Maharishi Maha cropped wide leg joggers a Maharishi Suikoki Kuno three-toed tabby sandal and carrying the exact same Maharishi rollaway backpack that Price has. And Timothea wonders aloud, Is it Victoria Powell? It can't be. The woman passes under the LED glare of a street lamp with a troubled look on her face that momentarily curls her lips into a slight smile and she glances at Price, almost as if they were acquainted. But just as quickly she realizes that she doesn't know Price. And just as quickly Price realizes it's not Victoria Powell and the woman moves on. Thank God, Price mutters as she nears Evelyn's.
It looked a lot like her. Hang on, I'm going to move a little bit because I'm bored. I move out of the kitchen into the communal space where a table has just been casually set, an array of mandarin goji candles from scent lit on small dishes. Nothing about stash is Maharishi nor Vanden, but he has a cute green streak in his hair. He stares at an ABBA promo from the last century playing on TV whilst vaping. Ahem, I cough. Vanden looks over warily, probably drug to the eyeballs. Stash doesn't move. Hi, Patricia Bateman, I say. I'm Patricia Bateman, I say, sorry. Waving, noticing my reflection in a mirror hung on the wall and smiling at how radiant I appear, she waves back limply. Stash pretends to inspect her fingernails.
Just get them out of here, Price is seething. They're both wasted and I want to watch the goddamn blue planet. Evelyn is still opening large bottles of artisan beer and absently afflicted by some residue of the days before plant-based sushi, saying, we've got to eat this stuff soon or else we're all going to be poisoned. He's got a cute green streak in his hair, I tell him, but this vape isn't even CBD. Bateman, Timothea says, still glaring at Evelyn. Yes, I say to Timothea, you're being problematic. Oh, Patricia. Evelyn says, but she's the girl next door. That's Patricia. You're not problematic, are you, honey? Evelyn is on Mars and I move towards the bar to make myself another drink. Girl next door, Timothea smirks and nods and then reverses her expression and hostilely asks Evelyn again if she has a safety pin. Evelyn finishes opening the beer bottles and tells Courtney to fetch Stash and Vanden.
We have to eat this now or else we're going to be poisoned, he murmurs slowly. We have to eat this now, moving his head, taking in the kitchen, making sure he hasn't forgotten anything. We're all going to be poisoned anyway on account of all the toxic heavy metals and shiitake mushrooms, Courtney says before exiting. I have to talk to you, Evelyn says. What about I come up to him? No, he says, then pointing at Timothea to Price. Timothea still glares at him fiercely. I say nothing, and Timothea takes another drink. Be a sweetheart, be a sweetheart, he tells me, and place the sushi on the table. Tempura is on the pan. I'm wondering where Evelyn got the sushi, the enoki mushrooms, the shiitake mushrooms, the pom-pom mushrooms, and even mashed shiitake. All seem so fresh, and there are piles of wasabi and clumps of ginger placed strategically around the platter. But I also like the idea that I don't know,
we'll never know, we'll never ask where it came from, and that the sushi will sit there in the middle of the glass table from furnished green that Evelyn's hip father bought and like some mysterious apparition. As I set the slate plater down, I catch a glimpse of my reflection on the surface of the table. My skin seems glowing because of the candlelight, and I notice how nice the little DIY trim I did looks. I make myself another drink. I still worry about the sodium level in the faux soy sauce. Four of us sit around the table waiting for Evelyn and Timothea to return from getting Price's safety pin. I sit at the head of the table taking large swallows of J&B. Vanden sits at the other side reading disinteressly from one of Evelyn's old threadbare student books called The Revolution of Everyday Life. Stash has pushed a chopstick into a lone piece of enoki mushroom that lies on the middle of a plate
like some shiny impaled insect and the chopstick stands straight up. Stash occasionally moves the piece of sushi around the plate with the chopstick, but never looks up at either myself or Vanden or Courtney, who sits next to me sipping sake from an old tin mug. Evelyn and Timothea come back, perhaps 20 minutes after we've seated ourselves, and Evelyn looks only slightly flushed. Timothea glares at me as she takes the seat next to mine, a fresh drink in hand, and she leans over towards me about to say, to admit something, when suddenly Evelyn interrupts, not there, Timothy, then barely whisper, girl, boy, boy, boy, boy, girl, girl, girl. He gestures towards the empty beanbag next to Vanden. Timothy shifts her glare to Evelyn and hesitantly takes the beanbag next to Vanden, who yawns and turns a page of the book.
Well, everybody, Evelyn says, smiling, pleased with the meal he has presented, dig in. And then after noticing the piece of sushi that Stash has pinned, she's now bent low over the plate, whispering at it. Evelyn's composure falters, but he smiles bravely and chirps, Saki, everyone? No one says anything until Courtney, who is staring at Stash's plate, lifts his mug uncertainly and says, trying to smile, it's delicious, Evelyn. Stash doesn't speak, even though he's probably bored at the table and can't identify with anyone else in the room. Her hair is red, voluptuous, her jet black clothes, neat and fitted, her personal net worth presumably obscene, and not a green dollar to be counted, and this is why she can afford to lack any intrapersonal warrant and sits there as if perplexed by the piece of plant-based sushi. Just as the table is about to start eating, she sits up and loudly declares,
pointing her accusing finger at a plate, it fucking moved. Timothy glares at her with a contempt so total that I can't fully equal. But I muster enough energy to come close. Vanden seems amused. So now, unfortunately, does Courtney, who I'm beginning to think finds this monster attractive. But I suppose if I were dating Louisa Caruthers, I might too. even laughs good-naturedly and says, oh, Stash, you're a riot. And then, worriedly, tempura, Evelyn is an advocate for corporate sustainability for your information. I'll have some, I tell him, and I lift a piece of eggplant off the platter, though I won't eat it because it's fried in something other than extra virgin olive oil. The table begins to serve themselves. Yes, stop.
Yeah, no, I'm happy to stop. Totally have to stop. Should we do this? Come on. That's good. I'm happy. Yeah. That's my speaker. Is it? I didn't get to any of the bits of the murder and the killing and the extreme violence. It's been fun bits. Would you like to read the whole thing? No. We could have a vote by the audience. Well, it's just quite clearly what's happening is that I've rewritten it from the point of view of a woman. Did anybody get it? No. You're idiots. You're friendly. No, no, no. Because I told them.
Oops. Cheers, Dave. Go on then. Okay. I don't expect, you're expecting me to comment on your novel. No. It was a way of wasting some time. Well, that's why I thought maybe I should stop you. I said, thank God someone did. Obviously, everyone thinks I was very rude. No, I think it's fine. These images, though, I haven't seen before. When did you do that? These ones? Yes. It's kind of a bit of a weird view from where I am. It's just a random hodgepodge. Recent? Yeah, probably in the past few years, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Gosh, this is the only light we can have. Okay, I won't be allowed to talk for five minutes before I ask you.
Can I time it and then tell you to stop? Yes. You may. I'll tell you to stop at four. But I can't read in this slide. Can I have more light, please, somebody? Yeah. Thank you. I mean, if you can do the microphone a bit closer. Yeah. Yeah. Is that okay? No. No? Yeah. Is that better? For the back? Yes, yeah. That's good. Shambles. It's gone off again. Okay. This is just to you. Yeah. I found myself writing an essay and then realized I was talking to you. Me too. I would place your work in the field of comedy.
Comedy is not laughter. Laughter deals with disfigurements of many sorts, and of course even in recent times, the maimed, the disfigured, the mutated – think of the human known as the elephant man – were exhibited to invite and excite laughter. You have gestured to Victor Hugo's 1869, The Man Who Laughs, and referenced a chapter which was the utilization of the unfortunate by the fortunate. His face had been chiseled, the mouth enlarged, the lips cut away, the gums laid bare, the ears distended, the cartilage cut, the eyes displaced, the cheeks enlarged, and more.
The face bears a forced and irremovable laugh. This is responded with laughter, laughter in the face of outrageous injury. None of that has to do with comedy, but it is raw material for you. Here is my definition of comedy, the only psychoanalytic thing I have. The element in comedy that satisfies us, that makes us appreciate it in its full human dimension, excluding the unconscious, is not so much the triumph of life as its flight. The fact that life slips away, runs off, escapes all those barriers that oppose it, including precisely
those that are the most essential, those that are constituted by the agency of the signifier. The phallus is the signifier of this flight. Life slips away, runs off, escapes all rules and regulations through something that is produced between the original and that original after you have worked it over, an in-between space. Something new produced through the similarities and differences between the two. It is – I'm sorry, I was expecting you to have shown this audience, some of whom may not know your work for many years, but you haven't. And so – They can Google. Right now. Yes. I'm sure they can right now. I'm sure some people are.
Some people are emailing definitely. That always happens. Something new is produced through the similarities and differences between the two. It is no longer Goya's original representation, nor is it the Chapman's image. What emerges is a new Goya. You can't say that the Chapman's fathered this new Goya, and you can't say that Goya fathered the Chapman's. In the in-between, life slips away, escapes. So this might seem odd, because your work seems much more about death than life, but I think it is about life, so that is just my comment. What I wanted to ask you was, there are isolated questions, but great deeds against the dead, and I do wish we had a myth of it,
from Goya's Disasters of War, is being constant in your work. I think since your GCSE exams, weren't you working on this at the same time? I believe you were. The GCSEs were done when we were about, I was about 30. Yeah. Yeah, so we got bad grades the first time around, so we tried to reach... We thought as YBAs, you might get better grades, but obviously, no, I actually got worse. It's true. We went to a cramming college in Notting Hill. Honestly. I know, it's been very smart. But what you had done was to take the figures on the tree. There are three dead figures on the tree in the original.
And you made a sculpture of it. A really horrific sculpture where you went much further, in a sense. You fragmented them more, you draped them over the tree. And I think the tree... I don't really contest that. Okay. Only because actually I kind of, because I think the kind of embedded metaphysics in the prints, in terms of the grain and in terms of the kind of the existential, you know, of density of the drawing compared to the sculpture, which was just even by enlarging the work was already a way of actually sort of shedding that intensity of the work.
So they were in its kind of extension into natural real life scale. I mean, I think in a way it it became kind of like an awfully superfluous representation of something which had a kind of veracity and a sense of violence to it. I mean, I think that in a sense that what's interesting about the transition from one to the other is that there's a certain amount of optimism that kind of went from one to the other, where that if you have this kind of drawing which is kind of this big, that has this kind of focusing intensity to it. If you engineer a version of it which is life size,
that you would presume that if you had some kind of empathy for or some compassion for the images, for the subjects of this image, that you would necessarily translate it and it would become even more intensified by its becoming real life. Because real life, you would get confused for real life as being real. real life as being naturalistic, but in actual fact, the idea that actually, you know, those things became, they became actually trivial because the materiality of it, there was no intent to actually try and sort of sustain the kind of existential value of the work from its authentic incarnation. And that's what you mean by deadness? Yeah, it had a kind of, you know, in a sense, I guess the reason that we have been kind
of repeatedly interested in this image, because if you were going to take this as a kind of a forensic document of kind of humanistic pain in its most elemental form, like as if somehow you could pick one thing which would be a fossil of pathos, and then you emptied it of its pathos by producing this thing which does nothing more, nothing less other than copy it. But in terms of the idea of actually how that thing is reproduced is that the materiality of it cannot sustain, you know, it's, I mean, I get the ultimate reason that we keep, is because it's like saying, you know, the metaphysics involved in this work, or I would say superimposed over this work, because I don't think, I think this, I think what's interesting about that work is that it undermines its own metaphysics.
is our repeat return to the scene of this crime. It's not in order to kind of amplify its metaphysics, but it's to actually drain it. But I've been talking, sorry, in my head was the etchings on which you paint. And I think what you've just said is not quite the thing you would say about that, I imagine. So this is the period when you are making plastic mannequins and even casting some of them and the deadness is there. Yeah, the inertia. But you did a lot with this. I'm really quite, I mean, what made you grip on it so much? Because you then did, well, with Lasso's War, you did all 89 etchings before you bought your first set, right?
Four of them. You then made those, each one of them into tiny, tiny sculptures. Yes. And then you did something in your GCSE. So it's, and they haven't stopped, you know, then you bought them, and then you bought two sets of them. Yeah. And I just, it's obviously, and it's this particular one, Great Teeth Against the Dead, that somehow, so I wonder where, how did it begin? Do you mean the big sculpture of the? No. No. You're interested in it. Oh. Because I think that there's a kind of, you know, even on a very, you know, hackneyed historical view of this work, the idea of saying the emergence of a kind of a notion of progressive modernity, which must have at some point, there's kind of some evolutionary sort of crawling
from the sort of the primal soup in terms of like shifting from religious iconographic representation, where all representation is determined by some formal requirement to describe the divine for purposes of kind of... So the idea of saying that, well... Three down already, four. So the idea of saying that you could kind of lay the blame for, certainly with Goya's interest in enlightenment and the transition, in a sense, from this notion of an art which has a kind of a pragmatic relationship to iconographic representation to an art that suddenly invents this notion of the psyche that has this concept of what it is to be human,
which is not negotiated by some divine notion of redemption. And quite clearly, this one picture, that if you're going to look at this kind of divergence away from the representation of the body as being something which has this kind of transcendental accord with divinity, is that suddenly you have this image where there are three people hanging on a tree. And in a sense, there's a kind of a really interesting reverberation in terms of its trinity. There are three figures. The kind of the fact in which this tree is, you know, okay, it's kind of optimistic to think that it has some cruciform element to it. But it is something to do with hanging. It is something to do with the idea that what happens with these bodies, as opposed to all other bodies represented in Christianity,
is that what they suffer is they suffer the burden of physics, which means to say that these bodies drip into the soil. And there's no redemption for these figures. So this is a hugely heretical image. You know, a hugely heretical image. It's kind of like, you know, the Holbein painting of the elongated Christ. And Dostoevsky says that you could lose your faith by looking at this. And the brilliance of this painting of this kind of elongated Christ is the reason it's elongated. It's because it's demonstrating the effect of gravity. The effect of gravity on Christ's body. Imagine the sight of that, to work out that actually more compelling in terms of this act of crucifixion. It's not redemption, the sense in which this thing has some kind of
an ability to return as new, what you have is that you have this thing which is longer than it was when it was, you know. What that demonstrates is this sense in which this new form of religion, i.e. physics, which Goya was, you know, the idea that here is this thing where what is so brutal about this image is there's no sense of redemption in this image at all. These bodies are doomed to gravity and to the simple redemption of matter. I was actually going to ask you what other paintings. That one. Well, okay. That's the one you're stuck with. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think even like Grunewald's Isenheim altarpiece is the same thing
because Christ, you know, the kind of the lepers, you know, sitting around, you know, Christ is on the cross. Christ is also a leper. So there are these kind of these interventions in terms of the sacredness of the flesh where suddenly you see the flesh of Christ as being also plague-ridden, which is kind of like, you know, how does that kind of fit in with the notion of, you know, Christianity? Tell them I know what you think. Okay. Very short quotations from you first. Yes. There is fundamental appeal to a reality, a version of reality that offers nothing practical, nothing utilitarian, nothing conforming to human scale, nothing useful, nothing truthful.
Another quote. A return to a set of ideas and a set of failed solutions over and over, as we have stated many times, like a dog returns to its vomit. which is also the title you gave for the Los Coppichos. We are interested in the redemptive value of transgression, producing things with zero cultural value to produce aesthetic inertia. I'm particularly interested in what you have to say about the repetition of failed solutions. In one sense, every artist is going to say it hasn't got there. But this is a particular kind of failure in your case. And here you referenced two things that I found really interesting.
One was Saad, and the other was Rosalind Krauss writing on Sol Levit. And if you just stay with Saad for the first... You've said about 120 Days of Sodom. While the book may be exhaustive in terms of his description of death and torture, Ultimately, the reading has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the individual passage of wasteful time. I agree, but then I have a question, I wonder if you've thought about it. And it is what Saad does in his writing, how he treats the body. And you have said at one point, you say something about you want to know how bodies become bodies.
and I think this is one maybe place where I'd like you to elaborate, perhaps off the cuff, perhaps you thought about it. But there is a fantastic violence on the body. So you have a vanishing imaginary space inside. All of their mirrors, everything is reflected, and so it's a closed space where everything is visible. And as it were, the violence of desire has already been displaced by something that almost sounds like a set of religious instructions that Juliet gives, I think, of how you get rid of desire. First, you lie down and you think about something, and there's a whole series of passages. But the end result of this, and I agree with the wasteful time, and that's wonderful, and
your repetition might be thought back, and the deadness, and it all fits together. but what do you, how do you think of this Saadian body? Yeah. I mean, I don't know how to think about it at all. I just would like to know if you have thoughts. Because it's quite like one of the bodies you operate on. Yeah, I mean, I guess that I suppose that, you know, thinking about Saad, you know, rather than, you know, the idea of saying that why would 120 days be interesting from the point of view of disavowing the content, which I guess is what I'm kind of suggesting that what's interesting about Saad is that you have this encyclopedic description
of transgression where transgression in itself has no intrinsic value. But what he does is that by kind of, by exhausting the plane of description, that you end up where desire itself, sexuality itself, become completely obliterated. You don't recover any sense. And I guess my interest in that would be that Sard's encyclopedic description of blasphemy, of violence, would be an entirely perfect example of capital. Okay. Because in some senses, the idea of, you know, what Freud says is that the idea of kind of, you know, voyeurism, the idea of scopophilia, what it does is it supplants the object of sexuality with things which become desirable without the actual act.
So the repression of the primary desires in favor of secondary returns. And I think that in some sense you could look at Saad as being this perfect example of, in terms of the deviation of how the notion of a naturalistic notion of sex is completely kind of, you know, it's intensified by the idea of saying, kind of in 120 Days by the Pasolini film. It culminates in that thing where the person has the binoculars. And rather than wanting to see the image, they turn the binoculars around so that in fact what they can't see is the image of,
I think it's someone being tortured at the end. So it demonstrates the notion of saying that The idea of assuming that sexuality has some natural kind of frame of reference is not how human sexuality operates. I agree with all that. There's just an inconvenience of this or what the place of this tortured body is. I don't want to go into it, but it was just a query. But the second thing was Rosalind Krauss, and she was absolutely brilliant on, when talking about Sol Levit, who did very irrational but logical systems. They were systems. And she compares it to a passage in Beckett's Malloy. Sucking stones. Where you have, yes, it's about sucking stones.
And he has four pockets, two in his jacket, two in his trousers, and there are four stones in each of the pockets. And he's going to rotate them all. So he does this, and he thinks, how do I know that I've rotated each of the stones? And so as he goes along, he makes more rules to be sure that every one of the 16 stones would have done whatever part, you know, it could go on. And this is compared to Solowit's work. You referred to it. I have just one thing to say about it, which is that Sol Levit's work and the Stones story,
they are a system which revolves with nothing inside. It's around empty space. I don't think your work is like that. And I think it, I think, well, okay, Karen, go on. No. No, we'll get to, you know. No, go on. Well, okay. I mean, so, you know, there's something kind of extremely visceral about, you know, Beckett's account of this stone circulation, sucking, pocketing, turning, returning, the confusion, confused about what the process of his own language is. And the interesting thing about Krauss applying this to Sol Loret is that you would see that Sol Loret is more within the register of something kind of like aesthetically scientific, schematic.
there's a structure to it. And so, you know, the analogy wouldn't seem to fit, really. But in terms of the relationship between Solowit and say, a kind of an expressionistic painter, right, an expressionistic painter would seem to be someone who has a kind of a confessional attachment to the work, the representation, the way in which the work is perceived, that someone viewing work could actually engage with the notion that this is a language that they could... Right, so then you would look at the soul of it and say, well, what's a soul of it compared to a monk? You know, you'd look at soul of it and say, well, it's barren. It has no expressionistic value whatsoever. But I'm talking about your work, and it's not barren is what I'm saying. No, I mean, I... And so I'd like some formulation. I mean, I would say that, not to be facetious, but I think our work is kind of,
in terms of, you know, if you think about the kind of the schematic procedural mannequin pieces, you know, in a sense that, you know, what they do is they present this notion of saying that they have this content, but in fact all they are is they're the combination of stone sucking and Sol LeWitt, but with some kind of exaggerated libidinal content, you know. They're kind of like, I mean, I would say, I mean, I'm really hugely optimistic in claiming this, but I would say like Sol LeWitt, Rosalind Krauss, but an overdose of Marx and Freud. But, um, I bet if you asked Sol LeWitt that, it'd be totally confused. If I think of, uh, if I think of your work on, I go back, I'm sorry, constantly to the etchings.
Yes. Um, and this in between that I was talking about. Yeah. Um, yeah. It's clear that it's an, it's, these are not the right words anymore, but in a sense it's an operation on Goya that produces an end result, which is the evacuation of, so, but it's doing something, I mean, it's doing something rather than empty, empty hole in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In front of it. Yeah. That's all I meant. Okay, very quickly. I did, I read your essay that you wrote. Oh God, I thought you might write it. Oh, you know. Well, this is new stuff. Yeah, it's terrible. No, it's a very frightening essay. That's why I read that thing and didn't try. There are two examples I want to reference in relation to the failed solutions.
I wonder if they made any difference because they seem different in kind to your usual interventions. One was the Bruegel. Apparently your gallery bought you a Bruegel. for 22,000 pounds. You were worth it. Yeah. Oh, but it was worth more than that. No, I think it was kind of like, it was like... Can I finish my question first? Okay, you painted over it. Yeah, of course. It was a crucifixion. I was stunned. I only read this very recently, and I felt quite uncomfortable. You had worked on a canvas of which there was only one, unlike the etchings. So I had caught myself out. Yeah. I had not relinquished the idea of the original.
But did it give you any slight qualms whatsoever? The misapprehension is thinking that we had, you know, that somehow the kind of the gesture of working on a Goya print was kind of, you know, you could compensate that by thinking there's lots of them, lots more of them. So this gesture can be kind of, you know, limited, damage limitation to just one set of goyes rather than, you know, one Bruegel. You know, I think so far we've worked on maybe eight sets of disasters of war, maybe, I don't know how many capricious. I mean, our aim is to work on all of them. That's fine. No, but so the misapprehension is just simply because there's one Bruegel
that you thought we'd have any kind of qualms about working on it. No, we have a slush fund of all the money that's paid for the Goyers in this kind of... But now we have to send these kind of anonymous people into auctions and stuff to buy the Goyers for us because they're wise to it. And also, actually, the price of Goyers has gone up. So Goya is a better artist for us drawing on him. And Bruegel, too. No. No. OK. My second example. No, no, no, the serious thing about this is that, you know, the purpose of drawing on these things is that, you know, when Duke de Kooning, you know, when Rauschenberg takes the world. Yeah, I thought of that. But it's not the same. No, of course it's not. It's kind of, that's folk art.
If you want any questions, let me just do my last thing. The second example of something new was this 2017 show plain southern, which so clearly shows the process you have of building on what was built endlessly because you include things from the giant fun drawing book and coloring book. Everything's in there with the Goya. And the combinations are breathtaking and very funny. what struck me was the collage that you collaged stuff with goya etchings left me speechless why could could I have the 14 images that I just want shown one after the other please and we
then we stop is that is it is that because I mean what's for somebody to do this he's definitely not gonna do it he's doing I think they worry no that's not it Oh, no, but these are not it. So what was he showing? Chaos. Ah, this lot. Not that lot. This lot. There's a part of that. Oh, but I thought you mean the collage ones. Yeah, they are. Yes, they're there as well. But you can see this was building on the building on the building with a vengeance. Everything from the past work is in these. Now, can we just stop? Can we stop briefly? But it's not the one I want,
so we can go on a bit further. Oh, there's the tree again. And can you see it? And one more? No, one more. No, one more. Yes. Now, if you knew the Goya, that would really have shaken up. And what I think is very interesting, why I bothered to bring it up, is I don't know any collagist who does this. And that is because you are copying the bloody Goya again. And it's wonderful. But look, the thing is that you've kind of drawn nice things on Goya. The thing is that what you can do is you can sort of, there's a kind of sort of an arrogance in terms of the fact
that if you do something, the idea and the incapacity of, say, for example, a commentator who will call it vandalism, there's something quite hilarious about the fact that vandalism is a kind of an incredibly impotent complaint, really, given the fact that actually there's an element of artisanal skill in terms of the lovely little paintings. And so what's demonstrated in that kind of gesture of anger by saying it's vandalism is to say that they're quite clearly not actually looking at it. So the idea of saying that on the one hand that part of the argument for these works when the drawing on the Goyers displays some kind of talented drawing,
that it kind of slightly mitigates the obscenity by saying, well, at least they kind of did something quite nice on it. The thing about the collages is what's quite funny about it is that fucking hell, it's like they've just cut things out and stuck them on. Have you? Or is it just right now? I mean, is it... I mean, that's brilliant. I mean, so even the idea of saying that Goya has been... No, tell me. That Goya has been sort of kind of, like, transgressed by Pritz-Dig, that's just too much to bear. Can we go back to the... It's just too much to bear. You can draw all over them, but as long as you're showing some skill, but if you stick Pritz-Dig on it and a stupid picture of children, or, you know... But in a sense, the thing, the game in the work, in this sense, is that there's a kind of... Yeah, yeah, we have that. But what did you, did you cut it?
You cut it. But why did you have to cut it? What difference if you just superimposed it? But what would that mean? Are we talking about, we're getting into some sort of really interesting idea about labor. No, you brought it up. I never thought you'd cut it. No, but you kind of seem to be more upset because they're stuck on. I mean, they're really stuck on. No, I'm trying to say this is brilliant because I do not know any collages. They work very, very in detail on Stesica. Yeah. I've never seen a collagist do this. And this is because it's your signature thing, which is copying. Well, you know, the only thing, I mean, I am going to fall into anecdotal storytelling here. Because it's funny. It's funny. It's just funny. I'm not going to apologize for it.
But, I mean, you know, putting glitters on, goyers, whatever, you know, sticking pictures on. But when we had the Hitler paintings, we had Hitlers in a box. We bought these Hitlers, and they sat in a box. The box glowed for about six months. It was like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. We didn't have the guts even to take them out of the box, because it was so, like, oh, it's a great idea to draw on Hitlers. Yeah, but I don't want to take them out. I don't even want to touch them. Anyway, came the day when we were very, you know, kind of brave one day, and we got them out. And I remember, you know, it's the same thing, like working out what would be the most insulting thing. We have got this great book, this amazing book, called Hitler, the Unknown Artist, which, you know, I mean, Hitler, the well-known genocider,
but the unknown artist, you know. So anyway, you know, so we had these kind of Hitler watercolors, you know, putatively, ostensibly, you know, some of them must be fake, some of them must be real. Also, actually, what's interesting is that we had these provenance letters from people saying, you know, I first got this painting from, this Hitler original from my dentist's pet dog's sister's wife's husband. So these kind of extracted sort of, you know. Anyway, so when we sat down to paint these things, I remember I started the first one. I have to say that Dinos was a little bit more squeamish about it, you know. And so we were kind of like, what would be the worst thing? What would be the worst thing for Adolf? What can we do that would be the most awful thing?
I think maybe rainbows. So if anyone's ever done watercolors, this is kind of an extended anecdote, but when you do watercolors, you tend to use the brush, and then you use the paint. And if you've done watercolors for any amount of time, there's this kind of little artistic tick that you have where you point the brush with your mouth, just so you get a nice line. So I'm doing this thing, drawing this kind of rainbow, colouring it in, pointing the brush, and Dinos said, do you think that when Hitler did that watercolour, he pointed it with his mouth? Copy your game! Do you think I've got a little bit of Hitler DNA in my mouth?
Anyway, it's just a thought. I heard you. Okay, so I can't resist, and it's got nothing to do with anything. And I would like to know what you think of Francis Bacon's work. I just can't help thinking of Freud, Eggs and Bacon. Okay, that's your answer. Could we have... Why isn't there artists called Eggs? It would be brilliant, wouldn't it? You could have a show called Freud, Eggs and Bacon. It would be brilliant. Could we have questions from the audience, please? No, obviously not. I'm interested in the relation between redemption and redeemability.
Because if you do these things on reproduction, especially digital these days, you can redeem anything. You could just press reverse and it's gone. But clearly you've done something which is irreversible and unredeemable. At the same time, somewhere around in the background is the larger meaning of redemption and irredemption. And I wondered if you could enlighten that. Um, um, no.
No. I don't, I think, I mean, I think that, you know, I mean, I guess the idea of sort of rewriting Brett Easton Ellis' book from the point of view of a woman, you know, or working on Goya's work is that it's kind of echoed by the idea of me and Deionce working together. The idea of two people making one person's work is that it already pushes the work into an area of kind of untrustworthiness. Because I guess the conventional notion of an artist is that they do something which can be treated as though it's trustworthy because it's a thing which has no reason to lie.
and it's a thing which has a kind of a slightly confessional element in terms of the fact that the kind of transaction between the person who looks at it and the person who makes it is that you trust that they're not lying. God, now I'm joking. That's quite weird. You get too much to go. I know. So the idea of working on someone else's work, I guess it just extends that notion that... Can I just say something? Heimlich maneuver, I think. Can I drink your water? I've drunk it. I've been talking more. One of the things that I think of, again,
in relation to your Goya work, I think of Freud's Rat Man. And the rat man came to Freud and told him a story of torture, which is a rat torture, I hope I got his name, the rats that put up the anus as torture. And what Freud described was, you know, the rat man was horrified when he was saying this, but Freud discerned a look on his face that was one of enjoyment. So it's like a hidden enjoyment. In a sense, what you're bringing out is that enjoyment, and you're bringing it out, and you're, the husk is, you know, you...
Well, that's really true, because I think if you look at how easily it is to sort of separate yourself from the experience of the work is by calling it shocking. When you call something shocking, you kind of sever any kind of engagement with the work with the work by saying that it's no longer anything to do with me. That's the redeemability that you want to get it off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's nothing to do with me because my experience of it is that I'm rejecting it by saying it's this, you know. But actually, in a sense, you know, shocking is a kind of a libidinal symptom. You know, it's a symptom of kind of pleasure. Of course it is. Yes, is there a mic here? I was just kind of curious how you felt when you and your brother were somehow working
on your own work. We were talking about this last night when the Saatchi storage facility basically burned and you guys had to recreate basically your help pieces. And in some way, at the same time, it kind of reminded me a little bit and in conversation, we were talking about Baldessari's idea of burning his paintings as a kind of conceptual, as a way to sort of almost liberate this kind of conceptual art. And even when Praveen is talking about collage, even Baldessari's idea of putting dots on things and sort of subverting these things, I'm kind of curious how you guys basically thought about that reconstruction aspect.
Because it's very different from a lot of the other work working somebody else's thing yeah i mean we were very happy when we heard about the fire only because we thought it was just damien and tracy and everyone else and then someone phoned up and said we actually had the biggest piece in there which is not so funny it was like yeah so it was a work that took two and a half years to make And, you know, the thing about this is that, you know, it's, you know, we had people phoning up saying, is it true that hell's on fire? You couldn't not then harvest this whole thing and think this is hilarious. You know, of course, you know, journalists, you know, is it true that hell's on fire?
Yes. I think it's always been on fire. You know, you couldn't not see that as being kind of a, you know, the work when it existed was a very, you know, problematic work in terms of where it was shown and stuff. So it didn't exist in any kind of positivised way, you know. In actual fact, what you could notice is that once it was burned, people had much more affection for it. You know, people mourned its loss, and once it was turned to kind of dust, it was like, oh, you know. But then you rebuilt it all. Yeah, we made two more. But also one of the things that we did is we also, you know, we had this idea, you know, we had this idea of thinking, well, you know, this idea of sort of thinking that, you know, making art is a kind of sort of, you know, failed, you know.
But that kind of, it's kind of failed, but it doesn't, it's not, it's not heading towards some notion of perfection in our case. But the idea of sort of the work burning was that, you know, pragmatically it was upsetting because that thing didn't exist anymore. But the wealth of stuff that came from it that was, you couldn't fail to see that was not, was also kind of worthwhile, was also actually became part of the work. You could really see that as being kind of actually quite a way of actually, you know, the idea that actually what you could do is you could repudiate the sadness that you were expected to feel by your work burning and then say, we'll just make another one. Because there's nothing more sort of blasphemous than piggybacking the sense of sort of sentimentalism that you'd feel if your work was burned, you know, sobbing and going, oh, I can never do it again.
We just instantly said, we'll just do another one. And so in some senses, what that did is that reinforced the notion of making the work that the work wasn't kind of organized out of some kind of tricky, emotional... And also, actually, we had this idea of saying that what we would also do is we would remake every other work of art that was burnt. We remade Trace's tent and then we just got bored of it and we couldn't be bothered with doing it anymore. But we still have Trace's tent, which is really quite good. I tried to give it to the Tate, you know, but they wouldn't take it. They were too scared of Tracy. Honestly, I honestly, it's true, you know that. Yeah, we actually offered to, I threatened to put it in a Luton van and take it and dump it on their front lawn. But I want to ask you about a rather cruel thing you did.
Gold Ubermensch. I don't think it's cruel. It's a four foot, eight inches. I think it's in one of the hell vitrines, is it? Oh, he's, there's a lot. No, but we did the big, massive sculpture with him on the kind of, like, the monocle for Glenn. About to fall off a cliff. Not really. With his computer and his wheelchair. I don't think he was falling. I think he was kind of... How did he get there? Because he was an inappropriate subject. You know, he was a completely inappropriate subject. And, you know, the idea of sort of, you know, kind of, you know, this notion of saying that, you know, Ubermensch, this kind of Superman, well, you know, you're confronted with this idea of saying, well, A, he's an inappropriate subject,
but also B, he's been presented as this kind of, you know, Superman. You know, Superman because actually, you know, Nietzsche has that great thing, it's no longer survival of the fittest, it's the survival of the weakest. What determines civilization is not fitness, it's weakness. Which is a kind of fantastic idea. It's a brilliant idea. That's not, I mean, poor old Nietzsche is misaligned by this notion that what he presents is the idea of the overman as being something better than human. He's just saying that it's something beyond human, not better. There's no kind of, you know, there's no fascism involved in it whatsoever. Was Nietzsche in your mind when you did it? Not all the time. Okay. Mark. Go on. I was thinking, I mean, some of the issues turned the other way around have a, not surprisingly,
a kind of religious source. I'm thinking particularly, I mean, it seems to be one of the cruelest and at the same time funniest statements by, you know, like St. Augustine is by. someone says, you know, will the body be alive in hell? Yeah. And he kind of says, yeah, but, you know, it's going to be slightly kind of different. Yeah. The body in hell is going to be slightly different in the following way. You can't faint, you can't lose consciousness, and you can never die. Yeah. Now, when you think about someone actually seriously proposing, let me have a think about
it. I want to give a kind of accurate answer on this hell business. And I think, I mean, in a funny way, he's right. I mean, in a sense, our notion of death and whatever is culled from a life which, however terrible, can at least end. The sort of putting one in one that just can't, where kind of immortality is just the most vile thing in the world, just outside the world. I think obscurely, I mean, it also kind of touches on the question of like what the difference
between a joke and laughter is. Because I think that people, as Parvian points out, obviously enjoy catastrophic events, even though it's very soon repressed or children are told not to look at it or whatever. I mean, I seem to remember like the 50s. There's an entire period when you're in the car of being told not to look outside because there's been an accident. Why you weren't allowed to, you know, you just thought, why can't we park and just go and see it kind of normally? but there is here
there's like a very discreet difference between a joke and laughter yeah but isn't there that joke isn't there the joke why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side which is not funny but why did the chicken kill itself to get to the other side which is funny so one involves pain and death and one just involves a chicken I think I've answered that question. I don't know how it fits in. There used to be a time in the 80s where Slavoj Zizek had the image of this man who was terrified that he was going to be eaten by a chicken. It's just the kind of fear he would have.
And checks himself into a hospital, and they say after fortnight we think you're cured and you can go out he said what do you feel about chickens he said i no longer fear that they're coming to eat me and so the doctor said so everything's all right he says not quite has anyone told the chickens um yeah okay last question Last question. Right in the back. Yes, yes, I have the microphone. Have you ever or do you ever have in mind when you're working that perhaps some future generation may also take your work
and then build upon it in the same way that you... Do you mean draw on it? Yeah, exactly. The Pritz stick of the 20th century. No, I just wondered if you'd ever reflected on this, about what the future life of your works might be, or if they may be treated in the same way, and if so, how that might make you feel. I mean, I do... Well, I've always kind of looked at the mannequin sculptures, for example, thinking that maybe in the future there'll be a kind of inversion of what's kind of valuable about it. that in some ways what will happen is that they'll get the sculptures in the, you know, 100 years time, chuck the sculptures away and they'll have the sneakers. And they'll be like, look, amazing, look at these things.
You know, I don't know really. I, you know, I don't really, it's kind of, it's a horrible thought. It's like someone else looking through your holiday snaps or something. You know, I don't, you know, we used to do this thing, I guess, you know, I mean, it's kind of probably more than I should admit to, but when we made some sculptures before, we had this idea of saying, God, you know, what about the idea of the future? What would happen if... I think I had to go to the Tate once when they had something, and they went through this, they had this pencil, and someone in kind of a white suit, and they kind of pointed to everything and said, how was that made, how was that made? And I said, mostly superglue, at which point they just winced at every, you know, because obviously that, you know, at a certain point, maybe 20, 23, everything we've ever made, which has like, with superglue in it, there's going to be this kind of like sudden defoliation event where everything's just going to go, and there's not going to be any work left.
But what we used to do, no, we used to, no, I'm not going to tell you that. No, so future work, I don't know really. I mean, I don't really think that art's... I had this idea of thinking that if in the future there was a kind of... Because obviously now we haven't mentioned mass extinction, which is kind of like the thing that we should have talked about. But imagining in the near distant future, there's this idea of how human culture will be perceived or raked over by alien anthropologists that will come down and work out what was going on with this kind of supposedly intelligent set of people. or they'd come across the Tate Gallery, and it would be kind of burning embers and kind of bricks and whatever, and they'd step over the walls and into this space that they would see as being some kind of sacred kind of area
in which these rituals would have occurred, and they would look at them and think, wow, you know, what are these people? Obviously, art must have been this thing that they venerated above everything else, this thing that they poured money into and they had this value, and they'll look for it, and they won't be able to find it in this gallery, and what they'll be doing is they'll be stepping over Carl Andre brickworks without noticing that that's actually not part of the building. You know, that's my image for the future. Okay. Good. Well, despite your attempts to sabotage the evening, I hope everyone has enjoyed it. I think I've been very generous with my time. Thank you very much. I mean, I drove in from Gloucestershire, for God's sakes. Thank you. .