The Art Menagerie

Is this a question? You or I may say "nay" - but who be we to judge? The official arbitor of the question is now conceptual artist Colin Lentil. Through an extreme and provocative catalogue of activities, Colin habitually snatches questions from the air and stamps on them. He initiates grating encounters with strangers who he becomes impatient with as soon as they begin to enquire about any aspect of anything. Whatever must this practice mean, I ask myself, but NO! This is the wrong question. And have not questions been the downfall of art? Should we stop asking questions? Is it right? Can it be done? Should I stop now?

"Yes, please do." says Colin.

I hold myself back from asking why. Lentil has a mean face, his brow crossed like a sticky bun, his legs uncrossed like the same bun reversed. I rephrase my question, angling it round a statement.

"Your practice... is... questioning the question." I say, cleverly. I can wriggle out of this one.

"Yes, I would agree with that statement." He eyes me insicively, challenging me as if in a parlour game.

"And... ...it blurs boundaries."

"Correct."

"It blurs the boundary between us right now."

"Mmm-hmm...."

I struggle. I think Lentil is winning, though who knows. The rules are written in biro on the artist's hand and that very same hand is currently in the artists' lovely mysterious pocket, rummaging onanistically.

"It challenges preconceptions." I say, stifling a question like a yawn. I have no idea what this means.

"In ways that you will tell me about." Now I'm getting the hang of this.

A chink in Lentil's armour appears as he shifts in his seat, with a clanky metal grating sound. He glances at the rules, quickly scribbling a footnote. On his hand. A handnote.

"Nah, I won't. To tell you about my work would be to answer to you. This is the habit of the questioner and is thus derundant."

Sigh. Bored now.

"OK. It would not be too much to presume that given your 'medium' is, as it were, the question - and the extermination of said question, that preventing others from initiating a sensible fact-finding dialogue regarding this practice somewhat puts you out of work."

"Was that a question?"

I snatch the phonemes from the air and dash them on the ground, blurring the chalky boundary between us and causing a mess of interrogative fragments. Lentil gets up - clankily - and makes his way sadly to the door marked 'Exit', tripping on his way. Boccioni does a sculpture of Lentil in mid-flight. We clap.

Rarely has the theme of dialogue been exploited as effectively as in the new show at Luton's Valentina Morose Gallery. The exhibition centres around a video produced by insomniac conjoined twins, Grahamina and Garetha Winnipeg. Their fourteen-hour disagreement over the album 'Tusk' by Fleetwood Mac is a riveting insight into the nature of identity and confusion.

The disagreement has since been heightened by the recent grant of Arts Council funding to Grahamina (left head - the one that looks like Tracey Emin) to embark on a journey to the arctic to interview snow leopards. Garetha remarked to Art Review this month: 'I wish her all the best in her adventure'.

Harvey Adendrum has created a chain of dogs encircling the British Isles.

Inspired by traditional Bible tales, Adendrum seeks to create modern-day myths, with a view to being misperceived as the second coming of Christ. The artist’s back-catalogue of headline-swiping work is so populist that just looking at it makes you feel like someone clever is like spooning jelly into your brain. Perhaps that’s why the government has pledged to buy everyone a piece of Adendrum.

Jamie Fruck, 11, from Liverpool says: "I was really happy and pleased when I got my Harvey Adendrum artwork. The piece I got was a video showing when Harvey filled Loch Lomond in Scotland with cornflour. The water went all sticky and then Harvey walked across it. It is funny and I like it."

Lisa Jibble from Rotherham was slightly disappointed with her work: "I had requested something along the lines of the ‘cress-dinghy’ piece, where Harvey filled four thousand dinghies with cress, tied them together and sent them out to sea to create a cress-island. Instead I just got 'A Punch In The Face, (1999)', which is apparently one of his most sought-after pieces. I'm thinking of contacting a dealer about it and perhaps trading it in for something less painful".

Cranczt's intimate series of films document false dialogues that never occurred between ex-lovers in a fictional suburb of Berlin in a version of 1984. Cranczt’s work reputedly makes most sense when the viewer is absent and disinterested. The artist himself claims (whilst smoking a cigarette nonchalantly and looking at me sideways) that his films are not made to be watched, but rather 'elegantly ignored and mildly disliked'.

In the video ‘Collapsing Lung’, currently showing at the Bilbao Guggenheim, a man and a woman coalesce in a lazy bedroom scene. The drawn-out dialogue of the two long-standing protagonists Bruno and Alma is achingly poignant and sheds a sickly light on our own deepest fears:

Bruno (smoking): ‘I have a pain in my lung.’

Alma (holding a clarinet, naked): ‘Do you want me to kiss it better?’

Bruno:‘My lung?’

Alma: ‘Yes.’

Bruno: ‘I don’t think…’

Alma: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle.’

(long pause, Alma puts clarinet down and applies some lipstick. Bruno extinguishes cigarette and turns over in bed.)

Bruno: 'I'm leaving you.'

Alma: 'Fine. I've been seeing someone else anyway. He's Swiss.'

(another long pause)

Bruno: 'You always did like the Swiss.'

Alma: (slowly and deliberately) 'Yes. The Swiss. I do like the Swiss.'

museum of modern art

The minutae of everyday life comes under the microscopic hammer tomorrow at the correctly-scaled auction for Emilie Bmilosso’s domestic performance art. For the last 49 years, Bmilosso has habitually been the only working artist in the Soviet Union and her work is expected to sell like hot shitcakes.

The most keenly anticipated item in the catalogue is ‘Conserving The 67^th Breath Of Each Day Since August 1956’ (mixed media performance, 1956 -). I asked Emilie Bmilosso to tell us a little more about the inspiration (and hopefully trauma) behind the work:

‘I remember as a child in Russia, my Mother would entertain my Uncles from Chelyabinsk every Sunday. Our family was very poor and we could not afford the luxuries Mother wanted to lavish on our guests. We did not even have a table for my Uncles to rest their vodka on, so Mother would strap an encyclopedia to my back and throw a tablecloth over me before the guests arrived. I had to crouch silently on all fours for the whole evening. Sometimes the celebrations lasted many days, so I had to be very disciplined and still - I even began to think like a piece of furniture...

If I moved or made a sound, Mother would beat me with meathooks as soon as the guests departed, so I very rarely even breathed. I lowered my heart rate to 1/67^th of the average Russian, meaning I had only to breathe one out of every 67 breaths.

It was a very useful talent in those days – air in Russia was very expensive in 1956 and had to be smuggled over the borders at night. It was also seen to be very rude to breathe when important guests came to visit. But with the air-savings I’d made as a table, I had collected up enough breath to blow up a balloon at on Christmas Day. A merry time indeed!

Ever since my Mother died in 1961 I have continued to conserve every 67^th breath of the day as a memorial to her. Before I die, I plan on releasing over 17,000 saved 67^th breaths into a hot air balloon which I shall charter to heaven.’

I grilled-cum-interviewed the sculptors-cum-filmmakers in their Chester-le-Street warehouse-cum-studio, ‘Apostle F’. Entering the vast space, I encounter some enormously intimidating pieces; a glowing goat’s head screwed in to a light fitting, a massive sculpture of a graphically ovulating wasp, the word ‘discharge’ written in semen on a mirror and, most notably, an enormously large painting of an electric carving knife. The piece, 50ft tall, hangs precariously from the wall on fraying twine. The pair inform me of the working title: Death-by-Numbers.

What is it you aim to achieve with your work?

Dollond: ‘A visual holocaust. Emptiness. Nausea.’
Aitchison: ‘Proto-Nietzschean decay. Fear. Apathy.’

Right. And this piece here, Death-by-Numbers. What’s the influence behind that?

Dollond: ‘We wanted to make the scariest and most dangerous painting ever.’
Aitchison: ‘And we thought that a really big painting would be scary…’
Dollond: ‘But then Aitchison suggested that we hang the painting precariously to increase the amount of danger.’
Aitchison: 'I just had a brainflash - huge unstable paintings! It was amazing. And then Dollond had a stroke of genius, didn't you?.'
Dollond: ‘Yeah, out of nowhere. I just thought what if it was a painting of a monster or a weapon? Surely that’d be the most scary painting ever.'
Aitchison: ‘And lo, it is as told. I couldn’t even look at it when I was painting it. I was too afraid.’

You famously declared that ‘the heartbeat of modern art is fading’ and that you would ‘fit art with a pacemaker and feed it morphine’. Were your attempts successful?

Dollond: (regretfully) ‘Well, in the end, we had to do mouth-to-mouth.’
Aitchison: ‘And we really enjoyed it.’
Dollond: ‘But unfortunately, art died.’
Aitchison: ‘But I carried on giving it mouth to mouth, with tongues, just to feel what it was like.’

But if art is now dead, what is it that we see in this studio?

Dollond: ‘The animated corpse of art. Jim Henson’s puppet graveyard of modernity. A dead ghost.’

Are you afraid that there are limits to ‘fear-art’? Or do you think that's all we have left in this jumbled, mixed-up flim-flam jamboree of a world?

Dollond: ‘Yes and No…’
Aitchison: (to Dollond) ‘And maybe?’
Dollond: ‘Maybe…(pauses) Y’know, there’s no limits to fear. The Greeks had it right. They had such a thing as a phobophobe – someone who is literally afraid of fear - a fearophobe, if you like. And logically by the same extension, you could be a phobophobephobe if you feared fearing fear.’
Dollond: ‘And if you fear fearing fear-fearing?’
Aitchison: ‘A phobophobophobophobe. See, it goes on forever. Fear is endless.’
Dollond: ‘And what if you are afraid of people who are phobophobophobophobes? Does that make you a phobophobophobophobophobe? Or literally, ‘one who fears those who fear fearing fear-fearing.'
Aitchison: ‘It does. I used it in Scrabble last week. 192 points’

But surely, by that logic, there are also philophiles? Those who, as you might say, love loving. And those who love those who love loving: philophilophiles? Isn’t it just a matter of glass half full?

Dollond: (suddenly depressed) ‘The glass isn’t full or empty. It’s dead. Smashed to be more precise. We videotaped its demise in a Newcastle pub. It’s over.’
Aitchison: ‘Love is dead. I’m a philophobe.’

Didn’t you address fear-fearing with your public information intervention-piece in Flanwydd Ty in West Wales? I seem to remember there was a public panic over your new terms – ‘phobophobes’ and the like.

Dollond: ‘Well, you know Mirror readers, they’re not the sharpest spanners in the wheel…’
Aitchison:  ‘They went off and attacked people they thought were paedophilophilophile’s, but who were actually paedophilophilophobes.'
Dollond: ‘Sad. But funny too.’
Aitchison: ‘Yeah, it was kind of funny to watch the hooligans get confused as they stopped mid-beating to figure out who they should attack next. You could see the look of terror on their face, which soon turned to resigned acceptance as they realized that by their logic they had to attack their own families for loving those who feared fearing child molestation.'
Dollond: ‘They were like an army of rabid dogs chewing their own stupid tails.’
Aitchison: ‘And choking on them. Just shows what a climate of fear we have in the country at the moment.’

Jaqueline Petroleum gathered copulous news-inches last month as she and two other Royal Academy artists went on strike outside the Tate Modern, vowing never to make work again until the public perception of art changes.

The powerful images of 3 whitewashed women wearing placards made from ethnically-masticated bark must be one of the highlights of this years fold-out megacalendar of events.

I asked the searingly fashionable Jaqueline Petroleum to give us an insight into the typical morning of a contemporary typical artist.

At 5.15am sharp I make a strong coffee, which I never drink. By that time, I’m too concerned with standing near a window and reflecting, questioning and finding inspiration. There’s something about the early morning light that compels me, like a moth to the flame of a candle in a cottage in a really pretty village.

After my coffee has encoldened, I’ll warm up my shakras by pointing them in the direction of Allah. Then I set off down the A32 in a rickshaw, looking for roadkill for my latest project - '(Un)Natural Disasters’.

Usually I’ll get a call from my agent at about 11am, updating me on sales. This morning he rang to tell me that a lofty businessman wants to buy my ‘Flat Badger’ at £100,000! It’s great to know that all the hard work isn’t for nothing.

In 1991, whilst at art college, Seedle was so inspired by Aldous Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’ that he decided to cut out all of the letter E’s from the book, soak them in ecstasy and distribute them to fellow students. The resulting e-mêlée was entitled 'Doors of Prcption' and received a gold star from tutors.

Since then, Seedle’s practice has sprouted and flowered like a soft mould on the upper lip of visuality; the contemporary moustache has been overrun with the mossy mildew of inspiration, and Seedle’s work is a particularly thick hair in this confused metaphor.

‘So what he do now?’ ask you, eyes glimmering like a mad sparrow.

Well, Seedle still works with perception, but has become more ambitious in the scale of his projects. His current intervention involves soaking library books in LSD and Ketamine - the result is a predictably hilarious nationwide panic. We find Barbara Cartland housewives, high on joy, serving their husbands Toad-in-the-K-hole; elderly gardeners shaving their heads and planting car stereos; paranoid engineering students firing staples at their textbooks and children finally able to understand the point of Noddy and Barney the Dinosaur. Worst off are the librarians themselves, who have been seen making nests from shredded magazines and scanning their eyeballs with barcode readers.

The only demographic thought not to have been touched by the epidemic are the press, art critics and PR monkeys, who are known never to read anything. The next stage of Seedle’s enterprise involves soaking web pages in hallucinogens, which will evaporate upon a user’s click.

From the paintings of Ad Reinhardt to the controversial work of Turner Prize-winner and premium spack-burbler Martin Creed, minimalist art has shrunk, shriveled and disappeared over the last 50 years. Taking the trend down a notch is Brent Hendrix, whose method improves upon the lessons learnt by past masters of the minimal:
Brent Hendrix steals his own work, usually moments after it goes on display. Speaking in today’s newspaper about the recent self-theft of his new work, he says:

‘It’s a real shame - the work was my best so far, it was a 3D collage made from hair, tinfoil, rhodedendrons and a Buick. It took me 6 years to make, but soon after I put it in the gallery yesterday, I stole it. It’s a travesty, I know. I mean, you would have thought I could have, like, not stolen it… but there we go. Back to the drawing board, I guess.’

Hendrix is making a public appeal to himself, offering a handsome reward for the swift return of the piece.

Being introduced to Peter Flan* is like meeting algae. His presence moves vaguely before me like a stain in the air, as grey as a prison cardboard. When he talks I feel his breath like a gas leak on my clammy cheek. I wipe away his wet homosexual kisses and take a seat on the jaundiced chez lounge. The man is so horrific he can only be a genius.

I ask him about this inspiration behind his latest collection:

‘When I conceived of this exhibition, I really just wanted to take painting off the canvas, stuff it in a transit van and dump it in the woods...y’know? I wanted my brushstrokes to look drunk and disorderly, like they had leaned on the canvas with their trousers round their ankles and fallen asleep... I wanted to soil the body of painting, so to speak - to mock the Masters, to shit on Cezanne…’

He goes on to discuss his attitude towards painting:

‘I guess the key thing is that I’m always aiming for is a sort of resonance… like last week when I discovered a dead shrew in some tepid dishwater… and my blind hands thought the poor creature was the cloth or the sponge, so I squeezed it dry….y’know? That sort of thing… I want my paintings to make the viewer feel limp… I want my canvases to encapsulate the emotional impact of a sick Victorian child finding an unexplained secretion of mucus in a damp crevice on a feverish Wednesday.’

He stops to offer me a sip from his plate of tea. I decline. My mind is agog, my mouth ajar, my face empty, gaping like a stolen purse. The man truly is a genius.

*One of the most reclusive artists of our time, Peter Flan was jailed in 1998 for smuggling atrophied cats into the country. Atrophied cats are illegal in the UK but farmed openly in Serbian restaraunts, where Flan ordered as many as 15 a week. In court, Flan claimed that his livelihood rested on the procurement of a rare pigment – ‘Tepid Yellow’ - which is manufactured only in atrophied cats and cannot be acquired readily in the UK. He has since been acquitted of all charges.

A selection of frangranced supermodels race for cash in the name of their chosen charity on a 100-metre ‘Cinderella Dash’. The models, in keeping with the traditional tale, all wear glass slippers for the duration of the race. Sounds interesting? Well, the gory documentation of just such an event is displayed at Pi Ng’s new show in the Serpentine Gallery.

We are treated to a level of interactivity unusual for a contemporary photographer: along with glossy prints of a bloodstained beauty, viewers can look inside the lascerated supermodels with the aid of punningly-titled ‘Tapeworms’, extensive parasites that are equipped with tiny cameras to record the inner progress of physical trauma.

The treats don’t stop there, however: in collaboration with a fellow new media icon, Hippolyta Dustkeys, Pi Ng offers us a giant 3D video projection, which details in slow-motion the moment the winning supermodel crosses the barbed-wire finishing line. Whilst the sight of a ribcage slowly being torn apart replays over and over, we are serenaded by an innovative soundtrack (a digital collage by Hippolyta Dustkeys), which samples the agonized cries of the losing supermodels as they claw for second place.

The exhibit is being hailed by high-browed feminists as ‘a new paroxysm for the modern woman’ and ‘a perfect summer afternoon activity for families’. Check it out.

Street-math is one of the most priapic genres to emerge this century, and involves the stealthy deployment of hardcore improvised sums in urban areas. The best examples of street-math have fallen from the brain of Pavet Mulodny, whose acute sums give way to more obtuse references, especially in equations such as  16/2) © +  1.188889 = Your Mother.

Previously a member of Crucifix Four, the street-math gang who pioneered the use of urban Spirograph in the Math to the Death battle of 2003, Mulodny has since gone his own way, having been inspired by the song 'Go Your Own Way' (Fleetwood Mac, 1977). Since the division, Mulodny’s career has really begun to flap: the artist has begun work on a collection of street-math props which are set to send shockwaves up the twisted spine of the street-math genre.

The bag of tricks he has so prettily managed to secrete up his sleeve include an actual square root (the last example of which was thought to have been lost in the library of Alexandria), a binary calculator, some hitherto unknown ‘homegrown’ numbers (cultivated in mutant soil imported from Chernobyl), and a delicious recipe for pi. All this suggests the outcome of the mathwar equation will inevitably fall in Mulodny’s favour. As he says in his own words: 'it's like eating putty out of the hands of a baby'.

Perhaps that’s why Mulodny seems to be eager to get off the streets, having proved all he can as the dingeboy of Brussels. Now venturing into the truly dangerous area of multi-dimensional mathematics, Mulodny was astounded to find that subtracting the 4-dimensional area of the concept ‘Your Mother’ resulted in him becoming locked in his own equation for eleven hours. Mulodny is performing this phenomenon at exclusive London galleries this week, whilst gin-mouthed art-terriers bray and whinny at the spectacle.

Michael-Craig and his family live in a giant inhabitable television. Situated on a prominent London street, onlookers and passers-by are treated to a realtime exhibition of family life. Amongst the typical domestic events (mowing the dog, hanging the children out to dry) we catch glimpses of the artistic process: Michael-Craig brainstorms, innovates and revolutionises in a silk kimono, slugging chilled Magners and throwing together crayfish and rocket focaccias for his educational psychologist wife and his 3 experimental children Sheldron (8), Muskat (15/4) and Jish (16/1).

Local councillors are angry about the work and have granted permission to a team of accountants in the office block opposite to start work on the construction of a giant remote control which will be used to change the channel.

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Following on from Thursday’s review of Henema Fa, the blind lesbian nominee for this year’s Turner Prize, there has been a satisfyingly disabled smell wafting downwind from the Tate: art-chins in high places have been wagging about another new artist - Bezier Conflagrĕ.

French, and deaf from the waist up, Bezier’s practice has involved faithfully attending various European nightclubs, discos and dancehalls and transcribing the dance moves he observes into poetry via the cipher of sign-language. The resulting tracts verge on the nonsensical, but like the monkeys-in-typewriters equation, Conflagrĕ produces work of Shakespearean dimensions.

The videostill above (above) is taken from a video installation, currently showing at the Tittelfukt in Leipzig, which documents Bezier’s reading of Berlin’s most notorious club event, Buttelfitzen-Freitziggernacht. The club is the setting for Europe’s most experimental dance pioneers (now being subjected to crushingly new EU regulations) who throw moves so cutting edge that onlookers have been known to weep and vomit through incomprehension and amazement. What’s more, these dancers unknowingly describe more than they know or can describe; the video’s crowning bubble occurs when two female vets on a Hen Night seem to communicate to each other the theory of relativity, whilst the moves of the crowd behind spell out an extract from a sub-clause of the Treaty of Versailles. Which only goes to prove the age-old parapet; when you’re deaf, no-one can hear you scream.

Investigating Henema Fa is like opening a birthday present, upside down, only to find that the present was a mutant scorpion which has now fallen onto the floor and stung your foot, injecting pure art straight into your bloodstream.

As I clear the remains of the creature from my shoes, I ask myself the simple question: ‘Is investigating Henema Fa really like opening a birthday present, upside down, only to find that the present was a mutant scorpion which has now fallen onto the floor and stung your foot, injecting pure art straight into your bloodstream, or have I wasted this opportunity for a clever insight and ruined my shoes?’. This indecision and lack of commitment to my own tropes and metaphors is a direct result of viewing Fa’s work. She pickles the eyes of her viewers, scrambling their preconceptions and serving the concoction back to the viewer as haute couture artfood, which, when you swallow it, quickly self-implodes and delivers a magnificent blow to the aesophagus, like an AK47. On crack. In a bedsit. In hell.

Blind, black, disabled stupid lesbian Henema Fa recently won the Arts Council's new £90,000 grant for blind, black, disabled stupid lesbians ‘challenging attitudes and preconceptions in the community’. Fa ‘confronts preconceptions’ and ‘represents minorities’ by making them truly sorry for being different. Holden Biscuit, a spokesperson from the Arts Council had this to say about the award:

‘It’s about time that the world stood up to itself and acknowledged these members of the community. Our research shows that less than 0.01% of the workforce are disabled, blind, black, lesbian and stupid – what sort of advert is that for inclusivity and anti-discrimination? At the Arts Council we are committed to turning up the volume of the voices of marginalization. So much so that we’ve had to buy new LuftWaffe speakers to use on our rallies. By the end of our nationwide tour we hope to have installed blind, black, disabled, stupid lesbians in many of the high ranking government positions, as well as handing over the keys to money factories to them and giving them our children to play with.’

Some critics of the Arts Council initiative claim that Henema Fa is a bad choice for the award. It is claimed that Fa became black during a ski-ing accident, and has only recently turned to lesbianism after years as a failing hetero. She has, however, been stupid all her life.

Mumps welcomes me to her bijou watercolour house in Sydenham with a voice like 6pt Comic Sans. Squeaking to me about her recent work ‘Protest’, she explains how she persuaded 30 friends to meet and emit a mass sigh, in protest at ‘The War’. This event was followed by a watercolour sleepover, attended by the divine and putrescent of the art sect, where 'The War' was discussed over pineapple smoothies.

Katie Mumps does not restrict her activist activities to protesting against war. She is also anti-television, and finds herself crying softly to adverts for washing powder or awnings. Mumps is so sensitive she has often been bruised by wind, and is thought to be at least 80% gas. Her favourite pastime (and a lucrative one at that) is making pastel drawings. Her preferred subjects are rainbows, waterfalls and unicorns.

In Britain, every year, more than 10 million people are mad. And over 5 million of those are mad and dead.

Blurring the line between art, commerce, death and madness, Santana has colonised the needs of this market (the Financial Times calls it the 'Yellowing Pound') and produces bespoke double-sided headstones for those with personality disorders. Each headstone is intricately woven from hand-hewn Malvern granite, and offers a bi-lateral experience for relieved and grieving relatives.

Merrell Santana has recently been ordained as a priest and will soon be able to offer a service from womb to tomb, offering a ‘schizo-christening’ for babies with a high chance of developing multiple personalities.

Get your click-fingers working on www.mad-and-dead.com.

Jugway's fountainous sprays of ambiguity, his messy fluid of meaning, force us to mop up the sticky chaos of polysemy with our logocentric tissues of cohesion and retire shamefully to the shower of rationality where we scrub off the dirty pawprints of truth, sobbing like apes caught in men’s bodies.

The work ‘Shelfish’, currently of no fixed meaning, is a love letter to the illogical, a homage to the hovering homonym, a dedication to decaying denotation, a pean to plurality.

Like a four-legged woman, Toby-John Jugway’s work holds a mirror up to the diseased face of art, forcing us to confront the cancerous idiot within. Open your eyes and smell the acrid truth, you stupid people: you've been Jugwayed.

In 1999, punkboss Richard Explosion’s career ended along with his first top ten hit ‘Iv’nt You Clever, Matthew?’, which reached number fifth up the charts and prompted legions of teens to stencil their parents with mocking slogans.

Since then he has disbanded as a solo artist and hijacked the moniker ‘Stabros,’ terrorizing Greek islands with his musical knife, which plays sections of ‘Ave Maria’ upon entry into his victim's bodies. Casual art-hounds and professional lawyers may muse and thrum at the dubious morality of these acts, but when they learn that Stabros’s victims can sell their wounds for upwards of thirty thousand euros each, they’ll be limping on the other side of their face. A holiday to Mykonos this year might be worth it after all.

Visiting Sue Magoo (born Susan Magoosan) at Sue Magoo HQ in Waterloo is almost a sensation. Not only the daughter of eccentric millionaire and philanthropist, F.Stop Magoosan, she also featured in the top ten of Art Monthly’s prestigious ‘New Fluff’ list in 1997.

Transferred directly at birth to her father’s flagship gallery in Kensington, Magoo was cruelly whipped by a gaggle of understimulated gallery staff who force-fed her items of art including paintings, sculptures and video installations, in the crazy-minded hope that she would bear fruit, like a fucking art-tree or something.

Amazingly, however, and much to everyone’s chagrin, Magoo did indeed grow a small sproutlet of pure art on her forehead; it soon developed into a prize-winning touring exhibition. But a cruel kink in the fate of Magoo found her succumbing to the pressures of fame and attempting to commit suicide by chewing through her own wrists.

Upon rehab, Magoo was cast as the fictional character ‘Lesley Draftclippings’ in Michael Stipe’s first novel ‘Creases in the U-Bend’. Now running for President, Magoo’s inspirational story shows us all how cruelty, abuse and desperation can result in cruel success abuse and money desperation.

For two decades, Jan Den Bingowing has attempted to force himself on the beautiful corpse of modern art. His extreme and innovative methods have involved shouting at a canvas in an attempt to scare a painting into existence and painting an angry bull red before running at it with a mirrored canvas.

More successful attempts have involved loading up a car with cheap art materials, stolen from a local art shop, and commencing a high speed car chase along a motorway, accelerating until he crashed violently into a giant canvas obstructing the road. His most eye-splitting attempt to date was ‘Aeronautic Industrial Colour Rape’, shown above (above). The event entailed hiring a small plane, fitting it with a canvas and crashing it into a paint factory at high speed.

Whether it was by chance or purely an accident, the painting below (below) was the result:

Amidst all the optical confusion stirred up by this season’s gallerysmashing show ‘Op Art, Pop Art and Pop Tarts (Part 1)’ at the Luthervandross Gallery in London, a revival in art movements with ‘op’ in the name has been trendballooning everywhere.

‘Drop Art' is the newest kid straddling the block. Two-thirds pointillist nightmare, half Fluxus tramp, Drop Art is a complexiful movement. The group hail from Hailsham, where, yesterday, in the face of mounting pressure from activist op-group ‘Stop Art’, Drop Art’s main spokesperson, Hollerton Machismo, dribbled on a microphone in a press conference.

Along with Stop Art’s campaign, and the recent interest in ‘Cop Art,’ best exemplified by the Shropshire Constabulary and their hilariously droll performance piece ‘Aimless Interrogation,’ Drop Art looks like it will have to pick up a stick and bash in the brains of others if it wants to survive.

The currently dead Euralia Perrimon is the subject of the upcoming Hayward Gallery introspective, showing soon in the Hayward Gallery.

Journeying inside the Perrimon skeleton via cables fed into the artist’s grave, Arteologists hope to uncover the secret of the artist’s seminal underperformance in recent times. Reasons for her absence have ranged from guesswork (‘She’s a recluse’) to speculation (‘She’s working on her masterpiece’) to pure estimation (‘She's a bastard’) and back to guesswork again (‘She’s a bastard recluse’).

Perrimon’s delicate watercolour renderings of pansies and cats were huge sellers in the 70’s, both internationally as well as throughout the rest of the world. Prices smashed the glass ceiling for female artist’s work, showering onlookers with shards of feminist liberation.

Fusion Clipart. Carving out a new genre is difficult enough for a young artist, but when you’re working with the flinty medium of clipart nothing could be more arduous. Glipse pioneers in his field using rare Photoshop tools unavailable to the general public; the ‘hammer’, ‘screwdriver’ and ‘blowtorch’. With these, he bends, breaks, reforms and reshapes clipart, sometimes working plexus-wrenching 16-hour days with nothing but glue and crackers to keep him going.

Fusing clipart is a difficult process, prone to structural difficulties and heavy lifting. What’s more, the fumes given off when clipart is dismembered mean that Glipse must work in a climate-controlled canoe.

‘It’s a lonely job’, says Glipse. ‘Sometimes I dream in Clipart. They’re more like nightmares, really. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I just see a big, stupid, clipart face… but it’s worth it. The knowledge that what I’m doing could change the world keeps me going. I’m constantly evolving my methods. For example, I’m currently working on a new process tool to incorporate into my work; it’s a Photoshop icon called ‘Microwave’. It literally microwaves the clipart to make it more pliable, which is really useful when dealing with really thick sections of clipart, like with this comical octopus... (gestures to comical octopus onscreen)’

A deep obsession with bureaucracy and administrative entropy characterize Oliver Melt’s work. In a ‘wilfully obscure’ act of neo-situationist detournement, Melt operates from within the context of a council office as an Administrative Assistant. His work, fleeting and banal-esque, often characterizes itself through the misfiling of minor reports and the misuse of office stationery.

‘Post-It Note Mumbles,’ currently at the Marion Flinge Gallery in Uttoxeter, displays 1000 absurd post-it notes, collected over a one-month period, that mix nonsense words with Dada poetics.

These memos certainly do send a semantic blood clot to the brain of the regular gallery-goer, but what must be considered is the effect they have on Melt’s unfortunate co-workers; Melt ritually deployed his associational tripe in the lead up to important meetings, scattering anxious colleagues with hundreds, if not tens, of faux-urgent cryptic messages.

For Melt, success has brought recognition and sponsorship; with the aid of Arts Council funding, Melt has now been able to give up his time-consuming job, enabling him to spend more time making art in the office.

Above: Gladys Fledgling's 'Horses at Dawn' (oil on canvas, 1988) encased in a mixture of concrete and feathers (concrete and feathers, 2006)

In a seething critique of the UK art market, Slight buys the worst artwork he can find and encases it in a mix of concrete and feathers. Smirking almost imperceptibly, he describes his work as: ‘An expression of an impression of a digression’.

The collage above, entitled ‘Mummy's Gone Dogging', famously won the Man Booker Prize this year, despite strong competition in the form of Lulu Shark’s confessional ‘Diary of a Gorilla’. Clapshaw's intriguing scenes have a delicate (sub)text/ure which limply clarifies the tragedy inherent in our sociosexual landscape.

Armed with picnic basket and an eccentric sewing kit, Clapshaw roams the laybys, flybys and car parks off the M1, gently weaving delicate scenes of modern day urban deviance, his stitches a real-time documentation of the ‘pigswill generation’.

Clapshaw’s Travels (soon to be a Channel 5 series) reveal more than we could never have imagined. In Luton, he stumbled upon a campsite populated entirely by Swiss Cottagers. In Leicester, a spree of nubile ‘fenceposters’. At Brent Cross, he found his own mother dogging in the car park of Somerfield.

This truly horrendous experience has had a invigorating effect on his work; in the latest pieces, spots of blood can be found amongst the stitches. Are these marks the traces of a simple prick? It's unclear.

A transiform future-sponge collective from Denmark, currently blowing people’s faces off with their scathing art terrorism. If Art was Ilegal(sic) will arrest (and detain) your vision, making you feel like you’re in a future totalitarian state where ‘Art is Ilegal(sic)’. If you ever wanted to know about ‘scuff-stuffing,’ ‘lukewarm optic-discharge’ and ‘Scabs Of War’, watch out - I’m about to spill the beans right into your eyes.

• ‘Scuff-stuffing’
If Art was Ilegal(sic) will only perform to members of the public willing to be taken hostage. Once you have had your head beaten inside a paper bag with a marmoset in it, their work is unveiled.

• ‘lukewarm optic-discharge’
If Art was Ilegal(sic) paint the eyes of the viewer/hostage with neon paint to enliven their visual experience.

• ‘Scabs Of War’
If Art was Ilegal(sic) document their work by violently throwing cameras at the hostage, processing whatever exposures may have been recorded on impact. High-velocity camera bullets are in development for the third stage of their work ‘Oslo Assassination; 2050 VIII’.

If Art was Ilegal(sic) have performed for Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate Modern, who has now promised a ‘futuro-retrospective’ for the works the group might have not yet made. See the history of the future, now. And in the future. Now.

Politically adhesive work. In collaboration with the families of hit and run victims, Labia’s main exhibit, ‘Intensive Care’ debuted at this year’s Open Studios in Clapham. ‘Intensive Care’, comprised of many separate and conjoined objects, included the memorable installation which exhibited Peter Young, an 11 year-old coma patient, whose limp, dull body was tattooed with extracts from Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

In the laminated catalogue for her most recent exhibition ‘Lamination Lamentation,’ Rhois describes her work as a 'post-institutionalist critique of art preservation'.

Using the medium of lamination, Rhois's practice has, for the past 11 years, involved the indiscriminate yet systematic lamination of her immediate environment. Working outwards from a chalk circle drawn in the epicenter of her studio, she has ritually encased the contents of her Suffolk home in plastic. Feffel’s lamination has so far engulfed objects as diverse as wallpaper, insects, husbands and toiletries, to name just four. Items.

In a recently broadcast radio interview from her laminated coccoon, Feffel's words seemed muffled, vague and strange, prompting the question: How long can genius survive the onslaught of it's own suffocation? We are assured, however, that Rhois has a stockpile of bubble wrap, and can live off the air contained therewithin for literally years.

Currently to be found locked in contemplation of the interminable act of laminating her laminating machine, Feffel Rhois’s conservationalist tirade is challenged only by her own patience, as well as that of others.

Working from the Guinness Book of World Records, Fist randomly chooses a record, by sticking a pin in his thumb, and thenceforth attempts to fail to trump the chosen record. Confused.com? So was he. Let us example:

His latest effort successfully managed to fall short of the record for Most Sausages Swallowed in One Minute. Fist managed to swallow just seven whole sausages in one minute, barely avoiding the record set by Cecil Walker (USA), who swallowed eight whole sausages measuring 15 cm (6 in) in length and 2.22 cm (0.87 in) in diameter at the St. Boniface Hotel, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada on March 13, 2003.

Other near misses include the ‘Oldest’ triptych, currently on display at the Victoria Miro gallery; Fist simultaneously failed to be the Oldest Man to Climb Mount Everest, the Oldest Billiards World Champion and the Oldest Female Astronaut, by pure dint of being only 31 all of last year.

John-Elaine Fist’s canvas is human achievement. His paints are failure itself. His brushes… well, you decide.

Working from his Loughborough studio, the 'InfoHive', Left collaborates with elements as diverse as air, rain, and his own tears. Exploring his deep-rooted obsession with futility, Left questions the artworld’s preoccupation with artists other than himself.

Max and Berrinda work in separate adjoining studios. Max calls his the ‘Penistry’. Communicating through a latticework of lubricated modem cables, they can often be overheard producing children and babies, by downloading their ovaries, vaginas and penises onto each other’s hard drives, before swaddling them in lambswool.

Their investigation into procreative impulses has most recently manifested itself in the obsessive organization of their various children according to size and attractiveness. A recent intervention by the Child Protection Services was a resounding success when documentation in the form of a video diary was exhibited at this year’s Venice Biennale.

Words fail critics when they try and summarise the work of this couple. Perhaps Jens Jensen was right when he declared in last month’s Wired magazine: ‘(the work is) …a bastard bullet aimed at the ragtag technology of procreativition. Thoughtmaking.’

A deep interest in her own self and identity spur Granada Polish not only to investigate the events dividing her own childhood and adulthood. Recalling a fictional encounter with her absent mother, she both investigates the child inside.

Her least famous exhibition: “I am not here. You am not it. She is can’t see. Forgetting” retold the tale of a brief encounter with a hare-lipped boy in a local delicatessen. Farming her own face, she has run rivets of flesh-erosion unto her own identitude.

Charma Blistow's time-based work playfully disrupts notions of authorship, arthood and the very nature of itself.

Blistow's more controversial/contravisual work so far has been when she designated two out of the hundred or so lamposts lining the Mall in London the status of an art object. It's objecthood came into being, according to Blistow, from 01:17 to 01:19 on the morning of January 11th this year. Photographic documentation does little to enlighten us on the presence of this object; Blistow's lampposts happened to be the ones that had dead bulbs. The hazy prints, currently on display in the artist's mind, tell us little. We see darkness, but don't we all? Isn't that the truth we all seek, fed to us backwards by the mother of our own preconceptions?

Future work includes the temporary designation of 7 acres of John Prescott as a UNESCO World Heritage Sight, and the nomination of three minutes in the life of the sagging Sally Gunnell as RIBA Building of the Year.

Contact the artist on charmablistow@runk.com, but bear in mind she only reads every 15th email.

Art - V are a provocative new art collective, consisting of some of Chelsea’s finest graduates. Conning the elderly into thinking they are ascending to heaven, the collective dress entirely in white and lead the inhabitants of nursing homes in single file, silently through the boroughs of the city of eastern London, towards the Church of The Holy Cassock in Bermondsey.

Ramses Betjeman, the group's appointed leader, had this to say:

"We lay on cakes and biscuits when we arrive in 'Heaven'. The old folks seem to like it. We'll often try to have discussions about the work, once they've got their breath back..."

"...we try and call the ambulance at least ten minutes before we get to the church. It's more seamless that way. I guess for all of us, it's a way of proving that art can perform a social function, that it's not just about, y'know, painting Damien Hirst.'