Out of mind

Art students and talking arses
April 19, 2004

I had cleared the afternoon to work on my presentation when the neurosurgeon called. Neuropsychological assessments are rarely urgent, but this one was. I had to determine a 17-year-old girl's capacity for informed consent to surgery. The girl's parents were against the proposed treatment; the surgeon thought she would likely die without it. By the end of a long afternoon and evening of assessments I concluded that she was quite capable of making up her own mind. It was close to ten when I got home and all I wanted was a beer. I filed a formal report first thing next morning before driving to the airport.

The flight to Glasgow was too cramped and too brief to get down to serious work and, after checking in at the hotel, I had less than an hour to shuffle old Powerpoint slides before meeting up with my hosts. We had a drink, went to a nearby Italian restaurant for dinner and returned to the hotel bar for a glass or three of Laphroaig. I slept fitfully. And so, next morning, I found myself in the Glasgow Film Theatre, standing at the lectern, somewhat ill-prepared and hungover. The splendid art deco auditorium reminded me of long-gone Saturday mornings at the ABC Minors, watching Lone Ranger serials and The Adventures of Zorro. There was black and white footage of a steam train on the screen when I arrived for the technical run-through. By the time the audience drifted in, the images had become more abstract. We seemed to be wandering aimlessly through a grainy, whitewashed universe of cardboard boxes. This was a Glasgow School of Art Friday event.

I was the main feature. My talk went well enough, I think. Sometimes it's hard to tell. There were certainly plenty of questions - about clones and consciousness, souls and selves, amnesia, identity, dementia, and other vulnerabilities of the human mainframe. When, finally, there was a lull, I might have nodded wistfully to the audience, raised the mic to my lips and crooned a song. It's that kind of place. But the chairman chimed in. "Perhaps just one more question," he said, spotting a raised hand. The question came. I thought I'd misheard, but hadn't. "Where's God?" the young man repeated.

Over lunch, Stephanie Smith showed me a catalogue of her work. She and her partner, Eddie Stewart, are collaborative performance artists who work in video. They use their own bodies to explore themes of closeness and distance, inside and outside, sexuality, aggression, tenderness and torment. They grapple with the enigma of embodiment. Right up my street. There's Eddie submerged in a bathtub, fully clothed, his life hanging by a thread of oxygenated kisses from Steph. In another piece, Intercourse, they are filmed spitting into each other's mouths. After lunch, Alan Currall, my principal host, took me on a tour of the main art school building, the "Mac," Charles Rennie Macintosh's architectural masterpiece. It is a work of art filled with works of art. I was moved to virtual silence. "It's amazing," I said now and then. The notched balusters in the library, dabbed with splashes of primary colour seemed hyper-real. On our tour of the studios we paused to inspect one of Steph and Eddie's exhibition posters. It shows a still from a work involving the insertion of a miniaturised video camera into Eddie's mouth. The viewer looks out at the world from behind the artist's teeth. Then, down the corridor, we bumped into Eddie himself. By exquisite coincidence one of his front teeth had just fallen out. He showed us the gap. Was there a camera in there, I wondered? Perhaps he was filming me.

Smith and Stewart's work is concerned with the bodily inter-relation of selves. My concerns are intra-personal. I document the struggles between body and self - and, in the end, the body always turns to rebellion. Seditious murmurs in the bowel boil up to cancerous insurrection. Localised hostilities in the chest and arm prefigure the shock and awe of a heart attack. The amoral autonomy of the ageing and diseased body inevitably overcomes our pretensions to selfhood. The "it" always subsumes the "I." We see this battle in William Burroughs's tragi-comic tale of the man who teaches his arse to talk. It starts out as a novelty ventriloquist act but after a while the anus gains the power of autonomous speech. "He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time." Before long it is shouting out in the street. It wants equal rights. It talks all day and night. The man can't shut it up. Having grown rudimentary teeth it starts to eat. It drinks too much and gets maudlin. We don't need you around here any more, it tells the man, "I can talk, eat and shit."

I caught the early evening flight back to Bristol and drove up to see my parents. My dad and I opened the whisky I had bought and, as we drank, we seemed to converge in age. He brightened, while I sank into reflection. I remembered the girl and began to wonder about the operation. I hadn't considered the possibility of failure. But I needn't have worried. My surgeon colleague put his clever fingers inside the girl's head and fixed the fault. She was OK, thank God - wherever He might be.