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(Background noise might make this episode a challenging listen.)
Episode image is a detail from the cover of $20,000 by Bill Drummond, published in 2010 by Beautiful Books Ltd; cover design by Cally at www.antar.cc.
Charles Adrian is joined for the 52nd Second Hand Book Factory at a noisy Royal Festival Hall in London by avid reader and mega-commuter Katrina Crear. They talk about art and value and Australia. Bill Bryson is mentioned.
Correction: Charles Adrian wants to say Royal Opera House towards the middle of the episode and says Royal Festival Hall twice instead; he also seems to say E flat instead of B flat when describing the Corelli track.
You can find more information about Bill Drummond’s exhibition The 25 Paintings here.
$20,000 by Bill Drummond is also discussed in Page One 175.
Also mentioned in this epsiode are the books Down Under and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson.
The Alison mentioned in this episode is Alison Windsor, who is featured in the 79th Page One.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
This episode features a jingle written for the podcast by the band Friends Of Friends.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 25th March, 2014.
Book listing:
The 25 Paintings by Bill Drummond
The Idea Of Perfection by Kate Grenville
$20,000 by Bill Drummond
Links:
Episode transcript:
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 74th Page One. This is the 52nd Second Hand Book Factory, I'm Charles Adrian and my guest today, at the Royal Festival Hall, is Katrina Crear.
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello Katrina.
Katrina Crear
Hello Adrian.
Charles Adrian
[laughs] You're allowed to talk now. So. Thank you for coming to the Festival Hall to meet me. We're sitting by this weird, kind of, children's library shed up on the fifth floor. The first thing I'm going to ask you is how do you describe yourself?
Katrina Crear
Well, I'm an avid reader of fiction. I have a very long commute. I have a four-hour round trip commute three days a week so it's very important that I have good books to read otherwise I would go completely mad.
Charles Adrian
Yeah, absolutely. Wow. [laughs]
Katrina Crear
So. And I... My commute is because I work in a commercial contemporary art gallery. That's where I work. So. And... yes. And I thought it was quite interesting that the book that I've brought is actually probably the only piece of nonfiction that I've read and enjoyed for as long as I can remember so... I really agonised over which books to bring and I... and there were... I read... On the train I read so many different books, I think I probably get through two or three novels a week and I don't always finish them because I'm very... they just... I read them to keep me going. They have to be entertaining, they have to click, so I quite often don't finish them. And the way that I choose my books as well is that I have two-year-old daughter and I usually pick my books up at the library when we go there on a Saturday. But she seems to think that a library is a place to go completely mad and [laughing] run around, which is really not the place to do it. So the way I choose my books is that I just grab them and I'll get home and I'll, sort of, see what, you know, five paper books I've... paperbacks I've picked up and...
Charles Adrian
I think that's an excellent way of choosing books. I think that's really... Yeah.
Katrina Crear
It's not really... It's not ideal, actually but it's what's happened. So sometimes I'll be halfway through chapter one only to realise that I actually picked this book up and read it a couple of months ago.
Charles Adrian
Oh, okay. Yeah, that's a... Yeah. I can see that's a drawback. [laughs]
Katrina Crear
So I've got... I don't always take note of titles or authors but... So yes. So there are... But I have read some good ones recently and I was going to bring those but I settled on this. [indistinct]
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Okay. We will find out later what that is. The... So the other book – the book that you like – you haven't been able to bring. So tell me about that.
Katrina Crear
Yeah, it was... Well, both books are by an artist called Bill Drummond and they're about art. And the other thing is, because I work in a gallery... I like art... Well, the thing that I do in the galleries [is] I'm a registrar so I deal with things like tax and insurance and transport and storage and things like that. So it's the very dry side of art. And I see a lot of art that I like and I think is interesting but I'm not... I'm rarely inspired by art these days. It's just... it's work. And it's okay but it's not... In a weird way, it's such a huge part of my life, it's not really... I'm not that inspired by it, I guess. I'm not driven by it. But then this is actually an artist who I am actually quite inspired by and I really enjoy reading his books. He's a very good writer. He's very entertaining and very funny. And I think he is actually quite profound but without really trying to be.
Charles Adrian
Interesting. And what was the book about, that you would have brought?
Katrina Crear
Well, it's... Yes, he has an exhibition opening in Birmingham next Friday and so it's officially the catalogue that accompanies that exhibition. And it's a tour that he's decided to do over ten years. It's starting in Birmingham next week and the book has... it has quite a lot of pictures in it but it also has all these... I suppose they're essays really about the various things that he does in his practice. So...
Charles Adrian
Okay. Uh huh. It sounds interesting.
Katrina Crear
[speaking over] But the things that he does is... or... The actual exhibition is called 25 Paintings but the the paintings themselves aren't really what's being exhibited. He says that the paintings are signposts to the activities that he does. So for example he makes beds. I think one of the paintings just simply says “Make bed” [or] “Make your bed” or something. And he has decided that he is going to... He buys the wood and then he goes out to a public place and he builds a bed. And then he raffles off this bed. And he has a... He's created a notice that says, though, that the bed is not the work of art, the art is whatever happens on the bed or under the bed or in the bed and the dreams that are had while sleeping in the bed. And... so yes, this is the point of all his work, [indistinct] performing the activity of making [indistinct].
Charles Adrian
He's creating a frame, in a sense, for the art to happen in almost spontaneously or...
Katrina Crear
Absolutely. And he's not the only artist. He's the...
Charles Adrian
Right. He's the instigator of a collaboration.
Katrina Crear
Exactly. And so the people who do these things, the people who sleep in the bed, are actually the artists.
Charles Adrian
Wow. Oh, that's nice. That's lovely. Okay. Well we'll hear... Obviously, we'll hear some of his words later.
Katrina Crear
Yeah, sort of. Yeah, because unfortunately I don't have the book with me because it's... I've only see a digital copy. And I couldn't download what I wanted to today so I can't read the passage out but I can remember some of it. [laughs]
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Never mind. It was... No, don't worry. We... I think we have enough to dream about. That's almost.... It feels quite appropriate [laughing] actually, given what you've said.
Katrina Crear
[laughs] [indistinct]
Charles Adrian
We will... the art will be in what we imagined the book might have been.
Katrina and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Charles Adrian
And I'm going to play the first track that I've picked for today. Now... So this podcast is going to go out on the 25th of March 2014. So I did a bit of research. Drake is paying at the O2 that night. At the Royal Festival Hall [sic] in Covent Garden Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty is on on the main stage. Francesco Cavalli's L'Ormindo will be performed at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. At the Barbican, the faculty artists are going to be playing Dvořák and Beethoven. But here, at the Royal Festival Hall, The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment will be giving an evening of Baroque music, including this from Arcangelo Corelli.
Music
[Allemanda from Concerto Grosso in B flat (op. 6, no. 11) by Arcangelo Corelli, played by the English Concert, conducted by Trevor Pinnock]
Charles Adrian
So that was the Allemanda from Corelli's Concerto Grosso in E [sic] flat opus six, number eleven, by the English Concert and Trevor Pinnock. Now, my book for you, Katrina, is something that... Actually, I did think to myself, you know, you have a lot of travelling to do on trains and you might... so I wanted to give you...
Katrina Crear
[speaking over] Did you bring me a really big thick book? [laughs]
Charles Adrian
No, I just... I wanted to give you a book that would be fun to read, that I enjoyed reading.
Katrina Crear
[speaking over] Oh, that's lovely.
Charles Adrian
It's Kate Grenville's The Idea Of Perfection and it's set in the... well, it's set in a small town in the middle of nowhere in New South Wales in Australia. And it gave me a huge desire to go to a small town in the middle of nowhere [laughing] in New South Wales in Australia – because I think there's almost nowhere so remote as these small towns. There's a bizarre, kind of, mix of... so they're filled with people that are very like us English people culturally and yet they are really miles from anywhere in a way that you cannot possibly be in this country. So I find that contradiction quite interesting and exciting. And the other reason I picked this is because it's about these two people and they're both of them, kind of... they're involved... One of them is supposed to be taking down a very old bridge but he ends up falling in love with it and the other one – the woman – is... she's trying to find old quilts that people's grandmothers would have made when they first settled there out of old dresses and things like that. And she's been making these kinds of quilts. She sees them as heritage. And so there's this whole question that comes up in my mind when I read it about how an object acquires value, which I think is always a question around art in general. But there's a really... I seem to remember there being a really nice scene where the woman... she's been... she's going to these different towns and trying to persuade the people to pull out of their closets all their tatty old [stuff] and they're all bringing her beautiful stuff and she's saying “No, no, no, that's not what I want. I want the tatty old stuff that your grandmothers would have been too ashamed to show anyone. Because that's now beautiful.” And she shows them the quilt that she's been making and they all, kind of, think, “Well, it's not really very well made [laughing] what you're doing, it's rather...” But her whole thing is: “But that's exactly what I'm trying to do. This is... It's supposed to look like this.” So I think it's quite fun because there is always that tension, I think, between something that looks beautiful and something that is meaningful and where... yeah, where do you find what you want, essentially? So...
Katrina Crear
Oh, that sounds very nice.
Charles Adrian
I'm going to read you the first page and then I will... We will see how far you get with it [laughing] on your commute.
Katrina Crear
[laughs] Or maybe I've read it before.
Charles Adrian
[laughing] Maybe you have. Yeah, we'll find out. [laughs]
Katrina Crear
I don't think I have.
Charles Adrian
CHAPTER I
IN HIS EX-WIFE'S clever decorating magazines Douglas Cheeseman had seen mattress ticking being amusing. Marjorie had explained that it was amusing to use mattress ticking for curtains the same way it was amusing to use an old treadle Singer as a table for your maidenhair ferns. But he did not think the amusing aspect of mattress ticking being used as a curtain had made it as far as the Caledonian Hotel in Karakarook, NSW, pop 1374. He could feel the cold dust in the fabric as he held it back to look out of [sic] the window.
Over the top of the corrugated iron roof next door, he could see nearly all of Karakarook. It looked as if it had just slid down into the bottom of the valley, either side of the river, and stayed there. Where the houses finished straggling up the sides of the hills there were bald curves of paddocks and, further up, the hilltops were dark with bush. Above that was the huge pale sky, bleached with the heat.
From the window he could see part of Parnassus Road, wide and empty as an airport runway, lying stunned under the afternoon sun. Along the strip of shops a few cars were parked diagonally into the gutters like tadpoles nosing up to a rock. A dog lay stretched out lifeless across the doorway of an empty shop. The awnings over the shops made jagged [....]
There you go.
Katrina Crear
It sounds good. I look forward to reading it. Something came up about New South Wales recently. I can't remember what it is. I don't know if it's...
Charles Adrian
Something in the news?
Katrina Crear
I don't know. Maybe not...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Something someone was talking about?
Katrina Crear
Maybe something someone was talking about. I've recently become more interested in the idea of going to Australia. My good friend is Australian and she just went... recently went back there and I've never really been that excited to go. But I recently thought that I would like to go.
Charles Adrian
I was... The reason I got this book was because I was going to Australia to visit some friends and travel around a little bit and the... one of the friends I was going to visit said to me... I think I'd probably written to her and said “What can I read to get me excited about Australia?” and she suggested this. It also contains a lot of, I think, slang from Australia. And it worked. I mean, it... yeah, it made me think “Ah, I want... Yeah, I really want to go and experience this... this... this particular kind of remoteness.” And we did go to – my friend is Alison – we went to town where she grew up. And I think it's not as remote as this town here but it's not dissimilar. It has this incredibly wide main street with shops either side. And it... Yeah, it takes you hours in a car to get anywhere at all and the idea of distance changes completely. The other book I recommend if you want to get excited about going to Australia is Bill Bryson's book, which is really fun. And it just makes Australia sound crazy and interesting and dangerous.
Katrina Crear
[speaking over] Actually, well I was... One of... I... Have you read The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson?
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] No. No, I haven't.
Katrina Crear
Oh, maybe I should've brought that.
Charles Adrian
[laughs]
Katrina Crear
That is a very, very good book. That's about growing up in the 50s in the States and it's so...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Oh nice.
Katrina Crear
... it's so cheerful. It's just the happiest book ever.
Charles Adrian
[laughs]
Katrina Crear
And it's really... it really makes you laugh. Like, laugh out loud.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Oh lovely! Okay. Oh I should look for that.
Katrina Crear
It's very funny.
Charles Adrian
Let's have another piece of music now. The 25th of March also happens to be Elton John's birthday so I'm going to play Mexican Vacation (Kids in the Candlelight), which is from Elton John's latest album The Diving B... The Diving Board. So happy birthday Elton.
Katrina Crear
[laughs]
Music
[Mexican Vacation (Kids in the Candlelight) by Elton John]
Charles Adrian
So that was Elton John with Mexican Vacation. So what's your book for me?
Katrina Crear
Well, it's fu... So it's the same author so there's a link. So. This book is called $20,000 [sic] but it's actually a paperback version of a former... an earlier edition that was a hardback that was called How To Be An Artist. And I really like the title How To Be An Artist because... well, Bill Drummond doesn't ever in the entire book address that statement [laughs]. He never tells you how to be an [laughing] artist.
Charles Adrian
[laughs]
Katrina Crear
But you kind of get to the end of it and you're like...
Charles Adrian
I can imagine all these people going [squeaky voice], “When am I going to find out?” [laughs]
Katrina Crear
[laughs] Exactly. So... But it's about... again, it's about something he did. So he... When he was a pop star – when he was part of the KLF – he had quite a lot of money and he really liked this artist Richard Long, who's a photographer that also... he just goes out and does [indistinct]. And he... So Bill Drummond bought one of his photographs. And the photograph was of a stone circle in a remote place somewhere in Iceland. And Richard Long had gone out walking – or hiking – several days in Iceland and had found the spot and taken this picture. So... And Bill Drummond really admired Richard Long and so when he had quite a lot of money he bought this photograph and he hung it on his bedroom wall. But then after a while he felt that he was just ignoring that picture on his bedroom wall. And so he decided that to really get something out of that artwork he wanted to go to that same spot where Richard Long had been and take his own photograph. So he decided to... He was going to sell the picture for exactly what he paid for it – $20,000 – then he was going to take that money, find that stone circle, and bury it...
Katrina and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Katrina Crear
... and then he was going to take a picture of the spot and hang that photograph on his wall. And he felt that that was going to be worth $20,000. And that was going to be his artwork. So he had this plan and he was going to go... he was going to do a tour over the length of Britain trying to sell this picture. But then in the middle of the night he had this idea... He wasn't able to find a buyer. This was the problem. He couldn't find anybody who was going to buy this off him for $20,000. So what he did was he cut... he took the print out of its frame and he drew a grid on it and he cut it into [laughing] twenty thousand pieces. And he...
Charles Adrian
Twenty thousand pieces?!
Katrina Crear
Yes, so it's quite... very small. I've seen them. And his plan was, he was going to sell each piece for $1 a throw and when he'd got all $20,000 in cash, he was going to put that in that box and go to Iceland and bury the box. [laughs] So the book also tells his story of going around trying to convince people to buy [a piece of]...
Charles Adrian
Wow!
Katrina Crear
... one of the twenty thousand pieces.
Charles Adrian
Yeah. Amazing!
Katrina Crear
And he's doing quite well. I think he's sold about two thirds of the pieces. You can still buy the rest of the pieces online. So he's still collecting the money to [indistinct]. But it's all very funny. And it's things like his girlfriend. You know, they... she... he tells the story of how they went to bed and, you know, there's this photograph worth $20,000 hanging on their wall and she wakes up in the morning and she just sees it all... [laughing] he'd cut it in the night. And she's like “What have you done?”
Katrina and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Katrina Crear
And he wonders the same. And it's... Yeah, it's funny how he tells the story.
Charles Adrian
Oh ni... Well, read me the first page.
Katrina Crear
Read you the first page of this one?
Charles Adrian
Yeah.
Katrina Crear
Okay. The first page. It's called... or the title of this first chapter is Bury the Box and Finish the Job.
This is the beginning of the text for the 2002 edition of the book.
In 1970 my sister Jane (19), and I (17) spent the summer travelling in Iceland. While there, we tried to cross the country from top to bottom. Starting at a town called Aku...
My goodness.
[with difficulty] Akureyri, we headed south. We only got halfway, to a volcano called Mount Askja.
The following three years, for me, were spent at art school. My ambition had been to be a painter of wild landscapes. While there I was overtaken by events and an appetite for the undoable. This led me to drop out and reject everything I had learned in art school.
Since then my life has been taken up with moving about, making careers in pop music, filling notebooks, suppressing the urge to create anything that might be mistaken for art and the usual domestic complications and celebrations.
In 1981 I became aware of the work of Bristol-based artist, Richard Long. He made art by walking and doing things on his walks. I fell in love with his work. In the meantime, he became an internationally successful artist, winning the Turner Prize in 1989.
In 1995 I went to the Anthony D'Offay Gallery in London and bought a Richard Long photo and text work. It was called A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind, (A Southward walk of 220 miles in 14 days across the middle of Iceland, 1994). It was a large photo of a stone circle he had built the previous year while on a walk across Iceland, from the top to the bottom. The asking price was $20,000.
In 1998 I was asked to interview Richard Long for the Bath and Bristol listings magazine, Venue. I didn't. Instead I wrote a story called A Smell of Money Underground. It told the tale of a day trip I made to Bristol to look at a new work by Richard Long and how I was now bored with the one that I had bought, which was hanging on our bedroom wall being ignored. A Smell of Money Underground was published in Venue, the Art Magazine Modern Painters and my own book of stories [...]
Charles Adrian
Thank you very much. I think I am going to look forward to [that].
Katrina Crear
It is fun.
Charles Adrian
Yeah, it does sound fun.
Katrina Crear
[speaking over] He really is very funny...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] It sounds interesting.
Katrina Crear
... and cheerful.
Charles Adrian
Wonderful. And – perhaps weirdly – my sister and I are going to be Iceland in May. So maybe that's... We're... We haven't decided what we're going to do yet. Perhaps we should go to the top and walk [laughing] down. See if we can find this stone circle. I could completely...
Katrina Crear
Yeah, the money's not buried there yet.
Charles Adrian
No, but I could move the circle and that would mess up his entire [laughing] project, wouldn't it?
Katrina Crear
[laughs] Well, if you knew... I mean, because somebody asked that.
Charles Adrian
[laughing] I could sabotage this.
Katrina Crear
Somebody asked in the book, like, “Would people start going out looking for the money?” He said “Maybe” but he said... but also Richard Long – now he would be the only person officially who knew where that stone circle was. So could Richard Long go there and dig up the money?
Charles Adrian
Yes, yes. Very nice.
Katrina Crear
And he thought that would be an interesting continuation. [laughs]
Charles Adrian
Yeah! Oh lovely. Oh, thank you so much. There's going to give me a lot of... a lot to think about, I think.
Katrina Crear
There are a few notes in some of the margins because I did write about it in my PhD so that's...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] That's joyful. I love... I love it when people have put their mark on books. That's... I think that's fantastic.
Katrina Crear
[indistinct]
Charles Adrian
That's all we have time for today. That's the end of the podcast. Thank you so much for coming and doing this.
Katrina Crear
Thank you for inviting me.
Charles Adrian
This has been lovely.
Katrina Crear
[It has.]
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast please go to pageonepodcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]