More Moaning. Karl Pilkington

says I need to shave it as it doesn’t work with a bald head. She says I look like a shuttlecock. To finish my look off, I borrowed his motorcycle helmet and a pair of shades. I’ll be honest, I was shitting it. It was easy earlier on his roof when no one else was watching. We found our spot in Times Square and it happened. We did our slow-motion walking and added slow talking to it too. It’s hard to explain now, but I think it worked. We improvised for around thirty to forty minutes. Crowds of people surrounded us, laughed and took photos as we told them to slow down in their busy lives. The fact that people stopped and watched means the message worked.

      I got a proper buzz from it, probably more than I’ve ever got from anything else I’ve done. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be getting invited to perform on the Royal Variety Show any time soon, but I thought the result was pretty good for something I’d not done before. The only problem I have with it as an art is that it’s now gone. If people missed it, they missed it. Matthew has nothing to show for that night’s work, and he will just have to start all over again tomorrow. He’s like a council worker with a leaf blower – his work is never done.

      I couldn’t get to sleep for a few hours that night due to the adrenaline rush that I got. I sat in bed and googled ‘performance art’ on the internet to see if what I had done really counted as that. One definition I found said that ‘performance art usually consists of four elements: time, space, the performer’s body, and a relationship between audience and performer’. We’d ticked all those boxes. Now every year when I see Times Square on the TV for the New Year celebrations I can say ‘I’ve played there’.

      That’s not bad, is it?

      PAINTING A MASTERPIECE

      My performance with Matthew was all about slowing things down. The next day I was due to meet an artist who does the opposite and creates artworks in record time. It’s easy to think that stuff that doesn’t take time to do is no good, but for art to be of any quality does it have to take years in the making? The ceiling Michelangelo worked on in the Sistine Chapel took him almost five years to complete. I’ve seen it and it is pretty good, but I think it’s a bit daft to have a fancy piece of artwork in a building where people spend most of the time with their eyes shut praying.

      Recently, critics seemed to go mad over the film Boyhood, the main reason being it took twelve years to make and the director stuck with the same cast over that time so you watched them age in the film. This fact seemed to take over from the storyline, and everyone just talked about how it was interesting to see the cast age. I watched it with Suzanne with her going on like ‘Oh, look, hasn’t he grown’ and ‘That hair suits him more than his last style’. It was more like going through a sodding photo album than watching a film. I didn’t understand all the fuss. William Roache has been playing the part of Ken Barlow in Coronation Street for fifty years and the critics don’t go on about him.

      The artist I was going to meet up with was called Ushio Shinohara, a well-known Japanese painter (to those in the know). As soon as I entered his home/studio in Dumbo (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass), the art district of New York, I could smell that familiar, chalky, damp smell of artists’ paint. I recognise it even though I’m not around it much. Elephant shit is another smell like that. Ushio introduced himself. He was a small man, eighty-three years old with white fluffy hair, similar to my auntie Nora’s, but unlike her, he had it in a flat Mohican. His hands were covered in so many specks of colour that when he put out his hand to shake mine I thought he was offering me some Skittles. I tried having a chat about his art but didn’t get anywhere, as although he had been living in New York for almost fifty years, his accent was still strong and with my northern accent we couldn’t make much sense of each other. I like being around people and having company, but I don’t always want to chat so I quite like meeting people who can’t speak English as it gets rid of all the small talk. Han Solo had it right knocking about with Chewbacca – someone to watch his back and help him out without having to discuss what he got up to over the weekend.

      The fact that Ushio couldn’t understand me didn’t matter anyway, as it was the art that was going to join us together. He got me to help mix up some paint so I could have a go trying out his painting technique. Only two colours were mixed: black and the brightest pink I have ever seen. The sort of pink that you only see in alcopops.

      His wife Noriko appeared, a grey-haired trendy-looking woman, who handed me some boxer shorts to pop on. Not boxer shorts as in underpants, but actual shorts that a boxer wears to fight in. I always wanted a pair of these when I was younger, but my mam said the shorts were a waste of money as boxing was just another fad that I wouldn’t keep up. After getting battered by a lad called Leeroy and hitting the canvas, my mam was right, I jacked it in. Today I’d be hitting the canvas again, but with my fists dipped in paint rather than my head. This was Ushio’s technique of getting paint on the canvas. He started doing it in 1958 and has done thousands of huge paintings this way. It looked like he still had most of them rolled up and stacked in virtually every available space in his studio like some sort of carpet warehouse. He handed me a pair of boxing gloves and got me to tie sponges to them using string. Once the gloves were on, he told me to dunk one in the bright pink and the other in the black, then acted out what he wanted me to do to the canvas. He wanted me to work my way across the big fifteen-foot-long canvas from right to left, thumping as I went, high up or low down, wherever I felt like. The main thing was not to stop. He slipped some goggles over my eyes and off I went. Thumping high, thumping low, left, right, right, right, left. The white of the canvas disappearing with every punch. The harder I hit, the bigger the splat. I was getting covered in paint with every punch as it splashed back at me. Forty seconds and thirty-five punches later I stepped back, wiped the paint from my goggles and looked at what I had created. As I took in the mess I had made, Ushio and Noriko applauded my efforts. They seemed happy, but I wasn’t convinced. To me it was very similar to the mess Suzanne makes over the kitchen worktop whenever she makes soup in the blender.

      KARL: How’s that?

      USHIO: Great!

      NORIKO: Good, yes!

      USHIO: Yeah! Masterpiece! Bang, bang, bang!

      KARL: I don’t know, can I add another colour?

      NORIKO: No. Finished. You shouldn’t think about the results. You cannot change the past.

      KARL: Yeah . . . I don’t know if I like it, then.

      NORIKO: We finish the work, we don’t think any more. After that the audience decide if it is good or bad.

      It’s a different way of working. Instead of spending ages trying to make a masterpiece, make something quickly and then at least if people don’t like it, you haven’t wasted too much of your time. I enjoyed the process but didn’t like the end result. To me it looked like one of them pictures of a virus they show on the news when an epidemic breaks out, or the stains you get on hotel room walls in Spain where the last occupier had been kept busy killing mosquitoes. It was probably the most basic form of art, like the painted hand prints that kids make in their first year of school and then end up being stuck on the front of the fridge. They’re always pretty crap. You never get someone putting someone else’s kids’ artwork on their fridge door, do you? It’s because they look shit. I had made something but not something I was proud of. I could quite easily thump a piano with my fists and make a noise, but I doubt people would rush out to buy an album of it.

      As the paint slowly dried on the canvas, I could also feel it drying on me and tightening my skin. I stood looking at what I had made while picking away at the paint on my arms. I used to like doing this at school when my hands got covered in Tipp-Ex. I got through quite a few bottles of correction fluid every month at school. The pages in my books were as brittle as poppadoms.

      NORIKO: You can bring home . . . if you want?

      KARL: