‘I feel as if I’ve snorted a line of office dust, or drunk a pint of bewilderment’

I’M STANDING in a London art gallery, staring at this sentence: “At the moment of becoming our thinking “I”, we reconstruct the jarring and incompatible into crazy narratives of surrealism.”

It’s been typed on a small white card and mounted on the wall to the left of a large painting, on which there is a single brown paint mark, in order to help the general public understand what the single brown paint mark means.

I read the sentence again — rev, rev, revving my brain in an effort to wrest some useful meaning out of it — but the meaning stays stuck fast inside it, like a car in a ditch.

After which, I lose interest in what the brown mark means and instead, start to wonder whether or not I should buy those shoes I saw this morning in Office.

I move on to an art installation, which comprises many large lumps of textured brown clay, scattered across the floor behind cordons.

It looks remarkably like an agglomeration of giant dog faeces to me.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything uglier. The group of school children jostling beside me is of the same opinion; one of the kids whispers, “for the love of fuck?” just before he’s viciously shushed by his teacher.

I don’t have a clue as to what the artist’s intentions were when he conceived the idea for this piece or what on earth it’s supposed to signify.

I look to the left of the installation for the little white card in order to find out. It says:

“Shapes move with internal freedom and without need to conform with or violate what is probable in the familiar world.

They have no direct association with any visible experience.”

The tone of these explanatory captions is putting me in a bad mood.

I rev my brain up, more feebly this time, and after this fruitless exercise, I back away from the brown lumps, thinking (no point lying) “for the love of fuck?”

Drifting across the room I come to rest in front of a sculpture. It’s misshapen-looking, yet emphatically phallic in shape and incongruously titled, “Little Girl”.

I locate the little white card and engage my brain with what’s written on it. Reading the third caption gives me a hangover. I now feel as if I’ve snorted a line of office dust, or drunk a pint of bewilderment.

Wandering around, I think mainly about those shoes in Office, I mean, the heels really were a nice shape . . . in buff maybe . . . you can’t go wrong with buff.

The time drifts by in a haze of doubtful objects, and my ability to think in any identifiable way has disappeared so completely that I find myself in another room, staring at a huge canvas, which is covered in hundreds of multi-coloured spots.

I wonder for a split second how I got here, when a man says sharply, “excuse me, madam, can I see your ticket?” and evicts me immediately, under the deepest suspicion, from the ticketed exhibition space into which I’ve wandered by mistake,

I sit down and look back at the spotty painting. I recognise it now as one of a famous series by Damien Hirst.

These spots aren’t painted by the artist himself but by a team of assistants.

This is because he sees the real creative act as being the conception, not the execution of an idea — or in other words, as he has said himself, “I couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it.”

I don’t need a little white card to tell me what to think of this.

I think to myself, “in this gallery you’re making the most amount of effort in order to have the least amount of craic and you can be sure that the artists who made these art works are having much more fun than anyone else in this place is right now.”

Then I think “that would look quite good on a little white card,” and I walk towards the exit to buy those shoes in Office.