A BURDEN SHARED

Extract from How To Be An Artist
2000

2.32 am. I can’t sleep. This is my present tense. Your present tense is whenever you read these lines at some unspecified point in my present tense’s future.

This evening I read through the text of this book one last time in search of stray apostrophes before it goes off to the printer in China. A book like this is only commercially viable if cheap labour is used. Would you have paid more for it?

I’ve been lying in bed trying to work out what it is about my tale that feels unresolved, letting my mind drift through from the back page to the opening line, from the selling of tins of grey paint back to when I first took the Richard Long out into the field and wondered what I had bought. >From where I’m lying I can see its dark shape hanging on the wall, where I suppose it will hang on and off until it’s sold.

I slip from under the cover. Lift the work from the wall. Make my way down the stairs. Lay it on the kitchen table and stare at the thing. So what happens when it’s sold? Just another burden for another bastard with too much loose change and something to prove. There is a voice in my head: ‘Bill, just cut it up into 20,000 tiny pieces and sell the bits at a dollar a throw. A burden shared …’

I get a screwdriver, a steel metre rule, a set of Stabilo pens and my Stanley knife. Undo the brass screws. Lift out the glass. Remove A smell of …, and using masking tape, fix it fast to the tabletop. Then I get to work with the steel rule and pens, gridding the thing up. First into 20 equal sized rectangles using black ink. Each of these 20 spaces I grid into 10 equal sized rectangles using red ink. Each of these 200 spaces I grid into 10 equal sized rectangles using a yellow ink. And lastly I grid these 2,000 rectangles by 10 again using a pale blue ink. That makes 20,000 of the little fuckers. Get my camera and take some pictures of the thing. It’s now just gone 4.30. First light is streaking the eastern sky and the birds have started up. Using the Stanley knife I cut out one of the tiny rectangles. Theoretically it measures 11.2 mm by 4.05 mm. I was going to keep it as a keepsake but since it’s about the size of a tab of acid I swallow it. Flesh of Christ and all that.

I peel off the masking tape, put the frame back together, put my implements away. I stand back to look at my handiwork. I don’t know if I like what I see. Shoddy, slipshod workmanship etc. Maybe I’ve made a big mistake. It might have been worth $20,000 a couple of hours ago, it certainly isn’t now. Climb the stairs. Hang it back on the wall. Slip under the cover and wait.