Mark McGowan - if because you haven’t heard of him - is a performance artist.

But, unlike those who chose ‘performance’ because it’s the medium that best suits what they want to say, McGowan is a performance artist because he is too much of a simpleton to be trusted with paint. He’d probably try to eat it. Or fuck it.

This week McGowan - who unbelievably has a job teaching at the Camberwell College of Art - finally achieved his lifelong goal. One of his attention-seeking hack-stunts made it into the Daily Mail.

The stunt? Dressing actors up as Jade Goody and her family - complete with cardboard boxes on their heads as masks - in order to reenact the moment a 27-year-old mother of two lost her fight with cancer.

Awesome, truly awesome.

No, not awesome. That other word...

Awful.

Fuck Mark McGowan, fuck him and his pseudo-provocative-but-actually-just-outrage-by-numbers schlockery  to death. I can’t really bring myself to waste any more time on him, so instead I’ll just copy and paste a short thing from The Friday Thing (written, I think, by Graham Pond) which (through cockney rhyming slang) called him out as a cunt five years ago.

Apparently, back in 2004, we hadn’t seen nothing yet.

...

Art for fox sake

The Friday Thing, 4 December 2004

TFT’s favourite living artist, Mark McGowan, is back in the news. (Tracey Emin is dead or, of course, it would be her.) You may remember McGowan from the time he pushed a peanut through London with his nose. Or the time he walked backwards through London with a turkey on his head. Or the time he petitioned Southwark council for ‘no sky’. If you have never heard of him before, you might assume from the above that the guy is a berk of the highest order. You’d be right. He is.

What makes him even worse than most berks however, is that he always couches his infantile, superficial ideas in ‘topical issues’. The peanut then, was something to do with student fees; the turkey stunt was a protest at people eating turkeys for Christmas; and the ‘no sky’ thing was... we forget. Something to do with the sky being too big. Silly man.

This week he tackled the thorny subject of fox-hunting. McGowan is of the opinion that it’s all a lot of fuss and nonsense abut nothing. He said: ‘One million people marched against fox hunting and another million marched for it. The housing estate where I live is full of crack-heads but no one marches to help them. Everyone gets really worked up about a furry animal, but no one cares about each other.’ Which kind of makes sense. Except for the implied notion that we should all be marching to buy crack for hopeless junkies. So what has this young performance artist pulled out of his sleeve to add to the debate? Well, earlier this week he roasted and ate a fox. There it is. That’s what he did. Said it tasted like lamb. Plans to eat another one on December 15th.

All fine and dandy of course, but is it... Oh, never mind.

No, it isn’t.