I made my way to the Bethlem Gallery and Museum of the Mind where I was meeting Mark McGowan to discuss the exhibition he has curated – Bethlem Live Lounge. As I entered he was telling the office staff how he ate a corgi: ‘It was minced and made into meatballs,’ writes Michael Holland.
The next two hours were a maelstrom of facts that sounded like fiction: a second-by-second tale of a super-goal scored for Borussia Munching Fatlads; Take That brought in to move Prodigy out, and Alexander Brenner upsetting artists in the most disturbing way. The rest I can include in this article.
Mark McGowan first made bleeps on my radar when the Southwark News wrote about the performance art pieces he was putting on in the borough. Almost every tabloid in the land portrayed them as stunts and invariably posed the question, ‘Is this art?’. And almost none of them actually put in the artist’s reasons for the performances and why they were art. But more of that later. How did McGowan come to be making art in the first place?
Growing up in Peckham and supporting Millwall was his early life until the 80s arrived and Ibiza beckoned: ‘I went out there in 1982 and came back in 1994,’ he says. But the years of drug taking had not prepared him well for life back in SE London and he was soon in the Royal Bethlem Hospital detoxing a drug addiction. While there he attended the art therapy classes and created numerous drawings and paintings. ‘You’re really good,’ the therapists told him. His ceramic of a man holding his head in his hand was put in an exhibition and more plaudits came.
At the end of his stay, aged 37, he went straight to Camberwell College of Art. ‘It was all kids there; they thought I was a teacher,’ he laughs. But it was there that ‘Mark the mad smackhead from Peckham’ was informed that art was not just drawing and painting. ‘They told me that I could do “whatever I want” – Anything! Can you imagine what that was like to me?’
It was at this point that Mark began ‘creating interventions into the media, pushing peanuts to Downing Street with my nose, rolling across London… framing them as art projects. Now I could express myself through these extraordinary things and not get my collar felt!’
Mark used the media’s headlines to preview his art. ‘The narrative begins with the media creating public outrage, then the event, then after the event,’ he says, still surprised at how the papers fell for it every time. ‘I’d put out a press release saying I was going to eat a corgi and the papers would be all over it!’ His performances have, however, brought attention to war and knife crime and are often politically charged.
Yes, it is easy to see why some could see his work as a waste of money and time, but if you listen to his explanation of what he is doing it all makes sense. Yes, his attitude might appear as if he is mocking the art world, but McGowan is a very serious artist who uses his talent to broadcast his feelings to all who want to hear it. ‘My work has touched on loneliness, a lot of it was shame-based.’
The downside to this is that his family never knew what to expect next with all the media attention, and often had to keep the younger members away from the TV.
Another disadvantage was that not enough people realised the seriousness of his work or knew what the message behind his pieces was. ‘When I catapulted the 71 year old woman outside the college it was to try to get old and young people respecting each other…When I crawled From Goldsmiths College to 10 Downing Street, that was about tuition fees that had just been brought in by New Labour… Now, since Covid, you don’t get the teaching hours or the facilities, students pay nine grand a year for a library card!’ he exclaims. ‘It’s such a business now, they’ve bought up all the property round the colleges and rent the places back to the students! They’re property magnates!’
After graduating, the artist spent many years teaching at various art colleges while also driving a taxi, a move that became the catalyst for his Artist Taxi Driver persona that has been on social media for 14 years. Behind sunglasses he rants about the day’s news and the state of the nation. But this move online has not stopped him from facilitating workshops at Bethlem, teaching and continually creating art: ‘The Artist Taxi Driver is performance art,’ he admits. For years he has berated this government for their austerity measures and the current cost of living crisis via his alter ego. ‘The Taxi Driver reflects all that stuff, I don’t imagine it.’
Some time ago Mark heard a radio ad for bowel cancer testing and after going along he unluckily found he had bowel cancer. Luckily it had been caught early and was cured. He now strongly advices everyone to get tested and promotes mandatory tests. Having gone through that trauma he says that ‘it makes you think about how much time you’ve got left and makes you want to make more art and quicker!’ Since the cure, he advocates everyday being the ‘best day of your life’ and to perform the most mundane of chores in the best way you can.
He pondered the age of his father’s death, Elvis’s and more recently Joe Kinnear at 77 – ‘F**king hell, I ain’t got long left…’ He gave a 10-hour performance of a poem he’d written about his mother: ‘What’s going to happen to all my stuff when I die?’ It was something she had said to him.
He talks about a Bethlem Community, people who have all come through the hospital – ‘We are artists first and even though we’ve all had mental health issues we come here and support each other as well as get support for anyone who wants to make art.’
It is also the venue for Live Lounge, a 3-month collaborative exhibition that puts the visitor front and centre by providing a safe space where they can come and sing, dance, recite poetry and do whatever they want – and be recorded doing it. Mark has already recorded twenty-two voices of the Bethlem community. ‘I’m working with a guy called Gowan Hewitt who, with all his machines, has made a soundscape from them.’ This will be on an album that is just about to go to press. Pointing at the two statues behind him that once crowned the gates of the original Bethlem, he says, ‘One side of the album is called Melancholy and the other is Madness.
The opening of Live Lounge will be various performers doing their thing, and over the opening weekend Martin Ware of Heaven 17 will be giving a lecture/workshop of his ‘Top 30 Tips for making a Hit Record’; Jools Cunningham, a Sadler’s Wells’ dancer, will run a workshop for ‘people who can’t dance’, with a ‘mini-Glastonbury’ to close the exhibition in June. But in between it will mainly be open-mic days for anyone to come and use the equipment.
“We’ve got wall-hangings, rugs, sofas, two synthesisers from Martin Ware, a double bass from the Everly Pregnant Brothers, loads of instruments and recording equipment.’ His excitement was real. ‘We don’t wanna create an exhibition as such, but a space for people to come and make music, and dance and sing – It’s gonna be amazing. It’s ephemeral, it’s an event that happens and then it’s gone, not like a sculpture or a painting that will stay on the wall for years, it will be the stories people tell before, during and after the event.’
Mark had a lot to say about the numbers of autistic people in jail, Brain worms, art as therapy and music being great for mental wellbeing. But with the art of The Masters still hanging in galleries around the world after many centuries, he is constantly trying to make something extraordinary to surpass them.
It could be easy to mistake Mark McGowan as a chancer who has blagged his way to where he is now. As The Artist Taxi Driver , in between deriding politicians and war, he shows articles written about his projects and laughs and comes across as someone who doesn’t take art seriously. He does. It’s himself he doesn’t take seriously and being constantly surprised at his standing in the art world manifests itself as laughing at the art world he lives in.
Bethlem Live Lounge, Bethlem Gallery, Bethlem Royal Hospital, Monk’s Orchard Road, BR3 3BX from May 8th – June 13th. Admission: Free.
