http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312288980/qid=1025174052/sr=2-2/re... Take a look at the book cover :) --- Smiley <smileyweb@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
...can be seen read online in the "arts" section of the electronic telegraph (www.telegraph.co.uk), but you need to be registered to look at it, so the text is below.
(btw, the web page provides links to www.klf.de and Mancentral, amongst others).
it also says the book is available on the penkiln-burn web site, but i can't find it (although both amazon.co.uk and bol.com both claim they can deliver it withing 2-3 days).
*****
The man with money to burn (Filed: 27/06/2002)
Bill Drummond, formerly of pop group the KLF, once incinerated £1m; now he plans to bury $20,000 in Iceland. Why? He talks to Mick Brown
In 1995, to celebrate having burned £1 million of his own money in cash (of which more later), Bill Drummond purchased a work by the conceptual artist Richard Long, entitled A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind. The work, incorporating a photograph and text, shows a stone circle, constructed by Long in the course of a walk which he made across Iceland.
Bill Drummond: once had to be dissuaded from cutting off his own right hand and tossing it to the audience
Drummond paid $20,000 for the work. He hung it on his bedroom wall but eventually grew tired of it, in the way you do.
It was then that Drummond decided to do a work of his own. This was the plan: he would sell the Richard Long picture for exactly what he had paid for it, no more and no less. He would make a stout wooden box with a padlock; put the cash in the box; travel to Iceland; walk to the stone circle; dig a hole in the centre and bury the box; step back to the point where he assumes Long took his original photograph, take a new photograph himself and return to England. He would then hang this new work, to be called A Smell of Money Under Ground, on his wall, in the space once occupied by Long's picture, relishing the thought of "those 20,000 greenbacks, rotting to mush".
To this end, Drummond is currently travelling around Britain, appearing in local arts and drop-in centres, offering cut-up pieces of the Long work at $1 apiece (American currency only accepted). Response, he says, has been "encouraging".
Bill Drummond, who is 48, is a tall, lugubrious man dressed in a flannel work shirt. In the early Nineties he was known for his work with the pop group the KLF, who enjoyed a string of hits before Drummond and his partner Jimmy Cauty dissolved the group at the height of their success, in front of a bewildered audience at the Brit Awards ceremony in 1992.
Renaming themselves the K Foundation, Drummond and Cauty achieved yet more notoriety for two gestures: presenting Rachel Whiteread with a cheque for £40,000 as "worst British artist" on the night she won the £25,000 Turner Prize, and then, most famously, incinerating what appeared to be £1 million in cash on the Isle of Jura in front of a handful of bemused witnesses.
Art prank? Scam? Political statement? Drummond and Cauty made an agreement at the time never to explain themselves, and they never have.
When Drummond first walked into the Anthony D'Offay gallery in 1995, it was to enquire whether Long had done any work in Jura, hoping to buy it as a sort of commemoration of the money-burning. Drummond has long been an enthusiast of Long's work, drawn, he says, by its pastoral themes, its "Zen-like" simplicity and the fact that, like Long, he too is obsessed with walking and with maps.
Long, it seemed, had not been to Jura. But when the dealer showed him A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind, Drummond felt an immediate affinity. As a teenager, he and his elder sister had once attempted a walk across Iceland, passing the spot where Long would later create his stone circle. "When I saw the picture, I recognised exactly where it was, so I thought, I'll have that."
Having later decided to sell the work, Drummond originally planned to mount an exhibition at a gallery in Bristol. He manufactured a couple of hundred "For Sale" placards as a prop. Then he changed his mind. Selling the work outright, he says, "somehow didn't seem right".
To make things more interesting, he decided instead to drive the length of Britain from Southampton to Dounreay posting the "For Sale" placards along the way, at the same time making a "state of the nation" record of his journey - "Although not," he emphasises, "in a Will Hutton kind of way."
He has now self-published a book of the journey, How To Be an Artist, which ambles amiably through some of Drummond's more oblique obsessions: nationalism, nuclear power, the enduring appeal of Bob Dylan and the wonders of the humble powan fish, which Drummond believes holds the key to the study of evolution, and which, on one page, he tells us, lives in Loch Leven, and by the next has discovered, to his deep mortification, that it doesn't.
The book is illustrated with photographs of the "For Sale" signs, dangling enigmatically from gate-posts, road-signs and the fencing around the Dounreay nuclear power station. The quiet joke is that the signs carry no telephone number or means of contacting Drummond should any passing motorist actually be interested in buying the picture. "Really," says Drummond, "it's just a shallow amusement, but it's an amusement all the same." Nor did he actually manage to sell the picture. The book ends with Drummond dividing it into pieces with a scalpel, in readiness for his current sales drive.
Inevitably, perhaps, the one thing the book does not address is the bold manifesto of its title - How To Be an Artist - although a hint is contained in Drummond's ruminations about the Iceland project. Where is the art? he asks rhetorically. "The art lies in the completion of the task, in the knowledge it has been done."
Which is about as close to an explanation as Drummond has ever come to giving for any of his work. Looking back over the slash and burn of his career, you could argue that it constitutes a running discourse on the ephemeral nature of pop culture, the vacuity of fame, the commodification of art. You could see his burning of the £1 million as a calculated act of heresy in a culture that worships money above all else.
"You could do," Drummond agrees evenly, "but I think I'm too close to the centre of what I'm doing to say, well, this is actually what it's all about."
The question people always ask about the £1 million is, why didn't he give the money to charity instead? And it's a question he is often asked now as he
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