ART ATTACKED!
“They’re taking the Pissaro” - Cornish artist Don furious that experimental works go unappreciated
THE WORLD OF FINE ART CAN BE VERY LUCRATIVE FOR THOSE WITH A CREATIVE MIND AND FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES. BUT RISING TO PROMINENCE IN SUCH AN EXCLUSIVE AND COMPETITIVE INDUSTRY CAN BE A TOUGH CHALLENGE FOR THE ORDINARY MAN IN THE STREET. AND THAT’S A CHALLENGE CORNISH ARTIST DON TOFFEE KNOWS ABOUT ALL TOO WELL, AFTER SPENDING THE LAST 10 YEARS TRYING TO MAKE A NAME FOR HIMSELF AS THE NEW DAMIEN HIRST, ONLY TO FIND THAT HIS MASTERPIECES HAVE GONE UNAPPRECIATED AND, MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, LEFT HIM IN HOT WATER.
“I’ve always adored fine art ever since I first saw that picture of that tennis bird scratching her arse,” Toffee told his local paper The Spurwash and Gaviscon Trumpet. “At an early age, I decided that I would devote my life to art.”
“Sure, having as much cash as Damien Hirst, Jack Vettriano or Picasso would be nice, but for me, making art has never been about the money. Having said that, putting so much of myself into my work and trying to create something beautiful only to get knocked down by the critics time and time again has started to make me wonder whether I should even be bothering to follow my dream.”
DREAM
And it’s a fair point, because Don’s long term dream of artistic recognition has turned into a bitter nightmare that has cost him his friends, his family and his reputation; even worse, he has yet to even find himself on the shortlist for the lucrative Turner Prize.
Instead, it has found him in violent confrontations, in and out of courtrooms and, on one occasion, even locked up in the slammer.
“It seems to me like it’s one rule for these young pricks who went to Goldsmiths, and quite another for unemployed, middle-aged men on the sex offenders register when it comes to producing artwork that Charles Saatchi might take off your hands for a couple of million quid,” the sanguine artist told the paper.
“Sometimes I feel like simply giving up, but I know the world would be a far less beautiful place without my oeuvre.”
Kitchen Art Installation
Toffee, 54, who lives in a caravan on wasteground near an industrial estate on the outskirts of Penzance, created his first piece back in 2018 whilst supplementing his income doing odd jobs around West Cornwall.
“I’d been trying to get inspired for years, looking to find something that would kickstart my career as an artistic genius, but at the time I was just keeping my head above water by lugging shit around the place with my mate Dean in his van.
WIPES
We got a call from this old fella up the road who wa nted u s to smash up his kitchen and take it to the dump for £70. Being a struggling artist, I needed the money, so we turned up and went to town with a sledgehammer on all the old units and chucked them in the back of the van along with the old white goods and some asbestos tiles.
Whilst we were on our way to the dump, I was suddenly struck by a wave of artistic inspiration as I felt a rush of powerful creativity course through my veins. I made Dean pull off the main road and head out into the countryside to a small lay-by that
I’d heard was popular with doggers on the weekend, but had never actually been there myself, obviously.
We pulled up and Dean watched on in awe as I frantically started creating my first masterpiece on the verge, piling up the shattered remains of the old man’s kitchen into something halfway between a sculpture and an avant garde installation. I finished it off by lugging the fridge freezer on top and spray-painting a big cock on the doors using an aerosol in the van. I stood back and admired my first piece, which I named ‘Juxtaposed Manifesto Between Christ and Space, Part 1’, before hopping back in the van and going home.
Over the next few weeks, I felt enthused and inspired as I feverishly scoured online creative forums and magazines, keen to see whether any critics were talking about my work and trying to find out who was behind this new wave of guerrilla art.”
I’ve Unfortunately, found that most people are philistines when it comes to the arts, especially magistrates.
Unfortunately for Don, when the phone did eventually ring, it wasn’t the Tate Gallery. It was the local police, who had been secretly surveying the area with hidden cameras in an attempt to catch illegal fly-tippers.
HOLES
“They took me to court and accused me of fly-tipping. I tried to explain that I knew the camera was there and that building my sculpture in front of the CCTV was all part of the artwork’s commentary on surveillance culture, but they weren’t having any of it and accused me of illegally dumping to avoid paying the charges at the refuse centre, which hadn’t even occurred to me, to be honest.
I argued that if I’d been Barbara Hepworth or Anish Kapoor, they’d have stuck a six-figure price-tag on my work and given me a peerage, but it fell on deaf ears. Unfortunately, I’ve found that most people are philistines when it comes to the arts, especially magistrates. Far from being showered with plaudits, I was given a hefty fine and a Community Service order.”
Electrical Inspiration
Toffee put his passion on ice for a few months whilst he regrouped and developed new concepts and disciplines to unveil to the world when the time was right.
And in early 2019, Don embarked on his most ambitious project to date.
“I was getting very little gallery exposure and I was still on the breadline, so I started supplementing my art by setting up a craft market stall selling plasma TVs and power tools which my mate Lee had pinched from his job at the Amazon Warehouse.
After a couple of weeks, I was visited by some sort of muse which inspired me to create yet another challenging and conceptual masterpiece.
I decided to curate my own show, so I hired a unit inside the Big Yellow Storage Company and stacked the TVs and drills in the middle from floor to ceiling, like a towering monolith reaching up to the sky. I stood back to admire my work, which I had named ‘Dimensionality Landscapes 4: A Matter of Life and Death’.
WHEELER
No sooner had I finished than there was a knock on the unit door. I opened it, expecting to see that art critic off the BBC who looks like him out of Bodger and Badger, or that bird with the hair off BBC4. But once again it was the local constabulary, who had been given an anonymous tip-off and were now accusing me of handling stolen goods.
They clearly had no idea that the big pile of drills and TVs that I had created was an edgy commentary on consumerism in the modern age. I tried to drum home my point by starting a display of performance art which, regrettably, resulted in one of the coppers getting a broken nose.
Unfortunately for me these ignoramuses wouldn’t know a piece of progressive Situationist art that transcended a formal linear narrative if it hit them in the face, which on this occasion it did, and
I ended up spending a night in the cells. If I’d been Tracey Emin or Grayson Perry, they’d have put me in a gallery and given me an OBE. But sadly there just isn’t any sort of education surrounding high culture these days.”
Action Painting
Don did his time in prison, where he spent his time creating a piece of conceptual art on his cell wall. The stylised work, in marker pen, explored the nature of society’s obsession with the male and female genitals in a state of arousal, and Don titled it ‘The Compulsion of Reproduction: Past, Present and Future.’
In the morning, the duty sergeant made him scrub it o ff with a bucket of soapy water and a brush, and he was released with a caution. Rather than being deterred, Don was now more determined than ever to go down in history as a true Renaissance man. And he didn’t have to wait too long for for inspiration to strike again.
“A couple of months back, I was doing a bit of painting and decorating with my mate Chopper, which rekindled my appreciation for the classic brush work of the old masters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Rolf Harris.
We’d do a few hours sloshing a bit of paint around on people’s walls and then we’d spend the rest of the day in the pub drinking super-strength lager and discussing the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and football. One day we were in there at 11am playing the fruities when some bloke came in and started giving me grief about someone walking paint all over his mum’s carpet.
CARTER
I told him that the ‘artwork’ on her carpet, called ‘Not There, But Here’ asked questions about society’s bourgeois preconceptions of where things should be, compared to where they are. Then he accused me of taking some money from her purse, which I hadn’t done, and which he couldn’t prove anyway.
He said he was going to the police, and I was furious. Now, any artist will tell you that great art can only be created when the artist is filled with emotion, be it love, jealousy or anger. And in my rage, I felt the need to create, and when the urge to create cutting-edge art washes over you, there really is no feeling like it on earth. I knew exactly what I had to do.
I ran out to the car park and just went to town, covering this bloke’s car in paint out the back of our van. I felt like Jackson Pollock, Kandinsky and Banksy all rolled into one, and it was exhilarating. I finished the piece off by driving the pub’s sandwich board through the cunt’s windscreen and stood back to admire my work, which I titled ‘Fraction Particle Mannequin Study: From the Walls of Perception’.
I thought this piece would surely be the one that got me my long overdue recognition, and I sat on a wall and waited for someone from the Serpentine Gallery or that Saatchi bloke to turn up and buy it. But as per usual I was carted off by a pair of Philistine cynics in a panda car.”
REAGAN
Don is currently waiting to go back to court where he intends to plead not guilty to affray, resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. “I’ll be arguing that it seems to be okay for Anthony Gormley to dump his Angel Of The North next to the A1 in Gateshead, but when people like me who aren’t part of the elite club try and join in, we get told to sit down and behave,” he told reporters.
“I only hope I’m up before a beak who’s an art lover.”
Toffee says whatever the verdict, he will never stop striving to be respected as one of the world’s great artists, and he currently has another major art project planned. He told the paper: “I’m working on an homage to Rachel Whiteread which involves filling some fucker who owes me £40’s garage up with concrete.”
I started supplementing my art by setting up a craft market stall selling plasma TVs and power tools