99 YEARS OLD AND STILL LEARNING ABOUT ART...

BEACHCOMBER and the Turner Prize: Part Two. The plot so far: Beachie’s pal, the Estonian artist Tushort Planx, has been taking him round the Turner Prize shortlist, explaining the artworks. So far, they have seen two hands clasping a gigantic rump and a pile of pennies on the floor. Now read on.

“What’s this one then?” I asked Tushort as we moved on to something looking like a giant kebab stick running through assorted rubble. “It brings to mind your own work of a couple of years ago which you called ‘Rubbish’.”

“It’s not as profound as my own ‘Rubbish’,” Tushort replied. “My ‘Rubbish’ was an exploration of the bin liner/rubbish sack dichotomy and the role of the space between the viewer and the dustbin or wastepaper basket. This item is a subtle and poetic collage by Helen Marten invoking countless associations and prompting viewers to look more closely.”

I looked more closely and saw that Turshort had just read those words from a blurb about the work. “You just read that!” I protested.

“Exactly!” he replied. “And you looked more closely just as I predicted. That’s as immediate an illustration of the power of art as you could possibly wish for.”

“But if it’s just rubbish on a kebab skewer,” I asked, “why doesn’t she just throw it away?”

“Oh come now,” he protested, “that’s hardly original. I did that two years ago in my own Turner shortlisted work entitled ‘The Irredeemable Nugacity Of Nothingness’.”

“I remember that,” I said, “though actually I never managed to see it at the exhibition.”

“That’s because there was nothing there to see,” Tushort explained. “The ‘Nothingness’ in the title was a literal encapsulation of the nothingness of the work. All great art, you see, leaves something to the imagination. By leaving everything to the imagination, I took art to its logical conclusion. Which is why I haven’t produced anything since. The ‘thing’ of ‘thingness’ would, for me, be a retrograde step.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I suggested, “but perhaps we should see the final work first.” I steered Tushort towards what looked like a very large toy train. “What,” I asked Tushort, “is the point of this one?”

“Can’t you see?” he asked in astonishment. “It’s a brilliant encapsulation of the human dilemma.” “I don’t get it,” I admitted. “But it’s so obvious,” he said. “That’s a Deutsche Bahn locomotive pulling British Rail carriages which is as poetic a depiction of this country’s EU problems as you could wish for. The German engine wishes to pull us around and we’d like to uncouple but can’t do so without closing the doors; and we can’t do that because the guards are on strike. And we can’t get on it anyway because it’s too small, and we’re not dwarfs, and the track doesn’t go anywhere anyway.”

“But we’re closer to dwarfs than those gigantic buttocks we saw earlier,” I said.

“You’re beginning to get the idea,” Tushort said and we left the building.