Neal Beggs picks me up outside the pub in the West End of Glasgow in which we had a drink last night. The plan is to walk up a mountain today, but we're a bit slow off the mark for our original idea of going as far as Ben Cruachan, near Oban, so Neal suggests we head for a group of peaks which are about an hour closer. Before we're out of the city we stop at a garage. Neal lives on a shoestring, one which involves running out of petrol on a regular basis. Not today, though. My contribution to the outing is ten-quid's worth of fuel, which Neal assures me will be enough to get us to the mountain and back. To the mountain and back: that has a nice ring to it, a sense of challenging task embarked on and duly completed. Neal hasn't been in the hills for months but he has been climbing a lot recently, on boulders (Dumbarton Rock) and on indoor climbing walls, and he's been thinking constantly about his work. It's a bit early in the morning for a full-on conversation about art, Neal's or anybody else's, but I try and stir my mind into engaging with what the driver of the vehicle - in which we're travelling north at a steady speed of 70mph - is going on about. The climbing figure. A metaphor for an individual's progress through life. But that's too simplistic, Neal doesn't want that to be the viewer's main take on his work, which he sees as essentially about the search for identity... We've been chatting solid for twenty minutes or so, and that's the gist of our exchange. The details won't stay with me, but that's all right because at least I'm awake now and fully taking part in what we're doing. Breaking away from routine. We talk both about intense experiences where the individual interacts with the world, where control of one's life is temporarily given up and where anything can happen. That's living. That's being alive. And it's something we're both constantly on the lookout for. But equally anti-routine is the going over of raw experience, the re-living of it, perhaps creatively, either through art or writing. We talk about striving to distance oneself from the everyday, getting away from simply going through the motions. Oh, to escape from doing the same old thing with the same inanimate objects and the same people, day after day, month after month, in this our one and only life... It's raining. Do we mind? Not really, but to give the weather a chance to brighten up we pull in at a cafe for a coffee. However, it's non-smoking inside, and what Neal really wants is a smoke, so we stand in the doorway looking out at the wet scene and Neal pulls on a roll-up as we carry on our chat. He tells me about a piece of work he's doing based on the ticket he gets given every time he enters the sports centre which has the climbing wall. 'Adult Pass' are the words that dominate the scrap of paper. Neal continues to speak about the piece as we move apart to let a morose youth - who's pushing a stack of cans of Irn Bru on a metal trolley - pass wordlessly between us. After another short drive we're there. That is, we're sitting in the car in a car park at the edge of Loch Lomond watching the rain driving in from the west. There's a group of three Munros in the area, though The Cobbler is just less than 3000 feet, and that's the one Neal has in mind that we might climb today. It'll be wet and windy up there, and with the map open in front of us we consider possible routes in relation to the windsweep factor. Neal's got all the gear, 'cos he's used to this kind of expedition. But my jeans are going to be soaked more or less as soon as I get out of the car. Maybe it's just to get me out from its shelter at all that Neal suggests we walk the first thousand feet - which is quite a steep stretch - and then see how conditions are. We tramp uphill through trees, then on up past the tree-line; me following in Neal's footsteps. The path is like a river in torrent: as envisaged, my jeans are clinging wet, and the waterproofing of my boots certainly won't hold out for much longer. We're neither cold nor tired yet though, so we strike up conversation. In connection with this 'search for identity' notion, I mention Bill Drummond who has written a book provisionally called 'How to Become an Artist'. In it, Drummond drives from the south coast of Britain to the north, erecting placards which state: FOR SALE A SMELL OF SULPHUR IN THE WIND $20,000 Now, 'A Smell of Sulphur in the wind' is a photograph of a stone circle in Iceland taken by Richard Long, which Bill Drummond bought from the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in London. (D'Offay's mostly sell to Americans, hence the dollars.) As time went on, several things about the piece of work, and about the financial transaction with the gallery began to nag at Drummond, and the journey through Britain was perhaps his way of exorcising them. In some ways it was a search for identity, or at least an attempt at the shedding of an older one. And perhaps a new sense of identity was found, because, in the last chapter of the book, Drummond drives back down through the country which he sees through fresh eyes, and he comes up with several ideas for pieces of work of his own which he intends to effect as soon as he gets home. There's a nice ring to that too; a sense of completion, whether artificial or otherwise. What Neal and I both find interesting about Bill Drummond's work is the engagement with art in spite of the negative attitude of the art establsishment to the artist (and vice versa) rather than with the help of it. The art world can be reluctant to embrace people who haven't gone through established channels. Sometimes it seems like just another club with membership rules, with routines that have to be performed, and codes of conduct to be followed. Fuck all that, of course. Though, actually, Neal and I are both using official art channels to progress our own ideas, at least for the time being. Okay, we're at a thousand feet. The weather has cleared enough so that we can see where we've come from, though it's still raining. Do we go on? Well, we've only been walking for an hour so the answer to that surely has to be 'yes'. My feet are soaking though. So maybe we'll only go as far as a couple of boulders which Neal has in mind as our next resting point about an hour from now. The search for identity. Another artist who I've been talking with recently, Peter Harris, has sent out an identical photograph of himself to a number of people with the request that they might make a drawing of him based on the photograph. I agreed to do this, but in a follow-up conversation, discovered that what Harris envisaged was himself taking photographs of the various individuals holding the drawings they'd made. I baulked at that. I didn't mind contributing to - or messing about with - the artist's search for his identity as long as it was on my own terms, but was less keen on him manipulating me for his own devices. Neal pulls me up on this. Last night I told him about an interaction with an artist that had gone terribly terribly wrong, one in which she'd finally objected to being included in my writing. She objected to 'having the most painful part of my own life exposed'. Indeed she went so far as to state her incomprehension that I could have used her - or indeed any human being - in the way I had done. I'd completely misjudged the effect my text would have on her, and I'm still reeling from the impact of her last couple of e-mails. Neal is quite right to point out at this point that when the boot is on the other foot I can be as protective of my privacy as the next person. So I really must bear that in mind in future. But back to the present moment and lunch at the boulder. I've got a 'ham and cheese slice' so I cram that in my mouth, bite hard upon bite. Neal's a vegetarian and has started his meal less fiercely, by mouthing his way through a banana. There's another cheese and ham slice I could eat, but I exert a bit of self-discipline and follow up with an orange. Then a Snickers bar. While chewing I suggest that we could either walk on to the top of the mountain, or we could turn back and spend longer than planned in the city, and that it wasn't clear which of these choices would make for the most rewarding day. We're going to have a good break from our respective routines whichever way we play it, but which is it to be? Neal's not sure where his preference lies either. But when we finish eating we seem to have made our choice. We carry on up by going back down to the car... Neal lives in a fourth floor flat in Dennistoun. The first thing I do is take my boots off and put dry socks on. The second thing I do is take off my wet jeans and put on the other pair I've brought, which cost me £38 earlier this week, and which are dark blue, made from a cross-thread, whose subtle quality of weave has been brought out by the cloth having been artificially aged by a year in the production process. What this seems to have meant in practise is that the threads on the front of the leg from knee to hip have been stressed by being rubbed in some way, and are lighter than the rest of the cloth. Does this make me look cooler than the average person going about in jeans? I'd like to assume this to be the case, but actually I feel like a complete prick having spent so much money on such a perversely luxurious product. The third thing I do is watch Neal as he demonstrates what needs to be done to flush the toilet. He, standing in the loo zone which is separated from the rest of his bathroom by a curtain of beads, steps onto a stool, puts his left hand over to the far side of the wall-mounted cistern, holds down the ball of the stopcock (I take his word that this is what his out-of-sight hand is doing), and uses his right hand to operate a lever at the near side of the cistern. He has to pull the lever more than once, and I have time enough to think that what I'm witnessing could almost be a demonstration of a climbing manouevre, where I'm carefully soaking up all the information relating to what hands and feet have to do and in what order, because it's me that will have to do the manouevre next. The toilet roars into life and water spills into the bowl. There's no piss or shit to flush, so it would seem like a waste of water, except I still have in the forefront of my mind all those frothing, bubbling gallons which I saw streaming down the mountainside a few hours ago, a fair proportion of which remains locked up within my one and only pair of footwear. The flat is a spacious high-ceilinged three-room flat - a typical old Glasgow property - which I settle down in the lounge of. The phone rings when Neal is in the bathroom, and he yells out for me to answer it. After the call is done, Neal tells me that his phone's been partially cut off because he only paid a proportion of his last bill (as much as he could afford) and now can only receive incoming calls. When will he be re-connected? Possibly quite soon, if he gets the money he has applied for from the Scottish Arts Council in connection with the solo show he's been invited to do at Zoo Gallery in Nantes. A copy of his application is to hand and so I read it. The gallery - which Neal pertinently notes has been generous in the interest it's taken in the work of several Scottish artists - is contributing £1400 towards the show, money intended to cover Neal's travel, his costs while staying for a fortnight in France, the cost of the show's opening and of publicity for it, but which doesn't cover any costs of making work. The application requests £1600 from the Scottish Arts Council to cover materials and making costs, though he's not sure exactly what these will be yet because he's still thinking about the show in the general terms of where he's got to in his work and where he'd like to take it next. Neal could have made it clear to the SAC that the first £100 he gets will go to paying off the balance of his current phone bill, but he has oh-so-sensibly chosen not to tackle that head on. Actually, there is a space on the form for the artist to write in the amount that he/she is contributing of his/her own money to the show. Neal has put zero in this space, though his life and work are so entwined that it seems to me that he'd be entitled to put all his living costs for the last month and the next three in that space. Maybe Neal broadly agrees with this, because he has written on the form in brackets: ("but it always seems that I end up spending some of my own money on the work".) Too right, Neal. But really there's no need for the brackets, the almost apologetic aside. Neal needs to check his e-mail, and asks if I want to come along to his studio where he can plug into its phone line. I borrow a pair of shoes so that I can do this, actually an old pair of training shoes identical to the pair Neal's wearing. They're a bit big for me and the sole is strange - giving my instep more support than my heel - and by the time we're in his fourth-floor studio I've kind of decided that when we get back to the flat I'll be wearing my own boots, whether still wet or not. Neal plugs his laptop into the phone line and sees that he has a new mail from Angela Kingston about a show she'd like Neal to be involved with at Angel Row in Nottingham, in autumn 2002. The theme is 'refuge' and she envisages the gallery containing huts and suchlike retreats. I reckon she may have Neal's red sequin-covered high-altitude sleeping bag in mind, an object which is currently in a bundle on the bare floorboards of Neal's flat. But the curator wants to arrange to meet Neal in Glasgow, so who knows what shape his contribution will ultimately take. The studio is an open one, shared between several artists though originally it was Lucy Mckenzie's. Neal is the last person to have come into the space which he reckons is a particularly relaxed one - everyone is friendly to one another. In Neal 's area is the painted version of 'Adult pass'. At the moment the white-painted sheet of MDF has black lettering which reads: 1 ADULT PASS CLIMB WALL ***1.25 But the enlarged A4 photocopy of the original ticket is lying around with its three subsidiary - not in bold lettering - lines of information that Neal still has to decide whether or not to include: B232320 16.05 4/8/1 ID:KHNS Activity date: 4/8/1 16:05 Area: Why does the date and time appear twice in the one little ticket? Why is the area of activity left unspecified? Why such apparently opposite treatments of space and time? I don't have time to answer these questions because there is more to take in. Neal shows me a painting he's been working on called 'This is a Modern World'. It's taken from a framed picture that Neal bought for next to nothing from a charity shop. A female ice-skater is being thrown into the air by a male skater. Beyond her outspread arms is a romantic-seeming mountain. In the painting the whole scene has been mirrored so that it looks as if the woman is going to jump into the arms of herself. It's a strong image but Neal isn't happy with the oil painting. He isn't happy that it's taken ages to paint, that it looks like a precious fine art object, and that it can't hold a candle to the spiritual qualities of the original faded image in its crappy falling-apart frame (I have to be careful and hold all of the bits when I lift it up from the studio floor). Back to Neal's flat. Off with the trainers and on with my own soakers which are nowhere near as bad as they might be - they don't squelch as I walk from one room to another in my artificially aged and now slightly wet jeans. It's never stopped raining since early morning. From the main room there is a view over this great crude block of a building which is topped by an expanse of black tar liberally puddled with water. Way below, there is a little patch of grass, someone's back lawn, and although the grass has recently been cut, for much of the year it has been unmown apparently, and when the wind blows down through the tunnels created by the lines of the buildings, the long untrammeled grass has danced madly, swirling around. So Neal told me anyway, only a few seconds ago. I look at the rain-spotted puddles, I hear the flush of the toilet next door, and I catch a glimpse of Neal in mountaineer position between stool and cistern. And from all that arises an even clearer picture, a vision of a mountain top, rising from the floorboards in the middle of this room from which creature comforts are so patently absent (bollocks! - what about the CD player, the books?). The mountain top rises to fill the vacuum (certainly there's no ornaments in here, no pretty pieces of worthless shit, no carpet). Of course it does - The Cobbler rises to fill the room wall-to-wall with pure mountain water, limitless mountain air, and all-too-human aspiration. Duncan McLaren
