Charlotte O’Sullivan is gobsmacked by London’s Underground movement
YOU’RE in a tube station in London and you see someone chewing gum maniacally, staring at a poster of Liz Hurley. Suddenly, he spins round and slap! There goes the gum, on to the end of Liz’s nose. What have you seen? Not an act of vandalism but a work of “glop art”.
Underground stations such as Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus are the best places to spot “glop art” — defined by its practitioners as the deliberate slapping of chewing gum on a glossy ad – — though sightings have also been reported in Glasgow.
Orifices are the favoured targets: eye sockets, mouths, nostrils. Posters for animal research and Rock Circus come in for quite a lot of stick.
One glopper, who refuses to be named, has been doing it for five years. He’s in his mid-20s, works in an office and says he started by accident.
He was coming home from a rave and, unable to find a bin, got the “icky mess” off his fingers by dumping it on a nearby poster. Now he’s drawn mainly to the faces of celebrities and models. “I’m reminding myself that they’re human, that they can look ridiculous,” he says. “They never have runny noses or spots. I’m adding the bodily fluids you never see.”
So why call it art?
Glopping may have a social message, it may be amusing, but the thought of anyone paying to see it in a gallery seems ridiculous.
London-based artist David Burrows, who works with chewing gum, producing “jokey” figurines of celebrities, finds that view narrow-minded. “The question is not whether glopping is art, but whether it’s interesting. If the people who do it call it art, it’s art.”
Thomas Kellein, a museum curator, says it reminds him of the works of Sixties New York group Fluxus – — “designed to combat and reject the system of high art”. The Fluxus group disliked the cult of the artist. Glopping is similarly anonymous. No one is likely to glop for the fame or the money. In that sense, it has a kind of purity.
London Underground takes a more philistine view of the movement, however. “It’s bad manners,” says one official, “and it drives the cleaners crazy.”
When I tell an attendant in Leicester Square that glopping is being described as art, he says darkly: “I bet it is. Well, it might be art. But it’s a health hazard. All that saliva!”