Severed Feet, Crashed Cars, Wanking Corpses and a Deep Fried Bible

Good Night Thomas

Glasgow artists littlewhitehead usually make creepy installations and plaster cast models of suicide corpses, but “The Thing” is a 200-year-old Bible that’s been deep fried. I rang them up to see why the want to “beat people up visually”. They’re very nice to talk to, but don’t compare their line drawings to David Shrigley. It annoys them.

VICE: You met at art school, right? Was it love at first sight?
LWH: No one else would speak to us or make friends with us. We became friends by default in a sense, the lonely guys getting picked on.

Is that why you want to beat people up visually now?
That’s kind of funny. It was a joke and we ended up making it our catchphrase. It’s escalating because now somebody was writing as essay about us, making out it was a kind of ethos, but we were just taking the piss.

The Thing

Not many people see corpses, so seeing people who have committed suicide is probably quite a violent experience for most people. Maybe in that way you do beat people up visually?
We quite like the voyeuristic aspects of our work, because our work’s accessible. You don’t get more accessible language than realism. There is a nice relationship that develops with the viewers from watching other people legitimately.

So This Is Romance

“So This Is Romance” is just a foot sticking out of a body bag. Is that what you think romance is? I read this article once about a gay couple whose sexual fetish was to do stuff inside this specially made two-person leather suit.
It’s actually a mechanical piece, when it was installed the body-bag masturbates. I think we’d always thought of “So This Is Romance” as a bleak, black comedy. It’s more about life than about any particular fetishes as such.

“Fourth Wall” is the one where the viewer walks into a dark warehouse and then a spotlight focuses on them and a canned laughter track plays. That’s quite lonely too.
We liked the “Fourth Wall” piece because it’s just kind of funny. The audience is key to it, it doesn’t function until they come in. They go to an exhibition and they end up getting laughed at. That’s slightly perverse.

I guess it’s nice to make the audience feel critiqued, when usually it’s your work in the spotlight.
Yeah. Standing there when the laughter is installed it was quite nasty, quite echo-y. It’s intimidating standing there blinded by the spotlight. A strange experience.

Nine Days, Seventeen Hours, Thirty-two Minutes, Six Seconds

In "Nine Days, Seventeen Hours, Thirty-two Minutes, Six Seconds", the guy who’s hung himself has jumped off a jukebox. That seems significant in some way.
Yeah, there’s audio playing from the jukebox and every time he hits it the track skips. The songs are important: the one that usually plays is a piece by Oliver Onions that’s called “Santa Maria”. It’s a cheesy Europop song from the eighties. When you see it, it’s kind of funny. The motor in it is important, because obviously it goes on and on and on and on, so the whole thing was about these absurd, repetitious life cycles.

I’ve got an uncle who’s a policeman and he’s seen people die in the most embarrassing situations, like this old man who’d died with his cock in a glass bottle he’d been trying to pee in. Also when my friend was in a car accident, she went to open the door of the lorry that had smacked into her car to try and rescue the driver, and the guy was alive, but she realised the reason he’d crashed was because he’d been masturbating. He had his trousers down and everything.
It’s a good symbol for life in general really isn’t it? You’ve probably given us our next two pieces.

Stoke

Score! You’re into being shocking right? “Stoke” is a public display of a car crashed into a tree, that’s pretty shocking.
We never set out with the intention to shock, but if we manage to in the course of the display that’s good. I think the problem with the “Stoke” piece was that it wasn’t so much about a car crash, more so about an abandoned car that had hit a tree. In the boot there was a sound like somebody was trapped in there, calling for help rather pathetically. A road safety group got annoyed because they’d applied for a lot of funding for a road safety campaign and didn’t get it.

You did another crash piece, “Nothing Ever Happens Here” with two cars in a warehouse. The glasses on the dashboard were the scary part of it.
We had a creepy audio track, and all the light for the show was coming from the flickering headlights of the smashed van on the side. Press folks said it was kind of David Lynch-y, just walking about the scene. The sound was an ambient, horrible sound that came from one of the cars. It was an uneasy place to stand, you kind of felt uncomfortable walking round, you felt that something nasty had happened.

Shit Shoe

The shit in ‘Shit Shoe’ looks like an intestine.
It’s spray-foam painted with brown oil paint. I suppose someone could shit out their innards. It’s our Dad’s shoe.

It Happened In The Corner

What inspired “It Happened In The Corner”?
That piece was actually inspired by walking through Glasgow. There was an incident one day and loads of folk crowded round. I still don’t know what it was, but I wanted to know. It became very annoying. We do most of the stuff in plaster casts of real people. A lot of people often think we use mannequins but we don’t because they’re generic, they’ve got no character in their body shape. The reason our stuff is more immediate is the fact that the shapes look familiar and realistic. It’s always more interesting.

What do you think of London?
London’s good but it’s quite normal. I reckon if we were in London a lot it would get tiring. Around Hoxton it’s dead easy to be an artist, everyone is, it’s kind of the thing to do. Even in Glasgow there are areas where it’s easy to be an artist, but we mainly work in an old steel mining town. You don’t get any artists here. It’s kind of hard if you want to do it, so you’re not doing it to be seen and to be cool, whereas down there it kind of feels like that sometimes.

Well duh.
We were asked to do a performance at the Trolley Gallery in Shoreditch while we were down there. We didn’t know why they’d asked. But the gallery had agreed to pay our train tickets, so it was kind of a no-brainer really because it was 220 quid. We made a cassette tape of us playing the organ badly, and when people started arriving we ran away to the pub and then phoned the guy that was organising it, telling him to press the play button. That was the performance. We tried to get him to get some money off the audience: we’d left a cup, so we texted him asking to pass the cup round, but we only got a couple of quid so. It wasn’t great.

I’m sure everyone there was absolutely loving it.
I think they did actually. They were kind of annoyed, but when they realised we’d run away they kind of liked it, which was weird

Anyway, I’m off. Thanks for talking littlewhitehead.
No problem. Thank-you! Goodbye!