| DooDaaa!
Ralph Steadman, the creator of his own inimitable
visions of Freud and Leonardo, Alice, Animal
Farm and Hunter S. Thompson's infamous Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas, has written the world's
first triography: a life of his artistic alter
ego, the redoubtable Gavin Twinge, as told to
Raphael Steed.
Twinge, last remnant of a nineteenth-century
domestic-engineering dynasty, founder of the
Doodaa school, and pioneer of Barcode Art, Shredded
Literature, Centrifugal Abstracts and the 'Philosophy
of French Plumbing', is the original angry voice
of contemporary art.
From the moment Steed first meets Twinge in
a London Bookshop, it becomes his quest to get
to the heart of the mystery and discover what
makes Twinge tick and how, after Duchamp and
the school of Dada, art lost its soul. Whether
he has to penetrate the south of France by London
Taxi or witness the creation of the first Aerial
Abstract as Gavin plummets from the skies over
Margate in a hired Cessna, Steed sticks by his
man, matching him drink for drink, as he preparres
for teh great exhibition that will crown his
life's work.
Illustrated throughout in colour and black and
white in the author's inimitable style, Doodaaa
is a work of comic genius.
‘I am now convinced Twinge exists,
and is the archetypal artist: not rich, not
famous, not wholly sane; generous, curious and
intriguing. It’s what makes the book so
difficult to classify. He is not a charlatan,
and none of his works are presented as ideas
to turn a quick buck. It is a Romantic picture,
shot through with the kind of satire that only
emerged in the Romantic period — the kind
of satire you can't prove is satire. Whatever
this is, it is a Rabelaisian riot of a book:
scatological, scabrous, ironic, iconoclastic,
bibulous and fabulous’
— S.B. Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
‘Gavin
Twinge is a hero for our times: subversive,
inventive, world-bestriding, world-destroying.
He is the Vishnu of vicissitude and the Jehova
of juxtaposition. In Ralph Steadman, Twinge
has found his apotheosis, his amanuensis, his
Boswell’
— Will Self
‘What we have here is not only
an amusing tale, but an important document in
art history, an insider’s account of what
it has been like to be an artist at a time when
the only apt artistic response to the atrocities
of the twentieth century anyone has so far discovered
is the aggressively inane and nonsensical are
called Dada’
— Kurt Vonnegut
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