There are several difficulties in following taxi drivers. They know the roads backwards. They love a shortcut. They can be considerate, but equally the converse. And we defer to them at junctions, because they make a living on these roads.
This is a short account in which I followed a taxi driver. It was just off the streets of North London. And we were not on the road but in a gallery. The venue was Holy Trinity Church, Cloudesley Square. As a savvy cabbie could no doubt tell you, this is now home of the Florence Trust, an arts charity that converted this salubrious address into studio and gallery space for contemporary artists.
The driver I was following was Mark McGowan, aka ARTIST TAXI DRIVER. And there was a time when I followed him near daily through prolific video posts on Twitter in which he ranted about political figures of the day. How things have changed, from bad to worse, since Twitter became X! But his incredulous attitude has aged well.
Since I had only ever seen him through a dashcam, where he became a kind of icon for a while in the 2010s, it was a little glitchy to be in the same room as him. Even if that room was white and cubic, windowless, high ceilinged, and populated with sculpture: an artist’s natural habitat after all.
Not just in the same room but on the same bill. Both of us were invitees to a reading of art criticism. Half a dozen speakers were involved and twice as many interested parties were in that space to watch. The space was also occupied by nine warehouse pallets topped with nine waiting chairs. These chairs were in the style of Gerrit Rietveld, all expertly handmade, as were the pallets.
Along with myself, McGowan had four other game passengers on this Saturday afternoon ride: Nat Pitt, Janneke Adema, Joshua Uvieghara and Daniel Pryde-Jarman. Dan was the artist responsible for making the chairs which he then put us in. The 4pm event was called, in a most straightforward way, Critics on Crates on Pallets, and was part of a day of performance staged by the gallery Division of Labour.
Dan briefed us before we took the floor. Sit anywhere he said. Don’t all face the audience he said. It’s not a performance. By this point I was realising that while the other readers had plenty of chops within visual art, I was perhaps the one closest to being what you might call a critic. Having said that, Dan, Janneke, Nat and Josh had all chosen very apt, compelling examples of the form and all read with great conviction.
But I read my own stuff, in accordance with the brief. Here’s the piece, which I printed, held in trembling hand and struggled through. Did I face the audience? No, I took a seat facing the back of the gallery. Could I be heard? No, as the words left my mouth I could hear them dying in the mid air.
None of this is McGowan’s fault, of course, but he didn’t make life easy. In a move which I can see was wise, he sat in a far corner; this offered a vantage point from which to address not only the audience but also all five other critics. He read with gravity and he read just before me.
Before I get into his appearance on Critics on Crates, I want to get into his previous activity. Along with the many films he made from the inside of the cab which he apparently drives for a living, McGowan lays claim to staging some of the most alarming pieces the world has ever seen or read about.
Please don’t take my word for it, and neither should you take his, but his Wikipedia page is stocked with the wild image of this middle-aged south London cabbie getting up to all sorts. Did he really roll along four miles of London pavements in order to raise awareness of people being rude to cleaners? That is the least of it.
There are eight more UK based stunts like this, or nine if you include the time he used his nose to push a toy pig from a London hospital, in which he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, to 10 Downing Street. Another section of his mythopoeic Wiki entry is dedicated to Controversy and Legal action. This alone runs to 2500 words, so this is not the time to get into McGowan’s sensational work
But the figure I formerly knew of as a furious critic of UK austerity governments, was in subdued mood, opting for quiet simplicity, as he read a piece by Tom Jeffreys about a 2008 panel at the ICA, on which he sat, and during which they both saw Russian performance artist Alexander Brener shit into his own hand. A new theme has emerged on this blog at least.
Jeffreys provided an elegant write up of the incident at the time, in which he managed to convey all the horror, astonishment and comedy of such goings on. There is very little I could have read to follow that particular story with all of its shock and entertainment value.
Nevertheless, it was a really interesting afternoon. In 17 years of writing this blog I have never got much sense of an audience so the experience of delivering my work into a heedless void really crystalised a lot for me. If I were a performance artist and not a dumb critic, I would have stood on my crate and retired the blog there and then.
The art world moves fast and crticismism may never catch up. Perhaps a persistent blogger can only attempt to follow people like the ARTIST TAXI DRIVER, who, however low key, burns like one of Kerouac’s roman candles.
I’d like to thank Dan Pryde-Jarman for inviting me to participate in this afternoon’s proceedings, together with Nat from Division of Labour and Steven from the Florence Trust for the infrastructure and the welcome. After the instructional death on stage it was good to unwind a bit in the pub. I wish Mark McGowan could have stuck around; given the presentational format, I feel we would have got on crate!
Critics on Crates on Pallets took place at the Florence Trust, Cloudesley Square, on 6th June 2026.