Mark McGowan crawling from London to Canterbury in December 2005 to raise awareness of loneliness at Christmas. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
Whether it's daubing yourself with gold paint and crooning music hall numbers, casting sculptures based on your form and sprinkling them through the Australian Outback or installing the indentations made in your bed in an art gallery, we're more than used to the idea of someone making art from their body.
What to make of a man called Mark McGowan, though, who later today will initiate what he calls an "extraordinary art performance" on the streets of New York by crawling for an "incredible" 72 hours on his hands and knees for an "amazing" 36 miles, dressed as George Bush, with a sign taped to his backside that reads "Kick My Ass"?
It's a protest, of course, and one with a specific aim: to offer, in McGowan's words, "a kind of therapeutic engagement". He goes on: "Hopefully people will be able to come and kick me (the President, George Bush) as hard as they like, and gain some comfort in the fact that they can say I kicked George in the ass." Understandable enough in its way, but - I can't believe my fingers are typing this - is it art?
Sorry, but no. For one, he appears to have difficulties with spelling the word "art" (it's an easy shot, yep, but then it's an easy word: one "a", one "r", one "t"). For another, his previous work - scoffing a swan in public to satirise the British class system, dressing as a British soldier and playing dead in Birmingham city centre - doesn't say much about the strength of his imagination, let alone his sense of scale. When Bush says "kick ass", hundreds of thousands of real people die; when this bloke pins it to his backside, it's filed under "And finally..." on the evening news.
What really sticks in my craw, however, is that it's just so bitterly, absurdly disappointing, the kind of juvenile stunt that makes me want to grab the man, sit him down and force him to look at astonishing, terrifying photographs, such as the one published earlier this week, that describe the horror of actually living in Iraq. (I want to do this to Bush or Blair too, yes, many of us do, but that's another story. Or an idea for a piece of art.) Hundreds of people are dying each day, you want to yell in his face - and this is the best you can do? The biggest you can think? Your utmost artistic effort?
Some people would like to draw a straight line between protest art and real art - protest art over there, real art over here. I don't think that's true. What you can do, though, is let the quality and bravery of your work make the protest for you.
For Picasso it's there in the rage of the brushstrokes, the terrified snarl of a horse, the sheer sense of horror on a canvas 11-and-a-half-foot tall and almost 26 feet wide. For Mark Wallinger, to pick a fairer and timelier comparison, it's there in the sad, futile way in which anti-war banners and placards, so ineffective in real life, are remade as museum pieces - nullified not by the artist, so much, but by a government too complacent to understand what they meant.
And "artist" Mark McGowan? He's wearing kneepads and stuffing a cushion down his trousers, for Christ's sake. He, and his publicist, should piss off.
