Man on the Edge

Last time I saw Kim Noble, he was stood on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral in a horse mask, holding a sign above his head. It was 3am and, if memory serves, the sign said one of two things: either ‘The End is Neigh’—which seems far too cheap—or else "President Alan Cunting Titchmarsh is Dead. Get Over It." Which seems about right.

Fringe-goers’ last glimpse of him was in 2009, at the end of Kim Noble Will Die: dangling 10 foot in the air, dressed as a dilapidated Superman, cradling a puppet of the son he and his partner lost in utero, to the roar of Guns and Roses’ 'Sweet Child of Mine'. Which seems about as wrong as it gets.

That show was effectively a staged suicide note: every night, Noble vowed to throw himself off George IV Bridge unless enough of us turned up to stop him. He’d been diagnosed with manic depression five years earlier and had just been through a particularly rocky break-up. Kim Noble Will Die was a smanifestation of his mental state.

We had to text his ex-girlfriend abuse, and watch videos of him self-harming or being pissed on in the street. He doctored rental DVDs to save others from crap films and masturbated into Vagisil bottles in the name of legacy, before replacing them on supermarket shelves. Female audience members got take-home pots of his (chilled) semen so that they might bear his kids afterwards. Pitch-black doesn’t come close: this was nihilism served neat.

Noble didn’t jump. He met someone while touring the show in America—one of the women left holding his seed, in fact—and started a relationship, the end of which has triggered another new show. “I do worry that I’m repeating myself,” he says in his deep, deep drone. “Just using a different font.”

This time, though, he’s not so beserk. “The starting point was feeling kind of lonely: living in a bedsit, not knowing where to turn, not having a proper job, not having a partner. All that crap. Someone said to me recently, ‘I hope you’re never happy. That would be the end of your work.'”

Noble enjoys that contradiction, I think; being best at his worst. Even offstage, his humour is self-vilifying. (“Maybe I’m just a fucking loser.”) He’s half hangdog and half puppyish, with sunken eyes, but cheerful colouring: lagoon-blue irises and carroty curls. His voice is so low and plodding, you’d think it stuck in ‘morose mode,’ but when he jokes, a raspy laugh cuts through.

You could say the same of his work, which hovers on the edge of comedy. His art-house double act, Noble and Silver (with uni pal Stuart Silver) won the Perrier Best Newcomer award in 2000 and, soon after, their E4 series, Get Off Me!, mixed disdain with conceptual daring. The first episode was a spoof ‘Making of…’ doc. Another was shot in a single take, with Noble running through London in search of Silver. “We shot ourselves in the foot by doing something that wasn’t easy: six programmes with no connection or overall meaning. You’d tune in next week to something radically different. Channel 4 saw it and went, ‘What the fuck have you done?’”

Then, in 2004, Noble’s breakdown broke the partnership up. “That was when I really started filming, documenting everything.” It’s a coping mechanism as much as anything else, though he resists the idea that it’s therapeutic. “Therapy makes me think of, like, ‘I’m drawing some flowers. I feel a bit better now. Let’s analyse the flowers.”

Mostly, it’s about relating to others and to the world: “It feels real. I’ve got this need to capture stuff because then I know it has another life beyond the actual thing happening. It exists outside of just one man alone, doing something in a bedroom.”

After his last break-up, Noble set out to seek company and connections. “The first thing I started to do was videotaping my neighbours without them knowing,” he deadpans. “Then drilling holes in the walls and recording them.” This isn’t a joke. Nor is it all bad: Noble stopped someone stealing their car. Mostly, though, the act became mundane: “OK, they’re having sex. Go and get the recorder out. Chart it down. Write it up.” It sounds like a dumbass version of Tehching Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece, in which the Taiwanese performance artist took his photo in the same spot on the hour, every hour. For a year.

That’s kind of the point. “A lot of my work touches on madness,” he continues. “I don’t quite know where the show stops and I, my life, begins… I wouldn’t say that all the things I’m doing are art.” His illicit shifts in B&Q, wearing a uniform he made himself, they’re real. So is his two-year online relationship with the man who thinks he’s a woman. As are their phone calls with each other. And, um, their dates. “It’s taking that desire for connection to the extreme. What lengths would you go to please somebody? I’m often asked whether I’d sleep with them.” He doesn’t even pause. “Yes, I would.”

“The thing is it doesn’t strike me as weird. It’s like, Fuck it, I’m going to chart my neighbours' sex life over a year. That’s a project.” Only, with every passing project, Noble becomes more and more innured. “I lose myself in it. I forget that drilling through your neighbours’ walls is a weird act.”

And ethically? “Ethically, I’m in a minefield.” Noble says he’s not good at defending the work on those grounds, but insists it’s more about him than it is them: “It’s their sex life, but it’s about the idiot listening in… Morally, I stand by the fact that I’m not setting out to hurt anyone.” Is that enough? Probably not, but the question itself is part of the art. And there are limits: “People think I’ll do anything and fuck anyone up, but that’s not the case.”

That said, he has just crossed a line. “I never thought I’d film my family – and I have.” His mum was in the last show. His dad, who has dementia, is in this one. “I felt, fuck, I’ve got to record this.” Why so? “There’s a kind of departing. He’s losing a sense of connection. It suddenly felt very necessary that I include it.”

“I don’t think I’ve really captured all the real day-to-day sadness of that existence, living in this mind that’s not sure what’s going on, the angst and anguish and anxiety of living in this perpetual cycle.”

The point is that, with Noble, there’s always a point. He's not overturning taboos for the hell of it. He’s not interested in sheer jackassery or shock for shock’s sake. There’s always commentary beneath, some attempt to articulate a universal truth or attack consumer-capitalist society; its constraints, its groupthink, its banalities. In that, Noble’s the perennial outsider, free from the conventions that bind the rest of us. “I’m desperate to live with a partner and a kid, in a normal house with a proper, regular income. Is there a loathing of that in there? I suppose so, but maybe that’s just a reaction against it because I can’t have it. Fucking hell, I’m a wanky, middle-class artist living in South East London.”