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We know what we are to expect of Mr Noisy when we are greeted on its opening pages by the central character reading aloud the very work of which he is part. For indeed, this is no simple parable about a person who makes too much noise – the racket Hargreaves rails against here is that of the piece itself. And so begins this cautionary tale on what he sees as the excesses and frivolity of metafiction. 

Of course, in order to tackle the supposed indiscipline he wishes to decry, Hargreaves must likewise make the text itself the object of our contemplation. The voice of Mr Noisy therefore booms across its landscape, just as did playful postmodernism across the literary landscape of the time.

For the people of nearby Wobbletown, it is a voice both deafening and oppressive – a wearingly unrelenting bombardment which makes it nigh on impossible for them to experience day-to-day life as a stable and consistent unproblematised reality. Grown tired of this constant bellowed reference to the ultimate status of their world as fiction – and, we might add, compelled by the genre of the piece to act - the townsfolk agree that something must be done.

Hargreaves obliges with a fitting resolution, and in a deft appropriation of Pirandello’s Six Characters, he employs this supporting cast of locals to march the author out of the text and restore the reliable narrator. Or, as the story puts it, to make Mr Noisy more quiet.

Hargreaves’ aim here is, of course, to turn the tools and­ techniques of metafiction upon itself, hoping that in doing so he will banish forever from storytelling what he regards as its smug and artless horseplay. However, such is his mastery of the very antics he so despises that they never seem more at home in fiction than when it is he who employs them. 

Despite his own hankering for a return to a more simple, more refined moral and literary universe, Hargreaves cannot silence his gift. 

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It was a pleasure last summer to exhibit The Taping Of Quincy in Siena - at the top of Via Lucherini, next to the junction with Via Sallustio Bandini, to be precise. The 'Leeds' version seen here doesn't quite scale the same heights as the 'Liverpool' version that I exhibited a few years back at the Venice Biennale, but it still has a certain charm. Wonder if it's still there or if it's found its way into the hands of a private collector. 

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Mr Tall is a man beset with incurable ennui. Able to take neither his own life nor a leap of faith with any intellectual honesty, he has no option but to face the absurdity of existence without the slightest hope of any relief.  Hargreaves cleverly captures the various aspects of this predicament by giving his character inordinately long legs. At their very least they form a most effective metaphor for his fundamental discomfort with the world. 

This is demonstrated particularly well when Mr Tall is bent awkwardly into his bed at night, irreconcilably at odds with what is simultaneously the essential condition of his being. These legs allow him insights, however, denied the common man or woman. They afford him a view above and beyond the rooftops of the town that might otherwise have bound his horizon and buried him in comforting falsehoods.  

Even in this latter respect they remain a dubious gift. And when his torment finally drives him to the cliff edge, they deny him the option of drastic action. It is now that we see Hargreaves the master at work, reaping the rewards of his choice of metaphor. For what is Mr Tall to do there? He is a man who can step off a cliff just as a doorstep, whose tread on the seabed is but a paddle by the shore. It is not as if he can hurl himself to his death or drown himself. It is equally hard for him to leap ecstatically into the void, beyond the bounds of reason - the abyss somewhat loses any promise or threat when one’s feet rest with ease at its base. There is no escape for Mr Tall. He is condemned to the ridiculous.

Failed by reason, faith and death, Mr Tall sits on the cliff edge staring out to sea. He is visited by a procession of those who live the absurd life, with no higher moral purpose to curb them. Mr Tickle, Mr Nosey, and Mr Greedy arrive in turn – a fool, a voyeur and a glutton. They each present to Mr Tall a life without apology, embodying in their different ways the maxim that what is important in the face of the absurd is not the best living but the most living. Hargreaves would normally punish such excess, but here he knows this is futile – it would bring about no change, no remorse.

The words of these visitors do the trick, though the resolution they bring feels a little too easily won given the weight of the quandary Mr Tall has been grappling. He sees his lack of hope was liberation all along, freedom from the need for a purpose.  He strides home briskly, revitalised, any imperative to find or create meaning decisively cast in his wake. But his jollity seems a simplistic response - has he found just another evasion?

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Portrait crop of an oldish work. An A1 print on some fancy paper would work on your living room wall, I think.

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During lockdown, I noticed that the food and fat residue at the bases of takeaway pizza boxes invariably generates beautiful abstract expressionist works. I framed and titled several, which I then of course sold for vast amounts of money on the international art market. Here is a small selection:

Manilow Synesthesia

Vitruvian 12 Inch Meat Feast

A Hunger Artist