Category: Discombobulation

Identified by many names, but effectively the partnership of Jimmy Cauty & Bill Drummond, active from 1987-1997.

Although best known for their musical endeavours, their real game was large-scale discombobulation. They terrorized the worlds of pop music and fine art in equal measure, in between writing an extraordinary book called The Manual, amongst numerous other curious exploits. But their most inspired Work was also one of their simplest: literally burning a million UK pounds in cash money on a remote Scottish island in 1994.

Both parties remain active in the fields of art and music. Cauty, notably, making and selling postage stamps for his own self-declared sovereign country, whilst in his spare time misguidedly buying dodgy second hand vans, crushing them into cubes, and sucessfully selling them back at cost to the dealerships he bought them from, as works of art.

Charles Shaar Murray on Drummond in The Independent, 2000 (via Wikipedia):

“[He] is many things, and one of those things is a magician. Many of his schemes… involve symbolically-weighted acts conducted away from the public gaze and documented only by Drummond himself and his participating comrades. Nevertheless, they are intended to have an effect on a worldful of people unaware that the act in question has taken place. That is magical thinking. Art is magic, and so is pop. Bill Drummond is a cultural magician.”