‘I want to bury it round!’ Kim Noble on her unusual way of promoting her art book | Kim Noble

There are marketing strategies to promote your first book, and then there are the what Kim Noble he fixed it. “I asked the publishers if I could hire a digger, and then I would go to the surrounding area, dig a big hole and bury the books in the surrounding ground,” he tells me, dying of coffee. “They didn’t think it was a good idea.” You don’t say, Kim. This is a book that’s been years in the making, Noble reports — as its dialogue reveals why previous efforts failed. “Someone came to me to write a book about a program I made, I started filming it.

“Then,” he adds, “he decided to make another book instead.”

There’s more where this came from: tales of Noble’s thwarted ambitions, why his oddball standup-meets-art work and flatlining, too. But mourning comes as a standard with Noble, who has created a remarkable career in writing – a series of horror stories about social media – the restlessness and dysfunction of his and undoubtedly our lives. But now he’s taking the risk he longs for in publishing, with a brilliant book rejected by film publishers, he says, “it’s going to be a hard book to sell. I don’t know where you’re going to put it on the shelf. WH Smith at Gatwick – it probably won’t get to that one.”

Just as Noble’s life shows the ambiguity between his desolate life and his art, so In Pursuit of Nothing Strange is “a book about the process of making this book”. A collage of photographs and abstract images, part scrapbook and part photo album, it tells how Noble was approached 20 years ago by an Icelandic curator who was keen to make a book out of his work. Through messages, Noble “really fell for this guy”. But when he arranged the meeting (business part, first part of the day), the woman did not show up. I never heard of them again, and have been looking for them ever since.

From the background (it’s all in the book!), the 51-year-old explains the story behind the story, and it’s an eye-opener – fans of Noble’s self-inflicted work, brutally honest about his losses and problems, will not be disappointed. Maybe, Kim, you should emphasize this aspect of public interest instead of hiding the book around? But Noble’s instinct is not commercial. “The publisher wants my profile on the back cover, which has scared me.

Have you tried, I ask you, to make this book sell more? “I like that question,” he says, amazed at the thought. “I mean, I want it to be successful, but I don’t think I have the skills to write a proper book.”

Interestingly, no one is expecting a “proper” book from this quarter – or from its publisher Cheerio, whose back catalog includes one of Noble’s favourites, a shopping list book its author found it abandoned in a supermarket on Holloway Road in London. The Londoner has been very happy with the creation of Wonderful Nothing, and welcomes the appearance of the artwork that he can, finally, hold in his hands. “This is something that, even if it’s bad, it’s difficult There. My life experiences have not led me to incredible wealth, or much of anything else. I see it as a heavy burden instead of saying, ‘Oh God I created wonderful things. But this is something I can pick up and look at when I’m in a nursing home and say, ‘I made this…’ ”

It’s not all beauty, mind you, in the life of this provocateur he turned into a man of letters. Our conversation is interrupted again and again by phone calls from a care worker for Noble’s mother, who is now taking care of her full-time. Both parents appeared in Noble’s work; his 2014 hit You’re Not Alone he explained about his father’s death. Glumly, Noble now tells me he’s working with his shrinking mother. In another experiment, he plays his ex-wife in a break-up conversation. Another, “I’m trying to recreate my birth with my mother, I don’t know what it is.

“I can’t help it,” he laments. “I just do the same shit, don’t I?” If you were to take Noble at his word, you wouldn’t believe that he has created some of the most innovative shows of the past two decades – filmed, controversial, and 2022 Lullaby for Scavengersin which he rejected the crowd completely and went to live with the wolf’s skull. But “the chances are diminishing”, he says, for him to engage in criminal activity. “I couldn’t sing Lullaby; almost everywhere in the UK would accept it. Even in Europe, cinemas are very afraid of what the audience will think.”

I believe we have not seen the last of Noble on the stage; there is even, he tells me nervously, a living part of his imminent book launch. But until then, the man is unapologetically happy to be making his first documentary, finally. “I have a hard time interacting with people. So just because I want to write and draw, I’ve been loving it a lot.”