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"Well, here we are in the world. I'm glad you turned up on such a crap day," says the voice through the headphones. Heather Phillipson is telling me where to go, what to look out for, what to think about on the journey ahead. Right now, I'm more concerned about walking into the Tyne or the oncoming traffic, cradling a borrowed iPad in my hands as I take her audiovisual guided tour from the Baltic in Gateshead across the river to Newcastle.
"One thing you can say about the weather is that it's traditional, though getting less so," Phillipson remarks as I cross the bridge. Bronski Beat's Smalltown Boy then kicks in, minus Jimmy Somerville's plaintive falsetto. Perhaps he fell in. The images on the screen largely coincide with the view I would see if I were to look around me: it is hard not to confuse the virtual with the real. That's how life is now, getting less traditional every day. Maybe I'm just an app.
At one point, Phillipson directs me to turn around and take a gander back towards the Baltic, where her exhibition – Yes, Surprising is Existence in the Post-Vegetal Cosmorama – has just opened.
The guided walk has a catchy title, too: Cardiovascular Vernacular (as in, 'It's Time for my Regular Cardiovascular Vernacular'). A poet as well as an artist, Phillipson's bafflement at the world is a prerequisite for seeing things afresh.
As well as leading me over the river, up and down too many steps and into odd corners that reek of stale piss, Phillipson keeps enticing me to eat another Greggs sticky bun. They're just heaven, she says. Later, as we pass yet another of the city's many Greggs (The home of fresh baking) outlets, the buns are more than heaven. They taste of modernity, she says. In between rest-breaks at bus stops and on benches, inches from the traffic, I am also tempted by the bananas in Phillipson's shoulder-bag. I keep seeing a flash of them on the iPad. If you are following the tour on a smartphone, the bananas will look smaller, but just as tasty.
Phillipson's voice is knowing and laconic, funny and disturbing, a stream of consciousness that keeps losing its purpose and finding it, remembering that she has a duty to her listeners, then getting sidetracked by the random musings and repetitive mental patterns that waylay us. What's in front of us and what's not, the vernacular and the fantastical, the ordinary and imaginary are all part of Phillipson's armoury as an artist and a poet. Sometimes she is a comedy turn. Sometimes she's heartbreaking. Walking along companionably, thinking you have grown used to her voice in your head, she shoulders you off the pavement and into the bus lane with an errant aside.
As we proceed up alleys and through underpasses, and make the daunting climb up Dog Leap Stairs, made doubly wearying by the audio accompaniment of Dire Straits' 1978 song Down to the Waterline, she talks about love. "Not that I'm hetero-normative. I'm not suggesting we conform to the couple-shape, but the place is romantic, so why not get into it?" Phillipson remarks. I would, had I any breath left. This must be the cardiovascular bit.
There are more journeys in Phillipson's show back at the Baltic. The first of her entertaining video installations is called Immediately and for a Short Time Balloons Weapons Too-Tight Clothing Worries of All Kinds". Whoaaah. The words are like something sticky spilt on the floor, to make you stumble into a dark red room with a cosy nook of cushions, a womb-like home cinema where I am instantly infantilised. Above me, coloured balloons float upward to a sort of mariachi rendition of Happy Birthday to You. "You must have made your way through some tight passages …" she remarks, addressing her audience in a familiar voice over a collage of sound and images.
We travel the world, get advice on the travails of the life ahead, on the need for cleanliness and the complications of love. At one point, we get a revivifying makeover. A razor hoves into view, then the screen is filled by slices of cucumber to refresh our eyes. Towards the end, the collage of images and voiceover erupts with gunfire and screaming, details of a mosaic version of the Bayeux Tapestry flashing on the screen. "Do me a favour," she asks , "Could one of you just nip in and give me a good hard slap in the face?"
Reeling out, I make my way between a gigantic pair of female legs, realise I've just ducked through a vagina, rebirthed as it were, though not born again. This exit comes as a surprise, and is a homage to Niki de Saint Phalle's famous 1966 Hon–en katedral ("she-a cathedral"), a huge female sculpture which one entered through a vagina-shaped door. In Phillipson's version, the legs are cut-out shapes of bananas. Everything connects.
A real speedboat rides on a sea of bottled Turkish water. You can sit in it and take another journey, splashing through someone's mouth, which looms on a screen up ahead. I ducked when we got too close to the epiglottis. Phillipson has a lot to say about the mouth in her videos. "What happens in your mouth may not stay in your mouth. Other people's tongues, for example. Or words."
Finally, I dried off in a drive-in movie about French kissing, hoping to pick up a few tips. It turned out that Phillipson meant French cuisine. Both are about pleasures of the mouth, so I don't think I can ask for my money back. It was free, anyway. Or it could have been a virtual-reality drive-through car wash we were going through. You watch her last video from the comfort of a yellow-painted Peugeot, the image projected on the windscreen.
I like Phillipson's work very much, but which do I like the best? Her collaged videos with downbeat ironic commentaries, the mad situations she contrives in which to watch them, or reading her poems on the page? Maybe it is all of a piece. Some years ago, Phillipson went on a creative writing course at Birkbeck, University of London, ostensibly to help her script her videos. She discovered she had a voice as a poet. Since then, her poems have won prizes and she was picked up for the Faber New Poets series in 2009. Recently, she published her collection Instant-Flex 718 (the title referring to a glue that bookbinders use). And Carol Rumens recently chose one of Phillipson's works for her Poem of the Week series in the Guardian.
The poets Phillipson comes closest to, I think, are people like Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, both of whom ground you in the everyday and contingent, sliding off into life's inner complications. Thoughts branch, jump the rails and arrive at their destinations by unfamiliar routes. Their voices accompany you, and you can claim some part of them for yourself. So, too, with Phillipson. She makes the world feel nearly new, filled with meaning. Or several meanings, too many meanings, which on a good day is what the world is like. You have to pare it down, which is what she's learning to do in her poems, a counterpoint to the excess of her video work.
Each of Phillipson's works at Baltic are mad journeys, but they're grounded by a sort of sense. "Never insert anything larger than an elbow," she warns, apropos of something. I'll remember that, next time I'm in the Tyneside conurbation. Not such a crap day after all.
