No ifs, ands or butts about it, Mark McGowan is out to kick some ass big time. But first he wants you to kick his ass. That’s why, for God’s sake, he’s on his hands and knees in the middle of a Midtown Manhattan street during rush hour wearing a George Bush mask and freezing his rear end off in the winter rain.

If you don’t believe me, read the sign: In big, black letters, the kind a kid in kindergarten would make, it says, “Kick My Ass.”

Through 3 p.m. Sunday, the 37-year-old British performance artist, as part of the art show SCOPENewYork at Damrosch Park, will be crawling all through the city daring you to make his day by taking him up on his offer.

“George Bush is mental,” he says. “His global policies are terrible. I want people to get some satisfaction when they kick Bush.”

His posterior may be padded (he wadded up his winter coat and added a pair of soft sneakers), but he’s not worried about covering his ass. After all, this isn’t the first time that he has staged a headline-grabbing shocking stunt. In the last eight years, the London art teacher has done everything from pulling a TV with his ear for 6 miles in Italy to get the ears of the public about politicians’ control of the media to dressing up as Queen Elizabeth on her birthday and inviting the public to bash him in her place.

Getting kicked may be a royal pain in the ass for McGowan, but it’s nothing compared to what some other prominent performance artists have suffered in the name of art. Chris Burden, for instance, had a friend shoot him in the arm with a rifle and crucified himself atop a VW. Then there’s Gina Pane, who climbed a ladder whose steps were studded with blades, slept on an iron bed that had burning candles underneath and cut up her face with a razor blade. The closest McGowan has come to this is nailing his feet to a gallery wall to protest autumn leaves. (“It didn’t hurt that much,” he confesses. “I just nipped at the webbing, I didn’t hit the bone.”)

McGowan has a lot riding on “Kiss My Ass” because it’s his American debut, and he’s been in training since December 2005, when he did an 11-day, 60-mile trial crawl from London Bridge to Canterbury Cathedral with a rose clenched between his pearly whites and 18 boxes of chocolates tied to his wrists and ankles. That time, the sign on his backside read, “Could You Love Me.”

Now the question is: Will NY love him enough to give him the winter boot?

With pads in place, McGowan sets out to find out, crawling carefully out of the SCOPENewYork tent, surrounded by a circus of clicking cameras.

Like a snail, he crawls, putting one black gloved hand in front of the other, trying to miss the river-like puddles on the ice-cold pavement. A woman and child, umbrellas in hand, don’t even notice him as they speed by. A white-haired man, his ears decorated with gold studs, wants to kick but doesn’t have the chutzpah. “You have to have a certain respect for the presidency,” he says as he walks away.

Now McGowan is crossing Columbus Avenue, and when the cabbies stop, they don’t even blink. “I want to get kicked, but I don’t want to get hurt,” he says. “I do have a $500,000 medical insurance policy that covers me.”

The first kick is delivered by a sprinting guy in a leather jacket who does the deed swiftly and softly.  By the time McGowan reaches the next corner, he’s red-faced. The mask is so hot, he takes it off, gets on his knees and practically pleads with passers-by to connect with him. “Wouldn’t you like to kick my ass?” he asks politely.

A chic blonde grins as she primly plants her Prada pump prominently on McGowan’s posterior. What possessed her? “It’s Bush! Do you really need any explanation? I can’t give you my name because I need my green card,” she says as she dashes away.

Then demure-looking Amy Brown, a documentary filmmaker from Long Island City, Queens, really gives it to him. Once she’s started, she can’t stop kicking. “It felt good,” she says. “I wish I had done far more damage.”    

Ah, that’s what McGowan longs to hear. He has felt her pain, and it has cheered him up immensely. In the next block, he’s kicked by a retiree carrying a cane, a Bush-bashing Texas native and an Ecuadorean transplant.

And so it goes, block after block: a kick here, a kick there. The kicker is that the only one who didn’t weigh in was the president:  By deadline, the White House still hadn’t replied to a request for comment.

When last seen, our suffering artist, suit soaked but backside held high as the Empire State Building, is crawling painfully toward Times Square in the hopes of getting in some more kicks. His joints are very, very stiff, but being British, so is his upper lip.