But I’m here.
And maybe that means everyone thinks I do.

I don’t like anything about the boat or where it’s going, but I’m just a deckhand, doing my bit, and I like my job.
I like the people around me, I like them all as individuals.

But here, on the boat, everyone loves the owner. I think he’s a coward, and for some reason that guy has figured out how to get enough money in his pocket so that everyone around him wants to blow smoke up his ass.

I don’t want to.

I don’t give a slice of cake about what he thinks of me, and that’s fine, because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even know my name. I don’t like that he has all this power on the boat.

But he does.

And the boat and crew bend over just to make him happy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful. I need the money and we go to great places. The work is fine and I’m healthy. Everything is great, until he comes into the equation, and then I see what everyone really is. I thought when I started they were here because they liked the work too. But they’re not. They want to be near him, or his money.

I wonder if he knows.
I wonder if he cares.

Must be nice, not knowing, not caring.

But while I’m here, on this boat, it doesn’t matter that I like the work, because every time I realise what the boat is for, a part of me dies. And I don’t think I want that anymore.

Kit

Rule number one of kit prep: look ally. Everything in the army is about looking like you’re good at war. The army is probably the most indicative moment in my life where I felt I belonged to a culture. But that was more just because I looked the part. It’s one of those things I learned early on: if you look the part, you play the part. Three or four days in the field doing night ops, kit prepped correctly, moving around in the dark, and you realise that as long as you always look like you’re lethal and ready for this, you’ll become it.

In the military if you can’t run a six-minute mile, you can’t run a six-minute mile. The scores are on the board. How you perform is a direct correlation with how you’re valued.

But what happens within each team at different scales is what the culture defines. What is it that we value? What are we measuring? Do we care about haircuts, or your grouping with a 9mm after you’ve run two miles?

And once people know you’ve got a good grouping and you can run, do they care about the haircut? Probably not.

What I loved in the military was the work. But do I agree with the overall idea of being part of a military force and all that entailed? Less so. You can unwillingly become a participant in a wider culture that is trying to do something at a far greater level than the small actions you’re taking within it, and understanding that from inside is very difficult, because often we’re just trying to fit in.

There were many things where I was part of the culture. There were many things I wasn’t. I don’t like drinking very much. But for some units I was in, that was an important part of how they came together. Certain nights you go to the bar and you have a beer together. I’d rather go to the gym, go for a walk, draw. Those nights aren’t something I enjoy, but I’ll do it, and sometimes when I participate, I’ll not know the rules, because I didn’t grow up going to pubs. But I’d still display membership. I’d still show solidarity, because leaving that cultural system meant that I would lose the ability to participate in the better parts of it, the freedoms of it. My job was reliant on it for a long time.

I knew that by not going I was spending my status, saying I was good enough at something else to justify my lack of adherence to the code. I also realised over time that it’s a cheap win, and eventually it became easier to comply and fit in and spend that status accrued elsewhere. But when I made that decision, I lost a part of myself to the culture.

Recognition

When we have these agreements that we make between us as a crowd, eventually those agreements cause repetitive actions, and those repetitive actions become culture. Culture is a byproduct of consensus reality, the version of the world a group has agreed to treat as real. That doesn’t mean that you can’t participate in it and disagree with the consensus.

Consensus occurs when we all see some value, objective or aspect of reality the same way. Being fit is good. Spending time together rather than apart is important. Wearing the same clothes improves efficiency. If we all value the same things, we communicate how to improve them. We align our goals together, and over time, that results in the texture of the group’s culture being organised around these values and perspectives.

Groups find ways to show who is or is not aligned with the culture; it lets newcomers know what to do before they can achieve it. In the military, run times are known. The infantry has a 2-miler. It’s run with 20kg in a backpack and a rifle. When new officers arrived at a battalion, we knew their 2-mile time before we knew their face. (Sixteen minutes is the accepted bar.) Having operational tours is another great example in that industry. You might be problematic and overly opinionated, but if you’ve had a few punchy tours, you’ll be allowed to voice your opinion. These measurements act as a passport. They let you move around the culture in less or more restricted ways if you have them.

The passport buys you the chance to act differently within a culture, but it doesn’t give you the ability to influence it from your novel actions. You might be beautiful enough to not wear heels in the nightclub, but that doesn’t mean your friend is. The doorman is still in charge, and the culture will allow exceptions where it wants. And once you spend that status, it is spent.

A lot of people have bought their way in, exchanging success elsewhere as a way to play a game in another field. They have the passport. But the credibility is spent on entry. You’re still expected to play the games of whatever the culture asks.

Markets

For the last few years I’ve been building a practice that takes my art and builds a bridge towards fashion. They are the two cultures I move between, and they ask different games of their passport holders. The art and fashion markets both build products for sale. That’s how they function. That isn’t to say that art is simply the production of objects for the art market, the same for fashion. Art is a far greater exploratory experience that sometimes results in an object that has commercial viability, but I would say this is rarely the aim. Fashion, while exploratory in its process, generally revolves around the production of garments that are worn by others. Fashion has some purpose. It’s worn. It’s used. And therefore is reliant on some trade at its base. It is a product, always, and thus fits into the market dynamics of our modern world in a cleaner manner.

While there are many great artworks that have no commercial value, and just as many artists, there are very few great fashion designers who haven’t had commercial success. Therein lies the tension between the two industries. And the opportunity for them to work together.

Great art need not succeed commercially, but it must succeed culturally. Fashion’s collaborations are best centred on this freedom. What would we create if it didn’t have to turn a buck? What would we create if we just wanted to communicate our idea, knowing that art does not always make money, but does always cost it?

Culture

Businesses sell tools, access, convenience, recognition, status, or even an association with values. Their intention is to contribute something and extract the value required to better deliver that. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it does mean that often this isn’t an emergent product from the culture growing naturally; it’s a new node in the network. It is connected to value and profit.

A business that’s built from within a culture is generally there to support what a culture is already doing. The track spikes within track and field. The firework displays for New Year’s Eve. There is demand, and a solution arrives.

Cultures define the products we should value and spend on: an English home seeks a garden, a Texan has a car, a Swiss banker is judged by the size of his house.

Once a culture becomes reliant on an external provider, it loses its agency. Once these provisions become baked into the culture, the direction the culture trends towards is defined by these elements.

Fashion bends to Vogue and the press, the military to the defence sector, the art world to the museums. While they are all connected and aligned to some degree, they do not have the same incentives. Because they are inherently different. They have consensus on some elements, but as the relationship evolves, it becomes clear that deep down, they are not the same.

Participation

The layers of culture often create a border around them to maintain security, so that people can’t come in. Just like a land border there are trade association groups, networking events, conditions of entry into any culture. Is this guy wearing Off-White trainers still? How gauche, we’re on Salomons now. These all seek to protect those that they deem to be credible, just like an MFA from Yale in the art world or heels in the club. It puts a bar on who can play the game by making sure that they come through a certain standard, and that means that they almost control the value system within them.

But once you have a culture, and you have commercial success within it, you now have the ability to divert it. You can change where things go. OpenAI started as a non-profit, a strong way to attract the best minds at discounted rates. A culture around exploration and endurance that a private company could not have. Wait long enough and the boat changes form. But now the cost of leaving is too great.

It’s a common bait and switch. I joined the army because I thought they were going to pay for my architecture degree and let me row across the Atlantic. I was mistaken. And once I was in the culture and trying to figure out how to survive or get off the boat, I became stuck. As we all do in relationships we thought were different to their eventual reality.

Lemonade

My interventions are like small boats of my own, I like to watch what people do once they’re on board. Maybe it makes me feel like I’m in control, I don’t know. But my favourite part of them is when I have a mutiny and someone does something with them, I didn’t expect. While I’m building for coherency, I most desire the opposite. With the interventions, what I’m trying to create in that first second of an installation is consensus that participation is acceptable. I’m trying to make it easy for them to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do. I hope to do this by firstly lowering the bar of entry, but generally through making it something they want to do. As soon as somebody has the desire to participate and give themselves a role, their identity has moved.

Thus begins the game.

One of my favourite installations from a few years ago was a lemonade stand. It was called ‘When life gives you lemons’. We attached some speakers to a bin full of free lemonade, and the lemonade had a QR code on the cans that went to a Spotify playlist.

You hear it, see it, pick up some lemonade and then scan the QR code. It takes you to a playlist where you can add songs which are playing next to you.

Nobody scans QR codes, they’re annoying. And this is a long process. But when we put it in places, what was interesting is how the people around it would set up rules. They’d teach one another what’s going on. At the end of the intervention, we put it out in Broadway Market, and a man ran over from his friends, took hold of it, and decided that the right amount of free lemonade for everyone is two cans.

It seemed excessive for me. I even felt that one can per person was a bit much, and it was already quite painful financially. But as he began handing out cans to new people, people started asking, “What is this?” Without a drop in his step he said, “This is mine. I made this. All you’ve got to do is scan the QR code and play the music.”

People listened, they asked him why he made it, what’s the reason, the lie continued, partly alcohol-fuelled but from what I could see, he genuinely believed it. And he was building a crowd; having someone next to the game made it grow. People would haggle and try and convince him that they needed three for their friends. But as a capable steward of his work, he stood by his rules.

It gave him a space to perform a role that wasn’t him. It was a minor culture, but it had resource and it had a space for someone to contribute to it. For a short period, he had some status within Broadway Market, within his friend group. He had found a way to contribute, but in the process, he had become someone he is not.

We all have this in us. We are isolated and deeply long to connect. Deep down I know that when I write, I hope it’s valuable enough for you to say to a friend, “Hey, this guy’s saying something interesting, you should read it.” But this creation of culture is a two-way street, because you may also say the opposite.

Final words

What I believe is that if art is to have this higher-order influence on the world, it cannot just be from some culture. It must address and explore who we are beyond this. Yes, there will be craft that is developed from within, that will help us communicate, but to challenge the cultures it must examine them from the side. Maybe that’s why we enjoy the starving artist, because we know he hasn’t been poisoned by the well of the city.

Not all art has to do this. But the art that examines and understands a culture sees it more critically from the side. I believe this is how fashion and art should coexist. Fashion brands looking to connect to art should offer their space for critique. For exploration.

Throw 1% of revenue at it, find some artists that you love and say to them: this is what we’re doing. Take it to the edge, show us how it’s wrong. Use it to inform the core processes, show it alongside the runway. Or keep it in the office or the archives. But don’t try and find a way to merge the cultures. We have consensus over what we must look at. We do not need to share a home.

While fashion and art collaborate, art must be able to not generate revenue, or it loses its freedom. That’s not to say it won’t, but it shouldn’t have that intention as its highest goal. Warhol made money the subject of the work; the loss comes when it becomes the condition of the work instead. And art must realise that fashion will take a part of its freedom. Fashion has already given up part of its space for exploration to make sure it stays commercially viable. These transactions are how cultures meet, and they are normal. But those crossing the bridge should know that they may lose a part of themselves that is hard to find again.

I’ve had great relationships with fashion brands since I came back to London. The first thing they asked of me was that I be more visible, something I was trying to avoid at all costs. The work sometimes demands that we change if we want to go in that direction.

Just as all of us seek out validation from cultures so we don’t feel alone, we also risk losing access to the parts of us that the culture doesn’t value. The transactions are part of the social side of being human. And we never know how much they cost until we’re in.

I love you loads,

Your obedient servant,

Russ x

Eventually we were so far away from participating in society that it became easy for me to see where I could find food for free. Sometimes at the cost of the people that were making and selling it. We agreed it was acceptable, given the situation.

At some point, a group of humans got together and decided that their time is best spent nailing wood and sweating into their work to build boats, so that they can leave where they are in search of resources that help them survive. It’s a good decision.

Where they landed they eventually found competition, and those ships began to carry more than objects for trade. They also agreed, it was a good decision.

Our manner of constructing a joint reality is a beautiful part of our species that no other animal on earth does to this level. Yes, the bee creates the hive and the ant creates the hill. The orca work together to hunt, and the dolphins will play in the waves. But none of them are on Substack reading an email right now from a person they’ve probably never met.

That’s kind of cool.

Today’s essay is about consensus reality.

We all have a unique perspective on the world, defined by how we move through it. How we view it. And the when and where. Sometimes the context to understand it can only come from those nearby. We gain agreement.

The broader the consensus, the more power it has to organise our lives.

Condition

What is it that connects the tallest to the shortest? The most beautiful to the most ugly? The richest, the poorest?

We will all experience death, isolation, meaninglessness, and freedom.1 These four conditions are baked into us all.

As we experience reality, and try to have an effect on it, and realise that nothing comes back, we feel a lack of meaning. What’s my purpose for doing this?

That lack of meaning slowly trends towards feeling that we are alone, and we seek others who have that same feeling. As we tie ourselves to them, we agree that the thing that none of us want is to die. The ultimate cost. And we create, in order to prevent that.

But as we become banded to one another, the things that we want to do aren’t aligned with those around us. The connections we’ve built to prevent our most carnal fears lead us to realise that we’ve given up something else that we all need. The freedom to experience reality on our own terms.

And the only way to get freer is by committing more to the group. So we commit, and eventually we extract value. So much value that we can step away from the consensus reality that’s keeping us stuck.

And once we break free, and we finally feel the freedom, we see the other side of the coin. That freedom in itself is terrifying. Once we realise we have free will, we don’t really know what to do with it.

We see the dark side of freedom and begin the cycle one more time. We move, we readjust, we reconnect. We find consensus with ever-changing groups of one another, to better understand what it is from this experience we want.

Want

Often the lessons we need to learn are the ones that come to us when things are going well. When we think that we’re finally through the dark times. And the road forks. And neither side looks like a path we want to enter. Because we thought that what’s at the end of each of these roads came together.

And it’s at these points we have to make a decision.

Sometimes we look to those around us, speak to them, ask them. Which way do I go now? Sometimes there’s no one there. And we have to go inside.

The cost of freedom comes again. And knowing that we have no one to blame for our choices in these moments means that we’re finally defining who we want to be. Often the decisions we make lead us to becoming someone different. And we don’t know how that person will respond to the choices that this one has made.

We want to take the left path, but the right is the only one that’s open.

But seeing that the left path has closed is enough for us to understand what we want. Even if it’s not what we can have at this point in our life.

Selfishness

And the reality is that we are selfish.

It’s a heavy word, selfishness. We long to be good people. And it’s an easy perspective to take when you’re not tested. When you only see the world through a lens that can give you what you want. Which is partly the things you desire, and partly protection from realising that in a world that doesn’t have that, we would be completely different.

I’ve had the fortunate experience of living without money and living with it. Being in a safe environment and being in one where conflict is the baseline. And that’s given me the ability to see how flexible I am as a creature.

I have a good friend who talks about spiritual awakenings. It becomes abundantly clear to us as men that peace is much easier to come by in isolation on the side of a mountain. Away from the carnal delights of the cities we love and the bills that come with them.

Scarcity

No one thinks that they’re a bad person. But when there’s only enough soup for the few, I think we all know that the people around us would rather have bread and soup than go without.

It’s not a nice thing to see in yourself, but it’s real. I know now what I can become, given the right conditions.

Those moments where we’re willing to shove, steal, ensure that we survive over others, show us who how malleable we are. Some will call to the floor. Some will push to the front. Others will steal from others.

Our way of challenging those actions is what defines us as a society. Not only do we build consensus over what resources are available, but we find ways to bring to justice those that challenge that.

We can create a rule to stop the strongest person taking all the soup, but a rule can also be used to hold the soup for the people who can write the rules. And isn’t that just the same as shoving? Instead of using our physicality, aren’t we just using our mind?

Incentive

We’ve known about consensus reality for a long time. The media environment we exist in is reliant on creating these coherent ideas of consensus. The earlier systems for this are the feudal systems and religions. A set of rules by which, if everyone lives together and works by them, we survive longer as a species.

We all wear clothes, generally in a way that helps us be identified for our role and function. We all go to work at the same time. We all agree that certain laws work well. All of this creates a functional civilisation within a given environment. Whoever is running the environment gets to shave the value off the top.

But they’re incentive systems, irrespective of their scale and value. They’re designed to make a group of humans behave coherently for the betterment of one another.

Those that commit to the consensus seek to benefit from it. And although sometimes those decisions are made with the best intentions, it’s often because the costs of these decisions aren’t borne by those that make them.

Culture comes from these consensuses. Actions that we perform together to show that we are aligned. That we understand what the agreements are between our groups. And the incentive structures for people to show that they are part of the consensus are a method of control.

It always benefits the incumbents. And they made the decision long before they took into account who you were. Or who you want to be. When I was stealing food in Paris it only existed because other people had worked to produce it. Breaking the rules around me didn’t suddenly make me independent.

Only the four parts of the human conditions and laws of physics lack incumbents. Nobody made those decisions. And therein lies the difference between culture and truth.

Interrogation

I believe that life gets better. Year on year on year on year. Humanity wants to improve.

And I don’t like the narrative that certain artefacts people have created are purely evil.

The most heinous things we’ve done as a civilisation have been done in the name of good.

In the art world, we tend to demonise. We’re left-leaning and collaborative by nature. We want to see things from different perspectives; we want to welcome other views. Just not dissent against our median idea of what our culture represents. A lot of the time, the most far-reaching and powerful structures of society are the things that we demonise.

But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be interrogated. Used, played with, critiqued, messed with. That work can’t be done from afar. I think art develops society through this. Through testing the borders of these things. To understand what humans are like within this system.

We all live within the system of fashion. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being interested in how our aesthetics can redefine who we are internally and how we’re perceived. But the more powerful forces exist within the industries that have the highest concentration of capital.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned for sure, it’s that even those that we think have good values will still choose money, because they’re not secure enough in themselves to think that they can get beyond it. Being able to risk it is a high bar. I know I’ve set it for myself. To expect it of anyone else would be unfair.

Money is real. Not everyone wants to live a life of freedom beyond the constraints of consensus reality. Some people just want to be rich and think that that means they’ll be enough.

Consistency

I probably have an unconventional view of what artists are exploring. If you look through the lens of who they are as a human, deeply, you can’t disconnect the artist from the art. Not in the truest sense of art.

There are painters that are exceptional painters, and they paint. But there are also artists that are living in a certain way that is consistent.

When I look at Damien Hirst’s work, it can be easy to decry it. But I think it’s a human in a phase of society exploring their relationship with wealth. How do I make money?

The 2008 Sotheby’s sale2, going straight to auction. His playing with pricing structures. The Currency3. It’s clearly a person obsessed with understanding the financial engineering of art. And when you take that perspective on his practice, suddenly, it’s not that important what he’s making, his painterly ability, or his use of other people. What you can learn is how he sees money and art sharing a bed.

I think Koons is exploring the idea of the corporation. The product. The deal. It’s so aligned with the American market during his tenure. His structure for projects. His ability to raise capital to create things that are far beyond the production capabilities of conventional systems. These are done through structured investment deals. Even in his most modern work, it’s clear that what he’s creating are things that nobody else can create4. The game is the spectacle sold as a deck before it’s made5. That’s where his magic lies. He knows how to make a good deal and bring those teams together.

Maybe the artist is better defined by what is driving them than by the physical artefacts. Even if that is something we don’t like the look of.

Border

I got the chance to see one of my favourite collectors yesterday. And they said something to me that gave me a little bit of belief in myself, in a time where that’s a little bit difficult.

They said, “I don’t see many artists that are living what they’re researching and understanding as deeply as you.”

I’ve seen many. Sophie Calle is probably my favourite. Someone that desires to look and see. A voyeur. A spy. Her life organised around the idea that what she wants is the perspective and then recording that and sharing it with all of us.

I’m just getting to that threshold of my life now. Where the people I meet know the artist before they know me. And I’m not sure whether there’s a border between them anymore after last week. I think that’s the decision I made. The door to whatever I once had has closed. Now there’s only me and my work.

The ego has become persona, and I’ve created a place where I feel free, but it’s also a prison made of my work. And if everything is now up for interrogation as if it’s work, that can create a level of mistrust. I’m upfront in what I’m interested in. Freedom and control. The malleability of our identities. And to a certain degree, that means that everyone that interacts with me knows they’re part of the game.

I have someone new working in the studio. And it’s the first time that I’ve been able to show the depth and darker side of my studio practice without the feeling that it mattered what they thought. It’s a scary place to be, working for an artist like me that is playing with these things. I understand that. But I tried to show them as much as I could, and the response I had was one of the most helpful feelings I’ve had in a long time. To see someone believe in what I’m doing, and offer themselves up to it, may result in this being one of the most important things that’s ever happened to me. Or it may not.

I’ll keep the story for another time, hopefully far in the distance. I’ve learned recently that it’s sometimes best to see how things end before they’re shared.

I would hope that some of the interactions I have are altruistic. But what I know about consensus reality is that they’re probably not.

Final Words

Next week we’re going to talk about how consensus reality relates to culture. Something that I believe art should not exist within, in its truest sense.

There is art that comments on culture. At its lowest, smaller cultures. Marketing for a company. Art direction. Brand ideas. The stuff that flies across the internet. Higher above, national identities. What it is to be a gender. And going beyond this, what it is to be human. And ultimately what is, and what is not.

If there is some hierarchy to the level of introspection that an artist can take on, it’s by examining these higher-order effects.

I have an open studio next week, and hopefully I’m going to be ready to show my first interrogation into tech culture, or at least the first phase of it. I haven’t put stuff out on the street for a very long time, because I really wanted to understand how fashion and art collaborate sustainably.

Next week, when I talk about culture, I’ll close up that work by talking about fashion. How does art integrate into the culture of fashion? I believe that some of the larger houses understand it, while some don’t.

If you like ideas, and want to talk, especially if you want to see deep into the rabbit hole of what I do, I encourage you to come next
Saturday 26 September from 2pm.
I’m at 89 Albert Embankment, SE1 7TP.
Search Russ Jones on Google Maps and it should come up.
I would love to meet you.
The only thing that I can promise is honesty.
Ask whatever you want.

I want people around my work. I don’t see freedom as the absence of people. Perhaps it’s closer to hearing what you think without needing to agree before I move.

I’m doing this because I enjoy it, and because I want to find out where it leads.

It just might not be the answer that I want.

I love you loads,

Russ x

Three days is a long time to spend with someone. But it’s not enough time when you’ve spent the last 18 months in someone’s world.

Today I’m trying to figure out where I start and end, and where the artist begins.

I’ve had a rule for a few years now that I always send the newsletter out on Sunday evening. I’m rewriting this one at 11pm, knowing full well I don’t know what I’m sending out.

I’ve just ended an 18-month relationship with someone who, throughout that time, was dating somebody else. In our closing moments, when I was trying to figure out what went wrong, I got something back I didn’t expect.

“The thing I’ve known for a while,
is that you just don’t have enough money.”

I’d managed to heal a little from it over the last few days. This morning I heard it again.

“A man has to feel like a man.
A woman has to feel like a woman.
Human nature.”

Friends

“We should still be friends.”

I now know that’s not the right path. But when we last spoke I felt that I should accommodate it. When we parted ways, I agreed to stay in touch by email.

It felt like I was being asked to stay as committed as I’d been, while she went off and lived her life, and I fell into playing the saviour. But I’m not a saviour. “I don’t have enough money.”

I spent the first half of today writing a letter. It’s the last she’ll ever receive from me. It’s something I promised. It took a lot for me not to share it here. I still don’t know if that’s how I want to live as an artist.

Part of what I realised I had become in that relationship was the emotional support for her to be brave enough to leave her previous one.

What became clearer over the last six months is that the pain she was feeling in that relationship, and the way she was being treated, was something she was learning how to do with me.

Sometimes people find art and artists at a time of need. Whether I was the support to leave, or a disposable object that hasn’t got sufficient resources to question being treated in this way, I don’t know.

Money

She comes from a much more affluent background than I do. The last time we’d spoken before this week, I needed some time apart, juggling our calls between her life events was messing with my head. She was on a boat with her partner and their friends on holiday.

At times during our relationship, I had to run faster than I could to keep up and provide at a standard that was acceptable for her. For her it was a man being a man. For me it was zeroing out my bank balance every time I saw her.

Sometimes I had to find time to see her at the cost of work, because that’s the time she could take away from her relationship. Over time my work eroded and hers began to flourish.

I thought that maybe that would be enough. That if I showed everything I had was devoted to it, then somehow it would be enough. Somehow I would be enough. That she would accept that although I don’t have as much as other people she knows, at least everything I have is going into us.

I’m not there. I’m an artist. I may not ever get there.

And as I’ve said very clearly before, I don’t like boats.

Cracks

The relationship broke down a few weeks ago. This week I managed to reconnect with her when she came to my city. To say what couldn’t be said. To get the last bit of juice out of the lemon.

There’s an emotion I love that you get very few chances to experience. Nagori. For me, nagori is the melancholy of enjoying something that you know is going to end. The lingering afterglow of the experience. I’m still in it, I think.

I told my friend the plan. Three days together as if they were the last three days we would ever see each other. She told me I was insane.

“You are insane”
“I know, I’m an artist”
“No, you’re literally insane”

They were the last three days we would ever see each other.

There’s a painting I made during our relationship. Whenever I thought about her, I’d pick away at it. It’s hers. It’s hers because it’s every part of her journey. I thought that on this trip she’d get to see it.

She sat in front of it and cried.

I think it’s the first time she realised that maybe I actually know what I’m doing.

But that’s still not enough.

What I learned today was that maybe I shouldn’t have spent any days at all.

I don’t want to learn that some relationships only work if you have enough money.

Collar

Money is a collar. A financial imbalance is a power imbalance. It gives you the ability to control the other person.

I’ve watched myself run around to match the lifestyle of someone I loved, as they stayed chained to another relationship for the same reason.

Today I thought to myself, maybe she’s right. Maybe as a man I need more money. At the very least, it seems to work. But I don’t know if a team always looks that way. If you can’t take someone at their worst, do you want them at all?

But All I do know, is that I haven’t got enough money for her.
Maybe that’s the whole of it.

Part of how I try to see the world is that people are defined by their actions, not by their resources. What I really hope is that the people I meet and fall in love with won’t be so flippant about defining me by what I have over how I act.

The wealthiest people I know don’t act like that.

I have a friend who understands wealth. He doesn’t wear it with ego. He’s comfortable with it. I’ve listened to what he’s taught me about it because there’s no emotion in the way it’s delivered.

“There are three types of people around wealthy people: other wealthy people that they can relate to, people trying to be rich, and interesting people. Russ, you are not wealthy like this. But you are interesting.”

That interesting side of me has taken me to some rooms I didn’t know existed when I was on the 510 bus to school in Wolverhampton and the kids next to me were setting fire to the seats.

I’m fortunate that when I’ve been brought into these rooms, I’ve been able to look around and see what I like and what I don’t.

I’d rather look for the rooms full of interesting people. From what I can tell, that’s what the wealthy people are looking for too. They have enough of the rest. So what is the money for? Power? Furs?

Maybe the life I’ve chosen means I don’t end up with certain people. I put everything in and ended up with nothing.

I still remember the first time I met her best friend. She sat opposite me, and when we were left alone she said,

“What have you done to her?”

I didn’t know whether I’d done something wrong. We had broken the conventional rules of relationships. My lips were sealed. I knew better than to voice the chaos we had started.

“What do you mean?”
“She’s not like this.”
“Like what?”
“Happy.”

Final Words

Maybe the work right now is me trying to process whatever I’m going through. Maybe it can’t be done in a day or a newsletter.

Today I thought a lot about how much of this I can share with you. Do I share the letter, do I share anything at all. I’m still figuring out my balance point. This will help.

Everyone gets to decide what they love.

I don’t have any advice.

Just remember.

Some things you can’t take back.

I love you loads,

Russ x

Nothing they’ve said makes sense.
Well, that’s not 100% true.

It does make sense
but only here
now
when nobody else is involved.

They’ve read some spurious paper on the internet
and decided to base their whole personality on it.

Remote agreement between a bunch of people
who have no idea how the world works.

I’ve been here a month.
Every day, the same narrative.

But it’s just here.

At first I tried to disagree
but they’re so insistent
so noisy with their views
but from what I can see
they don’t amount to anything.

Noise from the hilltop
about how the ground looks.

Maybe they’re the only ones that can see.

But.

It’s one thing to see from above.

It’s another to keep that perspective from down here.

They might be right.

That might be how it is.

But once you’re here
on the ground
things start looking very different.

And the higher you get
the further away from this you are.

Maybe being able to see how things are
is exactly what happens
when you put the spade down.

What the hell does an archer know about farming anyway?

These fields,
I’ve ploughed them for years.

And them
sat up there
watching.

Seasons pass. Summer they wear cloth, winter they wear fur.

Let’s see those gloved hands dig out the harvest after the summer we’ve had.

Nobody is attacking the castle in the rain.

But I’m out here,
spade in the ground
praying the water has finally got deep enough
that I’ll have food next year.

Deep enough down
so we all do.

But I’m grateful.

No digging
means I got some time up here
and I’m starting to see what they see.

I hope I stay long enough to learn what I need to
but leave in time
to not lose what I once had.

Consensus Reality

Last week we talked about the rarity of the individual experience.

How our senses and experience define how differently you and I see the world.1

This week I’ve been looking into how we make sense of this as a group.

As solitary as our existence is as humans, for longer than we have been human, we have been reliant on the pack to make sense of our senses.

I’m sure you’re already thinking about mimesis and the proliferation of actions through culture. We will get there.

For now we assume that two individuals, our equivalent of Adam and Eve, have turned up and are trying to make sense of the world.

They are unique
varied
and require one another.

Beautiful
fragile
alone.

Adam and Eve have different needs and different abilities, and while they agree about much, much they do not.

I’m sure you can relate.

But this variation, and the agreements between them, is at the core of how we build consensus reality.

There is little more important than this relationship.

Adam is the hands. Eve is the eyes. That’s the first thing they agree on.

Adam’s role is to forage. To find.

In the day, he goes and finds food.

He brings it back
and together they assess whether it is good.

If they were to both try all the items Adam finds,
the poisons he accidentally picks up
may affect Eve.

So he begins to test them before bringing them back.

A nibble of something here,
a taste of something there.

If he becomes ill,
don’t bring it back.

If it tastes good,
get more.

Eve, our second filter, can now only consume what doesn’t kill Adam.

Content that Adam has not killed her with his findings,
Eve is happy.

Until one day she notices
a small fruit,
delicious,
beautiful,
but only one.

And tonight, Adam is not hungry.

So how many did he have before he came back?

Pack

“one is all right, two is too many, three is not enough.”

Lately Adam has been hanging around with his friends. Adams.

They forage together.

A while ago, one of them was walking past a tree with an Adam at its base. He had fallen ill after eating something from the tree. Adam understood that this Adam was inexperienced and needed help. He showed him where to find things to take back, and in return the lesser Adam would help him carry things back.

Adams out foraging found it easy to work together. Similarities in preference were established, and over time they understood that they, as Adams, had a lot in common.

One day the Adams went out further than they had gone before. Together they could travel further and risk coming back after nightfall. Eventually they found what they were looking for. A tree so grand that it carried enough for them all to eat for a lifetime. Tall, beautiful, strong. They stood at the base of the tree in admiration. It had everything they wanted. Together they had agreed that an Adam should be big and strong, so that he could climb and find. They had also agreed that the more an Adam could carry, the better that Adam was, and this tree knew how to carry. The Adam tree was everything they sought in this world.

They ate what they could, then came back with their woven baskets full. The Eves that evening ate the fruit, but it wasn’t the same reaction. The fruit, plentiful and delicious, made them feel unwell.

The Adams had an issue. Together they had agreed that this tree solved everything. A tougher journey, yes. But now their food problem had been solved.

But the Eves, less so. This was not what they needed. If anything, they preferred the rarer, less plentiful fruit that gave them what they needed. For the Adams, these sparse items were insufficient. How can an Adam be big and strong with this amount of forage?

The Eves needed to find a solution. Together they realised that the colour of the new items was not correct. The green items were not what they needed. Red. That’s the good stuff.

They sent the Adams out for red.

Season

If I see a red fruit again, do I eat or pick?

But things change over time and space.

An apple picked too early in summer might be perfect by autumn.

Just like that first love who was clearly the right person at the wrong time.

Equally, the where.

A martini is a great drink.2 A nice bar, on a date, you’re about to have a lot of fun. At work, in a board meeting, things may not be looking good for you in a few minutes.

While these personal journeys across time and space allow us to build up a more coherent perspective of reality, we are limited by the time we have on this planet.

And the human lifespan is much too short for how good the experience could be if we got it right.

So we found a way to share, to make it easier, to be more efficient.

In 1935 Muzafer Sherif sat people in a dark room and showed them a static source of light. Over time it looked like it moved. When he asked them how far it moved they would give a number. When he asked them alone the distances of movement were varied and broad. When he asked the group, the numbers converged. When he asked the same people alone, they would give the group’s number. The light didn’t move, but the groups had found agreement. Packs are useful because we no longer have to measure and check everything ourselves. They become dangerous when we eventually stop measuring.

And these agreements about how to experience reality ‘help’ us. But they also narrow our experiences. What if everything has changed? What then?

Incumbent ideas are developed by those who have benefited from them so far. But what if I really like blue fruit, and my Eve does too?

Does anyone want to go look for blue fruit together?

Or are you too scared to not be part of the pack?

Fear

The scale of the pack determines the efficiency of the consensus between them.

A hundred Adams that can find, forage and retrieve effectively is more reliable than a single Adam. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best. Just the biggest.

But a hundred people on the same hill still only gives you the view from the hill.

Over time the human mind has equated the scale of the pack with the safety of the path.

In riskier environments, it is generally better to stay on the path that others have worn.

In less risky environments, one can travel around freely and explore.

The more fearful we are, the closer we get to the pack.

When humans get shot at or mortared, they bunch up.

I used to love watching my teams operate at night.3

Reality changes very quickly when you become nocturnal.

At the start of a training run, they would bunch, clumsily bumping into each other while stacking outside a house.

By the time they became comfortable at night, they’d be able to give each other room to move.

As fear went down, so did their need for security from one another.

This fear exists in society.

We are all scared.

Scared of dying.

Scared of going hungry.

Scared of not finding love.

And as such, we find the pack.

It is these urges that make us follow.

These insecurities.

They are baked into us.

But once we find the pack
we have to learn what they believe reality looks like.

On a dating app we all agree, by ranking together, what a good photo looks like, and this filters reality down before anyone even meets.

In a bar, the agreements around what we want run deeper, but they’re not written down.

But in both places the rules exist and consensus has been established.

Final Words

There are rules of the road for every given environment.

And the only way to be free

is to leave the path.

But be warned.

There may not be fruit where you are going.

But if there is,
others will come.

This week I’m looking into the next layer of how we abstract reality to experience it by picking away at how consensus reality becomes culture.

Love you loads,

Your obedient servant,

Russ x

p.s. Is this a better time to send these out?

hit reply, let me know.

and I can feel my guts shake.

I thought I was coming to a concert to listen to music.

My ribs, hips and stomach are vibrating.

This isn’t how I listen to music when I’m walking around.

It’s certainly not how I listen to music on the bus.

Until today, I thought listening was something I did with my ears.

But I don’t think I’m using them anymore.

And for the first time in my life,

I think I’m hearing music as it’s meant to be heard.

The colours are more vivid than anything I’ve seen before, but I am sober.

I look up and I can’t quite process what’s happening.

I’m at capacity.

It’s too much, and I know that as soon as I get up it’s going to be too little.

I can feel it all over me

In my fingers, my toes, and now in the way my hands are pressing into the floor next to me.

I like this.

This is how I listen to music from now on.

Dresses

Every few weeks, I go on a magazine run. I flick through the editorial, fashion, art and culture magazines I find around town as a way to keep myself somewhat aligned with reality.

Every year, I buy a whole bunch of them, cut out what I like and make a mood board. Mainly so that Oprah Winfrey smiles on me from above.

What I’ve realised is that the dresses look amazing.

Unusually for a pretty dudey dude, there aren’t many aspects of male fashion that I like beyond tailoring, which isn’t really helpful for how I live.

But what I do love, is a beautiful dress.

What’s interesting to me is how our perception of dresses changes as we encounter them in different arenas.

The first time I see the dress, it’s implied that it has certain characteristics.

I know the dress exists somewhere in something. But as soon as I’ve seen it, it takes on all the attributes of the magazine’s presentation: the model, the shoot, the lighting, where I’m sitting, the magazine it’s in, the texture of the pages it’s on, the neighbouring pages around it.

Its characteristics are implied not just by this, but by the logo slapped on the page next to it.

Reality exists. But our subjective experience of it is always relational and partial.

That’s not to say it’s false. It’s just a thin sliver of what is actually happening. Tinted by everything around us and whatever our minds are absorbing alongside it.

Whatever objective reality is, as limited fleshy beings, we only ever get a certain cut of it.

Partial. Filtered. Relational.

For every what that exists in the world, there are countless ways to interact with it. What we experience is tinted by where we are, when we are, and how we interact with it.

My experience of staring at this dress right now is distinctly different from looking at it on my phone later today.

These are many different ways to experience the same what.

When we change our sensory environment and how we engage with the world, our relationship to it changes too.

Were I to try and experience the dress through taste, by eating it, I would realise something about it that very few people would understand. But I would. And my relationship to it would change both me and the dress.

In 1969, Alvin Lucier made an artwork called “I Am Sitting in a Room”. He recorded himself speaking in a room, and then played that recording back into the room, recording it again. The process repeats until the resonant frequencies of the room dominate the recording.

The environment isn’t just the background. It is part of the signal we process.

And the closest environment that distorts the signal is ourselves.

As we take on new positions from which to observe the same thing, we begin to learn more about it.

And we begin to change.

There are two ways this can happen.

We increase Fidelity: we get more detail, a greater resolution of the object from the same position

We increase Multiplicity: we broaden the range of positions from which we can encounter the same object.

When you see someone wearing a dress well, that is fidelity.

When you see someone using a scarf in a novel way, that is multiplicity.

The broader the range of ways we can perceive something, and the more detailed those perceptions are, the better our model of it becomes.

This is a core skill for how humans interact with reality.

In 2001, J. Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë published A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness. Their argument challenges a simplistic model in which seeing means receiving sensory information and constructing an internal picture of the world.

Instead, seeing is something we actively do: we learn how sensory input changes as we move through and interact with an environment.

Perception is a skilful activity.

As new sensory information comes in, we assume we are learning more about the environment.

We forget that the environment is also changing us.

SALESSALESSALES

I head to the store and look at the dress.

Like any store with the ability to put its dresses in a beautiful magazine and on a beautiful website, the changing rooms are an improved experience.

I’m welcomed in.

The fanfare begins.

‘Russ is here and he wants to buy a nice dress.’

Out comes the hostess with a glass of champagne. She ushers me over to my changing room with its beautiful, soft flooring, and inside is the dress I’d seen in the magazine. How did they know!?

It’s been a hot day. The air conditioning is just right. I can feel the damp sweat of the outside air evaporate from me and I feel at peace.

The champagne slides down cold. The glass is great. I look around and there is a perfect place to set it down. As I place the glass down on the leather trim, it feels safe and secure.

I fold the dress’ fabric through my hands and feel the texture. As I calm down, a light aroma awakens my nose.

They must pump it through the space.

And rightfully so.

Now I feel beautiful.

I feel strong. I feel capable. I feel like there isn’t a decision I could make that would be wrong right now.

As I put on the dress, I think about the magazine. I think about how it felt when I looked at it.

You know what?

It looks exactly like I thought it would.

It’s beautiful.

And so am I.

When I first saw it in that perfect lighting, the girl wearing it was significantly taller, skinnier and more beautiful than I perceive myself to be.

But I’d forgotten that was her, because now that is me.

The lighting in the changing room is astounding, but that’s not what I’m paying attention to now.

I’m looking at me.

Here, enclosed in this small room with this giant mirror that, for some reason, looks better than other mirrors I’ve seen before.

I feel good.

But it’s a mirror.

How different could it be?

Space

In 1977, Robert Irwin installed Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

A sheet of white scrim dropped from the ceiling along the gallery, stopping at eye level. A black line circled the walls at the same height. Natural light entered through the gallery window.

Almost nothing was added, but the experience of the room had changed completely.

The environment is the experience.

I look at the label on the dress.

The numbers are more numerous and far higher than the ones I see in my bank account.

However, what I’ve learned about this dress since seeing it in that magazine, on my phone and right now in here is that it is very, very good.

In fact, there are probably no other dresses as good as this.

It is probably the best dress.

And this is probably a good price.

But I’m worried.

Maybe this is too much. Maybe this isn’t right.

I begin to think about the dress, but all I can think about right now is how good it is.

Everything I’ve experienced so far has told me so.

I’m in the changing room. I have no one with me. And I’m yet to think a negative thought about it.

But why would I?

It’s great. It’s perfect. It was in the magazine, it was on my phone, and now it’s here on me, and I feel amazing.

Training

In 2014, Christopher Summerfield and Floris P. de Lange published Expectation in Perceptual Decision Making: Neural and Computational Mechanisms.

Wordy, yes. Complex, maybe. Complicated? No.

The core idea is that we don’t encounter sensory information like a sensor. What we’ve already learned about the world generates expectations, and those expectations influence how subsequent sensory evidence is processed.

It might be easy to think that we’re experiencing the world by seeing, taking that information into the brain, deciding what to do with it, then acting on it.

But the system works both ways.

We navigate the world partly through predictions generated from what we’ve encountered before.

Our predictions shape how incoming information is processed.

The stronger the expectation, the less new information we need before settling on an interpretation.

Usually, that’s incredibly useful.

It makes us fast.

The problems begin when we no longer notice how much the prediction is shaping what we experience.

Ouroboros.

Brand

By the time I put the dress on, I’ve already decided what it is.

Well, actually, the brand has.

The website and magazine have built up an idea of how it should be perceived, and the changing room and sales professionals have told me everything I need to hear to make sure I walk away with it in my hands.

Each encounter I’ve had with the dress has changed me. My frame of reference has slowly tilted.

A new observer every time.

And there’s a problem.

More perspectives don’t necessarily mean more perspective.

The magazine, website and changing room appear to give me different experiences of the dress. But they have all been designed by essentially the same system.

I might think I’ve encountered the dress from three positions.

I may have encountered the same authored perspective three times.

And as such, the dress is now in the bag and the credit card is in the till.

The exchange has happened.

The hostess smiles sweetly.

“Thank you, Mr Jones. It’s always great to see you. The dress looks fantastic.”

I hold it in my hands and step out the door.

Wow.

Great day.

I haven’t worn a dress before.

But tonight, at the party, I think it’s going to look good.

Perspective

Art has no requirement to be anything.

It is something that comes out of someone attempting to do it.

But from the viewer’s perspective, what it can offer is another position.

Art lets you look at something in a different way.

Sometimes that means changing the conditions under which something can be perceived.

In 1997, Olafur Eliasson made “Room for one colour”. Monofrequency light reduces the colours available to the eye and makes everything look like a yellow-tinted greyscale. Everything is still there, but most of the colour is removed and you only get contrast.

Maybe art gives you greater multiplicity: the same object from a novel position.

Maybe it gives you greater fidelity: the same object delivered in a way that lets you see detail you otherwise couldn’t.

Sometimes it interferes with the distinction between the thing and its surroundings altogether. Playing with what something actually is through deception.

Or by creating an environment that is deceptive by nature. James Turrell’s Ganzfeld installations remove spatial references by flooding areas with light and colour, so the eye can no longer locate itself in space. While the objects haven't been materially changed, our ability to locate and perceive them is completely altered.

Across these dimensions lies much of the value I find in art.

We can argue whether something is new, whether it’s well executed, whether the craftsmanship is good.

But great art leaves the observer with a perceptual capacity they didn’t arrive with.

If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you’ll understand that I only have one real rule with art across all mediums: The artist’s role is to create a frame of reference, and keep the viewer within it.

That frame is the artist’s perspective.

Great art pulls us into it.

And sometimes, we leave seeing differently.

Art creates perspectives.

Perspectives create perceptual experiences.

Experiences update observers.

Updated observers perceive what comes next differently.

Tonight, I’m wearing a dress to a party.

And so far, everything I’ve said has only involved one observer.

Me.

But reality isn’t experienced alone.

Eventually my perspective has to encounter yours.

Next week: consensus reality.

Final Words

I hope you’re following what I’m trying to do and that it’s useful.

And that the little things I’m learning every week help you as much as they help me.

This coming week I’m going to be putting out a little bit more video content and trying to share some of these things in a more easily consumable manner on socials.

And if you’re in Vauxhall on the 26th of September, I’m having an open studio where I’ll probably turn the studio into an installation exploring some of these concepts.

I don’t know. Let’s see.

It’ll be fun.

Anyway, peace and love. Hope you have a great day.

Your obedient servant,

Russ.

I’m sure we’re going to find a way to communicate.

We have to if we want to keep talking keep taking up room in one another’s lives

I know that when I say what I see sometimes you can’t see it

maybe you think I’m lying

maybe I am.

But I’m trying not to

I’m trying to say it exactly as I see it
but sometimes
I don’t have the words
I’m sure the same is true for you

or do I see it right?

Maybe it’s because we come from different places.

They gave you different words to use
you had tablecloths and a driver
I had happy meals and bus tickets.

But we’ve seen the same things
from two very different places

and the most important parts seem to be where we agree

it’s just the other stuff…

and it’s getting in the way.

I know if I learn the right words
you’ll be able to hear what I’m saying

But part of what I’m seeing
can’t be said in the words you have

Or maybe I don’t know them well enough, yet
If I learn them will you listen?

I want to
but will you hear me if I do?

All Art is Abstraction

Welcome to week 1 of Abstraction. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be looking into abstraction as an idea and sharing my notes. I have a hunch it’s going to help me with my current work, and along the way I’ll share what I’ve learned so far.

You’ve probably seen “Abstract Art”, the internet is awash with it, and there’s always someone telling you the CIA sponsored it. None of that is very relevant to its utility, but I’m sure that will be obvious soon.

There are very few cheat codes in life; it is hard to get ahead of the queue of people already close to where you want to go (and it’s highly unlikely those people will tell you otherwise). It is human nature for those that found something difficult to tell you that no other option is possible. It makes them feel justified in their difficulty, and it ensures less competition.

I have always preferred talking to those that found an interesting or shorter route. Why waste your life listening to those that only know misery?

Most people walk around assuming that the fastest route between two points is a straight line.

Those people also mistake the map for reality.

But if you understand reality,

you also understand that

The map is not the territory

and

Abstraction gives you the shortcut.

We all think using abstraction; learning new things is an abstraction of your current world. Look at our current situation: I’m writing this, thinking about you, and you’re reading this, trying not to think about me or the week ahead.

My hope over the coming weeks is to learn a little more about how abstraction can be applied to the projects I’m working on. My gut feeling is that we’re about to enter a phase of reality where everything gets a little more confusing to understand.

So I might as well get a head start.

Here’s what I’ve gathered about reality and how it works in relation to abstraction.

Let’s begin.

Objective Reality

Reality is the soup that we all live inside of. It is and always will be accurate and truthful. The soup is made of energy travelling around us in an almost infinite number of directions and forms. Sometimes that energy coagulates so densely that it absorbs the energy around it. These coagulations are what we call mass: energy so thick that it holds itself together and begins to act differently to the raw floating waves of reality.

Scientists argue about how many dimensions it all exists in. It doesn’t matter much for us whether it’s eleven or infinite, you and I will only ever meet it through the narrow slot of the human senses.

Human Experience

Reality is modulated by our human experience. While everything is happening within the reality soup, our senses are a filter on it across time and space. We only ever see, smell, feel, taste, and absorb reality through that filter. We can improve those senses, hone them for a broader view and change where we are, but we are always a narrow filter on what is actually happening.

The most intense filtration we have is time. We are finite beings with lives and deaths, experiencing any given moment

for an instant and no longer. Beyond that instant we are remembering; stitching things together with thought and no longer experiencing objective reality but creating our own version of it in our minds through thought and memory.

Reality filtered through the human experience is a thin sliver of what is actually happening. Once it’s interpreted through thought and subjectively analysed, it may not bear much relevance to reality at all. From the first step of interacting with the world, it is tainted by the lens we’ve developed so far.

Consensus Reality

As social creatures, we often experience similar events. Things happen while we’re stood next to other people, and there is an agreement on these things. Equally, reality often agrees with other parts of itself.

If I were to fall from the building I’m in, there would be a strong agreement between myself and the ground. We make agreements with the laws of physics whether we like it or not (also intersting is how humans love to contest them, maybe to prove our immortality but more likely to hide from our insecurities about death). Within our populations, consensus helps us navigate the complexity of being fleshy meat sacks floating in reality soup. It’s already confusing enough in here; the reassurance of someone else experiencing the same thing is part of how we survive it.

We develop consensus most easily with those that share our whens, wheres, and hows, meeting similar whats. That is to say: we find it much easier to understand people in the same locations and time periods, doing the same things with similar resources. Change any of those variables, and it can be very hard to understand why someone is doing what they’re doing.

The broader consensus lets us see reality from a number of perspectives at once, it also means much of our own experience is relegated to being hidden. When we interact with the world through consensus reality, we agree that some parts of our own experience didn’t actually occur.

Culture

When a given action is repeated by a specific group, and it benefits them, the group optimises for it. Groups naturally form around those with similar objectives and conditions. Human objectives are broadly similar everywhere: food, differentiation from the pack, status and security, procreation.

If we’re all in the same place, in the same period, trying to get the same things, then over time we find ways to decide who gets what. That repetition develops culture. Culture is what emerges when a group keeps doing something and starts optimising for it.

Culture ranks reality. It defines what is beneficial through the lens of the group: what exists and what shouldn’t. Reality viewed through the lens of culture is innately biased: biased to the needs of the culture, beyond any requirement for truth.

Language

Over time, repeating the action isn’t enough. The group’s objectives and fidelity needed to achieve them outgrow simple memetic theory. We need to communicate and propogate so we develop language. This may seem rudimentary, but remember what we’re watching: the modulation of reality through culture. All cultures, over time, develop a language.

That language might be clothing, oral, visual, or physical. Language takes many forms, but developing one lets a culture spread beyond itself. The most prominent recent example is looksmaxing where the subculture’s private vocabulary has escaped into the wider world, dragging the culture’s relevance and resources along with it.

Language enables accuracy, specificity, and the transfer of reality from where it occurs to where it does not. It spreads culture and consensus across the physical plane. And, more importantly, it protects what the group has built, when a culture has its own communication system, it gets to decide which parts of itself matter.

Interacting with reality through a specific language filters it through the culture of that language. There are trade-offs, but the language is primarily designed to enable the culture. Experience something through its own language, and you’ll understand it the way the culture meant you to.

Physical Record

Right now, we are using language to communicate. I’m sharing my perspective of reality with you in a different time and space. We’re both looking at the same thing, maybe feeling the same feeling, through a system that transfers energy across time.

This locking of reality develops permanence; it lets reality remain long after the culture has lost its resources. The archives, the textbooks, the articles are all trying to preserve and communicate across time. The physical record is how we alter reality forever, staining it with our clunky little words and actions.

Interacting with reality through the physical record might sound like a verbose way of saying “reading books”, but the record is everywhere: the way rocks age in layers, the holes we dug for coal for hundreds of years, the fact that one day we stopped digging.

Some of the most prominent physical records we’ve left as a species came from the language of war. Groups of us, in specific places at specific times, looked at the world and said: if we don’t do something now, they will take our food. The language we built to answer that left marks on the planet that are still visible today.

Art?

I don’t seek to define what art is, it’s not that important and there’s enough contradiction and difficulty in that problem that it is potentially more boring than this essay, and I’m not going to entertain the usual controversy about the aesthetic or visual characteristics of art either.

Let’s just agree it exists. fair?

Whether art is defined by some aesthetic interest that surpasses the everyday and steps into the sublime, or by some non-aesthetic functions (ceremonial, religious, even propagandistic), it can still be considered art. It only has to be valued as such by some specific group, however right or wrong they are.

By any definition, art is an abstraction. It shows a unique aspect of reality, often through language or the physical record, that illuminates some part of objective reality, consensus reality, or the human experience in a way that convention cannot.

If you’re still with me, trying to figure out why any of this is relevant, I think therein lies the value of art: unique maps for people in unique positions, trying to figure out unique things that require unique tools. When a piece of work resonates with something inside you that you haven’t felt before, you can’t quite explain it. No matter how many readings you do, there’s something behind all of it that just feels right. That thing your language can’t find, often because it comes from a culture you’re not part of, is a missing key to a reality you’ve already experienced but cut off from yourself, because at some point the people around you couldn’t feel or see it themselves.

Poets Corner

Draw Away

like the trench like the stream without water,
like the stream like the river that can't hold the boat,
like the river like cloud that can't hold the rain,
like the rain like the boulder too heavy to float.

- Thomas May

Final words

I know this week was tense, terse, dense, and heavy. I’m on the road at the moment, and I haven’t quite been able to get everything I want down for this week. My practice has escalated aggressively in the last two weeks, and I’m still finding my feet with a new pace.

I should be there by the end of this week.

I’ll be breaking down the different elements alongside sharing how I’m thinking about them in relation to the actual work I’m making. I’ll also be sharing my little deep dives into the limitations of a time-based perspective on art movements, if you’re interested in art history, or in looking at reality through a non-market lens, those might be for you.

Culturally, humanity has been very focused on artworks as a product, especially over the last hundred years. My understanding at this point is that art is about to go through a huge shift, and there may be a better way to look at its value than whether it was relevant to the market forces of its time.

Hope you enjoy the next few weeks. I know I will, as always. If you have questions, hit reply. If not, I’ll speak to you soon. Next week we’ll be looking at the boundary between objective reality and the human experience, specifcally how thought, sensory input, and reality interact.

I love you loads

your obedient servant

Russ x

In three of the shows, I knew an artist involved. But in each case I left without any real connection to the gallery, the other artists, or the industry. At no point did I feel like I was brought in.

Now, some might say: “Russ, you’re an artist. You’re meant to go and talk to them.” But I know what I look like. And unless you know who I am, you’re not going to stare at me and say, “Hey, this guy is an artist. We should probably go talk to him.”

When I engage in the art world in a conventional way, I don’t like the experience. I don’t feel well looked after. And I’ve been doing this for a while now. But when I engage in other industries, fashion, luxury shopping, nightclubs, private members’ clubs, all industries where I’m not from them and generally not the perfect client, I still feel looked after. Or at the very least, I understand the game required to be looked after.

My understanding of the world is that art is a service. Any activity that it’s a privilege to undertake, in a commercial manner, is a service. If you have the good fortune to be able to do something that some people work hard to be able to do in their spare time, and it makes money, it is a service. Because the days of you doing that may be numbered if you think otherwise.

And when I speak to artists, I get that feeling. I know that we all care. We all care because we know that we get the chance to do something that little us prayed that they could do. But when I speak to gallerists, I don’t feel the same way.

And that’s because money is a gatekeeper.

Which is fine.

Unless it’s broke.

Money people

I have a small group of associates. I would love to say they’re friends, but they’re a little bit further away than that. I speak to them once every three to four months. A couple of them read this newsletter. I guarantee if I ask four of those people what their favourite gallery is, they would say the Tate.

If I go to the group of people financially below that, the ones happily spending £15 to 20k on trips abroad for friends and family, the ones that have just bought new APs, the ones that are pretty close to getting through their next round of funding, and ask them who their favourite artists are?

Apart from me, they don’t know any.

But they can tell you where the newest openings of restaurants are, globally.

They can tell you which are the best boats to go on. And they’ll even tell you the best places to go skiing, or, if you want something a bit more dangerous, an off-piste adventure in the desert.

They know what’s going on, because they know when something has swag.

Because that is where they spend.

They know who the cool musicians are. Some of them even know the niche things, like up-and-coming chefs, or hotels in obscure locations that are hard to get to.

One of my favourite collectors always knows the best dance shows and theatre productions in London.

She rents out superyachts and shares this list with her clients. Not long ago, I asked her what her favourite galleries in London are.

She didn’t know.

She’s one of very few people I know with a client base wealthy enough to change the London art world and loves art herself.

And she hasn’t found enough pull within our world to be interested.

The galleries?

The art world?

Not everybody cares enough to check them out to see what they have on offer.

One friend just started paying £2k a month to be part of a mastermind group to help him improve his business performance.

Some of them have multiple club memberhsips, where they pay between £3,000 and £8,000 a year to go to events and meet other people.

They’re part of communities and they’re willing to spend to enable them.

They’re just not choosing to be part of this one.

Because they don’t think it’s fun.

And they don’t see it as a part of culture, because they get that elsewhere.

Different game at the top

If you’re a top-tier gallery, you have the privilege of overwhelming amounts of demand for your limited supply of work and great artists. It is in your best interest to play the game of making sure everyone feels like they have to work hard to get a piece. It helps you increase the price of the work.

But I don’t think the rest of the art market should be replicating this model. I believe most people within the art market are trying to do so just to serve their egos. And I believe that’s resulting in a weaker market overall. It’s also resulting in less money on the table, because people don’t like it.

People are willing to undergo the pain of poor service at a top-tier gallery, or at Hermès or Chanel, because it is established as a brand, other people want it, and you understand the game going in. Art may, at that tier, be able to take that status. But right now it doesn’t have it, because it is culturally irrelevant to those outside of it.

Scarcity only works when demand exceeds supply. That is not something we are experiencing in the vast bulk of the industry.

More importantly, we are still providing a luxury good. And the only insight into luxury goods that I see within the art world is the balance of supply and demand. But the most important fact to understand about luxury goods is that the volume of sale increases the more experience a consumer has with the product. I am highly unlikely to buy a Ferrari before I sit in it. But once I sit in it and take it for a spin, believe me, I am far closer to making a purchase of that vehicle, whether it’s a good financial decision or not.

Fashion already understands this. It produces perfumes, T-shirts, anything it can do to enable people in the spectator position to become a customer in fifteen years.

Art need not try and do this through prints or commercialisation. But what it can do this with is community and education. Because the most important thing that we have isn’t someone that buys an expensive work. It’s someone that understands what an artist is trying to say over a fifteen-year period, and is willing to tell the world about it in a way that they can understand, and help that artist gain a stronger foothold culturally.

Warum

Why do I think this happened?

Galleries took over the sales function.

Which means they have to own the marketing funnel. They have to. However, the media environment galleries are in has changed significantly since they took the lead. As such, what you’re seeing is a large number of artists circumvent the gallery system by approaching the media environment directly. Alec Monopoly and the Instagram artists are great examples of this.

In the first few years of an artist’s career, the artist and the sales function are within the same world. And if you’re independent, like myself, that’s the way it stays. And you can choose whichever media environment you want.

For most galleries, a lot of that is going to be done through email and in person. And they’re going to have a very small footprint online. Because they assume the people they know, the ones that come through their doors, are sufficient. Clearly, for many galleries, that isn’t true.

But it’s clear to me that if artists the art world would consider unsuitable can build out fully fledged practices, ones that also support other artists, there is cash being left on the table.

None of this is revolutionary. It’s just stuff that artists are already doing. But artists are doing it. Not galleries. And if you look around on Substack, you will find artists talking. You will find critics talking. You’ll find curators talking. But where are the galleries?

Δ

The art world is going through a change of guard.

The institutions that will survive the next three years will have the following characteristics:

A growing customer base

Growing revenue

Growing cultural relevance.

Some of them will take the following approach.

Find customers from adjacent industries or worlds, through content and non-competitive collaborations.

Educate them on Art, and develop their taste.

Provide them high-quality service, so that they feel part of a community, and become customers.

Those institutions will be here in five years’ time.

The clearest path I can see, whether that’s for an independent artist or a museum, is aligned with both the incumbent egos and the new media environment is as follows:

Institutions will rely on three communication methods.

Social media,

Email,

In-person events.

There will be nothing crazy or new…

On socials

They’ll create long and short-form educational content that helps people understand how to engage in art.

They will document shows before and after, so people can decide whether to attend.

And they will provide something interesting, whether it be satire, their own TV show, or podcasts along the side.

I think, realistically, you’re probably going to see something like Barstool Sports for Art appear in the next year or two.

It’s probably going to be based in New York.

Someone is going to take that, probably somebody who’s already doing something like this as a podcast.

Whoever establishes it, and creates a coherent communication system around global art involving The US (both coasts), Europe and Asia, is going to sweep up here.

It’s probably going to be a media organisation that’s the next big name within the arts, rather than a gallery.

It’s likely the biggest piece of the pie left in the change of guard.

On email.

They will write more and collaborate with writers more often.

The art world and the writing world sit next to each other.

Writers already write for shows.

Critics are writers.

They are already part of the media environment, but their reach is not being pushed.

I imagine it’s not hard to build a small email flow around the artists coming in and out of the programme.

It still surprises me that, with all of the shows I’ve been to and all of those guest books I’ve written in, my inbox isn’t full of emails and interesting insights into the artists in these galleries.

Maybe my handwriting’s poor and I’m not getting all those emails.

More likely, it’s just not part of the way they’re doing business.

I expect they’re going to be sending show updates, doing Q&As, introducing the artist and the ideas, before and afterwards.

They’re going to write frequently, because there is a significant amount of noise out there. And the reality is, if you’re not commercially competitive, you’re also not culturally competitive.

People vote with their dollars.

In person

We’re going to see more community events,

More talks.

More “activations” of existing shows

Brands have realised this works, they even call up people like me to do it for them.

What’s crazy to me is that the highest cost for most galleries is their real estate spend, and then they spend very little trying to get people into it.

If you look through what I’ve listed here, none of these are expensive things to do. They cost time, yes.

But I’m sat here in a studio by myself, and I imagine most galleries have a bigger staff count than one. And I have to make things as well.

So if I’m able to do it here, there are definitely going to be galleries out there that can double down on this.

If there is any value in what I’m saying about bringing in other people, I think this is the easiest way to get it.

I’m not saying everyone has to do it. But someone reading this is going to know someone that’s going to take this strategy.

And I tell you: in five years’ time, they’re going to be happy.

Scale

Realistically, if you’re an institution of any scale, within two to three years you’re going to start making video content.

Better sooner rather than later.

And when the whole of the art world is doing this, we’re going to see consensus over how our video formats look.

There’s already some.

The level of abstraction that’s acceptable.
The slow frames of how we present art.
The use of foreground and background.
The absolute love of the horizontal format.

And I think that language is going to be interesting.

But why am I even talking about this?

Maybe it’s crazy that I’m saying this stuff, and it comes off as conceited.

“Hey Russ, you’re an artist. Make some art. Put it out.”

Is this even your responsibility? Does this even affect you?

But what I do believe is that everyone on this newsletter cares about art in some way. And my way of bringing people into art is through this communication. I came to art through a weird route.

I grew up in a rural town, with not a lot of money, and a narrow focus on what existed as art. It took me a long time to realise that this was a world that could support how I live.

And as such, I understand how easy it is for people to not know this exists. I imagine, for a lot of people on this newsletter, I might be the first artist you’ve ever heard speak.

I’m very grateful for that. It’s an honour.

There are other great artists. Artists significantly better than me, that I will spend the rest of my lifetime trying to get as good as.

But I do believe I’m solving something. Which is the fact that I communicate with you.

And that fills me with so much joy.

I think galleries will do the same.

And this is my way of saying I’m going on this route. And I believe it is a path that is big enough for more of us.

You may not agree with my strategy or my ideas.

If you work in art, you may think it’s not going to work.

That’s fine. Watch this space.

But if you’re in art, and you know someone who’s trying to do something interesting to get more people into it, then please send this to them. I would love to talk to them and understand what they think.

The art world and the art market have value.

If that value isn’t known to the right people, and we do not yet know who they are, it will shrink.

If you love art, and you believe the world is better when we’re able to see one another’s perspective, then please share this with someone relevant.

Final Words

Next week, I’m going to be talking about abstraction.

Over the last few weeks I’ve really tried to redefine how I’m approaching my practice, beyond the work that I’m creating, and I’ve had to make a number of sacrifices that have hurt a lot.

I really hope that what comes from those is of benefit to you and your world.

As always,

it’s an honour to be able to create for you.

I love you loads.

Your obedient servant,

Russ x

And when’s the next time he’s going to do it again?

I get it.

He’s a monk, but surely there was a time.
It can’t be that hard here, there’s no girls.
But I’m pretty sure those two dudes that are no longer here found love.

I guess if you just stay away from it, it’s easy.

But don’t you then just live your whole life being owned by it?

Living in reference to the power it has over you.

Avoiding it.

If I stay here, in this monk place, it’s easy.
I could do it.
I’ve been here 7 days.
I could do 100.

If I just make sure that the only girls I ever meet come to this place, and they’re not coming here to find a dude, so I guess I can probably just give it up.

And then I never have to want it again.

Maybe this is what I do from now on.
Maybe that’s how I get to peace?
But there’s one problem.
That’s absolutely not what I want to do.

I don’t want to do that at all.
I have no desire to do that.

But is the only way to get what he’s got to give up the same thing?

In fact, what is it that he’s actually got?

Peace?
He’s got peace here.
I don’t want peace here.

Well, I do…

But I want peace there.

And is that even possible?

If everything comes at a cost…

Does it always come at the same cost?
And does everyone pay the same price?

That can’t be the case.

I want a discount.

Roles

We’re born into a world that offers us roles, characters that we can perform. And to perform all of these, there’s some sacrifice we have to make.

The world expects you to cut off your ear to become the artist.
One must put in the hours of both craft and torture to be accepted.

You have to become, grow into, learn and acquire the identity as the world expects. The policeman, our local emblem of power, is the clearest example. He wears the badge to gain power, authority, status. But what does he lose?

Most importantly he gives up control over his own identity.

He becomes a rank.

A number. A badge. A role. PC.

He loses his first name.

The institution takes that part of his identity, and in return, gives him authority.

This sacrifice as a transaction for authority, power, value and meaning is baked into human society.

We are wedded to the idea of giving things up to be validated in a role.

Sacrifice

When we see sacrifices being made, we assume that gives someone authority, because that’s the language we’re taught growing up.

And when we don’t see the sacrifice behind a role that we believe has some desire to gain authority or power or success, we discredit it.

Nepo babies.
Attractive painters.
Those born with money.

We’re taught that the only way to get something is through sacrifice.
The actual quality of the work is almost moot.
Because without having followed the same route, the process, how can it be real?

The sacrifice is part of how we value it.

With money and business, it’s complex because if someone’s credibility is based on them having succeeded financially, which was their starting point, what have they really done?

How much have they really gone through?

Whereas on the flip side, with service-based roles, the military, government, education, research, firefighters, we can see there’s been some natural sacrifice.

Whether of their time.
Their freedom.
Their personal space.

And there’s an honour in that.

Artists

With the artist, the fear is always that they’re fraudulent and in it for the money.

Art and money have been sleeping together for centuries.
We just don’t like catching them in bed.

The easiest way for the artist to prove that they aren’t in it for the money is to see them starve. The easiest way to prove that it’s legitimate is that it doesn’t work financially.

Because then why else is this person doing it?

Every industry, every role, every identity moving around through common parlance has a required sacrifice, even those more unique among them.

People like to see that people are on the edge to succeed.

And they also want to see certain failure mechanisms within them to guarantee authenticity.

No one wants to see a criminal prosecuter with a Richard Mille on his arm. He has to forego some financial success. Interestingly, would it be as weird a move for a corporate lawyer.

Performance

These sacrificial expectaiont allow us to validate the roles around us.

They also allow us to make sure these objects in reality are real. To verify them. To make sure they’re not doing something they’re not supposed to.

But conforming to them without knowing what they are is just as performative as those that are faking them.

Anyone that’s been to art school has run into the characters that pretend to be from more disadvantaged backgrounds than they are.

Partly to fit in. But partly to receive the authenticity of sacrifice. Because once you see the game, it’s easy to masquerade in it.

It’s no different to saying this is a good soldier because he has shiny boots.

The monk can sit there and wear his robes all day and tell me he’s zen.

But if he doesn’t put himself in an environment that tests that, then we really don’t know.

Maybe he’s sat on the sidelines talking a good game.

Defect

We have a defect.

And the defect is that when we see the sacrifice taking place, we cling to the beauty of the idea.

I’ve been through hardship.
I’ve sacrificed.
Therefore, whatever I’ve done is validated.

But it’s tricky.

That isn’t to say that real sacrifice isn’t beautiful.

It’s that humans love sacrifice a little too much.

We always have.
We think sacrificing things is what makes us better.
Sometimes that’s true.
But more often, getting better comes first.

The sacrifice is just part of the path.

It’s rarely as simple as just giving stuff up.

Humans sometimes perform the failure mechanism because we think that’s what made them successful.

We think if we make the same sacrifices we’ll be okay.

For weight loss, maybe that’s possible.
But not all paths in life are about caloric deficits.

When in reality, the success is the success, and there will be failure mechanisms of sacrifice along the way.

All this to say, don’t worry.

You’ll get your sacrifice.

Your bloodthirsty, slightly kinky, 100% masochistic human world will lose something on your road to the life you want.

You just don’t know what yours is yet, because you haven’t HAD to make it.
And trying to find it isn’t as helpful as trying to go somewhere.

The reality is, when you’re trying to get somewhere, it will fall off.

Sometimes you’ll really like it.
Sometimes it doesn’t have a nice, beautiful picture.
Or a beautiful story.

And those are the hardest things you’ll give up.

Heterogeneous

There are different costs for everyone, with everything.
The problem is we don’t actually know what somebody paid.

We only recognise the prices we’ve been taught to recognise.

Maybe the artist didn’t pay by being broke. He paid with isolation.
Maybe the entrepreneur didn’t sacrifice relationships. She sacrificed certainty. Maybe the monk didn’t give up sex. Maybe he let go of his family.

We assume everyone pays the same culturally recognised price.

But nobody pays the same price.

There are different costs for everyone, with everything.
But that’s not how the world sees it.

Because the world likes generality.

It likes it to be simple.

Price

You’ve got to find your own price.

Suffering someone else’s sacrifice won’t free you.

Or get you to where you want to be.
But, going to where you want to be will.

Until then, everything’s free.

Everything’s free.
Do whatever you want.

When you figure out the price you’ve got to pay, then pay it.

Eventually, it’ll be paid.

But until then…

Just go where you want.

Be not afraid.

You’ll get your chance to cut off your ear eventually.

Love you loads

R x

p.s. if you’re one of the 42 new subscribers this week, welcome.

‘service’
‘yes chef’

I turn to the kitchen
they’re moving
maybe faster than I am

Good.

I need them tonight

yesterday was a mess

the accounts are down
and what I thought was a good batch of john dory
seems to be coming out like rubber
but while they may notice
that the seams are under tension
the tables cannot

there’s no star on the wall
and no critic in the seats
but I look out and I see at least three people I recognise

they know me
and I know them
but we will never sit down for coffee

the front row of my show

I could tell you their order before they came in the door
I could even tell you their birthday
or the nights they like to eat well

but what they do for a living
or where they live
shot in the dark

all I know is they like what I do
and they keep coming back

I’ve seen the suits
the writers
the adjudicators
the ones they tell you can make or break you in this game
I can tell who they are as soon they come through the door
you can smell it on them
I know when they’re here I have to work
I have to make a show
but for the ones at the table
I want to

they’re here because they want to be
they’re going to be here when the papers stop writing
and the crowd thins out
they’re going to be here because we have an understanding

Welcome to the 133 new subscribers this week, happy to have you here. Use the comments section at the bottom of the email or the chat on substack to keep talking. Video will be up on YT and IG tomorrow, Enjoy!

The painting is of the Battle of Crécy, fought in the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between England and France. A victorious Edward, the Black Prince, Prince of Wales, stands over the lifeless body of King John of Bohemia.

King John took part in the battle with his fellow knights despite being completely blind. He held ropes connected to the knights around him while they ran into battle. John knew he would die, but still chose the path that most honoured what he was devoted to.

The spoils of victory are sometimes greater than the territory we seek to gain. Sometimes it’s the manner by which we manage our newfound responsibilities.

After the battle, the Black Prince took King John’s motto, Ich dien (”I serve”), which can be seen inscribed on the breastplate of John’s horse in the painting.

While King John lost his life, the most important part of his kingdom was kept alive.

Ich dien is still the motto of England’s Princes of Wales.

The crown’s weight is often heavier than the gold and jewels it contains.

Ambition

I’ve had the fortune of seeing the world from a few different perspectives. I’ve been lucky to work with some of the brightest and most devoted humans on the planet, and I’m even more fortunate to have a small group of them collect my work.

The ones that really make a difference, good or bad, are often more than ambitious. They are devoted. They hold a position of leadership because they serve. Whether it be an idea, a client or a location, they live in service to something bigger than themselves.

I remember sitting with a Swiss banker who had taken an interest in my work. He and his wife shared parts of their collection with me and showed me what they loved. When it came to their worlds I thought I had little to offer, but they listened. Both of them managing billions in funds; me, a homely artist who knew a few dudes and dudesses with interesting startups in their sectors. And I realised the devoted will always listen.

The world is full of people with big dreams and even louder voices. The human desire to display success over achieving it has only been exacerbated by modern consumerism. There is a world of things and accolades for us to buy to pretend we are successful, but doing the work is never about showing we’ve done it.

To achieve, we must make sacrifices. Where we allocate our time and resources is what we value: some will spend on comfort and medals, others will devote them to the cause.

The first sacrifice devotion asks for is ourself. Otherwise the work can never become larger than the person making it.

The ego would rather suffer in familiarity than die in transformation.

I’ve heard the speeches. You have too. Ambition wants to be right; it is loud and seeks to prove. Devotion wants to find a way forward; it listens and seeks truth.

Complex

That isn’t to say that all service is good, and I’m not saying it’s easy either. People serve all sorts of things throughout their lives, whether it be nations, religion, their families, the corporations and dictators they work for, even beauty, science, or, on the other side of the spectrum, addiction.

For me, it’s the highest form of love: the sacrifices we’re willing to make for some external idea, perpetually devoted to it, maybe our whole life.

We can be in service of many things, but to work for something is to be in service of it. Every day we clock into the company, we’re in service of the values it espouses. When we don a football shirt, we become part of the whole and all that it represents.

There isn’t a moral basis to devotion. Everyone’s entitled to devote themselves to whatever they want, and every atrocity in history has required the devotion of some group of people.

Service is a multiplier. It amplifies whatever else sits above it. But when you feel it on the other side, when you feel someone in a position of service to you, whether that be a well-presented restaurant or a religious experience, the feeling is palpable.

Muses

I’ve been looking at the muses and their role in the arts for a few years now. When we, as a society, realise the current paradigm isn’t working, we look back in history to some aspirational period where it was. For me, in the arts, it’s ancient Greece, where the artists and the thinkers steering civilisation were one and the same. It would be folly to copy them; we’ve come too far in too many fields. But maybe aspects of their process are still relevant now.

The ancient Greek thinkers and artists devoted their works to the Muses. There were nine, each covering a specific sector or idea within the creative world, ranging from astronomy with Urania to love poetry with Erato.

Maybe it’s not a collectively exhaustive list in the modern world, but it removes the ego from the creation. What they’re doing becomes more about discovery than a performance of success. It’s the creation of art as a service, the enclosure around it a shrine to the process rather than the result.

Call it a false idol if you like. As a psychological tool, at the very least, it allows the artist to stop asking, “Is this good? What will people think? Will this make money?” and change the frame: “Does this continue an idea and help me explore it more coherently?”

Devotion to a muse, or any higher idea, places the judgment outside of us. A fallible individual can’t be objective about their own work; they can be objective about whether the idea moved forward.

Art

Artworks don’t have authority. They can’t make you do anything. That’s part of their value. They are honest because they ask nothing of you. But art itself has always held authority. You don’t have to scratch too deeply to hear someone say that art can change the world. But how? Why?

The artist has an idea that serves civilisation. They may serve one element of it, whether it be death, memory, beauty, love, war, or power, but their devotion to that subject means going further in that space than anyone else, irrelevant of what the world is doing. The further they go, the more unique the perspective they can offer the rest of us: a vantage point from some conceptual plane, a bird’s-eye view from a journey no one else has taken.

When I look at the art market, which is distinct from art and artists, I see a collective of institutions serving their own narrative, and I don’t know if that narrative is always civilisation. If anything, it has begun to serve the culture it has created. Trying to fit into the group it built, and the rules that define it.

When art begins to serve itself, it loses its authority in the wider world. Who wants to follow someone who only looks after themselves?

Art is a service. Firstly to the idea, and then to that idea reaching as many people as possible. If the institutions don’t act as a vehicle for those ideas, they will decay. The drawbridge comes up, the gatekeepers stand strong, and people realise the castle only looks after itself. The fields are outside the walls and the harvest will feed another court that will open it’s doors with a smile.

Poets Corner

Nugae

Feeling different
led to differently doing
nothing much the same,
led to making sense
at the border of sense 
and nonsense at all. 

Nonsense has no wings
but still attempts to fly,
nonsense is a life that
leads attempts to die,
nonsense is a poetry
poesis est nugae.

- Thomas May

Final Words

Art is a personal endeavour.
It only needs the maker to enjoy it to exist.

Once shared, it belongs to those who consume it as much as it does the creator.
If anything, it's more theirs than those who present it.

While you may get more enjoyment from understanding the process behind it and the context it sits in, that's a choice that can only happen when it's made available to you on a plate that you’re used to eating from.

That's the service I feel is missing.

love you loads

r x

I gave it to you.

And you dropped it.

Maybe it wasn’t worth anything.

But to me,
it was.

I thought we were building something.

Like a cake.
You gave me the sponge.
I added the cream.
The jam.
The second layer.

Then I gave it back.

I thought you were going to decorate it.

But then it dropped.

I remember it hitting the floor.
Along with my stomach.

An upside down cake.
I remember watching the rain soak into the sponge.

I thought about those cakes where you pour alcohol over them to make them taste nice.

But this wasn’t that.
This was just rain.

and every drop that landed on it
broke off a small chunk
and made a small puddle inside.

I remember watching the small chunks drift down the side of the pavement.
and thinking,
I wonder how the mice find that stuff

but then I realised that my shoes were soaked too.

and I look up.

And you’re smiling.

And I can’t understand.

But then I realise,
you’re not really there.

I look at your hands,
they’ve got no cake on them.

Normally when you drop a cake you grab it

You get icing on your fingers
or at least a bit of jam or cream
but your hands are empty

and I realise you were never going to hold the cake
it was never your intention.

I look behind you and I realise
You’re not alone

and while I’m stood here in the puddle
watching our cake go down the drain

They are not
They are watching you

Smiling

By now it’s obvious, they don’t even know you bake.
Not long ago I don’t think you did.
But we defineitely do now.

or at least we did.

But even though I can see them
they can’t see me.
they can’t see the cake.
and now I realise,

No one ever will.

WTF IS LOVE?

Love is permission to become someone new. When we love someone por something, we hand them/it the ability to reshape us into the person they/it needs to sustain the deal. Slowly, our identity changes to fit the relationship. Whether it is a person or a needle, we all show the hallmarks of what we love.

I’m sure there are millions of therapists who would argue that healthier boundaries make for more stable relationships. But that isn’t the bargain I make with life when I want love.And, if I wanted to experience the world safely, I wouldn’t have become an artist. And if I wanted to feel the most beautiful things safely, I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to love them.

The privilege of a life this sensitive, of feeling everything this deeply, is that love is something you encounter a lot, you sit next to it, watch it, most people hear about it and chase it once or twice, but in art it’s only round the corner. The problem is that when we are so susceptible to loving anything, whether it be a material or an idea, we grant it authority over who we become.

The hope is that the things we love treat us justly, so that we may grow. The ideal is that two objects love each other so completely that they blend together, grow, and create something they could not have created alone.

The deepest heartbreaks do not come losing people to the game of love. It is realising that the authority you granted them was shared amongst people you didn’t decide on. They passed it on. To their friends. To their audience. To everyone they need approval from. You handed yourself to one person and found yourself governed by a committee.

When someone you love will not be themselves, when they defer to others, you begin a losing game. The authority over who you become is no longer about making you the best person you can be. It is spent keeping the balance between the people they are trying to please and keeping you far enough to not ruin it.

Relationships don’t collapse because of evil. They collapse because agreements change. A lack of safety. A shift in priorities. The discovery that the other person was never as far in as you were.

The cost of love emerges slowly, after the deal has been made. Renegotiation can only happen while the desire is still there. Once the agreement stops being protected, there is very little left to do. You either suffer or leave.

I believe we only get to keep our experiences, and only for the short moments that we have them, before they lead on to the next. The things we buy, the accolades, the money, the investments, the watches begin to own us and define our identity, until it’s all we have left.

I have the fortune of living in both worlds. The one favours the material goods, the things that show your successes and make you feel safe. And the other that values the subjective experience of time passing over us.

I understand that living is a balance between the two, and there is a reality to material safety.

But anything that can be bought, can be bought from you.

or worse, taken.

The only thing people can’t take from you, is the way you experience things. I’ve been on the sharp side of the military. I’ve watched a person’s world become small. Those moments just before they admit it’s all over, and I know how quickly safety can vanish. Those that have felt it know how important it is to cherish every moment, to love and love fully, because we may never get the chance again.

During 2022 and 2023 I interviewed over a hundred people about love. The most interesting were in their mid-forties. Stable relationships, money, families, careers. And still, some of them would tell me about the last person they really understood love with. They remembered the feeling. How they smelled. How they spoke. Most of all, they remembered the mistakes they made, the ones that meant they could never see that person again.

If you find someone you love, I hope you have the courage to savour every moment of it, because the most valuable things in this life end. You may keep the watch. You will still have the boat. You will even have the house and necklace. If you’re really luck you may even keep the dog. But those moments together, where you felt more seen and understood than at any other point in your life, they may only happen once. An after that, you will only have the memories.

Stay safe out there,

peace and love,

R x

Balance Sheet

There is no end of artists who want to be household names. That position requires some bending to the establishments that decide who gets known and for what, and who wants an artist that bends. One may break through to that level of renown late in a career. But those intentions for success rarely end with art fulfilling its greatest good.

It will surprise no one inside the industry when I say the art world has struggled for relevance over the last few years. On social media, creators have pushed the boundaries of shock and socially critical performance. Fashion houses and luxury brands have become the only products people use to expand their level of taste. And technology has regressed everyones experience to a mucky median.

Art, especially the visual kind, was once the cultural good because it challenged how the world looked. It is now a cultural good. And not one built to participate in modern society like the others.

It’s financial engine has a culture of its own, one I’m not sure does anything but produce more of the same. It crowns a name, sells it hard for a few seasons, then scans the pack for the next one to ascend the levels of sales and shows.

But art has always had the others. The ones with nowhere popular to stand. Who say, here is where the culture is going wrong. And often those people are celebrated posthumously. The art market, along with the undertakers, is one of the very few cultures that reads the obituaries with glee.

The obvious place for us to start is fashion. I completely redirected my practice in 2024 to see what a bridge between art and fashion looks like. It is now one of the core pillars of what I do. Last year we partnered with Topshop on their relaunch campaign. This year, something else is coming. Soon.

Because art’s role is not to be part of culture. Anything that is part of a culture is a victim of it. It must participate by the culture’s rules. And when art collaborates with fashion as an advertising mechanic, it surrenders the one territory that suits us most.

Observation.

Outside

Our job is to step outside of fashion and look at it from there.

The fashion industry has coverage. Opinion pieces, all paid for. Friends of the brand, part soft power, part payroll, telling you what to buy and what to avoid, all inside an industry that works together so the right applause happens at the right moments. The last critics who bit were banned from the shows. It has a hierarchy. It is established. And everyone in it is owned.

Artists are not. We have the advantage of being comparably broke as an industry. We owe them nothing.

The one thing fashion cannot develop by itself is honest critique. It already buys everything from itself. The machine can produce infinite acceptable campaigns that shill products to the masses, but it cannot disapprove of one. It is a culture that has nothing at stake. Nowhere unpopular to stand. Honest critique is the one asset left that cannot be generated.

So why partner with fashion at all?

Fashion has been growing steadily at 3 to 4 percent a year. Art fell 12% in 2024 and clawed back 4 (that still leaves it down 8-9% Net since 2023). We have too much critique and not enough sales. Fashion has too many sales and no critique.

Fashion turns over 1.8 trillion dollars a year. Every gallery and dealer on earth, 34.8 billion.

What if there is a 1% piece of value the art world can provide? Which artists do we bring in to offer a novel perspective, to deliver a critque, an observation we can’t see from inside our machine? What if we spend 1% of our budget on art collaborations. Would it return more than 1%? Surely. Would it change the art market?

yes.

Merch

When most people see my merch, they see cool hoodies. Well made, well done. But the people who have been to the studio, who understand the practice, know what I am saying with it. All fashion is marketing. All of it is merch. That is all it is. You turn your consumers into walking advertisements for your brand. I say this from inside it. And there is much to talk about inside high fashion. The inspiration. The construction. The commendable work the designers do. The critique is not meant with contempt, it’s simply attention.

This spring Prada hired Jordan Wolfson, one of my favourite artists. His creatures walked through the campaign while the cast repeated a sentence they never finished. I, I, I, I am. The closest thing to a critique fashion has bought in years. It makes sense that it was Prada leading the way. Some reviews called it fashion annexing art. They saw an invasion instead of a bridge.

Fashion has the money. Its growing. It has the machinery and it has the crowd. The one thing it cannot build is a mirror.

Good job that’s the only thing we make

Poets Corner

Prison

Between the bars that I’m behind,
a teeny spider floats to the centre,
building, from nothing, a trap for flies.
Should I swoop to destroy its work?
No one would ever know 
it was me that saved that space
from the struggles of the gnat.

- Thomas May

Needed a week

carrying a lot rn

appreciate it loads

nothing but love

r

x

Like a mosquito that buries itself in your skin.
We are completely unaware
of how much damage is being caused
until the damage is done,
blissfully unaware
until we begin to scratch.

Clawing at the infection that has begun.

Maybe she was never mine.

My attachment to those words,
to that idea,
to this thing that never really existed,
is this the cause of all the pain?

Maybe I’d convinced myself so completely of what could be, what should be and what would be delivered, that now, faced with the reality of my world, I find myself far from those ideas. And that is why I’m hurt.

Because the reality is that whatever I thought it could be, whatever I wanted it to be, was never something that was within my gift. Because the only thing that I have is now. And when I look around, she is not here.

You see, we play it out, we say it out. We want it to be this endless perpetual moment. Feel the high and maintain it forever. But the reality is, if you could, you would. And if you don’t, you won’t.

So if the light only stays on for a second and then it goes somewhere else? Then maybe that’s what it is. A light for someone else.

And as much as you might think that it will come back, and you can say those words to yourself, and create all the ideas and stories and plans that bring that light back, and make it shine as bright as you know it can shine, for as long as you want it to, in front of you, just as you always dreamed, just as it did once before. You know these are just stories, just ideas. And you will become addicted to them just as I have. Because they are as intoxicating as whatever you think that light is. But they keep your room dark.

And when you’re faced with the reality that is this, when it’s finally time to realise, you’ll be carrying all the sheaves of paper, all your stories and ideas, all those memories of the future where you said you’ll see the light one more time and everything will be okay. You will look up and you will say, “but where’s the light?” And when you finally notice that it is still somewhere else. Then the only thing you’re gonna be able to do, to keep yourself warm, is set fire to those papers, until even the stories are no more.

But at least you’ll have light.

Why is a policeman in charge?

The policeman’s in charge because I say he is.

Because I have given him the power.

The narrative.

The story.

The word Police comes from the Latin politia, which is simply ‘civil administration’. It comes from the Greek ‘polis’. The city. A policeman is the city’s man. A policeman becomes the figure through whom the city speaks.

I remember growing up watching a terrestrial television series called The Bill. I remember the music. I don’t remember the stories. I remember it being infectious to my family. I remember thinking how attractive everyone was. The state has always played a role in their city’s man, in how they manufacture the identity of a policeman. In how they make sure it’s something seductive, something with weight. We’ll look at the state’s role next week, but this week I want to focus on the power of the noun.

When we define a noun, when we define a thing, we attach all of our ideas to it. A partner. A lover. A girlfriend. A boyfriend. ‘Someone’ I care for. ‘Someone’ I know. This is my ‘friend’. All of these things define our relationship to someone. How we perceive them. How we want others to perceive our relationship to them. And the more we compound these ideas, the stronger that identity becomes. It doesn’t matter whether we have a positive or negative relationship to the nouns that we define as individuals. Just that we use them.

I’ve been testing this out for a few weeks now. Listen to the nouns that people say around you. Listen to the things that people reference, and you’ll notice something. You’ll notice that what they are trying to say is: I am close to this thing. It affects me. See us together. Every noun establishes a relationship between the speaker, the object and the listener. In status environments, that relationship becomes a form of positioning. Pass me the paintbrush. They can use that resource. This is my friend. I am similar to this person. Would you like to see photos of my dog? I like photos, I have a dog. If you’ve ever felt the sting of infidelity, it’s normally the clearest sign. A partner mentioning someone’s name a little too much. The way they say it. Why? Something trying to get out?

We often use nouns to define ourselves because we have a weak sense of self. When our own identity isn’t strong enough for the environment that we’re in, or the tasks that we’re doing, we use roles, institutions, nations and relationships to give the self a structure it cannot yet produce alone. Announcing this to the world, and associating ourselves with those things, gives us resources and strength. Real or otherwise.

Watch people at networking events. The weaker characters will define themselves with the nouns that don’t reflect their value. They’ll use nationhood, industries, roles, accolades. The nouns they value in their industry, the jargon, the brands. Words that say nothing about who they actually are, all deployed to establish how successful they are, because they see those ‘things’ as more powerful than them. It’s the same as when you meet people who name-drop their contact list. Yes, they have proximity, but they also have an insecurity that tells you they do not believe they are enough. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re not. Maybe that’s their decision, and every time they use someone else to prop themselves up they are contributing to their own demise. And maybe if they just believed in themselves, they wouldn’t need any of that stuff anymore.

Roles

I’m still not sure what the hell I do within the world. But the nearest conceptual reference that I have is that I am an artist. The unfortunate reality of that moniker is that it is attached to an economic system that isn’t quite how my system works. Equally, it’s attached to a social prerogative that assumes my day-to-day life mainly revolves around the painting of still lifes or portraiture. It’s a very confusing term for me to use in most environments. But it’s just about good enough to define what I do, given there isn’t a better one. And the reason I became someone that used it is because I wanted what I thought the artist had. Freedom. What better archetype for someone that’s trying to figure something out than the character that already has it.

The same system applies to our enemies and foes. We define ourselves by them. By their scale, by their relevance. If I challenge a government, my ego is placed on the same level, and that can be intoxicating. The police fight crime, crime is bad, therefore the police are... Just as The Joker is defined through his conflict with the Batman, our antagonists are still things that we are close to, that we are defined by. And our referencing of them indicates their influence on us and our requirement to be defined by them. A little like how a recovering alcoholic is still defined by the substance even when they’re ten years sober. Identity can form around the conflicts we define ourselves by.

Corporate dogs

A friend once told me there are two really interesting facts about how McKinsey operates. It’s not the biggest company in the world, but what it does have is identity. The first is that when you work there, you never reference the competitors. Boston Consulting Group and Bain do not come up in conversation. What I noticed when I was at BCG was that the competitor firms would surface in polite conversation all the time. At McKinsey this wouldn’t be allowed. A refusal to say the noun. Starve the name and you starve its power. Refusing to pronounce a competitor’s name denies them space inside the organisation’s internal reality. (The second was the idea that merch is brand dilutive. They don’t make any. It’s likely why most artists should be careful with novel mediums such as merch, and also why it’s so impressive that Ye built in this medium to such success alongside music. But all for another day.)

Notice what I did there. Look at the nouns that I’ve used. I have decided to reference others to position myself closer to them. There should be no requirement for me to do this. I began with corporate institutions, probably got insecure, and then tried to reposition myself near unconventional artists. There’s some underbelly of status too… all of it based on my need to be perceived as qualified to say what I’m saying.

Polis

Those that reference the policeman place it in power.

“I’ll call the police.”

By virtue of how they’re referred to, the line that we draw towards them, and the situations in which they are called, the connotations of the word act as a flywheel. A feedback loop that feeds in on itself. And with that power, there becomes an identity.

“I’ll call the police.”

Said in a moment of panic. We watch them arrive and fix the situation with weapon systems and care. They then take that same power system and place it into a space where they shouldn’t necessarily have it. Innocent questioning on a polite day. Asking for your personal information at a protest. Asking you to do things that you might not otherwise have felt were appropriate. They are able to leverage that power in another space through the shared identity.

It’s the civilised equivalent of saying “don’t you know who I am?”

Masquerade

I’ve felt the feeling of losing the name. I was running a counter-poaching operation in Uganda, and then two days later I was sleeping on the streets of Paris at Christmas with nothing but a blanket and a ticket home. In Africa I had a team: doctors, experts in counterinsurgency. Autonomy, weapons, free rein, a direct line to the government. Complete power. And on the streets. Nothing. No uniform, no resources. Exactly the same person, but despised for no reason other than I didn’t look like someone important. That loss of status is still one of the most painful experiences of my life. But it taught me how little of me was actually important once the uniform society had given me came off. Everyone has this experience eventually. Some will fight it when it happens, others will embrace it and realise. It took me a while to put it all together, but now it’s pretty clear.

The world is a masquerade ball.

Wear the appropriate uniform.

Use the right name.

And make sure people know it.

Name

The policeman is really powerful because we’ve been using the word for so long. We think it means a certain thing. We think it means it’s going to help. Depending on where you live and your experiences so far. But generally, in most cases, that is your port of call in an emergency. This is who you call when you are in danger. Who else are you gonna call? If it’s not the police, it’s someone who can provide the same level of service. Maybe it’s someone that can deliver violence, or maybe it’s a lawyer. But most people in the world don’t have protection or a lawyer on speed dial. Only those that understand that the police aren’t the only solution. That the police are a lower enactor of the real powers of society and reality. The powers that attribute power to the police. In our case, the legislature. Once again, for another week.

But right now, what I want to focus on is how we define the police. What is the context in which the police are presented? And who is able to do that?

Watch how the police are being documented right now. Daily clips of success, same in the US and UK. Phone footage, bodycams, social media edits. Whatever you think of each one, notice what it is doing. It is redefining the noun and maintaining its effect. The police force is as much a media organisation as it is a technical one.

Communities have always done this. When Robert Peel put the first uniformed police on London’s streets in 1829, the crowds renamed them. Raw Lobsters. Blue Devils. Peel’s Bloody Gang. Eventually these reduced to the one we still hear today. Bobbies. It’s not meant as affection. It’s a diminutive. Over time, because of its softer sound, the police embraced it. We find this in every community around the world that has a difficult relationship with the police. They find a new way to define them that fits their perspective. The feds. The black and tans. Five-o. Pigs. All of them new nouns for a group that holds power. Nouns that let you establish a relationship to it that’s more coherent with how you see it.

All this to say.

The policeman’s in charge because I say he is.

So what happens if I stop saying it?

Keep the uniform.
Keep everything else.
Get rid of the rank.

Just call him by his name.

“Frank.”

How powerful is Frank now?

And what is it within the name that gives it power?

Final words

Over the next few weeks I’ll be staying in this same orbit. I’m not sure when I’ll leave, but I have some ideas of how this feeds into the practical side of my work that most of you know me from.

If this is your first week here, welcome to the other side of the art world.

You came just in time.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do,

love you loads

r x

It’s been a while since I saw one I liked. A helper… One that made me feel they were in this for the right reasons. Who ever is? You see, the easiest authority to question is the authority that admits it wants power. The harder one is the authority that disguises itself as service.

“They’re not in it for the money.” No, of course not. But that doesn’t mean they’re here to help. The way I see it, some of the ones trying hardest to help are also the ones most hungry for the power that helping provides. Positioning themselves as the white knights of the world, lowering themselves to whatever level makes them feel like they’re above someone. Isn’t that what they’re doing?

Maybe it’s a cynic’s way to view it, but the transaction is clear. If you wear the uniform, you get the power. If there was an easier way to get it, would they take that route? And don’t the best always want to climb to the top? Make the biggest changes? Then what? What’s the difference between them and the ones who seek to hold the strings from the shadows? Aren’t they just as cloaked and protected as the other side?

Humans love power.

Gluttons.

We hope for fate, and when we lose confidence in it we seek ways to define it.

Stability in the form of work. Guarantees on lifestyle. An identity we can maintain.

All of this to not feel like we will fall away into the darkness.

And those that maintain it on our behalf, the caretakers of our free will, we offer the greatest status, power and focus.

Many take it without us knowing, choosing themselves for the role.
Others emerge from the system around us, responsibility falling into their laps when they least expect it.
And an even smaller group find it when they least want it. Granted the status and privileges without a desire for what they turn you into.

But where does authority originate?

Authority

Legitimate... The dictionary’s already decided. Implied power is such a beautiful trick of the tongue. One source of authority anointing another, authority creating authority. Better to choose those that rule in your own favour. An agreement to obey before the sentence can be finished.

The word authority originates from the Latin ‘auctor’. Roughly translated: the founder, the guarantor, the author. Author and authority are the same word. Authority is less about who enforces the actions and more about who defines what those actions are.

In 1651, Hobbes delivered his social contract, and decorated it with a frontispiece of the Leviathan: a king whose body is made of hundreds of smaller bodies.

The policeman maintains power through careful balance of the triangle: his desire for control, the path given to him to do it, and ensuring we keep respecting that path. Without any of those vertices it fails.

Deference

Control is what the system does. Authority is the author of it, and deference is how we hand over the pen.

Deferring is innate within humans. We want security, or more, we fear the loss of it. Having someone in a role of authority gives us the excuse that certain things don’t need to be thought about. The brain can relax a little bit.

We navigate through life thinking we all want free will. The more I test that idea, the more I think most people don’t.

There’s a thought experiment around free will that is worth trying. Imagine now you are sat with all your worldly desires complete. Unlimited resources, life goals achieved, health, wealth, stability. What would you do next?

Maybe you already know.

Maybe you don’t.

Maybe that’s normal, because most people don’t have an answer.

Humans like tension. We need it, the friction. And those of us who are most afraid of how the world will treat us need it the most. Drama and problems justify our existence. They let us feel held. They remind us that whatever we’re doing is connected, even if it’s in opposition to what we ‘want’.

So who keeps the policeman in charge? Why is it there? Something material? The hat it wears, the uniform? The power it holds to apply the law? The confidence it carries from all of those things? Or simply because I agree to that power by virtue of where I am, the jurisdiction and the systems that incorporate it?

And if all of that is the case, how much of this is legitimate and how much illegitimate? How much of it is from me and how much from them? Because even though I didn’t agree to any of it, the people around me have. And that’s legitimised it in some way.

Legitimised

A banknote is a piece of paper and an agreement, but it can still be used to buy a house. Something made up, used to create something real. We mint authority the same way. Just because it’s made up doesn’t mean it’s not real. The shackles and systems may be immaterial, but they are just as effective.

Hume answered the social contract with a ship. You woke already aboard, miles out. The only way to withdraw your consent is the sea.

The first authorities were victims; scapegoats for the blame of the crowd and once they turned their violence onto a figure it wasn’t long until it became sovereign. A king is just a scapegoat with a stay of execution.

In England, authority lives in the environment, the King’s land. Our ability to affect the nation state is limited compared to most of Europe. Even within the arts, the institutions rule and deference runs deep. You won’t find many willing to exist outside those structures, or to admit there is quality outside of them. All paths lead to the incumbent axis of power.

England teaches authority socially through the environment. There is a well aligned idea of what is proper. Good and bad, high and low, correct and vulgar. England aligns it’s popuplation without brute force, it just leans on you enoigh to make you feel badly arranged.

So where can the English human find control? The garden. The small kingdom we are still allowed to rule. And just as we judge our rulers, we will judge our garden.

This week I was in Vauxhall Park and picked up some lavender. Volunteers run the park. A little network of them. Nobody appointed them. They banded together and took authority over their environment through contribution, and now they define that space more than anyone else. They are no different to the policeman. That doesn’t make them bad. It makes them the holders of authority. They just did it.

I can’t change what they’ve built, and, I don’t want to. Because today, due to their authority, I have some free lavender. I have been bought off, and now their authority has grown.

This isn’t new for this area. Three hundred years ago the neighbouring park was called the Pleasure Gardens. It cost a shilling at the gate, and the paths around it were designed to give you something you didn’t have elsewhere. Freedom.

When we look at how we interact with gardens and plants, we see that we are creating places where we have unlimited authority. Yes, we’re limited by the seasons and our skill. But the weeds are pulled, and the rosebush pruned. Everything is in its right place, and there is only one source of authority.

Me, and my work.

We like that the garden can’t fight back. We like it because it’s how the world treats us, and when we are forced to defer to the authority, it can feel good to pass that down the chain. And if we are just in our gardening, maybe the authority above me is just in how it treats me, even if, like the trees I prune, my fate is fixed.

Part of my identity is that policemen exist, and I agree to that idea.

“I” am someone who says policemen can do things.

That’s the basis of all of of this...

Tomorrow you will still stop at a red light.

Why is a policeman in charge?

simply because I said so.

But if authority comes from me,

why can’t I get rid of it?

See you next week,

love you loads,

r x

Don’t go inside.

This week I’ve been thinking about permission.

It’s a beautiful tool within any system of control.

Beautiful in the same way that when you see a pianist’s hands dance across the keys you forget that it is the strings inside that are doing all the work.

Humans love control. Over time we’ve learned that permissions are the spine of any system of control. Rules sit in the open, ready to be crossed, contested and punished. Permissions indicate a system of power that is beyond negotiation. While the keys may be played in any order, the keys stay the keys.

Asking permission for the most simple of activities enforces a level of power that defines the relationship. In schools children raise their hand to use the bathroom. It is effective because it describes a relationship beyond the situation. My bodily function is secondary to the will of the teacher.

It’s an indication of a wider hierarchy, one that is established through the permission dealer and the allocation of permissions to the whole. When it’s at its most beautiful it is a symphony that plays itself. When a group is brought together and the idea of a permission structure exists, it permeates deeper than if we are told the rules. Because we have decided on the permission. We are both the guard and the prisoner of our beliefs.

The panopticon is inside the mind.

Maybe all of this sounds obvious to you.

But over time we have learned that this idea of permission, and of incumbent permission granters, is universal. We favour doing what those before have done, and grant permission for just that.

For those incumbents that are astute, it would seem obvious for anyone that manages to escape the rules to turn around and make some to protect themself. The equivalent of using a ladder to climb the walls of a castle before tossing it down afterwards. Or creating a toll booth at the point of no return.

none may pass. unless you pay the price.

All this to say something you might already know.

You can just do stuff that other people don’t.

Permission and civil coherency is essentially a social good.

“You have to wear pink on Fridays.”

“you can’t sit with us”

They are ways to create predictable situations. Why would anyone want an elephant that misbehaves? Better to ensure it doesn’t realise it’s strong enough to go through any door. What better way to do this than let it teach itself that it doesn’t have permission.

Or that on the other side is disaster.

Decisions

I’m fortunate to have luck on my side. It’s something I decided a long time ago. Like many things I believe in, it is true.

I like that I’m lucky because there’s no possible downside to it. It means I can do certain things that I’m not supposed to. Like looking behind a curtain or underneath the carpet. I also believe that if I keep thinking it, I’ll become luckier.

I wish I could say that about a lot of aspects of my life and personality. Of all the areas of my sense of self that I’ve managed to find some way of managing, this seems to be the one thats had the most benefit, with the least struggle.

But I’m yet to figure out how to believe in wishes, and that would definitely give me another trick to changing the lens I have on reality. I currently think there has to be a special event with some unique conditions or something.

To achieve belief changes, we often need some event or inertia.

Sacrifices help, as does a group acknowledgement of the act.

Secrecy can also help with the belief change — the less something is contested while forming, the less it will be impacted.

These principles apply to permission formation and the relief of it alike.

The public humiliation of offenders in the classroom is no different to the News at 10 or the glossy tabloid tear-downs used to keep the media carousel spinning.

But beliefs come from the ‘group’.

We share this opinion.

we do this.

it works like this.

if they have a title or a role, they are in some way this.

the fact that I want to identify myself as an artist indicates I want some of this.

The package of ideas and permissions attached to the word comes for free.

If I were to tell you I’m a policeman while writing this, it would have a different effect.

But that’s you, not me.

Those permissions and beliefs have nothing to do with me, or whether I’m an artist or a policeman.

And you can change them.

but like the elephant choosing to go through the door

it might not look like you can fit.

but if you believe in what’s on the other side

the locks would never have stopped you anyway.

I’m going back underground for another week, maybe more…

I’ll be up for air soon with something tangible.

Right now I’ve got to stay low.

Again, I appreciate the latitude…

Hopefully you can see where I’m going better than I can.

love you loads

Russ x

I’ve been sat here writing for quite a while now. When I’m not writing, I’m making stuff, and when I’m not making stuff, I’m thinking. When I’m at my best, all that thinking, making and writing line up together. When I’m at my worst, I hide.

My world is chaotic. I’m lucky to know that when I’m not doing these things it becomes even more so.

I’ve tried normal jobs. I still dream of them. I once spent a summer looking into cardboard boxes. I thought if I could find something that everyone needs and I could sell to them, then maybe I could fit in. Be the cardboard box guy. Get a factory. Nice car.

I can’t.

Maybe that’s because I’m dysfunctional. Sat a little too far from the teacher and a little too close to the microwave.

When you look in you might see a thin veneer of order. It’s an act. There is some balance point between me and the world, but it’s held together with tape and thread. Just like the idea of me. Whatever that is.

But over time, from scratching away at the world and myself, I have started to understand the river running underneath. And I may be wrong. But who isn’t.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is, I don’t exist. I’m just a set of actions trying to get somewhere, while also trying to not do certain things. And along the way I get distracted by things that taste good, smell nice, look pretty. And those experiences are as much me as the me that wants to get to the place, or that doesn’t want to do the things.

In fact, those me’s are more me than the person who ends up at the place I’m trying to get to.

In fact, I don’t know if I like that guy. All I know is that if I was him right now, I’d help me out. And he isn’t. So maybe he’s not such a good guy to become after all.

I think I’m trying to get a better view. Trying to see reality as best as I can. And that means getting better eyes, better feet to get there, better hands. And when I’m there, hopefully I’ll be able to make something to show you what I see.

And that’s it. That’s me. The labels, the skills, the actions, they’re just ways for me to walk around reality and take part. Play in the game with everyone. Costume jewellery, so you don’t think I’m crazy.

But, I hate to admit it, these are not decisions of a sane man. The cardboard box factory, that is a sane decision. That is logical. People need boxes. People don’t need someone to write whatever it is you are currently reading.

But here I am.

control

Do you get a say in who you are?

We all assume so, but it’s a privileged assumption to hold, one based on the idea that with some level of competence and communication the world will see you as you see yourself.

But it’s failed. It cannot. And for the most part, will not.

Even if it were to see you as you want to be seen, it would be a lie. Because you’re the only one that can see that.

The hampering aspect of looking at identity and our ability to mould it is that we are always at the mercy of the world. We are whatever it wants us to be. We can plug in, redefine our selves, cut off a limb and play the game. But if the waves turn, we will not be saved.

In fact, those most wedded to their identities, their sense of self, they will be the ones to suffer first.

Freedom is not some extrinsic set of conditions. It is a decision.

The bird can only fly because it is happy to leave the ground. We don’t realise how scary it is to leave the nest. But there was a day when every pigeon learned to fly. Maybe you’ll see them a little bit differently. Or maybe you won’t realise until you next go up a big building, and realise how scared you still are. Of being you.

We tie ourselves to our identity, to what we are. It gets harder over time, because we as humans are responsible for one another, for our kids, for our partners. But we, this idea of you and I, are not real. It’s language syntax. A way of communicating, so that in this marketplace, where we trade goods and energy to recover as we sleep, we don’t tear each other apart.

Like the animals we know we are.

direction

The self model of identity ends up with two solutions to navigating life.

We use them both all the time, interchangeably.

At any given time, we are either trying to be someone (goals), or being someone (values).

When we exert force on the world in pursuit of some goal, our ego identity is defined by this action. I am going to the fridge to get food. The more important the goal, the more discomfort we can suffer to achieve it. I will move to a new country. The more we identify with the goal while we pursue it, the more resource we allocate to its success. I will learn a new language. The more success and validation we get from the journey, the more this identity becomes permanent. I eat food from the fridge, I like to live in Italy, voila.

This goal-pursuant model is what drives a lot of the AI delirium at the moment.

Normally the discomfort of actually having to solve the problems we encounter stops us producing the things that aren’t aligned with us. Remove the discomfort of the work, introduce some polite feedback, and all of a sudden we have an enabler of failure — but with your best interests at heart. Surely. Right?

The second model is values driven. It can sound alluring, and what it lacks in force it makes up for in alignment, but it pays for that alignment with passivity. It’s the playbook of allocating time and resource to the things we value. I value food, so I go to work. I value nice food, so I do overtime. I value the people I work with, so I stay late to cover them. The nuance and the trade-offs are where the identity is formed. When we replace one value with another, we define ourselves by it. I prefer family to friends, health to decadence, freedom to success.

But we are passive when we pursue a solely values based approach. The only obvious way to be adherent to our values is to never challenge them, to avoid the chaos of modern life let alone the cities and complexities of ‘success’. For the monk on the hill or the devout of any faith it’s an easy choice - but there’s a good chance you won’t end up anywhere new.

Goals.

Values.

That’s it.

Both change who we are.

And identity is always a choice. Even the incumbent one you already have. It’s a decision every day to keep it.

The inertia is real.

But so is the discomfort of knowing you could’ve changed yesterday.

agility

If you couldn’t already tell, this change of direction has been more of an internal journey than an external one so far. Guess that’s the way it is.

Someone once told me that the benefit of being an artist isn’t the lifestyle, or the successes. It’s that you get the opportunity, throughout your life, to get a good perspective on who you actually are. What happens when you give yourself the ultimate freedom to create? What is it you end up doing? What is it they end up seeing?

Whenever I take these turns in my practice, to look at things a little differently, the first few weeks are always clunky. I watch parts of my identity shift. The work. The people I keep around me. The things I do. The ones who’ve been around longest understand that this is what it’s like. There have been times they’ve had to tell me it’s hard to keep up. But they understand, and over time I think they’ve all realised they just have to give me a little space to figure out what the next bit looks like. So I appreciate that.

I feel like I’m getting closer to something more structured. And maybe that’s the benefit of control, if you pick the right master it will treat you well. In the same way the cardboard boxes gave me some boundaries to stay sane. There’s a predictability in it I think I’ve been looking for. But I won’t know what the cost of that is until it’s done.

All this to say: I’m grateful there’s a little latitude, from everyone reading this and everyone in my world, to explore and take some time to figure out this next phase. To get somewhere more concrete and hopefully closer to what you came here for.

and closer to why I did too.

love you loads

r x

All she has spoken about
Is her dog.

That’s the thing with addicts.
They all act the same.

When I started looking into love as a lever on identity I ended up finding people who used it to benefit themselves.

Maybe that’s what I was looking for.

But I’ll never forget Steve.

Steve taught me that sometimes what we fall in love with is something that fixes something in ourselves. Some side of ourselves we can’t access without it.

A perspective.
A feeling.

Steve was a heroin addict.

I always felt like he and I were closer than he realised.
Maybe that’s why we were friends.

I met him in London Fields.
Every day I’d go to the park in my ski suit and draw the trees.
I don’t like drawing people,
for me it’s too intimate.
Buildings and trees I like.
Especially in that park.
There’s a tree there I really like.
I loved going out everyday and drawing it.

Steve would come every few days.
He had same game every day,
same routine.
Different clothes.
I remember seeing him walk through the park with one shoe on.
He ran over to say hi then ran off.
normally I’d walk with him to the shop and buy him a can of Nurishment,
he liked banana.
I agree, it’s the best flavour.
There’s only two types of people I see drinking those things
(Three if you include me)
bodybuilders and heroin users,
both addicts in they’re own way.
I still remember the metallic taste.

As tough as his world was, he managed to have some fun.
Always on some interesting hustle.
Something found, something pilfered.
All in the name of the game.
Steve had the added benefit that he was lovable.
Charismatic,
Funny.

Like all relationships, you don’t really know anything about them, until one day you suddenly do. I remember that day with Steve.

“You know Russ”
“The kid needs feeding”
”and the girl, she’s always nagging at me”
“She needs me to do things”
“They all need me to do something”
”and I don’t know how to do them”
“I can feel I have this thing inside me”
“And I want to let it go”
“But I don’t know how”
“I didn’t learn that growing up”
”I didn’t learn any of that stuff”
“I know I need to, I just can’t”

He was talking about crying.

He didn’t know how to cry.

I always regret that moment.
I thought he needed stuff from the store.
Not a way to get something out.
And in that little moment of time
I didn’t figure out how to show him.

That was the last time I saw Steve.
A few days later one of his friends found me in the park. He’d been killed. Beaten up and left for dead.
Everyone knew what had happened.
The police knew, but nothing was going to be done.

Steve had a lot of love in him.
But as much as everyone loved Steve,
Steve loved heroin.
It gave him something nothing else could.
And took whatever it wanted in return.

Who started it?

I don’t know much about love and I don’t trust anyone that says they do. But what I do know is that it’s addictive, and it changes who I am when I’m in it.

I’ve loved a lot of things. And every time I’ve realised I’m in love, I know that what I’m about to see is some part of me change. And I won’t know what that is until it ends.

But why do I love the things I do? Why have I loved the things I’ve loved? What was it I wanted from them, and how did I learn to get it?

Humans love to prize novelty. But we’re mimetic by design. Derivative to our core. We think we’re branching off into something new, something unique, our own interpretation of the ones who came before us. But we’re not. We’re just finding the middle ground in the spaces they left behind.

René Girard coined the term mimetic desire in the 60’s. We want what we want because we saw someone else want it first. A chain of desire, running back and back, all the way up to the present day. Imagine the child and the toy. Largely uninterested, until another child holds it in their hand. The wanting isn’t in the toy, it’s in the other child’s hand.

I’m fortunate to have some very ambitious people around me. Sometimes, I wish I had their ambition. Their desire to ‘get’ somewhere. I can see it, these nice places. I have it sometimes. But I’ve realised they’re only ever things I’ve seen someone else have or do. And isn’t that just me saying I wish I was more like them, than I am me? Some deep admission that I am not enough? Maybe that’s at the root of desire. The agreement that we’re all sort of incomplete.

Slavoj Žižek extends the idea toward the media environment we’re brought up in. In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema he presents the idea that films aren’t made to tell stories or ask questions. They’re built to teach us how to want. They teach us what longing looks like, what desire should be, how a person in love should behave.

Just like the printing press let a layer of the world be guided through a given lens, film does it with the extra juice of industrialisation. They educate us on how to experience and interpret, connecting neural pathways through sound and vision in a way that real life cannot. When you look at the roots of cinema and film, I feel comfortable agreeing. But how much of the world I’m experiencing is guided by the films I’ve watched? How much of my world has been tinted by film in a way I’ll never be able to interpret? Am I just trying to live out a life inspired by some falsehood? And how deep does that go? I know I feel what I feel. But even that appears to be malleable. And if the feelings are not me, then where do I begin?

Control

I think we all forget that when we close our eyes and feel the feelings we have, even that isn’t really us. The world, and what it’s taught us, has taught us to be a certain way and to love a certain way. And the reality is we don’t have much choice over that. That is until we stop doing it. Until we take control of what it is we love.

But how much power do we have to control what we love? How much power did Steve have, to take control of his world at that point?

Whenever I spoke to him, I realised he didn’t want to be in the situation he was in. But what was also clear is that it’s a hard battle, and not many people make it out. When I think about Steve, all I think is that he didn’t get the tools he needed. He knew that. It was clear from our conversations. With all the desire in the world, he couldn’t get out of it. And by the time he’d learned the tool he needed to not go backwards, in this case heroin, it began to own him. What he reached out to and fell in love with became his downfall.

And that’s the risk we take with love.

That’s the risk we take with all of our decisions.

Gluey

When we love something, we don’t stay separate. We become it. We’re as much the thing we love as we are ourselves. And that continues until our identities are one and the same. You can see when someone’s in love because they define themselves by it. A mother with her kids. A heroin addict with the needle. You know when someone’s in love because they wear it like skin.

You don’t get to choose what or who you fall in love with. We’re just lumps of sentient meat bouncing around the planet until something connects to us in a way that shows us some side of ourselves that has been buried in the dark.

Whenever we’re in it, we want to devour it. Consume it. Be so enmeshed with the thing we love that to separate ourselves from it would tear us into the ground. I’m willing to mould myself into whatever it takes to have more of it. To stay in that tension just so it doesn’t let me go. Because this is the feeling we want. And we never wanted to change.

Maybe it’s that. All of it is just us wanting to be something we’ve seen before. Some other state of being we don’t believe we’re capable of alone. Something that isn’t us. And maybe it isn’t real, and we’ve been taught it. But I don’t believe that’s all it is. And that doesn’t mean I’m right. I might be wrong, but that’s my choice. And just like every addict, I’ll be happily wrong. Because these are the tools I’ve got, And I’ll keep using them until one of us stops working.

Because I still don’t know what love is. But I do know that it’s powerful. And from what I can tell, there isn’t a better tool in the world for doing what I love.

love you loads

r x

It was childhood themed and served as away for me to learn a new medium, bring some cool people together, and do what I do best.

These are my notes on what I learned.

30 humans, primarily strangers from different industries, socio-economic backgrounds and ages. Nobody in the room knew more than a couple of the other guests. Apart from them knowing me and my work, it was a cold room.

When they arrived the headmaster met them at the door and took their name on roll call. The servers, teachers, were briefed to hold a hierarchy all night: nothing given without something done first. Charades, times tables, trivia in exchange for food and drinks. It looks childish, and like most of what I make, the casualness is part of the camouflage.

If you drop very different people into a flat room they don’t mix. They cluster with whoever they already resemble. Put a hierarchical system on top and it equalises them. With everyone equally a student, equally subjected to the absurd rules and games, you can begin to strip out the preconceived divisions they walked in with.

I wanted a room where people who enjoy my work from different perspectives could connect. Collector or new friend, someone who’s followed the work for years or someone who’d never seen it at all, they should feel equal, and the easiest way to do that is to lower them.

The shared indignity works two-fold: navigating a chaotic situation together bonds a room faster than good wine ever could. A fortunate side effect rather than a stroke of strategic brilliance.

I set the evening up to learn how to bring such a group together, to understand whether you could find stability in a novel experience. Normally I use the space, and the people who visit, to show my work, sometimes to sell it. I’d assumed that idea and this experience were much closer together than they are. They are not. The two things I learned both live in the gap between those situations.

The first is that I lost the ability to see.

In a studio visit I can read people visually. Someone walks in and their eyes flick around the room, snagging on things and ideas as we walk. There’s enough there for me to understand what they’re seeing, to help them navigate the chaos. A split-second where I catch them trying to look at something, and I step in to talk about it. The studio is loud, visually; it’s an assault on the senses, so people need help to navigate it. During the dinner, with music and performers and flowers and food, that channel went dark. I couldn’t read the room the way I normally would.

It took me a while to understand that this wasn’t a weird version of a studio visit. It was a completely different beast. Showing people work and bringing people together don’t use the same systems, it’s overwhelming.

The second thing is a little less clean, it’s a complication between the work on the walls and the work they were in. The game itself is the art. The dinner, the headmaster, the rules, the whole intervention they were standing inside of, that is the medium I’m trying to work in now. It isn’t new to the world; performance artists and interactive theatre have been here a long time. It’s new to me, and what I was really doing was trying to integrate that medium with the work on the walls.

I didn’t especially want them staring at the walls. The game was the thing I wanted them inside of. But I’d assumed the two could coexist, the durational piece running while the objects held their own in the background, and that isn’t quite what happened. The game was absorbing enough that the work on the walls fell out of view more than I’d expected. It was impossible to hold both at once. Which is also why almost no one critiqued the work, even the people who know it well: there wasn’t room in their attention to look at it, let alone judge it. Maybe I simply didn’t draw enough attention to it. Maybe the two mediums need a different choreography than running them side by side. I can’t connect the dots yet, but I will.

Whats interesting is that almost everyone in the room already knew my work to one degree or another, and it still slipped past them. Maybe that’s a good sign. I doubt any have encountered the street interventions as participants, but I thought they might recognise that’s the game I’m playing with them here. Someone told the filmmaker that’s following me around at the moment that they’d love to be part of a social experiment one day. I try not to think of the work as social experiments, but we both found it funny that they couldn’t see the frame they were inside. Maybe I camouflaged the whole thing too well, and no one quite knew what they were doing.

I went in trying to learn the tools for a new show concept, and what I came out with is both better and more awkward than I’d hoped. Everyone left with a good feeling. The game built something that is scalable in a way that the objects I make can’t be, so there’s something in there that takes it beyond a fun night, something that could work with a far wider group than the people who already follow the art. But at the moment, it’s strength is the problem. As it stands the game is absorbing enough that the work it’s meant to sit alongside drops out of view. If I can’t integrate the two more tightly, the new medium doesn’t carry my work to a wider audience, it crowds it out. That’s the next thing to solve, and I don’t think one dinner is going to be enough to solve it.

I’ll continue my thoughts on control next week.

love you loads

R x

I’ve known since the 28th of January, 2019.
Seven years and 124 days.

I thought I wouldn’t sleep last night.
I knew I would.

I remember knowing I’d wake up.
I remember knowing I’d come here,
sit down,
and write this to you.

I know exactly what I’m about to say.
How the pen moves across the paper.
How I’ll eventually have to get up and go.

I’ve watched this happen.
Dreamt it.
And now it’s the day,
and here I am,
writing it exactly how I thought I would.

Every letter the same.
Every pop of the pen in place.
Even the sunlight coming through the window.
The smell of the old burnt candles in the room.
I’ve known it all before.

I even remember knowing it would feel like this.

I just wish I knew
what happens next.

Control

The coin slides into the vending machine. The claw grabs the teddy. The parcel arrives at the door. Small proofs that when I press a button, something happens. I collect them all day, like cookies for the voice that tells me the truth. The one that reminds me I have no idea what’s actually going on. And worse, that I can’t stop it.

The voice gets louder the more I listen. It’s been there since I was young, and it feeds. Over time I learned to train it. The cookies keep it tame, stop it looking around for fears to snack on. But it never goes. It just sits on my shoulder, leashed, placated by my small celebrations. And every now and again it gets hungry, and starts to make some noise.

We like to think of control as an absolute. That we can nullify the world’s chaos and manufacture certainty. That’s what we’re all after, isn’t it. Certainty. But it’s all just an elaborate game of chance. Risk is baked into the equation of living. And the more we live, the more there is.

We get good at the managing. We get smarter, more experienced. We learn which games we can win and which ones we shouldn’t play. Everything gets a little tidier and we start to believe we’re turning the tide of entropy. Until reality knocks us down. Time moves faster every year. Gravity takes us under. And eventually the soil removes us from the world.

Addicts

We’re all addicted to control. It’s the one thing everyone reaches for when they feel unsafe. Some of us just have politer habits than others.

I’ve had polite addictions, and some less polite ones too. I’ve also been close to people hooked on things I’d be too afraid to touch, who came back. Something about rolling the dice and surviving scars us all the same way. You get access to a little parcel of freedom that’s hard to come by otherwise. It costs you, but it’s real. Normally it arrives as a leash that lets you know exactly how close you can get to the edge without going over. And like all animals, we like to pull on the leash.

I’ve spent the last six months pulling on mine, playing with fire, telling myself I’m learning how far I can go before I have to come in. But even when I point myself somewhere steadier, the same delusion sits underneath. That I’m somehow safe from the fear in what I do for a living.

Sneeze

A sneeze.

Something I have no say in. I can’t even control the sound. I’ll probably do it again very shortly. And while it’s happening, I am not in control. An involuntary action that defines me as much as anything I choose otherwise. Right now, to anyone who wants to look, I am the sneezing man.

So how much do I actually choose? How much of me is something I have a say in, and how much is circumstance, or decisions made by the people around me, or by a version of me that wanted something else? How much have I just wanted for so long that I do it without knowing if it’s good for me, or whether what comes after is what I wanted at all?

If I’m to be free, and alive, how much of that has to be voluntary?

And how much can I train into the body, so it moves exactly how I want, and carries me where I want to go.

Even when I no longer want to go there.

I’m trying something new this week

Over the last few months I’ve been trying my hardest to leave the studio and go see other humans.

As those of you who have been following my work for a while will know, I quite like the solitude.

But this week I guess I’m doing the opposite.

Anyway,

Wish me luck

Love you loads,

R x

Head first.
Heels up.
Wet grass,
still warm.

Knees green.
Clothes too.

No watch.
Empty pockets.

Climb the hill again,
and go.

I don’t like the climb,
but I’ll do it.

Seems to have gotten bigger this time.
Or maybe I rolled a bit further,
stayed on the ride a little bit longer,
didn’t get off at my normal stop.

Maybe I’m getting good at this.
Still need to go back.
Back up.

No watch on my wrist.
Empty pockets.

I can go wherever I want.

Play

I spent this week installing Playground at Ladbroke Hall as a way to add to the floral noise of Chelsea Flower Show.

A conceptual installation built on Huizinga’s idea that culture comes from play, sited in the gardens of Ladbroke Hall. It takes the form of an immersive floral environment with interactive elements to engage in.

Ace, who led the floral artistry, and I have worked together for a couple of years now. Last year we had five months to prepare. This year we had five days.

The hypothesis I’ve been playing with over the last two years is that if art wants a wider crowd without losing its purity, it has to interact in adjacent spaces. Find the people who already understand some of the things we prize. Fashion and Floristry → Beauty. Retail and social media → Spectacle. The crowds who value having something to say → Thought.

It’s not a pitch to become enmeshed in culture, if anything it’s us riffing on their games to let them know what we have to offer. The core movement isn’t novel. It’s how humans have always operated. We take our toys to the fringes of our friendship group, figure out what they have over there and play a new game together.

Huizinga puts forward this idea that culture is built from a sense of play. White cube galleries don’t have that. A few weeks ago one of my most important supporters was in town and we took a ride to White Cube Bermondsey, it’s an incredible site, but even when it’s in full swing, it is not a place where ‘play’ is natural. Most artist studios are, primarily for them not an audience, but the site of ultimate freedom for their inhabitants, and what is play if not an exercise of freedom.

Finding play inside whatever constraints are against you, the tools, the environment, the audience and their whims, is part of the game we all play. Taking that into industries focused on beauty, commerce or spectacle is where we can lend our toolset and bring over those that like how we play.

Playground

The installation has three key elements. A Jean Prouvé Maison Démontable turned into a sanctuary from the city. A violet floral installation built around the scent of hyacinth. Tatami mats underfoot that pull you into the ground without making you dirty. And a layered soundscape that reminds you that you can have fun in nature by doing nothing. To see how I could affect the hall’s conventional clientele I added egg timers, a visual excuse to spend more time inside than they otherwise might.

When you walk through Ladbroke Hall and see the £200,000 tables and £100,000 chairs, and watch the people being taken around, it’s clear they don’t know the name of the artists they’re being shown. But they probably have really nice homes that need a big table in them.

I thought it would be interesting to see if I could get them to take their shoes off. Lie on the floor. Change how they engage in the world for five minutes of an egg timer. And see if that little change creates the spark I believe art is.

A change of perspective.

There’s something special about falling over as a kid. An unexpected part of our body impacts the floor in a way that lets us realise we are both significantly sturdier and more mortal than we thought.

The floor. Grounding, honest, humble. A place we avoid as adults in the West. Maybe our egos don’t let us lower ourselves to those dark depths. Maybe we’re scared we might fall and not be able to get back up.

Falling over brings us to the present. It focuses us. But as we get older, we try to do it as little as possible. And with it we lose access to our mentor the floor.

At the back of the gardens, sits a deck with two books on it. One for memories of play in childhood. One for adulthood.

The childhood book was full of stories of scuffed knees, chasing one another, playing around in nature with a freedom you only really get as a child amongst other children that see you.

The adulthood book was filled with references to sex, debauchery, and civil disobedience. We lash out a bit when we’re older, maybe because the only way we know how to challenge the rules is by abandoning them entirely and showing those around us we are still free. Showcasing our descent into Bacchanalian decadence. Cranking on the dopamine and serotonin as hard as we can to feel something in a world that really just wants us to do our job.

Throughout the garden, alongside the floral installations, there are poems scattered for people to read to the plants. We often mistakenly frame nature as an object to look into. We distance ourselves from it. Even as I describe it now, I frame it as some other, as if I’m not a part of it. Our polite civility tells us every day that we are unique. That our pretty little clothes and our idyllic sense of self, makes us distinct from the flora and fauna we have named.

But I am an animal, and so are you.

The first time I saw this game played was with Uriel Orlow, he was handing out poems to people in the back gardens of the Venice Biennale. A crowd of people excited to be there, standing in the bushes, reading poems to plants. It’s inspiring every time I see it. Art is an activity, a process, not a product for your walls. When you see it happening, it’s infectious.

Sit down

There’s a small card in the Jean Prouvé. It says this is better when you sit down. It should say lie down. I figured if people saw the phrase lie down they’d resist. But once they’re sat down, they might figure out the lying down part themselves. Letting them feel smarter than me costs nothing.

A family today took the card out of the sanctuary and into the rest of their day. They photographed it on a tree branch. On the grass, with their daughter lying underneath. In the basket of a Lime bike. On the saddle of another. On the rail of a London bus. They sent me the photos as I wrote this.

When I make work I don’t really know who it’s for. Me, for sure, but usually there’s someone else out there on the same wavelength. When someone takes it into their own life it feels complete. Today that was them.

Next week I’ll show you some of the paintings I’ve been working on. And I’ll start going in the opposite direction to where I’ve been going for the last few months, which has mostly been towards and around ideas of freedom.

Welcome to summer, from here we’ll be looking at the other side of the coin.

Control.

Thanks again.

Love you loads.

R x

If you enjoyed this week’s issue of Hot Girls Like Art, share it with a friend. It’s always nice to be the person that found that artist that made it before eveyone else.

Share

Peace and love

R x

Dingy.
Vermin-infested.
Cramped.
Dark.

There is little ventilation.
The lingering smell of a man chained to the wall is all he has for accompaniment.
For the most part he sits alone with a blindfold on.

It’s 1986 in Beirut and Hezbollah has captured Brian Keenan.

He has spent the last six months in solitary confinement, blindfolded, chained and captive in a country he may never escape.

One day, his door opens.

A food delivery like no other before it

In the bowl today is fruit.

Amongst the fruit, is an orange.

As soon as he sees the bowl, his eyes become burnt.
Burnt by the colour.
Burnt by the orange.
He lifts it with his dirty hands, caressing it, smelling it, licking it.

Repeating the word orange as gets drunk on its colour.

He refuses to eat it. Sitting with it for days, it becomes his muse, fondling, rearranging, contemplating all that it represents.

It becomes the point of worship. His obsession with it eroding the walls that confine him.

The walls begin to sing.
The cell expands.
And his captivity begins to melt away.

And then he realises.

I read Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling when I was in the military. He was taken into captivity around the same age as I am now. And what I realised is that all I have learned about freedom I have learned from him putting the darkness of his experience into beautiful prose that lets us understand how to better experience the darkest points of our own.

I was wearing military uniform doing things I had no choice in. I longed for freedom in what I was doing. But I only found it in the games I would create to keep myself sane.

It wasn’t the only time I learned this lesson. When I was living on the streets of Paris, it was the games I played with my friend that stopped me from going inwards and collapsing under the austerity of our situation.

He spent four and a half years in captivity. Much of it with the journalist John McCarthy. Although that period of his life should be marked with violence and darkness, what always stayed with me was how he found a sense of play within it. They held imaginary dinner parties in the cell. They planned the menu, they argued about the wine, they built up the guest list. All the captors gave them was bread and a bowl, yet every night they dined like kings.

Throughout the whole experience, Keenan spent his time on a floor that someone else owned. And still, he managed to find a sense of freedom within it.

Circle

For the last few weeks I’ve been exploring sovereignty. Especially the contradiction of it in art when we consider who pays for the floors on which Art is shown.

We’re all born into a world who’s game has started long ago. The rules have already been set. The floor is already owned.

The question I haven’t been able to quite figure out is:

What does sovereignty look like when the floor is always owned by someone else?

How can we be free, when there is no free land?

In 1938, at the same time the Nazis were laying the marble in the German pavilion in Venice, a Dutch historian named Johan Huizinga published a book called Homo Ludens. The Playing Man.

His idea is that culture does not produce play.

Play produces culture.

We do not play because we have civilisation, the same way that dogs do not play because they are civilised. To civilise a dog, it must first learnt to play. Humans in the same way have civilisation because we have learned how to play with one another.

All objective systems come from some form of play. Law, ritual, poetry, war, commerce, all are forms of play that have coagulated and hardened over time into rules. Some have stricter rules than others. The court. War. The temples around us. The markets we engage in. But beneath all of them is the older fact of two or more people agreeing to a game and entering it together.

Huizinga calls this bounded space the magic circle. A place inside which play can occur. He defines it as having four properties.

First, it is bounded. It has edges. It is not everywhere. There is a space in which we play.

Second, it is voluntary. You cannot be forced to play. Compulsory play is not play.

Third, it is free of material interest. Play is not for profit. The minute it is, you are doing something else inside the form of play.

Fourth, it absorbs the player utterly. When one is inside the circle and playing, the only world that is important is the one inside the circle.

He defines these four conditions as the conditions for freedom.

Keenan’s basement would not naturally be perceived as somewhere free in any conventional sense. His captors controlled what he ate, when he was chained up, when he was allowed to use the bathroom, where he would be, and what light he would experience. To some degree, it’s the same level of control that rests over all of us when it comes to the rules and sovereigns guiding money, land and politics.

But within that cell, he and McCarthy built a magic circle. They shared stories, made games, constructed a space the captors were not allowed to enter. Inside that space, all four of Huizinga’s conditions held. Bounded. Voluntary. Free of material interest. Utterly absorbent of its two previously unfree captives so that they had a sense of freedom within it.

Even though the captors owned the floor, Keenan and McCarthy found play as a way to gain sovereignty.

Sovereignty doesn’t come from the refusal of our captors, nor the ownership of the building they hold. It comes through the construction of our own magic circles on the ground we do not own, where our own rules hold and the captors cannot follow.

Flag

The art world’s standing narrative is that art needs more support. Scroll through any social media platform and you will see the never-ending appeals for more public funding, institutional protection, grants and residencies. The argument positions artists as a sector that cannot generate sufficient value and therefore requires subsidy.

I think this is a failed framing of our situation.

If Huizinga is right, and the more I read him the more I think he is, then art is not a sector inside culture. Art is one of the forms culture is originally made of. Play precedes culture. Art precedes culture. They are the older fact of what makes us human.

The minute we define art as being constrained by the market and its allocation of resources, we define art as something that lives inside whoever defines the resource allocation within those cultures. It implicitly means art is no longer free. It is a byproduct of the people who pay for the floor.

I believe the flag of freedom should fly higher in art than in any other industry, because art is the only industry whose product is not a thing but the prior fact of free, voluntary, bounded play. We are the definition of freedom.

Every other industry exists to extract resource and arrange it. Art exists to remind us that the arrangement is not the point. The point art makes is that we are inherently free. And we always will be.

There’s no escaping rent. There’s an existing game we must participate in to make it happen. But we often become conditioned by participating in it, and begin to think the whole purpose of our lives is to build larger and larger circles. To become free.

Yet there’s no shortage of people with large circles that have become empty, telling us that maybe there’s a deeper point at hand.

When I think about Keenan and McCarthy, two people telling stories on the floor of a basement chained to the radiators, maybe it’s that. The ability to find our sense of freedom in a world that’s always owned by someone else.

And maybe there lies the role of art. As a reminder of how to make magic circles wherever we are.

How do we become sovereign?

We do so by remembering that we can always play.

This week I’m trying to find a sense of play by building my own magic circle.

I’m installing tomorrow. It opens Tuesday. By the time I write about it properly next weekend, you will have missed it completely.

Inside there’s a sanctuary you can sleep in. There’s a playground with games you can lose at. There’s the conversion of what the institution’s owners define as a playground into what I would describe as a magic circle of play of my own.

I have spent the last week calling in every favour I could to make it happen. Thank you to everyone who resourced me well enough that I get the chance to play a little bit more.

My bet is Huizinga’s. If play precedes culture, a person dropped into a properly constructed magic circle will produce culture by being there. The work is bounded by the space they enter and the time they spend inside it.

Much like my one rule of art. All we are trying to do is “keep the viewer within the frame of reference.”

I’m making the bet that the audience that frequents Ladbroke Hall, an audience used to engaging with art at the level of high-design aesthetic, might take a few steps further in by being given somewhere to play. And see my perspective on art. And hopefully when they leave, they take the circle with them.

It’s a small step towards the evidence for an argument I can’t put on paper better than Huizinga did ninety years ago. Or maybe it’s just a way for me to justify that I still don’t like being on boats. That when I’m on one that’s owned by someone else, there’s a way to find my own sovereignty. And that’s something nobody else can take from me.

Poets Corner

Remembering Seasons
 
Winter hits like buckets and balloons of water,
more ice than water, more water than balloon or bucket,
thrown at the flesh, thrashed against the wall
 
Autumn appears like a blink of late bloom,
blanketing safety with threaded dead leaf and hindsight,
between shots of cold winter’s firing squad
 
Summer flashes like the flicker of leaves, flying attachment
to trees, and the warmth of a sun in the distance,
sinking into the sand of it, pretending away the freeze
 
Spring eventually shows like a world waking up,
buckets empty of balloons, empty of ice and water on flesh,
all thrown, forgotten, remembered, forgot
 
- Thomas May

Playground

If you’re in London this week, come by. Eat at Pollini, it’s one of my favourite restaurants in London. Plan the menu. Argue about the wine. Take a few minutes in the sanctuary and remember you are sovereign.

When this city starts to feel like a prison.

Come play in the little magic circle I have built for us all.

I’ll be there. Come say hi.

Love you loads.

R x