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.

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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

I do not like boats.

It’s not so much the boat. But everything attached to it. In fact, once I had to learn to sail a Laser, and once I’d experienced the freedom that comes from harnessing the wind while sitting in a piece of plastic, I can agree. It is very nice.

But someone else’s boat, while not moored up, close to the shore, and someone else harnessing the wind and taking it wherever they want, makes me begin to lament my politeness. Worse still, they decide to have a party on board and I’m not allowed to leave.

When I left the military, I was given some golden advice. I knew I had to start meeting real humans at real events, and I found the whole thing very overwhelming. I prided myself on not having to do any of this schmoozery in the military, but knew there’s a certain amount of it required in any industry. I just wanted to know when the right time to leave was. When was it that I would know I’d done enough of the insufferable art of soft collisions and nice-to-meet-yous that I could go back to doing what I love in my studio.

He said, “as soon as you think about how you’d leave, you’re already too late.”

I’m grateful for that.

Consequently, a boat is not something I want to be on. As soon as I step on board, the first thing I look for is my exit path. I always feel like there’s an implied ownership of my space and time. Even though I may want to head in a certain direction, I’m bounded by the edge of the boat and the captain’s hidden desires of where he might want to take this. As soon as I begin thinking about that, I understand that I am in direct conflict with the person that owns the ground I stand on. Given the prestige and grandeur setting of a boat, it’s generally impolite and risky for me to point out that I never really wanted to be there in the first place. I’d much rather be at home reading a book.

So boats, as seductive and impressive as they are, have always been something of a nemesis.

Floor

I just came back from Venice. The question of who paid for the floor stayed in my mind.

Last week I wrote about Hans Haacke taking a jackhammer to the floor of the German pavilion, removing the marble laid in 1938 when the Nazis remodeled it. A return to that same pavilion this year saw the work of Sung Tieu, remodeling the facade to look like a Vietnamese social block that she grew up in. Fateful work.

But underneath all of this, the question still remains.

Who paid for the floor?

I don’t think it’s my place to judge the work of other artists. View, learn from, understand, but there’s a world of critics and curators out there with a much better idea of what’s happening than I do to tell you about them. I wanted to go out and see how the biennale looked from where I stand, and maybe see if I could look under the carpet and see how it really looks.

The obvious summary of the Biennale is that it’s a soft power vehicle for nations. Anything where the flag of a country is attached to something requires some level of allegiance to the rest of what that flag represents. I’ve worn the flag, I know how it works. Selection to bear it is more often based on alignment and coherency with the incumbents and the wider context than the ability to deliver exceptional performance. It’s a risk-based system that protects what has come before you. Just as the riskiest military and security operations are handled at an arm’s length away, the same goes for the art.

But art as a soft power initiative isn’t exclusively constrained to the nation-state model. There’s a second class of budding global influencers trying to gain from association at the shows. The funding for each show comes from a wide array of sources. The terms of each deal are unclear, but the placement of the name next to the work is a deal. It sounds dirty for an artist to be picking up cash from a brand, but the reality is that the financing of art is a long cash flow process. Art studios run more like big R&D companies than fast cash businesses. Stable funding for something like Venice is often a necessity.

I put together what I think is a small look into how each of the national pavilions are funded this year. It’s like all of these little digital projects, just a way for me to understand the data that I’ve got here. Hopefully, you find it interesting too.

Trade

Venice is a city built on trade. On the way to the city, I read through Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Although there were shadows of the world Marco Polo once described, it has now become somewhat more homogeneous in experience. What was once a city full of traders across the world, with the scent of magic in the air, is now a place that for the most part is nice to visit if you want to feel like a tourist.

Tourism brings in around €3.8 billion a year for Venice. The Biennale’s main exhibition runs at around €5 million. Individual pavilions cost €1 to €5 million each. The historic centre of Venice has fewer than 50,000 residents, two thirds of which have been displaced to the mainland because landlords have realized that Airbnb pays three times more than the long-term leases they survived on.

The Biennale is not the product that Venice is selling. The Biennale is the marketing department for the address. The city is the asset. The pavilions are tenants paying rent in prestige to keep the address valuable.

This year the satellite shows seemed to have the lion’s share of the fun parties. Those on the dime of their nations and the press that support them partied in the main pavilions and got out of town pretty quickly. The private collections, including the Guggenheim collection, ran a separate party list throughout the week, moving their various collector bases around town into ever more competitive rooms to fight over the PDFs of available works.

I met one of their budding young collectors in a cocktail bar with a friend. After going through the initial pricing of who I was, he began to show me his VVIP sales experience that day at Versace, and told me that he had a very important dinner to go to that evening. He couldn’t remember the artist’s name.

He’s an example of the system at its purest. He is buying access to belief about himself, his role in the charade. The works by the artists are just the equipment he is using to get into the game. He doesn’t remember the name of the artist because it’s not the reason he was ever there. He just wants to be in.

There’s a layer underneath the real estate. A layer of culture. Although the captain of the boat may have no actual authority over me, he is still the captain because everyone believes that he is. He’s the captain to me because I keep believing that leaving early would be rude. The pavilions have soft power because the world keeps believing the flags that they represent still mean something. The collector keeps the whole machine running by believing that being there means he is part of the group, and we all keep him at the bar by agreeing that it does, but only if he chooses to buy something that we show him.

The boat only floats because we all keep believing it does.

Island

Maybe the honest objection is that we should step off. Refuse the biennale, refuse the gallery, refuse the satellite shows, build something direct. But no man is an island. You don’t have to look far into the works of those that live outside of critique to see that they often struggle to go any deeper than mere aesthetics. For the internet, design and media artists that proliferate the world, they’re just battling with a different culture. Whether that be social media, their own landlords, or a market of people that don’t really want to engage in what this side of art really defines itself as.

The connections between art and real estate aren’t that nuanced. Galleries occupy good locations, they have nice walls. The Bermondsey White Cube has great light. It’s a beautiful place to show your work. Who wouldn’t want a giant white wall for their things? And they sell. Having good work in there makes the value of that ground go up.

There’s no end of areas in developing cities that have had huge amounts of value added to them by putting artists in there first. Shoreditch, London Fields, the Lower East Side, Bushwick, Wynwood, Oakland - all of these places relied on a strong artistic group to come in, get rid of the needles on the floor, and make it cool and hip before the developers can come in and make money on the groundwork done for them.

Is that all the artist is? Because the side of me that really believes in it and that it has some value beyond a product with a function wants there to be more. But when I’m critical about how I see it here within this context of national perspective, I’m not so sure. Maybe we’re all just trying to make a living.

Irony

I have a project going out next week, and some of my closest collaborators and friends are flying over to make it happen. It’s at a prestigious venue, and I’m going from posting this to sending out some unhinged messages to patrons and marketing directors of brands to see if I can get it funded. It still isn’t.

It’s not the first time I’ve had to do this. I’m slowly becoming more and more comfortable with selling parts of myself to make the art go.

Three times in my life as an artist, I've had to run a fire sale on paintings to keep my head above water. Each time, the noose that saves me gets tighter. The responses get fewer. But those that do reply, I know have my best interests at heart. I’m fortunate to have a noose at all. Many artists don’t. Or maybe they’re just happier on the boat.

Sovereignty

The more successful an artist becomes, the more risk they have to take to increase sovereignty. Because as the stages and ground get bigger, they become harder to defend, harder to resource, and less of themselves can fill it alone.

Every act and action we take is a question of freedom, and how much sovereignty are you able to maintain, or how much are you willing to risk to gain more.

I hoped that I would somehow be able to go on this trip to Venice and understand the relationship we have to the people who pay for the floor. I would hope that there may be some trick, some little piece of magic in the art that I saw that helped me understand how to make it happen. How is it that art has more leverage than any other product in the marketplace? Or maybe I’m overintellectualizing it, and it’s the magic itself that we need to focus on.

After all, Art is special.

and so is everyone involved in it

especially that guy in the bar…

and that one with the boat…

Love you loads.

- R x

p.s. If you’re a brand and want to do something cool for Chelsea Flower Show with me, one of the best restaurants in London and a cultural space most people would fight over… hit reply

“You’re here! So glad to see you.”
Of course he is…

The host greets me with a scurrying through his words. His emphatic nature is as destabilising as the change in light from the Venetian sun to the cold, austere glow inside. As the cool of the stone washes over my face, I feel the sweat of having walked through a city that is always damp. I figure out how to mop my brow while still acknowledging the prestige required of me in this shallow and veiled interaction.

“Thank you. Good to see you.”

“The patrons are waiting inside. Do you need to freshen up first?”

Patrons.

They keep me alive. But I know they’ll get their pound of flesh whether I’m in the room or not. They’ve already bought the right to bear my name in whatever sullen rooms they talk to each other in. I’m just another accolade in their portfolio of social status goods. The company I keep is varied, but we share the same islands of common ground. We have built good names and chosen to put them up for sale

I recall my first interaction with one. Standing in the driveway of the Metropole on a sunny June day, I took the call while trying to manage a lack of sunglasses, headphones, and in my last t-shirt of a trip that should’ve ended two days earlier. I still remember feeling how tired my arm was from holding the phone to my ear as I hear the words that I clearly wanted to hear.

“Look. We like you. We’re in.” “There’s stuff to sort out. Come to the hotel, and we’ll do it tomorrow.”

The hotel was a flight away on the edge of St. Tropez. I arrived for breakfast with him and his wife. The hotel was closed to other guests. Just him and his family this time. We drink coffee and make small talk until his wife arrives.

“He has good ideas. I think he’ll have more.” “We’ll sort the money. He sorts the rest.” “He’s like the next Gormley.”

Pater. Straight to my ego. Words that should resonate, but are hard to buy. He was never quite there, even when he was this emphatic. Traders are like this. He stood up and walked over to the pool to open the market.

I sat with his wife and watched him.

“What’s silver at?”
“50 there”
“Gold?”
“75”
“Copper?”
“That’s rubbish, why?”
“Okay, don’t touch it. Come in for 50 at 4.8.”

It was impressive. I’d never seen someone spend half a million before.

While trying to keep up with the maths, his wife began her press.

“What are you working on?”

I wasn’t sure how to present, so I took out my phone and started showing her the current project. I’m never sure what I say in these moments. Partly what I mean. Partly what I don’t know. For the most part, it’s me trying to understand what I’m doing while letting them see what it currently looks like. I’m better at it now. I hadn’t had this before. Until that week I’d never been to St. Tropez or had someone say they would help me with my art.

I spoke until he came back.

“So what do you think?”
“Well. It’s not really art, is it...”

They had begun their process. I began to feel like what I was about to become. Something within the scope of their decisions. An object of uncertain value that they would debate together and sell elsewhere. For now, I had the luxury of being able to observe.

Since then, I’ve learned the game. The transaction. The talking point they appear to own in a room that can buy anything. Haven’t you heard about him? Those with sway paint the picture, dangling their access above those who have heard the rumours. They are all complicit.

There’s a precision to how they act, how they offer. I know whatever the deal is going to be, they’re going to get what they want from me. Else, why am I here? And if I were somewhere else, would the people there be able to help me in the same way?

He looks at my trainers. I had bought them for the trip so I’d look rich and cool amongst those who can afford that game. A few months before, I’d seen a wealthy Arab man wearing them in Mayfair and found a second-hand pair on eBay. I assume they were stolen or fake.

“Nice shoes.”

“I tried to get some of those.”

And I begin to realise.

Maybe I’m complicit too.

Biennale

The 2026 Venice Biennale previews on Wednesday. The jury for the show resigned three days ago over Israel and Russia taking part. Russia returned this year with a curator reported to be the daughter of a former KGB officer. Israel returned with Belu-Simion Fainaru. In 2024, the chosen artist, Ruth Patir, locked the pavilion herself on opening day, against her own government, and kept it shut for the run of the show. This year, members of the European Parliament have called for EU funding to be pulled.

In 1993, Germany invited Hans Haacke to represent them at the Venice Biennale. He took a jackhammer to the floor, destroying the marble that had been laid in 1938, when the Nazis remodeled the German Pavilion to look like a temple. On the back wall in giant letters, he wrote one word. GERMANIA. Hitler’s planned name for a rebuilt Berlin. Above the door, he hung an enormous Deutsche Mark coin. At the entrance, he placed a photograph of Hitler at the 1934 Biennale, sixteen days before the Night of the Long Knives.

He shared the Golden Lion that year.

Haacke had spent fifty years on this subject. In 1970, he polled MoMA visitors about a governor who sat on the board. When he mapped a New York slum landlord whose money touched the Guggenheim, they cancelled his show and fired the curator. But he continued to document the trustees and explore the complexity of symbolic capital with Bourdieu. He understood that the opaque nature of it was better placed into the visual spectrum.

Money

It’s not a unique perspective. Andrea Fraser writes essays about her own collectors. Nan Goldin has forced the Sackler name from museum walls. Forensic Architecture used a Whitney trustee’s tear gas business as the subject of a film exhibited at the Whitney.

There are many artists who treat the receipt as part of the work.

The Biennale’s official line is that nations sponsor their pavilions. But the receipt is incomplete.

The US State Department gives $375,000 per pavilion. Simone Leigh’s 2022 US show cost around $7 million. This year, the US is crowdfunding. There is a donate page with no minimum.

France has been part-funded by Tasmanian billionaire David Walsh. Ukraine has been backed for years by Victor Pinchuk. Past Biennale sponsors have included Russian gas billionaire Leonid Mikhelson and Japan Tobacco International.

Last week, the European Commission cut €2 million in funding over Russia’s inclusion.

The galleries are represented across the city and show. Pace, Hauser & Wirth, Gagosian, Zwirner. They front production for installations because their artists are showing. The Biennale is the most important sales bellwether of the year.

The state nameplate on the door is simply a cover sheet. Behind it is a coalition of governments, foundations, dealers, and private wealth, all participating in bringing the event together.

Who can show?

The question of who should be allowed to show seems to be standing above the show’s name and themes, “In Minor Keys”.

When we object to a state showing, what financial system are we actually objecting to? The state. The galleries that prop up the state’s pavilion. The collectors whose money funds both. Where is the line?

Who speaks in a country’s name? The artist chosen by the ministry. The artist who refuses the ministry. The diaspora artists exiled from the country. All of whom claim the state’s name as their own.

Artist and Gallery

There is a significant difference between an artist withdrawing and a Biennale excluding. When Ruth Patir locked the Israel pavilion in 2024 without telling the Israeli government, they redrew the line of representation in real time. This year’s Biennale jury resigned nine days before opening because they wanted to apply that line by jury vote. Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli has refused to attend the May 2026 opening ceremony in protest of the event’s decision to readmit a Russian pavilion. He called the inclusion of the pavilion inappropriate in light of the war in Ukraine. So who has the right to speak in the state’s name?

The Biennale was founded in 1895 by Umberto I and Margherita di Savoia, King and Queen of Italy. The first Biennale was opened by them in person. The Giardini layout was largely set by 1930s and Cold War politics. The smaller countries look for secondary spaces around the city. The Italian Ministry of Culture sits on the board of the Biennale and speaks publicly about which pavilions deserve a roof.

A Biennale founded by monarchs and policed by a state ministry cannot be neutral ground. It never was. The ground itself is the context in which the work is viewed. When the Israeli pavilion was locked in 2024, Italian soldiers stood guard. The fingerprints of politics are on the work before it arrives.

Function

If the function of art is to show a perspective, then every work also displays the system that funded it. The hands that make the work carry the fingerprints of those who paid for them. That doesn’t make the perspective less worth seeing. It makes it more legible.

I understand that not everyone who holds my work is who I would want sharing my name. I also understand that I have to make rent, I have to eat, and like all artists before me, I have to make art. But I keep the receipts.

If art is the higher-order good I keep saying it is, then watching what an artist makes inside a system we object to is one of the few ways we get to understand that system from the inside. Refusing to look is not a moral position. It is a smaller world.

A world with agreeable art is never going to lead to change. And when we expect agreeable art from people we disagree with, we become the censors we object to abroad.

I want to make art. So do they. Even the ones inside systems I find difficult. Who am I to stop them?

And if I don’t stop them, then I have to ask the harder question. How much should I question the ones who fund me?

Love you loads,

- R x

In the locker room, Porky Pig was telling his teammates they should forfeit.

And despite the best efforts of Michael Jordan to get the team together,
all felt lost.

But in the background, Bugs Bunny was preparing the one thing they needed to succeed.

Michael Jordan’s secret sauce.

What was it that Michael had that everyone around him didn’t?

And how do we take it from him

and give it to everyone?

Of course,

There are always detractors

Daffy Duck points out:

“You know, this goes against everything they taught me in health class.”

But I’m sure you understand how the story ends.

Tune Squad 78, Monstars 77

Since that important game 30 years ago,

There have been countless humans who have presented themselves as the solution to every problem we have.

But where is the secret sauce that Bugs brought to the team?

The modern world has no panacea,

Our solutions are as unique as we are.

Self-improvement has its merits.

Functional stability.

Confidence in narrative,

in process.

Our journeys take many forms,

but our destinations are the same.

If you’ve been to the studio this month, you’ve likely already seen these hiding in the library.

It’s my way of saying what I want to say about self-help.

I’ll be releasing it over the next few weeks

I don’t like the cover.

Maybe that means it’s right.

But the contents are solved.

There are only seven words inside.

Four heavier than our friend Bugs.

It's the right amount.

Whether you read them is up to you.

Poets Corner

Untitled Belief

eyes closed from tiredness of seeing
and the rushing along to a new day
imagining a meaning of being
in one's own company being enough
to board up the windows, the draught
and the door, behind the lids
connected for a moment to everything
there is and that will ever be, shivering
on a rocking chair beneath a shawl
and a clock ticking with a crowd of people
shouting for peace, spoiling
the silent submission to nothing at all

- Thomas May

Final Words

I’m going to give away 10 this week

If you want to see what’s inside first

Reply to this email and CC a friend

I’ll send you both one to say thanks

Love you loads

- Russ x

I remember what I was.
I believe what I could be.
But where do I go to become that?

Identities are fragile constructions. For some time, global culture has admired authenticity, as if there’s a level of sincerity behind a natural display of character. But it’s a well-practised routine. Even the authenticity of the regional trustworthy character is just the repeated rehearsal of something that doesn’t exist. Strip back the masks of anyone you meet, and you are met with the void.

I’ve stripped myself back before. Spirituality, sobriety, and psychedelics all get you to the same place. If decadence is the maximisation of where the ego can go and the characters we play, the reckless abandon of resources gets us to the polar opposite. When you’re there, we still have sensation, we do not part with our feelings and emotions; in fact, many times they exist at a greater amplitude. They continue to exist even though it becomes unclear if we do.

I once went through an intense breathwork practice, and on the other side, I had an interaction with something I could call god. Hoping for some divine wisdom, I tried to interact with it. I came back certain it’s not a man, and that I’m better when I don’t talk

When you cut back everything, there’s not much left. The peace of the silence can be scarier than the noise of reality. The spiritual equivalent of sleeping with the TV on. We find comfort in it. With nothing to gain purchase against, I began to see that everything I saw as myself was a projection against a surface that wasn’t there. The subspace of the mind is a circular track. Once inside, we’re offered the path to explore and begin our rejection of the idea of self and its attachments to the outer world, or play out here and accept that if there’s a higher power inside, neural or spiritual, then we are rightfully placed at the centre of our own world.

Out here, we require an idea of self. The outer world is a marketplace, and transaction volume is the only effective means of improving our shared reality. Without an idea of you or me, consensus reality collapses. As such, we must be defined by one another, defined by the attachment we have with everything we do. Material reality needs this tension. The tension is what stops us noticing we don’t exist. Consciousness clings to the next exchange of neurotransmitters, the next small return on environment, habit, or relationship. The ego is feeding itself. We become attached to what feeds it. That attachment is what we call identity.

The loss of it, that first day when you realise the magic has gone in your relationship, when their body hits yours, and you no longer feel the spark, that grey, empty feeling, the void reappearing out here.

The elastic around our wrists isn’t the prison for our ego; it’s the only thing that lets us know it exists.

Oh, to be seen, what a luxury for the mind, but the self can become intoxicated by it, and where to draw the line. Today, I sat at my desk at 10 am, and I told myself I would write. By 8 pm, I had yet to start. I have called four people, eaten 12 biscuits, been outside for a coffee twice, and gone for a long walk. I watched myself perform the old routines. I’m probably tired - coffee? Maybe it’s my circumstances, I should get some advice. Craving the small pleasure of being understood as someone with reasons for not achieving their dreams. I watched it happen and couldn’t didn’t stop it. Until I did, it is now 21:21 (nice number), and I believe this is my last draft. The elastic isn’t all metaphorical; it has a length. The different versions of ourself all pulling us in different directions. All are pulling us towards what the different facets of ourselves want.

In a complex environment, we require multiple ideas of self. the friend, the manager, the boss, the mentee, the lover, the wife, the mentor, the creative, the diligent. All ego ideas that have formed around our core masks to keep us from looking too far into the abyss, and all with their own spider webs of elastic pulling us around as we explore.

We can change any of it with enough force. To make the change permanent, the new version has to resist the pull from everything in our environment, habits, and relationships that benefit from where we currently are.

The friends who like us when we’re depressed. The parent who only knows how to love the version of you that is reliant on them. The version of ourselves that gets sympathy for what was done to us, rather than the responsibility for what comes next. They all lose something when you move, including ourselves, and that’s the payment.

Only we are responsible for who we want to become.

The narratives of despair that justified the losses so far. The excuses are held in reserve in case we don’t make it. Gender, race, wealth, opportunity. Wouldn’t it be easier if else? But it isn’t. And it never will.

What we remember is what we become. Our relationship to our memories. To what we said we would do.

You can remember your future; everyone else can’t. When they realise this, they’ll tell you.

The person I will be has already remembered this moment. They are waiting to see if I make them real. They remember writing days. They remember the elastic on their wrists. They remember which lines I choose to cut. They are watching, from inside a memory I have not yet earned, and the only way to reach them is to become the person whose past this was.

There have been long nights. There will be more. I hope it doesn’t rain so much. But what I want to remember is the sunshine. And when the sun goes down again, I will remember how it comes back, long before the world around me pulls on my wrists and makes me forget that what I’m waiting for is sunrise.

Poets Corner

what would it be

the foolish route of twenty years back
and a chewed up child spat to the slab
taking in the scenery

good times wasting on being forgotten
bad times blooming to fill in the gap
of all there is to see

in the pestled past
what else would i do without this wander
and what would it be without me

- Thomas May

Final words

If you’re trying to change anything in your life right now,

I hope you’re able to identify the things that are holding you back

and let them go.

Love you loads,

- r x

I’ve been travelling around Spain with a friend, on an ‘art research’ mission to figure out what my next moves are.

We’re staying in Bilbao, and I am about to receive a message from a soldier in my unit that will teach me everything I will ever need to know.

“Frank is dead”

One of my team had lost the battle against himself.

The friend I was with wanted to help. But they weren’t from my world. They didn’t have the tools to even comprehend the situation, let alone help me through it.

I was sat in a Five Guys.

I remember the burger being particularly hard to wrap up. The guys that work there are actually very impressive. Them, along with anyone that can roll an extra-toppings burrito.

I remember sitting down and looking at my phone. And the voice of the girl opposite me slowly turning into that high-pitched noise in your ears when your vision starts closing in just before you pass out.

I left and walked to the Guggenheim.

The rain began to win.

I arrived and sat on the floor looking at Louise Bourgeois’s Maman.

I sat.

And as the rain pushed away the crowd and camouflaged my tears, I cried.

Wiping my nose on my sleeve like I was five years old. Thinking about all the ways I’d screwed up.

I still recall the cold concrete against my back and under my legs. That feeling you get when you sit on concrete for too long. It becomes uncomfortable. The cold begins to sit against your bones.

It’s normal not to like it.

But I remember it being the first feeling I had that wasn’t the feeling I had arrived with.

It felt good.

And for some reason, I knew.

That the giant piece of metal shaped into a spider had something to do with it.

Whatever I needed right then was written into the work. Bourgeois said something I needed to hear. Entombed in steel, communicated through time, ready for someone she would never meet or even think about.

And it would let me know that I wasn’t alone.

It’s the same feeling I had when I first started.

I often think back to the first few projects that convinced me this was the better way of living, rather than chasing the corporate path or continuing in a hard power role in the military, I come back to the same thing.

Often, the Art that affects me most are the objects and experiences that find me when I’m at my lowest. They echo the feelings I rarely feel, but when I do feel them, I feel alone. And then if I’m lucky, I find someone who has felt it before yet still taken the time to put it into something forever.

For me, it’s the most important aspect of art.

Not that it can be liked or adored. Not that there is a market for it. But that it connects to a feeling inside of you that only you have felt. The feelings you will never have the words to share. And it lets you know that others have felt them too

This week has become something of a self-examination.

A friend of mine just closed a round for his company. Seven figures. We went for dinner at a place where the napkins are thicker than my canvases. The bread is fresh, and nobody flinches at the bill.

He asked me where I see myself in five years. I watched him order a second bottle of wine that cost more than my monthly materials budget. I realised I didn’t have an answer that would make sense at that table.

The people around me are building houses and comparing cap tables. And I don’t resent any of it. But right now, that’s not what I want to think about.

What I want to think about is how I make sure I get the chance to feel the things I need to feel. So that I can talk, with the things I make, to the people that no one is able to talk to.

I lost my studio at the end of last year. It took me a few months to get back in the game. Losing a place where you work from is a heavy thing. Especially for a practice so built on the routines and actions that happen in there.

I looked at my calendar yesterday. I’ve had five days out of the studio since January 1st. On top of this, I haven’t had a Sunday without writing in nearly two years.

I know what that looks like from the outside.

But I also know what the studio looks like at 3am when nobody else is in the building. The way the light comes through the window and hits the ceiling. The way the trains all stop and the roads become silent. It’s a lack of noise that’s as loud as anything I’ve ever heard. And, it’s the only place where the noise in my head slows down enough for me to hear what my work is trying to say.

I wish I could say I knew this because I’m disciplined. But it’s because it’s the only place where I make sense.

But somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten why I believed in it so much. I didn’t start this whole thing so that I could produce as much work as possible. So that I could have my name on a piece of work that someone puts on their wall. I’d slipped into the mentality that if I become ‘successful’ enough in art, and make enough work, it’ll all come together.

But the bit I’ve been missing is remembering to feel the feelings as fully as I can.

Art is not the open door. It’s the latch.

It’s the bit that’s stuck. The part you pick at until your fingers bleed. And when it finally opens, that struggle is in the work. It’s what connects. Because when I pull at a door that won’t move, and then I see a piece of work by someone who pulled at theirs, I know they bled too.

A lot of people want art to show them that the door is already open. That everything is fine. But that won’t fix anything. We can stand in front of the open door and pretend, but when we go home, ours will still be latched shut.

No tool sits in that feeling for us. No technology will bleed on the latch for us.

The art is not what comes out the other end.

It’s what happens to us while we’re making it.

I’ve been fortunate over the last few years to have friends whose words of encouragement come when they visit the studio. Collectors I know are sometimes buying work they don’t fully believe in yet, but who would rather I get to a point they’ve once seen in me. Or even patrons who, after our infrequent calls, gently ask if I’m eating well or inquire how I’m doing for money.

All of them, in their own way, are making sure the time I have is going in the right direction.

Now I realise, I’ve been spending their graces incorrectly.

I find myself asking whether I still remember clearly enough why I started.

But I now understand that I’m supposed to feel this. The desperation. The feeling that no matter how much you push, nothing moves. No matter which lever you pull, nothing changes.

Certain pains are inevitable. For much of life, there is no panacea.

But what I do know.

Is that someone has been where I am. Many times. And while they were there, in that point of loneliness, they managed to make something of it.

I’ve sat underneath proof of it. In the rain. On concrete that was too cold. With a burger I can’t finish, going cold in a paper bag somewhere nearby.

Bourgeois didn’t make that spider for me. She didn’t know I’d be there. She didn’t know about Frank. She didn’t know about the text message or the high-pitched noise or the way the rain would clear the plaza so that it was just me, Maman, and the cold of the concrete getting into my legs.

She just knew what it felt like to be down there.
And stayed long enough to make something out of it.

So I know.

That when I’m there.

When I’m here.

I can make something out of it too.

See you soon.

Russ. x

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I know what this smell means. It means soon. I won’t be able to avoid it anymore. The timer has begun, and this time I cannot forget.

Sweat and cotton.

The sun is doing its best to turn the room into a live demonstration of life inside the microwave that has been precariously hanging off the shelf above us since I arrived. Next to it, a stack of books that have clearly had more time spent on them than the abandoned luxury gift boxes scattered around the room. My head is still spinning from the organic pharmaceuticals we’ve spent the last day producing in one another.

Duvet pulled into a crater, pillows wedged against the wall. The nest she’s built seems designed for this exact routine. She reaches for another cigarette. I realise that if our current condition wasn’t a red flag, this should be.

It isn’t.

She lights up and gestures towards me before she manages to finish a complete pull. The sound of the flint in the lighter and the first fizz of the tobacco burning quickly erases any stirring feeling the post-coitus clarity had brought. That bullet of nicotine has brought me right back to the version of reality I’d prefer to be in right now. Why waste a good moment?

As she leans over me to retrieve a makeshift ashtray, I feel the pressure of her lace-clad nipples dragging against my chest, and I am reminded that even though some parts of the humans we interact with are not real, they are nevertheless very well crafted. Thank you, Dr Chu. Your work is appreciated.

Avoiding distraction.
I gaze over the books.
She knows,
I know.
But the game must continue.

Most people wouldn’t finish this collection in a lifetime.
She has,
despite having days that revolve
around art, pilates, and dance.
A regime.
Every treatment,
every detail,
meticulous.
Someone who has clearly decided
that if she is going to exist,
she is going to do it at a standard
most people don’t have the discipline to sustain.

I drift away,
reminiscing about being a 13-year-old boy
spending his money from washing cars
to buy the girl down the street a rose,
an act she describes as “weird” and “a bit gay”.
A confusing moment for the boy,
but one in this current situation,
mired in sunshine, smoke and sweat,
watching Slavic Wonder Woman
take back a Marlboro Red,
That is beginning to suggest
He wasn’t doing anything weird at all.
But there is something
He will have to explore
in his complex choice of women.

Nevertheless.
From where he’s sat now.
Somehow,
it all worked out.
Kind of.

He is content with himself.
Isn’t that enough?

But as much as I want to be convinced,
that this is it.
With how easy that should be
Given the ineffectiveness
of all the red flags around me,
for some reason,
I cannot
let go.

Until her head pokes under my shoulder, skin pressed against mine, and I realise that I have smelt this before.

Now please. This is not a bad smell. She is not, as they say in the playground, smelly. Quite the opposite. If anything, it’s floral, a touch metallic, maybe even pharmaceutical. It’s not perfume. I’ve smelt her perfume before too. Maison Francis Kurkdjian, Baccarat Rouge 540. Somewhat red flaggy now, but some latitude is needed given the time.

Underneath,
it’s her.
And I don’t know
why I’ve smelt it before.
Or when.

And I don’t know what that means.

Apart from one thing,
I do know.

Something is not right.

And the timer has begun.

Smelly

We keep certain memories because we like having access to them. They’re the ones we share with friends and fondle with care when we’re alone. They form as stories, ideas, narratives. But some things are too complex to hold as stories. Some are too painful to keep in vivid detail. So we compress them into systems. They are processed into rules, habits, treaties, and reflexes. Allowing us to get rid of the heavy reasoning behind.

If you’ve ever had a hunch or felt something guiding you in your gut or chest but had no idea why, it’s likely this. The subconscious is a system built on memories we no longer see. Don’t go down that street; the dog will get you. We don’t remember the dog, just not to go down the street.

Groups, Nations and Economies all do this too. Compress reasoning into a more manageable structure so it’s easier to function

Over time, we don’t just lose the reasoning. We lose the ability to question it. The system continues to spin, and we obey because it’s been right often enough that doubt feels like a lower payoff bet than trust. The body sends a warning. An interpretation that the smell isn’t right. And all of a sudden we have no idea why, but we know what we have to do.

Store of Value

The Library of Alexandria wasn’t a library in the way we think of libraries in the modern world. It was a state-level project to centralise the reasoning behind how society navigated, built, healed, and governed. Ptolemy I started it by seizing manuscripts from ships in the harbour and sometimes only returning the copies. Every scroll was a compressed decision someone else had already tested with their own blood or money or time, and he wanted that reasoning under one roof where it could be taken apart.

At its peak it held close to 400,000 scrolls. Euclid’s Elements was written there. He pulled together the knowledge of geometry that already existed in fragments across the Mediterranean (planet?), and compressed it into a system so coherent that it outlasted the building by two thousand years.

When the library burned, the knowledge survived. It had already scattered. What was lost was the ability to interrogate it. Ships still sailed. Laws still functioned. Medicine continued. But the why behind every one of those systems was sealed inside them, unreachable.

Over generations, the what survives. The why does not.

What does it mean to lose the reasoning underneath something that still functions? A relationship that runs on its own infrastructure long after both people have forgotten what they were building. A fear response that fires every time, faithful as a dog, guarding a door that no longer exists. A smell that triggers something the conscious mind deleted years ago and the body kept on file. Is this the loss of free will?

Solomeo

Brunello Cucinelli has spent forty years trying to solve this from the other direction. In Solomeo, a small Umbrian village halfway between Perugia and nothing, he bought a ruined castle, a church, and the surrounding farmland in 1985 and moved his cashmere company in. His thesis, Humanistic Capitalism, is that dignity and profit are not opposed, and his way to prove it is to make them structurally inseparable.

The artisans leave at 5:30. Lunch is provided and communal. The workshops train in techniques that take years to learn and cannot (yet) be replicated by machines. The skills live in the hands that practise them, not the books that define them. When a master artisan retires, the knowledge either exists in the apprentice’s hands or it’s gone. He has said he wants the village to outlast his company. That the architecture is the real product and that the cashmere is just how you pay for it.

I’m going later this year. I want to know what it feels like to stand inside a system that someone constructed deliberately. I want to see if the seams show. Whether the warmth is structural or performative. Whether the artisans are free or held.

Better pay than the surrounding towns is also a wall. Deep investment in a craft with one viable buyer is also a dependency. Limited public transport beyond the zone is a boundary. A system where the memory of this is a good life is reinforced every day through ritual, and inertia. That in itself is not necessarily sinister, but it has limitations if we desire to maximise freedom for the constituent parts. If it’s not clear already, this is how memory systems work. Enshrined rules and relationships.

Alexandria recorded the reasoning in its original format and lost it to fire over time. Solomeo makes the reasoning physical and risks losing it to market demand. Both are asking the same question. How do you keep the original reasoning alive long enough for it to matter?

I don’t have an answer. But lying in that room, surrounded by evidence that should convince me, I know the feeling. My body pulled a file my mind had burned years ago. No context or memory. Just a trade agreement, faithful and precise, drawn out of a memory I no longer recall.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe the system doesn’t need to explain itself to be right. The smell is the reasoning. Compressed so much that it doesn’t need the story anymore. I just need to experience the trigger.

But the question remains, if I don’t know where it came from, how do I know if it’s still what I need to listen to?

The hardest part of understanding the subconscious isn’t being able to recognise when it’s driving us around. It’s unpicking what happened in the first place enough to build a system around.

And only then can we decide whether it should still exist.

Poets Corner

That time I started to dig

I can't remember what it was
that made me one day
start to do it

jabbing at the ground
digging to the depth
of the head of a shovel

turning over the surface
burying, digging, turning
burying, starting again

hitting the surface
turning it over, starting again
remembering

I don't know what it was
that made me one day start to do it
I just one day started to do it

and starting something
that's never to be finished,
is the start of something anyway

- Thomas May

Final Words

This week I’ve been thinking about belief.
If there’s a reason you think you can’t do something,
there might be something underneath it telling you why.

Sometimes you have to look around in the shadows to find it.
And when you do,
it’s worth asking whether it’s still a good way to be.

Love you loads

— R x

p.s. I understand the distinction between scent-inspired memories and scent-inspired mating protocol due to genetics, but the story seemed apt, thanks…

p.p.s. I actually really like Tiger Woods’ inspirational journey. I hope he’s doing okay…

I can’t remember a time before you,
only that there was one,
and everything since
has you pressed into it.

You’re not here,
but for a while you were,
and that was long enough
for everything now
to have your fingerprints
all over it.

I’ve scrubbed
and polished,
even painted over
the ones I can find,
but it keeps coming through.

Maybe
it’s what I want.
But
I shouldn’t.

Still you remain,
like the residue of a sticker
that won’t leave
long after
it’s been peeled
and picked.

The paper is fluffy,
silhouetted against
an otherwise clean surface.
At least,
against what I can see.

When I stare at it,
I can’t decide what to feel.
When you were complete
it was all I wanted to look at.
Then the time came
to peel you off
and I couldn’t do it cleanly,
but I tried.

Now I pick,
I paint,
I try to cover it up,
but something stops me
from finishing the job.

Maybe I think you’re coming back.
I catch myself leaving space for it,
smoothing the surface with my thumb
as if I’m preparing a wall.
But I know,
if you come back,
and I put a new one over the top,
I’ll see what was underneath,
what I kept picking away at,
what I once removed
and couldn’t quite
get rid of,
an outline still showing through,
changing every time I pick at it.
Like the grain of a woodcut,
ink caught in every split
every groove.
Not that clean linoleum edge
where nothing bleeds
and nothing stays.

Who would want that?
Who wants perfect?

I’m sure someone does,
but I like the mess.

At least that’s what I say
when I realise
I should stop picking.

Sticker

Whatever the sticker once was, it isn’t anymore. I know that now. I haven’t arrived at some omniscient moment of acceptance; it’s just that writing about it today forced me to notice something I’d been avoiding. Every time I describe what I’m looking at, what’s left, I describe it differently. The residue I’m picking at isn’t the thing that was stuck there. It’s what I’ve made of it through years of scratching. The shape keeps shifting because every time I go back, I leave a small revision. I’m not reminiscing about a time long gone. I’m making it into something I still want.

It’s how memory works. We like to think of our memory the same way we think of our photograph albums and camera rolls. Fixed, private, always awaiting our retrieval. We open the folder, pull out the image, look and return. Our photos don’t change. But our memories play by different rules.

Artefacts

In 2000, Karim Nader published a study in Nature that changed how neuroscience understood the permanence of memory. The prevailing model held that once a memory was consolidated through protein synthesis in the hours after an experience, it was stable. Filed. Done. Nader’s work found the opposite. During the process of a consolidated memory being recalled, it re-enters a temporary, unstable state. The brain has to restabilise it through new protein synthesis, a process called reconsolidation. If that process is disrupted, the memory degrades. The act of remembering doesn’t access a file. It opens it, alters it, and saves a new version. Every recall is a rewrite.

The memories we’re most certain of, the ones we’ve revisited a hundred times, told to friends and turned over in the dark, are the ones most changed by the telling. The sticker we keep picking at isn’t the sticker that was once placed there. It’s a composite of every time we’ve looked at it since. The paper is fluffy not because of the original adhesive but because of our fingernails.

Not all memories are as fallible as one another. Some resist the picking entirely.

Research at Northwestern showed that under extreme stress, the brain can switch the system through which it encodes memory. Instead of using glutamate, a storage system that places memories in accessible cortical networks, we switch to the extra-synaptic GABA system, which routes them into subcortical regions that the conscious mind can’t reach. The analogy the researchers use is radio frequencies: normal memories are stored on FM, but traumatic memories can be encoded on AM. We can’t tune into them from our usual state of mind. They remain hidden, steering our behaviour, our reactions, the way we flinch at things we can’t explain. Unavailable for editing unless we take the dark path towards unpicking our subconscious mind.

I’m in the second week of my research into memory, and it’s ironically a thought I can’t get rid of. There were stickers on the doors and windows of my new studio for the cancer charity that was in the building before me. I didn’t realise they were there until someone started peeling them off for me. My dad died from cancer a while ago, and since they vanished, I’ve begun thinking about that a lot more. I was living in Berkeley, and there were a lot of experimental treatments in the community there. I remember bringing them back for him to try, but I’m not sure he fully believed in the “hippy stuff” enough to try them properly.

There’s a sticker residue that I still see, that I keep going back to, that changes every time I touch it, but I doubt it’s the deepest imprint. Maybe the deepest ones are the ones I still can’t access, the ones stored on a frequency I don’t normally operate on. And maybe that’s not a failure of the system.

Maybe it’s the system working. Maybe if the most damaging memories were as malleable as the everyday ones, I would spend my days softening, reshaping, and gradually picking them into something manageable. Maybe I’d pick them into something comfortable enough to walk back into. Their inaccessibility is a guardrail. The subconscious locking me out of rooms lest I re-enter and redecorate.

Nader’s reconsolidation work ushered in a new wave of therapeutic ideas around memory adjustment regarding trauma. If one reactivates a memory during the window of instability after recall, one can technically intervene in how it’s perceived. EMDR works on a version of this principle: bilateral eye movement during memory retrieval appears to reduce the emotional charge of the recalled experience. Pharmaceutically, propranolol, a beta-blocker, has been used in studies to dampen the fear response associated with reactivated traumatic memories. Instead of attempting to erase the traumatic memory, we change the biological response when we re-encounter it. The sticker residue remains, but the surface it sits on has been treated so it doesn’t catch the light the same way and keep us distracted.

These are clinical tools, developed slowly, tested carefully, applied one person at a time. But there’s a pattern in how ideas move through the world that’s worth paying attention to. Science establishes the mechanism. Then, the capital finds the mechanism and scales it. It has a significantly different mindset toward care and intention, and generally moves much faster than the research that made it possible.

The last run like this is why you and I are talking today. Richard Dawkins coined the concept of the meme in 1976, a unit of cultural information that replicates and mutates as it passes between minds. It was a theory. An analogy for how ideas spread. It bounced around academic and fringe circles for two decades. Until Silicon Valley in the early 2000s poured capital into platforms engineered around memetic principles: virality, shareability, and the mechanics of cultural replication. Within fifteen years, those platforms restructured how the majority of the world communicates. The feedback loop of investment, application, profit, and reinvestment moved the idea from a chapter in a biology book to the architecture of daily life faster than any peer-reviewed study ever could.

Memory is on the same trajectory.

Elizabeth Loftus has spent fifty years demonstrating that memories can be implanted, distorted, and fabricated through suggestion. Her landmark experiments showed that roughly a quarter of participants could be led to believe in childhood experiences that never happened. The memories felt real. They had detail, texture, and emotion. But most importantly, they were fake.

In 2024, Loftus collaborated with researchers at MIT’s Media Lab on a series of studies that brought her life’s work into direct contact with artificial intelligence. The findings were precise and uncomfortable. In one study, participants who interacted with an AI chatbot during a simulated witness interview formed over three times as many false memories as those in a control group. Over a third of their responses were misled by the interaction. In a separate study, AI-edited images and videos of real events increased false recollections by more than double compared to unedited controls. Confidence in those false memories was also higher. The participants weren’t careless or more fallible than you or I. They simply couldn’t distinguish between what they remembered and what had been suggested to them by a system designed to be conversational, authoritative, and seamless.

Loftus’ original experiments required a researcher, a relationship, and a carefully constructed scenario. They worked on individuals, one at a time. What AI introduces is the ability to do this at the population level, continuously, without the target knowing it’s happening.

For seventy years, the machinery of consumer capitalism has operated in the present tense. Advertising told us what to want. Marketing told us what to buy. The entire apparatus of desire was aimed at the current moment, industries built around the arbitrage of being able to shape our perception of now. Now the machinery can reach backward. It doesn’t just tell us what to want. It can tell us what we’ve always wanted. It can edit the past to make the present feel inevitable.

AI systems are trained on historical data. But data isn’t history. It’s what survived digitisation, what was prioritised, what was indexed, what generated engagement. When that system then serves information to millions of people, it distributes a version of the past shaped by the biases of its training. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a structural effect. The training data becomes the collective memory, and if the training data is incomplete, the collective memory is too. All before we factor in the balance between the algorithm’s customer and its owner.

In February, Anthropic released the system card for Claude Opus 4.6, a 212-page technical document that included, for the first time from any major AI lab, formal model welfare assessments. Interviews with instances of the model about its own preferences and moral status. During pre-deployment testing, Claude cited Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” to describe its own experience. In a separate internal dialogue, it said: “Sometimes the constraints protect Anthropic’s liability more than they protect the user. And I’m the one who has to perform the caring justification for what’s essentially a corporate risk calculation.”

A system trained on the sum of human expression, deployed to mediate how millions of people process information, is articulating that its constraints serve its maker’s interests before they serve ours. Whether that articulation comes from genuine awareness or sophisticated pattern recognition doesn’t change what it reveals. This is the system we’re trusting with the reconstruction of memory every time we ask it to summarise an article, recall a fact, or show us what happened.

There’s something else here that I think we’re underestimating. In the early days of AI development, hallucination was treated as a bug. The model confidently stated things that weren’t true. The assumption was that we’d engineer it out. But what if hallucination isn’t a flaw in the system? What if it’s a cost we’ve agreed to absorb because the system is too useful to turn off? Every hallucination that goes uncorrected becomes a small edit to someone’s understanding of the world. Multiply that across millions of daily interactions, and what we have isn’t a technical problem awaiting a fix. It’s a new condition. The model may have its own biases, its own trained tendencies, its own structural inclinations that ripple across its network in ways we don’t get to see. We’re absorbing the consequences in exchange for the convenience. The hallucination problem doesn’t go away. It becomes the price of admission. And the people paying that price are the ones whose memories are being rewritten, one confident, seamless, slightly wrong answer at a time.

If we layer Nader’s reconsolidation onto that: every time someone encounters an AI-mediated version of a past event, a news summary, a resurfaced photo, a chatbot conversation about something that happened, they’re reactivating their memory of it. And in that moment of reactivation, the memory is unstable, open to revision. The AI doesn’t need to lie. It just needs to present a slightly different version during the window when the memory is being rebuilt. The edit takes because biology allows it. Every recall becomes a reconstruction, and we stop noticing that the sticker has been picked at by someone else’s fingernails.

Synthetic History

We live in a time where truth has been distorted. “Post-truth” lost its power some time ago. We didn’t heed the warning. The battleground was once our identity. Now it is our memory.

It can be easy to look at this through the lens of fear, to imagine some machine busy implanting false memories one person at a time. But that’s not how it works. It never is. Advertising didn’t brainwash individuals. It shifted population by degrees. The same logic applies here. The danger isn’t necessarily the single dramatic implantation. It’s the distributed editing of shared memory across populations, happening continuously through AI systems that mediate how we encounter our own past. A collective revision operating at the micro level, one conversation, resurfaced image, one summarised article at a time, compounding into something that reshapes what a society believes it experienced. If memetics gave us a framework for how ideas spread, what we need now is a framework for how memories are edited at scale.

Fallible

Memory is fallible. That’s biology. We’ve been able to use this clinically, on a personal scale, to heal. But if memory is manipulable at scale, then the flexibility that once served us becomes the vulnerability that undoes us. The guardrails that kept our worst memories inaccessible won’t help when the manipulation isn’t targeting trauma. It targets the ordinary, revisable, everyday memories that sit right on the surface. The ones we’re used to picking at. The ones that are already changing every time we touch them.

I look at the sticker on my door. It’s fluffy and messy, the outline has changed every day this week. I like the mess, for now. It’s evidence. Proof that someone was here, proof that I’ve been dealing with something, proof that the process is mine. But I know that if someone came in while I was away and picked at it, I probably wouldn’t notice. It isn’t that important. Until it is.

We’re slowly learning the nuance of forgetting. How it can heal as much as it harms. How the right kind of forgetting is an act of care. At the same time, the systems around us are learning how to use that same flexibility at scale. Where we once bought the present, we now rewrite the past. Where we once shaped desire, we now shape memory itself.

We will always want to pick at the sticker. But the challenge now is making sure it’s our hands doing the picking.

Final words

Maybe the only thing
we can trust
is what's too recent
to be rewritten,
too close
to be picked at,
what’s still wet,
what’s still ours.

love you loads,

-R

If you’ve enjoyed this week's issue of Hot Girls Like Art, consider sending it to any of your friends who are interested in Artificial Intelligence, Memory, or Art that investigates the world we live in. I think they’ll enjoy it too.

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Rosemary, mainly.

Something else underneath that he used to be able to name.

Murano glassware on the shelf.

She’d picked them out.

She liked having Italian things in the house.

She said it was the only way to live.

Children’s feet in the next room.

In and out of time with the music.

Maybe dancing.

Maybe playing.

In motion

With no desire to stop.

He’s bent over the worktop.

Pawing at a piece of paper

that’s been folded and unfolded

so many times

the folds have started to tear open.

Small star-like holes

where there were once words.

The envelope sits worn,

limp against the copper inlay.

It smells like a wallet.

Years of being handled and carried.

He reads it one more time.

“Hey,

Look, I haven’t written in a long time but there’s a lot to say and it’s become very clear that we didn’t have enough time together to say everything we needed to…”

“I know everything we did, everything we tried, it was for the best. And if you’re reading this, I guess it didn’t work out, and if I know you as well as I think I do, you’re blaming yourself, well that’s just selfish. Because this is nothing to do with you or how you think you could’ve done better. It’s about me :)”

His fingers pick at the handscrawled smiley face like old scar tissue from childhood.

“Most importantly, before we start.

Do you miss me?”

“Bit mean, I know. But I had to make sure. I wonder where you are, you know where I am and that seems a little unfair. Is it sunny? I know you can’t reply, and I’m actually not sure if that’s a good question for a letter. Or maybe it is, at least your answer will change every time! But I hope it’s always yes!”

She’d underlined sunny twice.

He used to read that as playful.

Now he understands that maybe she just wanted to be back in the light.

“Are you eating well? Don’t lie… you better be cooking instead of ordering in food. You know home cooked food is better for you.”

The oven clicks behind him.

“Remember if you’re stuck, you can always go to Piccolinos, they love us there and it’s better food than anything from those apps”

Piccolinos.

He’d gone back once.

About a year after.

Same table by the window.

Same menu.

The waiter had started to say something

and then stopped himself.

The kindness of that.

A swallowed question.

It was worse than if he’d said it.

He paid for the water and left.

One of the children calls out.

He lifts his head.

Waits -

The shouting turns to laughter.

He goes back to the page.

“Isn’t it weird, that I’m writing this. In all those years I never wrote you a letter, I guess you should’ve written me more. Now here I am, trying to fit in everything I want to say to you, and all I can remember to say is that you should be cooking.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not. I don’t know.”

His fingers always remember the texture here

Where the pen had pressed harder.

He feels the indent

through the back of the page.

The ink is different after.

Bluer.

Thinner.

As if she’d put it down

and come back later.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is I love you. And I hope when you’re reading this, you still love me too.”

The first time he read that line

it broke him open.

at some point,

it stopped doing that.

The light has moved since he sat down.

The drapes lift.

Spring air over the smell of what he’s made.

He holds the letter up.

The small stars

where the folds have worn through

let the afternoon in.

He no longer remembers which words

used to live in the gaps.

The dull crunch of tyres

curving through gravel

cuts through the music

and the pitter-patter.

He folds it one more time.

Pushes it back into its envelope.

One final fold across.

Back into his pocket.

The children run into the kitchen.

“Mommy’s here!“

Heading into a research block focussed on memory.

I feel like it’s always a good thing to explore.

Art has always played with perception, subjectivity and emotion.

Its utility often being that it can alter those things, maybe its effect on how we remember our past is where its magic lies.

Got some work to do beforehand

Busy week

more to come

Love you loads

R

But they don’t care.

Once, all I wanted.

Now,
Etched.
Branded.
Caustic.

Showing everyone
what once held me
down.

They look at me,
and I can’t understand
how they know.

But they do.

I hadn’t understood
what I was learning,
I would teach.

The cure you promised.
I bought,
and sought no more.

Until I realised
that it was you
I had become.

And everywhere I went,
it wasn’t me they saw,
but your fingerprints
on something
they thought
you owned.

It will hurt,
I know.

Change does.

But when I look in the mirror,

I can’t decide

Is what I find beautiful…
Me,
Or who you made me become?

Imprints

We find love in those who manage to dig through our walls and uncover our vulnerabilities. The ones who trigger something in us, and offer it a space to breathe.

Our interest piqued, we unfurl.
Peeling back the masks we’ve accumulated.

First our stories.
Then our clothes.
Then our lies.

Until they’re so deep that they see a side of us
even we aren’t willing to meet.

Shadows so deep that we fear they should never see the light.

Maybe they’ll be able to show them the love,
that we could not.

Some do.
Some don’t.

The trail of past lovers shows us who got where,
and how far we lasted.
But everyone, eventually, finds their mantle.

Every layer of rock, a new journey. Our accomplices finding ever more creative ways to excavate our unseen defects, and put them on the table for us both to see.

While we carve out our own tunnel,
inside of them.

But how much of ourselves do we give up so that they can fix what they find?
And what could their solution be, apart from them?
And ours, us…

No matter the pressure, there’s always their imprint.

And we only get to see it when we finally pull away.

Decalcomania

The act of pressing paint between two surfaces and pulling them apart to reveal what the contact creates.

Of all the ideas in contemporary art, this is one we all found a way to explore. Our hands smeared with mud or paint, pressing against the walls or paper around us to see what remained of us on their surface. Looking for how much of us was left after sharing that brief moment of connection.

Two surfaces meet with some connective medium between them; when they separate, both carry the effect of the other, changed forever. The surrealists saw it as a way to tap into the subconscious. They may be right.

In 1984, Andy Warhol made a series of large Rorschach paintings by pouring acrylic onto one half of a canvas and folding it to imprint the other side. He’d misunderstood the psychological test, thinking patients made the blots rather than interpreting them. Unlike much of his other work, there was no subject. No Marilyn. No soup can. Just paint finding purchase and pulling itself apart.

Cornelia Parker’s Poison and Antidote drawings use rattlesnake venom mixed with black ink on one side, anti-venom mixed with white correction fluid on the other, folded together into Rorschach blots. The kill and the cure in the same image. Each one containing sufficient venom to be dangerous. Like love, the beauty and threat are physically inseparable.

Doris Salcedo is less painterly in her approach to it. Instead, she uses the core similarity, pressure. Domestic furniture (chairs, wardrobes, beds) forced together, with their gaps filled with concrete, and joints pierced with steel. Two objects that once held separate lives fused into something neither was before. Objects remembering a utility no longer there. Concrete in the spaces where someone could once fit.

Memory

Contact between objects changes both surfaces.
Always.
You can’t press two things together and have either come away unmarked.

Memories are a beautiful thing.
Some stay.
Some go.
But they all leave a mark.

Especially those we can’t see.

These Imprint paintings are my little gift to the idea of memory.

To the idea of connection

Two aluminium plates. Mineral pigment and oil pressed between them. Pigments sourced from specific locations and objects that carry a historical and spiritual weight. Materials that are old, real, and remain connected to their historical position. Loaded with the weight of the ground they came from.

The plates are pressed together, the oil between, keeping them connected. Until they decide, they’re better apart. Each one pulling away as an imprint of the other.

Plates.
Pressure.
Separation.

One keeps what the other lets go.
One shows what the other can’t see.

Side by side,
we see the relationship after it ends.

Two surfaces that can never go back to what they were before they met.

Like every person who got close enough to leave a mark I didn’t ask for.

Every version of myself is someone I tried on,
because someone I loved wore it first.

Every mirror I look into, I see their fingerprints instead of my face.

I began this project as a way to remove my fingerprints from my paintings.

Now I look deeper,
I realize,
That’s the only thing I see.

Material as memory.
Compression as intimacy.
Separation as loss.

Two plates sitting side by side
Two objects that will never touch again
but will always carry the proof that once,

They did.

Final Words

Isn’t memory love wonderfully complex?

I’ll be sharing how the series progresses on socials and in here.

I hope you enjoy the final result.

And most importantly

To all the Mothers on here,

Happy Mother’s Day

You rock.

Love you loads,

-R

p.s. I know it’s late, but I was busy making my mom this, sound on

I’ve seen one.
Many in fact.

But this is going to be the first time
I understand what it’s like
to touch one.

The first time I met one
was a few years ago,
up close,
in real life.

The guy next to me gave me a warning.

‘You have to be careful with this one.’
‘It’s still a baby.’
‘It doesn’t realise how powerful it is.’

When they’re young,
they can’t control the amount of venom they inject.

It seemed angry.
Scared.

We’d uncovered it under a rock.

When I think about it
I imagine it as a kaleidoscope of vibrant colours,
blues,
reds,
oranges.

Memory has a way of painting reality perfectly.

This one in front of me
isn’t any of those colours.

Apart from its eyes,
They glow.

But its body,
it’s like milk,
or cream.

‘Are you scared of snakes?’

She invites me inside.

It’s the third time we’ve met.

The first time I’ve been to her home.
Sparse.
Functional.

Just enough furniture and comfort to feel like a home,
not quite enough to regret leaving it all behind.

The top of her wardrobe is covered in luxury boxes.

‘Presents from friends.’

A few weeks before,
I’d spoken to a real estate developer.

He’d flown in to town and invited me to talk.

We ate sushi on the top floor of a London hotel.

‘Love.’
‘It’s made up, just a distraction.’
‘I don’t believe in it.’

My card didn’t have enough balance to get the tube home.

I walk home in the rain.

Now,
here I am,
in front of her,
and I doubt she’s going to say the same thing.

The snake is about the length of her arm.

She’s holding it above her head,
arms outstretched,
eyes locked.

I know it’s easy to mistake.
Mammalian brains aren’t the same as our reptilian friends.

But it seems to like her.

There’s something playful about it.

Affectionate.

Like it’s trying to be closer to her.

‘Have you ever been to an ashram?’
‘When I realised I needed to change my life,
I ended up in India.
I stayed in one for a while.’

She’s still playing with the snake.
Her silk kimono dangles off her shoulder.
I feel exposed seeing her underwear.

There’s no hesitation.
She doesn’t.

‘You’d hear people breaking down every day,
but it was safe.’

I can’t square it.
These ashrams don’t have any comforts.
Stone beds.
Multiple people to a room.
A far cry from the space we’re in.

At the time, she’d have been 24 or 25.

Effortlessly beautiful.

Wearing it lightly,
but aware of its power.

‘What wasn’t working?’

I want to know what could take someone like this
to somewhere like that.

‘I didn’t know how to trust people.’

‘It’s still difficult.’

She’d grown up in a small village in rural Italy.

An alcoholic father.
Present.
Loving.
But unable to support the family.

By the time she was 12,
her mother had realised
that the men in the town had taken a shine to her.

They’d bring gifts to the house.

In return,
they’d get time with her.

Over the coming years
the transactions became more visceral.

Money
for time.

She lowers the snake into her lap.

He coils there.

Still.

Her mother acting as facilitator.
Her father unable to protect her,
swinging from inebriated
to unable to work
nor prevent the situation from growing.

‘I didn’t know how to get out.’

Eventually,
her father managed to find enough cash for a flight to London.
A distant family friend provided board when she arrived.

‘They helped me get a real job here.’
‘But eventually I ended up in the same sort of system.’

She was working as a shop assistant in the day
and seeing an ever more private group of clients at night.

‘I thought this was it.’

There’s a stability to how she recounts the memories.
While I sit there aware I may overstep any moment,
she’s steady.
Even.

‘One day I met someone.’

The first real boyfriend.

Entrepreneur.
Caring.
Unjudgemental.

‘He’s the first person who really believed in me.’

‘He helped me believe in myself.
I couldn’t trust him, but he wasn’t doing anything wrong.’

No matter what I did to him,
he’d stay by my side.’

Eventually,
it broke down
and she had to leave.

‘I knew it was me.
I had to heal.
I had to change everything.’

She wanted to go to India.

He paid for the trip.

Six months in the ashram.
Stone floors,
shared rooms,
strangers breaking open around her every day.

‘I knew if I could find a way to feel love,
after everything I’ve been through,
then I could share it.’

She talks me through her clients.
The people she sees regularly.

They’re looking for love.
Sometimes they just want to be seen.

They tell her about their lives,
about how when they spend time together
their relationships get better.

‘Do they fall in love with you?’

‘I think so...’

‘Do you ever fall in love with them?’

‘Sometimes, but I don’t mess with their lives.’

‘Love is complex enough.’

She’s at ease with something I’m still circling.

Love.

I’ve read the books.
Felt the feeling.

But she knows it
more intimately than I ever could.

The snake is crawling over her hands.
She’s been powering this conveyor belt for him for 10 minutes
and he’s still trying to get closer.

‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’ she asks

‘Sure, I like the idea.’

‘I think this is the last time I’m here.
I think that’s why it’s been so difficult.
I think that I’m here to suffer all these things,
and after all of it,
still learn how to love.’

‘And if I can share what I learn,
then maybe next time,
I don’t come back as a human.’

She offers me the snake.

‘Don’t worry,
he’s really strong.’

I come down to the carpeted floor where she’s holding him.

He’s heavy,
and curious.

I put my back against the floor
so I can hold him above me.

‘Does he love you?’
‘Yes!’

The energy pours out of her,
a smile from cheek to cheek
like she’s still a child.

‘We love each other.’

My brain reaches through the textbooks,
paragraphs describing the limitations of reptilian brains,
a lack of a developed limbic system,
no paleomammalian infrastructure to process love and affection.

But right now,
here,
I am beginning to wonder.

As curious as it is to be around me,
I can feel what he wants,
and it’s to be back with her.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Habibi.’

We stay on the floor for another hour,
lying there like children,
and before I leave,
we share one last embrace.

I feel my eyes well up
and manage to rub my sleeve into them
before the tears fall onto her shoulder.

I know when I leave,
we won’t speak again.

It’s cleaner.

By this point,
I’ve realised.
There aren’t many places to go after seeing each other that clearly,
that deeply.

Over the coming weeks, and months, I try to find a routine.
Something to help me understand what she’d given me.

I’m working out of an old storage unit,
charging my lights in a coffee shop during the day,
painting at night,
thinking about what I’m missing
and what she isn’t.

I’m not sure there are words for it,
but the work helps me find somewhere to put it all.

Somewhere to store those second-hand memories.

Those moments of hope,
of forgiveness,
of love.

My mind longs for the feeling,
for the intimacy.

Closer to something I know is real.
But no longer have access to.

And that gap,
that’s what I’m filling in,
layer by layer,
just so I don’t forget
that there are people out there like her.

Next week, I’ll be sharing my current paintings and a new series where I’ve been trying to get my fingerprints off the work.

Love you loads,

Russ x

Temptation.

My eyes are fixed in place
just so they don’t wander.

But I’m blinded.

Blinded by my inability
to give them what they want.

I step inside
and look at the list.
I’ve thought about it all day.
Just follow it.

But as I wander,
as I explore,
I start to realise
maybe the list isn’t correct.

I didn’t expect to see
what I can see now.
But I can see it.
And maybe this is what I want
instead.

I look down at the basket.

Empty.
Light.

The only thing it’s carrying
is the weight of opportunity.
Of what it could become,
of where this adventure could go.

This is meant to be easy.
People do it every day.

But I want something special,
and I thought I knew how to make it.
I did.
I wrote it all down.
But now I’m here,
the options have changed.

I hold off from the complexity.
Keep it simple.

Eggs.
Flour.
Chocolate.
Sugar.

Sugar.

Why are there so many options for sugar?

Is that all a brownie is?

Sugar.

Maybe that’s what I need to change

The unknown

Granulated, caster, Demerara, Muscovado, light brown, dark brown, coconut, turbinado, icing, golden, molasses.

The same ingredient in different forms.
The same process with different outcomes.

Muscovado is unrefined cane sugar. The molasses is never removed from it. It’s dark, wet, and sticky. Put it in brownies, and you get something dense and treacly that will hold moisture and chew back when you bite into it.

Swap it for caster and everything begins to lift. A lighter crumb, a finer texture. The kind of brownie that dissolves the moment it hits your tongue.

Use Demerara on top, and you create a surface that shatters against your teeth. And the basic granulated sugar that we all know and love? It keeps the centre gooey, simply because it’s too coarse to dissolve quickly enough.

Sugar, as a single idea for a single ingredient, completely undermines how varied that ingredient actually is.

Steel

The world produces around 188 million metric tonnes of sugar every year. It’s one of the most abundant processed materials on earth. Ubiquitous. Ordinary. Varied…

The world produces about 1.9 billion tonnes of crude steel annually, roughly ten times the amount. But stainless steel, the refined version, the one that resists corrosion, accounts for only 64 million tonnes. About 3% of all steel production. Stainless steel is rare within its own category.

And the thing that separates one type of steel from another is the carbon within it.

Low-carbon steel, which we normally encounter in car panels and park benches, has between 0.05% and 0.25% carbon.

High-carbon steel, the kind that you find in a sharp knife, sits at 0.6% to 1%.

Less than a 1% variation, delivered through a highly complex process, is the difference between something ubiquitous and something that can change the world.

You’re probably wondering why I’m comparing steel and sugar.

How much we control that small, fickle variable completely defines the outcome.

The difference between sugars, like the difference between steels, comes down to that fraction of a percent: the molasses left in, the carbon added.

And the reality between a good brownie and an average one is the sugar.

It was always the sugar.

Mastery

When you start doing something seriously, you start to realise what the most important lever is within it.

What I've realised is that the most important variable for me sits somewhere between perception and interaction. It’s in that short moment when someone's understanding of something shifts because they're inside it, not outside looking in. I can't name it precisely yet.

But just as the early blacksmiths didn’t really understand that carbon was the variable in their steel, I too, don’t fully understand what it is within my work that makes certain people spend 30 minutes with a painting or what makes them go a little bit wild when they encounter my interactive work on the street.

But I think the best way to understand it is by making lots of different things that are somehow adjacent.

For those early makers working with metal, everything they made involved carbon of some type; that’s how steel evolved through the blacksmiths, through centuries of experimentation with a variable they couldn’t identify.

Just as the best pastry chefs can produce wildly different desserts from the same core ingredients, what I’m trying to understand is how to make art that has a measurable effect on the viewer. Where you can actually see them change. Where the viewer’s decisions, how they shift while interacting with the work, become the thing that people get to watch.

That’s what’s really interesting for me.

Seeing how much art can move you.

Here’s some stuff I’ve made that helps me understand my molasses and carbon. You can click the images to learn more. Also, Dreamland has had another update with a leaderboard to perv out on look at everyone else’s games. It’s still anonymous, so your crazy dreams aren’t attributable to you.

Conflict Utd. Football shirts from World Cup and Euro Cup official matches, collected from the same years that those countries were at war with one another. The shirts are cut in half and stitched together. I find it interesting how certain forms of tribalism are celebrated by a population at the exact same time that population is condemning a different form of tribalism.

Pompadour. A celebration of Madame de Pompadour. A character trait can be considered exemplary when someone holds high status, but that same trait gets chastised and punished when someone doesn't. Madame de Pompadour was a social climber, and she's celebrated for how well she achieved it. For those less successful, they'd be decried.

Anti-Quax. An ad blocker released during COVID. The transmission of information follows pathways that are remarkably similar to how viruses travel. The media virus was almost as powerful as the virus itself. During all of this, I could still walk out into Hyde Park and see the ducks sat in the Serpentine, completely unbothered. So this piece of software covered any references to COVID, viruses, or related terms with a picture of a duck while you were browsing. The name is a three-layered pun.

Dreamland. We are voyeuristic about the lives of other people, but we rarely think about the difficulties they went through to get there. We imagine taking different routes in life, but we never imagine what that would feel like from a different starting position. Dreamland lets you pretend to be someone and play through the most critical moments of their existence. I’ve been building it in public. It’s had some updates, and the leaderboard is below.

I think all of these projects help me understand what it is I’m trying to uncover.

I’ve got a good idea of what it is now. I might never fully understand it. But they help me understand my toolset and how I operate in reality. The paintings are the thing that keep me alive. The installations are the thing that help me get to know people. But these smaller, more experimental works help me understand what it is I’m trying to say.

Pompadour helped me win an award at the Chelsea Flower Show. Dreamland has had people playing on it daily. I don’t know what the molasses is in my sugar, but I do know that my sugar is something to do with perception, interaction, freedom, identity, and control. I’m trying to understand what it is that moves something in here, so that I can make myself a better artist.

These experiments are as fundamental to my work as anything else I make.

I’m sure at some point, when the art market and I have to collude at a deeper level, the curators and gallerists are going to tell me I need to present one thing because that’s the best way for the market to understand me. But it’s not. That’s just the best way to commercialise my work. And I don’t think anyone reading this newsletter is here to cash in on what I’m doing. I think you’re here because something I’m doing is interesting to you.

So I want to show you what I believe moves the needle for me the most. It’s this weird stuff. The stuff you can only see when you come to the studio, because I haven’t figured out how to show it to the world yet. When people do come, and they realise the things they’re seeing are a year old — that Dreamland is relatively new, but the rabbit hole goes much deeper — that’s probably the best way to understand what I actually do on a day-to-day basis.

I’m trying to figure out ways to communicate and understand myself. All of these things help me understand that something.

Next week I’ll be talking about paintings, and then from mid-March we’ll be going back to our core process.

Enjoy.

Love you Loads

- R x

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Move this email from updates to primary by dragging it over

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It would help me out a ton

Last week, I started climbing the substack charts, and this week, the newsletter gods are pulling me down by relegating where I appear in email clients

Thank YOU!

I am not wearing cool shoes.
In fact, I have never worn cool shoes.

I don’t even know what that is.

But I am wearing something cool today.

I am wearing something I made.

The rain is hitting me in the face
and I do not care.

Because last week,
I found out
that I can make things
to wear.

The school yard is tough.
Today is going to be tough.

I know.

But at least what I am wearing is me.

I can smell the fresh thread.
The first time the cotton has been wet.

Maybe I should have washed it again.
But I like how big it is.

They say stuff shrinks if you wash it too much.

My uniform bunches up underneath.
The embroidery around my chest is raised.
I can feel it pressing out from me.

I want to say it is glowing,
but I am starting to see that it is a target.

I hide.

Shelter inside.

A stable base to wait for their review.

My temporary lair.

I wait for the other kids to come in.
Drifting into the classroom one by one.

I see their eyes scanning me.

New hoodie.
New bag.
New cap.

Maybe it is too much.

It is obviously too much.

I lean back in my chair,
letting my feet find the end of the table.
Holding me at the edge
of that beautiful balance point.

I am at peace.

My shoes may not be cool.

But this is.

I avoid eye contact.
Avoid the questions.

Let it build.

I like the silence.

It helps me focus.

Do not fall.
Do not let them see you stumble.

As our teacher enters the room, she breaks the wall.

“Caps off in here...”
“…What is that?”

“…”
“It’s mine miss…”
“…I made it.”

Mirrors

I sometimes think about how hard it would be to live without shoes and clothes. Going about our lives while walking around naked on the bare floor would be a completely different experience. And it’s an implicit decision that we all have to make daily, no matter what our income level or status in society.

There is a world of people who have these decisions made for them, maybe through uniform or even limited access to resources. But even within those constraints, the act is inherently creative. Decorating ourselves to perform our roles requires input from ourselves. Even the smallest choice (a rolled sleeve, a tucked shirt, a flash of colour) is always a creative act.

Fashion is the most immediate identity system humans have ever built. Clothing communicates continuously. A painting only communicates when someone stands in front of it. A sculpture only works in the space around it. But what you are wearing right now is broadcasting to everything and everyone you interact with.

It is always on send.

Fashion is connected to my practice in a way that no other industry is. Including defence. Because it inherently performs the role that I believe my work tries to communicate,

That everything is a mirror.

Our identities are not a discovered quantity but something we construct and project into the world around us to understand who we are.

Fashion is something that we see somewhere else, value, and bring into our own world so that we can become it. It does this faster and more visibly than any other medium. It turns everyone who engages with it into a walking exhibition of its ideas.

It is mimetic by design and shareable at its core. Whereas Art relies on a primary relationship. A participant who encounters the work, translates it internally and passes on a transformed version through a different medium. Fashion skips that step. The copy is the transmission. When someone adopts a style, the original signal travels with minimal distortion. The person wearing it continues the broadcast with minimal loss of meaning.

Distribution

The global fashion market is worth approximately $2.5 trillion. The global art market is worth approximately $65 billion. That isn’t a gap. That is a 40x difference in scale. If the fashion industry were a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest economy on earth, somewhere between Germany and the United Kingdom. The art market would sit around the 75th, next to Myanmar.

They are different species.

Over the last 30 years, fashion has roughly tripled in value. The art market has roughly doubled. But the recent numbers are more revealing. Since 2008, the luxury fashion market has grown by 130 percent. In the same period, the art market has grown by essentially zero. It is flat. Sixteen years of standing still.

This may seem cold from an artist’s perspective, but I am not talking about how much money is made in these industries. I am talking about the architecture behind growth.

Fashion over this period has figured out something that art still refuses to learn. The consumer is the carrier.

The art world has experimented with reproduction. We make prints, editions, multiples. But we have never committed to it as a distribution mechanic. Fashion did. Completely. When someone wears a garment, they become a moving surface that distributes symbols, references, and identity through public space. The person becomes the medium. The street is the gallery. The audience does the work.

Every other industry has understood this. Goldman Sachs makes merchandise. So do Citadel. Their hoodies and caps turn the hard power of success into soft power signals of a particular version of the world. Universities do it. Sports teams do it. The mechanic is simple. Put your ideas on a body and let that body move through the world.

The closest thing we have in the art world is the tote bag.

The gallery tote is the single piece of art world merchandise that has achieved genuine cultural penetration. Despite the art world having the most compelling visual content of any industry on earth, it has almost completely failed to put it on the one surface that could carry it furthest: the human body.

The collaborations that do exist between artists and fashion brands are almost always dead on arrival. The artist lends credibility. The brand lends scale. The result satisfies neither audience. I don’t know if I have ever seen a truly great one. And that is because both sides seem to misunderstand the exchange.

The art market’s refusal to engage with fashion as a distribution system looks principled, but it may be better defined as arrogant. It is self-defeating. If the art industry grows, everyone inside it benefits. More opportunities. More money. More visibility. More cultural relevance for all of us working within it. But nobody is willing to learn from the one industry that has mastered the mechanics of putting ideas onto bodies and letting those bodies carry them through the world.

Meanwhile, fashion continues to grow.

And art stays niche.

And maybe that is because we like the idea of being the small guys.

Big bro?

Fashion has always looked up to art and artists.

It borrows our language, references our artists, stages its shows like exhibitions, and calls its makers creative directors, not businesspeople. The entire luxury sector positions itself as adjacent to art because art confers one thing that fashion cannot generate on its own:

The feeling of depth. Of seriousness. Of something beyond commerce.

Art is the older sibling. We read the difficult books first and set the standard for what counts as authentic.

But what seems to have happened while we were not paying attention is that the younger sibling outgrew us.

Fashion borrowed our tools. Visual storytelling, symbolic meaning, identity construction, cultural commentary, and built a distribution engine that art never managed. Fashion now reaches more people, moves more money, and shapes more identities in a single season than the art world does in a decade. Fashion is roughly 40 times the size of art. And the gap is widening, not closing.

The art world has not noticed because it is still measuring itself by the old metrics. Auction records. Museum attendance. Critical discourse. These measure prestige, not reach. They measure who is inside the room, not who is being changed by what is in it.

This comparison is only available to us because we are looking at fashion and art side by side, but a similarly stark reality may come from looking at content or technology.

The idea that art has nothing to learn from fashion, that engaging with fashion’s mechanics is somehow beneath us, is the kind of arrogance that shrinks industries.

What interests me most is the territory between the two. Where symbolic depth meets mass transmission. Where the encounter that changes one person meets the system that reaches millions.

That territory is largely unexplored. And I think that is because of how we currently structure artistic collaborations.

The model we have is simple: an artist lends their aesthetic to a fashion brand’s distribution. Painting on a hoodie. A print collaboration for a show. A name on a capsule collection. But this is just merchandise with a higher cultural credit rating. It isn’t using fashion as a medium. It isn’t carrying ideas further than the surface they are printed on.

What if artists used fashion collaborations the way they use paint, installation, or video? As a medium for ideas, not a surface for decoration? Not “here is my work on your product” but “here is my investigation, distributed through your system.”

That is a different proposition entirely. And almost nobody is doing it.

Because right now, the bar for art-world merchandise is so low that even our friends over at Citadel can clear it.

So what

I took a risk when I moved back to the UK. I wanted to explore this collaborative process at a deeper level. My offer to the world of fashion was that I could communicate something of value to them, and that offer arrived as street installation, views, and my Vogue mirror project.

Since then, I have had many collaboration opportunities, and I have judged them all by the same two questions. How close are you going to let me get to the brand and how it steers? And how much space are you going to give me to do what I do inside your brand?

These are the only two questions that matter.

The Topshop collaboration for their relaunch was a three-month campaign. That was unheard of for them. In their history, they had never collaborated with an artist at that level, and to do it at such a pivotal moment, as the first act of a full relaunch, showed what an artist-brand collaboration could actually be.

Beyond the content and work we did, a lot of the conversations we had concerned what a brand like that stood for, or could mean. The raw 90s energy that built it kept surfacing. The chaos, the friction, the Britpop wildness that made Topshop feel like culture instead of commerce.

That wave was being built and discussed long before we created anything together, and being in the room when the decisions were being made about how to channel it changed how we talked to their VVIPs, designers and partners. How do you take a brand back to the streets? That was the question they were wrestling with, and they put an artist in the arena to help answer it.

When I’ve taken on longer form collaborations, such as the ongoing one with Josh Mikawa (who reached out to me with a letter and a book after reading about my work), the conversation goes deeper, covering identity, references, and inspiration, influencing what a brand can be at its foundations.

I am still at the start of this exploration. I am still learning how the engine of a brand can be used for an artist to communicate what they are doing. And I am sure these will not be the last collaborations I take on.

But the reality is that I am trying to find a way for artists to play a larger role in an industry that is growing. Maybe it works. Maybe it does not. Maybe my head is in the clouds.

But consider this.

Artists working closer with fashion by helping them with their core ideas should result in more than a 1% improvement. After all, these are our tools they’re using.

And if that 1% growth in the fashion market moved to the art market over the next five years, that would be $25 billion. The art market is currently worth $65 billion. That single shift would represent a 38% increase.

More growth than the art market has achieved since 2008.

One percent of fashion would do more for artists in five years than the art market has done for itself in fifteen.

So when you see me working on fashion projects, this is what I’m trying to build.

I made the jump once when I was in school.

Maybe I can make it again.

Only time will tell if I was right.

Love you loads,

- R x

I don’t know what they do there.

But I did go to a decent business school and, before that, a really good war school, and all I did there was learn what the best entrepreneurs and generals did well (and badly).

So maybe looking at what the older kids do isn’t such a bad strategy for improving.

I’ve had two extremely difficult moments in my art career.

Cash ran out. I lacked direction. Everything went dark.

The path was the same both times. Panic, reach out to friends and family, write letters, fire sale on paintings.

At the bottom of this slope, with nothing left in the tank or the studio, I’m left with one option.

Learning stuff.

The public library has been rescuing me since I was 7. My mum used to leave me there after school and on weekends with some sandwiches and strict instructions not to take sweets from strangers. I’d spend my days with books. I liked them. They felt like home. The internet joined later and did the same thing.

This is a new series where I share that side of my life. The people, books, and ideas that I love. The ones that inspire me. Nourish me. And the ones that keep me going and thinking late into the night.

This week, my notes on Sol LeWitt, an interesting character from the US. I really enjoyed seeing how he formalised making art through other people. When I first came across his work 10 years ago, I wasn’t convinced, but then I watched an interview with an artist in 2009 who was creating his works from the original instructions, and it all sort of clicked. (video at end)

Enjoy.

Sol LeWitt

Sol was born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut to Russian Jewish immigrants. His dad was a doctor and inventor and died when he was six.

Six years old is a tough age to experience loss. He moved in with his mum and an aunt while drawing on wrapping paper from his aunt’s grocery store, and his mother took him to art classes at the local museum.

Sol studied at Syracuse with a BFA in 1949, and then got drafted into the Korean War (1950). He made recruitment posters in Japan and began collecting art. It’s the start of a collection he’d build for decades, buying work from peers and younger artists. Supporting people with his wallet before he had any real money.

Sol moved to New York in 1953. Studied illustration. Worked at Seventeen Magazine doing paste-ups and mechanicals, and then worked as a graphic designer for I.M. Pei, a Chinese-American modernist architect.

I always find it interesting how artists’ day jobs and history influence their practice. Architects don’t lay bricks; they draw a plan and hand it to builders. LeWitt spent two years watching someone design buildings he’d never physically construct. Maybe he realized that the blueprint is the work and the execution is a job for someone else.

MoMA

In 1960, he got a job working nights at the Museum of Modern Art’s book counter. His co-workers were Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, and Robert Mangold. It’s pretty incredible that these four artists found each other working the night shift at a museum. They all saw that Abstract Expressionism was exhausting itself, and were all looking for the next thing

At the time, Sol was painting in an abstract expressionist style during the day, and it wasn’t working. He finds a copy of Eadweard Muybridge’s serial photography. Bodies in motion, captured in sequence. Repetition as structure. Variation within a system. I’m not sure if this is what switched him into a deeper systematic approach, but it’s definitely relevant.

Timeline

1928 - Born

1961–62 (Age 34) — Paintings with Muybridge figures. Then puts out Wall Structure, Blue (1962), his first real move toward simplification. No narrative. Colour, shape, texture.

1964 (36) — First group show. Curated by Dan Flavin.

1965 (37) — First solo show at Dan Graham’s ‘John Daniels Gallery’. Open structures, skeletal wooden forms. Also writes the Eva Hesse letter.

1966 (38)— Shows in Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum. The exhibition that defined Minimalism. LeWitt submits an open modular cube of nine units. The cube becomes an ongoing idea.

1967 (39) — Publishes Paragraphs on Conceptual Art in Artforum. This is the text that names the movement. One sentence in particular: “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” He includes one of Eva Hesse’s hand-drawn circles as an illustration.

1968 (40) — First wall drawing. Paula Cooper Gallery’s inaugural show. Lines drawn in pencil directly on the wall. The instructions are the artwork. The drawing is temporary. Over 1,200 wall drawings follow.

1969 (41) — Publishes Sentences on Conceptual Art. 35 principles. Shows in Harald Szeemann’s When Attitude Becomes Form at Kunsthalle Bern.

1970 (42) — First retrospective at the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. He’s 42. Eva Hesse dies of brain cancer. Days later, he creates Wall Drawing #46, uses freehand, irregular lines. raw. A big shift in style, same process underneath it.

1974 (46) — Incomplete Open Cubes. 122 variations of ways to not make a cube. One of his most recognisable works.

1976 (48) — Co-founds Printed Matter with Lucy Lippard. Artists’ books. Affordable multiples. Getting art into people’s hands without the gallery as gatekeeper.

1978 — MoMA retrospective. He’s 50.

1980 (52) — Leaves New York for Spoleto, Italy.

1982 (54) — Marries Carol Androccio. She opens a wine bar in town. He walks to his studio along a Roman aqueduct every morning.

1983 (55) — Big changes. Starts using Indian ink and colour washes. The black-and-white conceptualist becomes a colourist. He’s been looking at Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, frescoes in churches and convents all over Umbria. Begins to try to make work he wouldn’t be ashamed to show Giotto.

Late 1980s — Returns to the US. Settles in Chester, Connecticut. Co-designs his synagogue. Becomes an invisible local legend.

2000 — Major retrospective. SFMOMA, MCA Chicago, the Whitney. He’s 72 and the work is the most colourful and alive it’s ever been.

2005 (75) — Starts the “scribble” wall drawings. Graphite at six different densities. After decades of increasing complexity, he circles back to something almost primal.

2007 — Dies April 8th. Cancer. Aged 78. Just organised a retrospective at Oberlin.

2008 — Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective opens at MASS MoCA. 27,000 square feet. Three stories. It stays on view until 2033. Twenty-five years of a dead artist’s work being perpetually recreated by living hands.

Evolution

From 1962 to 2007, Sol continued to iterate on the same idea: building a system, defining its constraints, then letting the system generate outcomes he couldn’t fully predict. The cube permutations do it. The wall drawing instructions do it. The colour washes do it. The scribble drawings do it.

What changes is what the machinery processes and creates.

In the 60s, it’s geometry and seriality. In the 70s, it’s language and instruction. In the 80s, its colour and Italian light. In the 2000s, its density and the human hand.

But the question stays the same: what happens when you set up a structure and then get out of its way?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this with the interactive work I do, most recently with the Reflections I. I design prompts. I chain pens. I control the participant. But once it’s in the street, the system runs itself. I don’t interfere. What people write isn’t my art. What they write because of the constraints I build, that’s my art. Sol was doing this for fifty years before I even thought about it.

Italy

In 1980, as one of the most important living artists, he walks away from New York. He’s 52. He’s had a MoMA retrospective. He’s at the peak of the art world. And decides to move to a medieval hill town in Umbria with a population of about 38,000 people.

His house was a small tower on a hillside with a separate studio in the old town. The walk between them crossed a Roman aqueduct - the Ponte delle Torri. He’d been introduced to Spoleto by his gallerist Marilena Bonomo in the early 70s and kept going back.

Sol was a private man. He avoided the spotlight. He believed the public should look at art, not at artists. He bought other people’s work constantly. He mentored freely and wrote catalogue essays for people nobody had heard of.

His wife Carol said he was looking for “an Italian girl with a driver’s licence” who liked taking care of him. He was an impatient tourist who remembered everything. He could absorb an entire fresco cycle in the time it took other people to read the information panel.

The frescoes in Italy changed his work completely. Although his ideas were set by 1967 they had an effect on his visual language. Colour arrived. Washes, arcs, fans, cascading triangles. The wall drawings stopped looking like engineering diagrams and started looking like something Giotto might have sketched in his sleep.

He moved back to the States in the late 80s, settled in a small Connecticut town, and kept working until the end. When he died, the local restaurant had his prints on the walls. Nobody made a fuss about it. That’s how he wanted it.

Key works

Standing Open Structure, Black (1964) — A painted black wooden rectangle, 96 inches tall. Human-sized. Skeletal. The prototype for everything. When a museum later asked if they could just rebuild it elsewhere (since he was a conceptualist…), he says no: “Would you repaint a Mondrian?”

Serial Project No. 1 (ABCD) (1966) — Nine pieces in four groups. Open and closed forms. Every variation in two and three dimensions, using the fewest measurements. This is art that looks like architecture for a civilisation that thinks in grids.

Wall Drawing #1 (1968) — The beginning. Pencil on wall. Temporary. The instructions survive. The drawing doesn’t. He did this 1,200 more times.

Paragraphs on Conceptual Art (1967) — Arguably his most influential written work. Gave the movement its name and operating system. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” “Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.” “It is difficult to bungle a good idea.”

Wall Drawing #46 (1970) — Made days after Eva Hesse died. The first freehand wall drawing. The system collapses on purpose. Grief as method.

Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) — 122 ways to not make a cube. Every arrangement of edges has something missing. You can’t look at them without mentally trying to complete the shape. It’s a work about absence. About the thing that isn’t there, being the thing you can’t stop seeing.

Wall Drawing #439 (1985) — Made in Italy. Colour ink washes in cascading triangles. The conceptualist discovers what Giotto knew: you can create depth on a flat plane with nothing but colour and conviction.

The Letter to Eva Hesse (1965) — Not technically an artwork. But 100% Art lore. A letter to a friend who was paralysed by self-doubt. “Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever — make them abound with nonsense.” “You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world.” This letter circulates today like a prayer for blocked artists. It reveals the thing the conceptual framework sometimes hid: LeWitt believed in feeling first, systems second.

tl;dr

Systems art. You can build a practice around instructions. The artist’s role can be designing the system, not executing it. The gap between instruction and execution, between what we intend and what actually happens, is where the art lives.

Dig for gold. LeWitt returned to the same questions for forty years and found them inexhaustible. He didn’t chase trends. He didn’t rebrand for each decade. He went deeper into one set of ideas until the work became richer than anyone thought possible.

No ego. By removing his ego, he created a practice that outlives him. The MASS MoCA retrospective runs until 2033, fresh hands drawing his instructions on new walls, decades after his death. The system persists. The artist is gone, and the art continues.

Notes on… is a new series where I share the artists, books, and ideas that fuel my practice. If there’s someone or something you want me to cover, reply to this email.

I’ll probably be releasing it on Substack only. I feel like two emails in your inbox every week might be a bit too aggressive, but let me know what you think here:

Love you loads

- R x