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

I get it.

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

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

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

Living in reference to the power it has over you.

Avoiding it.

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

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

And then I never have to want it again.

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

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

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

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

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

Well, I do…

But I want peace there.

And is that even possible?

If everything comes at a cost…

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

That can’t be the case.

I want a discount.

Roles

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

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

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

Most importantly he gives up control over his own identity.

He becomes a rank.

A number. A badge. A role. PC.

He loses his first name.

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

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

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

Sacrifice

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

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

Nepo babies.
Attractive painters.
Those born with money.

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

The sacrifice is part of how we value it.

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

How much have they really gone through?

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

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

And there’s an honour in that.

Artists

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

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

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

Because then why else is this person doing it?

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

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

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

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

Performance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defect

We have a defect.

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

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

But it’s tricky.

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

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

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

The sacrifice is just part of the path.

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

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

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

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

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

All this to say, don’t worry.

You’ll get your sacrifice.

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

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

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

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

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

Heterogeneous

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

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

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

We assume everyone pays the same culturally recognised price.

But nobody pays the same price.

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

Because the world likes generality.

It likes it to be simple.

Price

You’ve got to find your own price.

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

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

Until then, everything’s free.

Everything’s free.
Do whatever you want.

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

Eventually, it’ll be paid.

But until then…

Just go where you want.

Be not afraid.

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

Love you loads

R x

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

‘service’
‘yes chef’

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

Good.

I need them tonight

yesterday was a mess

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

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

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

the front row of my show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ambition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complex

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

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

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

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

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

Muses

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

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

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

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

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

Art

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

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

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

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

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

Poets Corner

Nugae

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

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

- Thomas May

Final Words

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

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

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

That's the service I feel is missing.

love you loads

r x

I gave it to you.

And you dropped it.

Maybe it wasn’t worth anything.

But to me,
it was.

I thought we were building something.

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

Then I gave it back.

I thought you were going to decorate it.

But then it dropped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

but then I realised that my shoes were soaked too.

and I look up.

And you’re smiling.

And I can’t understand.

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

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

Normally when you drop a cake you grab it

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

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

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

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

They are not
They are watching you

Smiling

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

or at least we did.

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

No one ever will.

WTF IS LOVE?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or worse, taken.

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

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

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

Stay safe out there,

peace and love,

R x

Balance Sheet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Observation.

Outside

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

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

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

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

So why partner with fashion at all?

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

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

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

yes.

Merch

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

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

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

Good job that’s the only thing we make

Poets Corner

Prison

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

- Thomas May

Needed a week

carrying a lot rn

appreciate it loads

nothing but love

r

x

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

Clawing at the infection that has begun.

Maybe she was never mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But at least you’ll have light.

Why is a policeman in charge?

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

Because I have given him the power.

The narrative.

The story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roles

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

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

Corporate dogs

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

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

Polis

Those that reference the policeman place it in power.

“I’ll call the police.”

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

“I’ll call the police.”

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

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

Masquerade

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

The world is a masquerade ball.

Wear the appropriate uniform.

Use the right name.

And make sure people know it.

Name

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

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

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

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

All this to say.

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

So what happens if I stop saying it?

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

Just call him by his name.

“Frank.”

How powerful is Frank now?

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

Final words

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

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

You came just in time.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do,

love you loads

r x

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

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

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

Humans love power.

Gluttons.

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

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

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

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

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

But where does authority originate?

Authority

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

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

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

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

Deference

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

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

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

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

Maybe you already know.

Maybe you don’t.

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

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

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

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

Legitimised

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me, and my work.

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

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

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

That’s the basis of all of of this...

Tomorrow you will still stop at a red light.

Why is a policeman in charge?

simply because I said so.

But if authority comes from me,

why can’t I get rid of it?

See you next week,

love you loads,

r x

Don’t go inside.

This week I’ve been thinking about permission.

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

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

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

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

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

The panopticon is inside the mind.

Maybe all of this sounds obvious to you.

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

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

none may pass. unless you pay the price.

All this to say something you might already know.

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

Permission and civil coherency is essentially a social good.

“You have to wear pink on Fridays.”

“you can’t sit with us”

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

Or that on the other side is disaster.

Decisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But beliefs come from the ‘group’.

We share this opinion.

we do this.

it works like this.

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

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

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

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

But that’s you, not me.

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

And you can change them.

but like the elephant choosing to go through the door

it might not look like you can fit.

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

the locks would never have stopped you anyway.

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

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

Right now I’ve got to stay low.

Again, I appreciate the latitude…

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

love you loads

Russ x

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

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

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

I can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But here I am.

control

Do you get a say in who you are?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like the animals we know we are.

direction

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

We use them both all the time, interchangeably.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goals.

Values.

That’s it.

Both change who we are.

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

The inertia is real.

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

agility

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

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

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

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

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

and closer to why I did too.

love you loads

r x

All she has spoken about
Is her dog.

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

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

Maybe that’s what I was looking for.

But I’ll never forget Steve.

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

A perspective.
A feeling.

Steve was a heroin addict.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was talking about crying.

He didn’t know how to cry.

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

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

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

Who started it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Control

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

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

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

And that’s the risk we take with love.

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

Gluey

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

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

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

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

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

love you loads

r x

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

These are my notes on what I learned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first is that I lost the ability to see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll continue my thoughts on control next week.

love you loads

R x

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

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

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

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

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

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

I even remember knowing it would feel like this.

I just wish I knew
what happens next.

Control

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

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

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

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

Addicts

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

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

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

Sneeze

A sneeze.

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

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

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

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

Even when I no longer want to go there.

I’m trying something new this week

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

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

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

Anyway,

Wish me luck

Love you loads,

R x

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

Knees green.
Clothes too.

No watch.
Empty pockets.

Climb the hill again,
and go.

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

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

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

No watch on my wrist.
Empty pockets.

I can go wherever I want.

Play

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

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

Ace, who led the floral artistry, and I have worked together for a couple of years now. Last year we had five months to prepare. This year we had five days.

The hypothesis I’ve been playing with over the last two years is that if art wants a wider crowd without losing its purity, it has to interact in adjacent spaces. Find the people who already understand some of the things we prize. Fashion and Floristry → Beauty. Retail and social media → Spectacle. The crowds who value having something to say → Thought.

It’s not a pitch to become enmeshed in culture, if anything it’s us riffing on their games to let them know what we have to offer. The core movement isn’t novel. It’s how humans have always operated. We take our toys to the fringes of our friendship group, figure out what they have over there and play a new game together.

Huizinga puts forward this idea that culture is built from a sense of play. White cube galleries don’t have that. A few weeks ago one of my most important supporters was in town and we took a ride to White Cube Bermondsey, it’s an incredible site, but even when it’s in full swing, it is not a place where ‘play’ is natural. Most artist studios are, primarily for them not an audience, but the site of ultimate freedom for their inhabitants, and what is play if not an exercise of freedom.

Finding play inside whatever constraints are against you, the tools, the environment, the audience and their whims, is part of the game we all play. Taking that into industries focused on beauty, commerce or spectacle is where we can lend our toolset and bring over those that like how we play.

Playground

The installation has three key elements. A Jean Prouvé Maison Démontable turned into a sanctuary from the city. A violet floral installation built around the scent of hyacinth. Tatami mats underfoot that pull you into the ground without making you dirty. And a layered soundscape that reminds you that you can have fun in nature by doing nothing. To see how I could affect the hall’s conventional clientele I added egg timers, a visual excuse to spend more time inside than they otherwise might.

When you walk through Ladbroke Hall and see the £200,000 tables and £100,000 chairs, and watch the people being taken around, it’s clear they don’t know the name of the artists they’re being shown. But they probably have really nice homes that need a big table in them.

I thought it would be interesting to see if I could get them to take their shoes off. Lie on the floor. Change how they engage in the world for five minutes of an egg timer. And see if that little change creates the spark I believe art is.

A change of perspective.

There’s something special about falling over as a kid. An unexpected part of our body impacts the floor in a way that lets us realise we are both significantly sturdier and more mortal than we thought.

The floor. Grounding, honest, humble. A place we avoid as adults in the West. Maybe our egos don’t let us lower ourselves to those dark depths. Maybe we’re scared we might fall and not be able to get back up.

Falling over brings us to the present. It focuses us. But as we get older, we try to do it as little as possible. And with it we lose access to our mentor the floor.

At the back of the gardens, sits a deck with two books on it. One for memories of play in childhood. One for adulthood.

The childhood book was full of stories of scuffed knees, chasing one another, playing around in nature with a freedom you only really get as a child amongst other children that see you.

The adulthood book was filled with references to sex, debauchery, and civil disobedience. We lash out a bit when we’re older, maybe because the only way we know how to challenge the rules is by abandoning them entirely and showing those around us we are still free. Showcasing our descent into Bacchanalian decadence. Cranking on the dopamine and serotonin as hard as we can to feel something in a world that really just wants us to do our job.

Throughout the garden, alongside the floral installations, there are poems scattered for people to read to the plants. We often mistakenly frame nature as an object to look into. We distance ourselves from it. Even as I describe it now, I frame it as some other, as if I’m not a part of it. Our polite civility tells us every day that we are unique. That our pretty little clothes and our idyllic sense of self, makes us distinct from the flora and fauna we have named.

But I am an animal, and so are you.

The first time I saw this game played was with Uriel Orlow, he was handing out poems to people in the back gardens of the Venice Biennale. A crowd of people excited to be there, standing in the bushes, reading poems to plants. It’s inspiring every time I see it. Art is an activity, a process, not a product for your walls. When you see it happening, it’s infectious.

Sit down

There’s a small card in the Jean Prouvé. It says this is better when you sit down. It should say lie down. I figured if people saw the phrase lie down they’d resist. But once they’re sat down, they might figure out the lying down part themselves. Letting them feel smarter than me costs nothing.

A family today took the card out of the sanctuary and into the rest of their day. They photographed it on a tree branch. On the grass, with their daughter lying underneath. In the basket of a Lime bike. On the saddle of another. On the rail of a London bus. They sent me the photos as I wrote this.

When I make work I don’t really know who it’s for. Me, for sure, but usually there’s someone else out there on the same wavelength. When someone takes it into their own life it feels complete. Today that was them.

Next week I’ll show you some of the paintings I’ve been working on. And I’ll start going in the opposite direction to where I’ve been going for the last few months, which has mostly been towards and around ideas of freedom.

Welcome to summer, from here we’ll be looking at the other side of the coin.

Control.

Thanks again.

Love you loads.

R x

If you enjoyed this week’s issue of Hot Girls Like Art, share it with a friend. It’s always nice to be the person that found that artist that made it before eveyone else.

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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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