No. You can't write a poem with AI.
Do you even remember why you started?
The sun and rain are competing for attention
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
Got something from this issue?
Help me grow.
Forward to a friend, or an enemy, with the button below