On Trying, Weirdness, What is Art? And why I'm not Worried about A.I.

Hey All,

It’s been a long time, shouldn’t have left you .. without a dope newsletter to step to…

Many of you will realise that’s an interpolation of Timbaland’s ad-lib at the beginning of Aaliyah’s classic ‘Try Again’. Youtube it.

The words, 'try again’, are also a good place to start this newsletter, which I predict will be meandering, like a river, but ultimately focused on a particular endpoint, like a river.

In the case of this newsletter, the endpoint - or outcome I have in mind, is always the same - to inspire, to instigate, to to make you (and myself - same thing) feel something, something good. Something different. Something deep. That’s what I try to do. That’s my intention.

I’ve been trying a lot, lately. Being an artist is trying.

Bukowski’s tombstone is famously inscribed with the words, ‘Don’t Try’. I get that. It’s like, let it come to you … don’t force it … all that sort of thing. I’m down with that. But also, like Macy Gray, I try. Can you tell I’m listening to an early 2000’s R&B playlist?

Everything informs and is intricately enfolded into everything else in ways that are often so subtle that we cannot directly perceive them. This is something that you can learn from art and apply to life. Like Lauryn Hill says, ‘Everything is Everything'.

Art forces you to accept the mystery of all things and simultaneously furnishes you with a map to navigate worlds. 

But all maps have edges and when you venture off the map, you need a new one. 

Simultaneously to all of this, ‘THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY!’ You gotta realise that. Looking at contour lines isn't walking up a hill.

So really, we are always in the mystery, blinking against the light of presence … following our noses, feeling it out. Sometimes that feels good, sometimes it feels bad, sometimes it’s just OK.

I really love hand poke tattooing. I’ve been learning so much about it lately, and making some of my best tattoos. Did you know that the origin of the name ‘Britain’, is directly connected to tattooing?

Supposedly, around 325 BCE a guy called Pytheas explored the coastline of this place and called it ‘Bretannike’ meaning 'painted' referring to the people's custom of painting or tattooing themselves. His name for the people collectively, ‘Pritani’, which became 'Britanni', gave them the name Britons.

This realisation around my own personal connection with and practice of an indigenous art form that my ancestors would likely have engaged with, is immensely inspiring. 

The colonialist history of Britain is dark and brutal and must continue to be reckoned with. AND ALSO, if British people are ever going to recover the spirit that is so denigrated by enacting horrors on foreign shores, they must find what’s good and wholesome in this place and its long cultural history and make something new with it - something that we can offer back to the world and to ourselves.

Some people get weird about this, they think I’m talking about Nationalism or something. No. In essence, it’s the total opposite - it’s about finding the ways in which people from the place where you’re from have developed ways to understand their basic humanity; that is is to say, what connects them to everyone else. That’s what all good culture does.

All the while we avoid doing this, we continue colonising via cultural appropriation, fetishisation and xenophobia. We are listless. We are flattened. We feel ourselves to not really exist in comparison to those who have a genuine connection with place. It doesn’t work.

I was in Paris again lately. It’s so beautiful there. The thing I like about Paris is that they take art seriously. Obviously I’m talking generally, but when you tell people in Paris you’re an artist, they just accept it - respect it, even. In this country, it’s not always like that. People want to know if you make your living from art before they’ll accept you’re a real artist. Well, happily, I do make a living from it. But, I’ve always been an artist, regardless of what I was doing for money and in some instances, I turned those things into art as well. 

You can do that, turn things that are not considered art, into art. You can walk artfully. You can take out the rubbish artfully. You can do anything artfully, if you want.

Which leads naturally on to the very basic question of ‘What is art?’ I don't want it to … but it does and so I'll try. 

Perhaps, the answer is contained in the words of the question, rearranged.

‘ART IS WHAT’

To contextualise:

Life is.

Art is what.

Do you get what I’m saying?

This is a freestyle! Give me a break! I'm trying! 

My art has been causing opinions online, which I like … not usually for the opinions for themselves as most of them are luridly ill-considered … More for the fact that art has this potential to create a schism in our perception, simply by existing and by someone calling it ‘Art’. This naming aspect is so fascinating and speaks as well to the utter miracle of language ... but here I want to focus on the electricity that art can impart on the audience, by it’s sheer existence.

For example, someone sent me a message me the other day outright ordering me to delete my entire instagram account for my crimes against art. 

The same day, someone else wrote to me saying that watching my videos had completely opened up their artistic life and made them feel as though they were ‘allowed’ to make art.

These messages are two sides of the same coin - in both cases, art is the thumb of the wiseguy, standing on the corner, flipping it, forever.

In the long run, it’s all for the good; more obviously in the latter case, but in the former - it is only by continually reaching these moments when our worldview is utterly confounded and undermined by what confronts us, that we eventually break down and evolve into more expansive realities.

Eventually. I’m talking collectively here, who knows in the case of this particular guy? … Wherever he ends up, he’s a part of the process. So am I. So are you. We're all doing it.

So,

Life is. Life just is. Art is what. Art is the what of life. Artworks are the what-forms that emerge from the is-ness … Hmmm.

Art is what? It’s a question. All form is a question, a dichotomy. Things only exist because at some point they didn’t and some day they will not again. The existence of all form is always in question. The world is always at risk of disappearing. That’s why it’s so precious.

Art is a pile of leaves, sitting in the autumn sun.

Another guy, online, said of my work ‘Pretentious BS but at least you’re happy’.

This is good stuff. It’s true. I have to pretend in order to know who I am becoming. 

I have to try on thoughts, styles, attitudes, clothes … I’m on the stage, improvising, with everyone else.

If I don’t accept the risk of being perceived as pretentious then I will never ACT. 

If I don’t act, I will never KNOW.

I have to try things out.

Bold of him to assume I’m happy. I don’t really see permanent happiness as the goal, for me, but I would say that I am very happy just to be here, in real life.

But A.I. is everywhere now isn’t it? People are worried about it. As an artist, I am not worried about it. For example, if A.I. could have written this email the way I’ve written it … then personally, I see that as a me problem. Not because it’s necessarily a 'good' email … but because it’s quite weird. 

A.I. can't be weird. A.I. can either be prosaic and unoriginal or it can be hideously off in a way that make it completely untethered from basic sanity. The latter behaviour only serves to horrify human beings and make it appalling to us. The former, well, we'll eventually get bored of it.

Weirdness isn't boring or insane. True weirdness is deeply interesting and heroically sane … it draws in certain kind of person … a weird person. As long as A.I. cannot be genuinely weird, it's no threat to artists.

If anything, A.I. is simply an impetus for the artist to become more weird, more interesting, to delve more deeply into his humanity, to discover more parts of life that cannot be encoded and bring them back to the surface … that’s always been the point of art, nothing has changed. It’s just that now we’re being chased by robots … but we always knew this was secretly what we wanted, that’s why we made all those films about it. It was written.

Luckily, the human spirit is too sprightly and fluid to be caught, it floods the desert of pure mechanism, causing things to grow there in a way that surprises, delights and confounds algorithms.

So, I’m not worried about A.I. 

Glad I’m not a market research analyst though. 

But I am! And my figures show that not all of you are going to my website! 

Please support me if you enjoy my work. 

I don’t mean to give the hard sell, but buy something from me please. I also accept donations.

Thank you so much.

Keep trying,

Much love,

Samuel.