White paint on a white canvas on a white wall

Asiimov was sitting with a Costa Rican artist called Rene Gonzalez. Sat cross-legged on the paint-splattered floor of his studio in Kennington, they were having an animated conversation about the current state of the art world over a can of Gamma Ray which they passed back and forth.

There was a peaceful stillness to Rene which filled the high-ceilinged walls of his studio. Everything from his shoulder-length hair tied back in a clean bun to the youthful exuberance lighting up his pastel brown face like a lightbulb - which betrayed the fact that he was 39 years old - and his insouciance to the paint which splattered him in most places from the neck down, gave Asiimov the impression that he was in the company of some Buddhist monk who just stepped away from his canvas.

Another detail worth pointing out is their shoes. Where Asiimov was wearing a black pair of Converse with a paint splatter print, Rene’s worn-down New Balance had collected authentic paint splatters, no doubt from his work.

Tom Wolfe once wrote that “the arts have always been a doorway into Society”[1], and it would take a lot of naivete to think the traffic only goes one way. So when Asiimov rang the buzzer for Rene’s studio, interrupting the tranquil flow of his work, he had come to immerse himself in the world of authentic paint splatters. To see how that world operated, and, most importantly, if it was as unjust as society at large.

Is the art world racist? Sexist? Classist? Does it offer opportunities to some people while depriving others? Is it evil? Can the purity of art be separated from the dirty business of the art world? These were some of the many questions which were impinging on Asiimov’s mind; questions which required answers if he ever wanted to enjoy going to an art gallery again. And who better to answer these questions than the working class of the art world; emerging artists, the ones who are usually the targets of the above issues, who can make part or just about their whole income solely through art, but not without struggle.

Stories about the contemporary art world are usually told from the perspective of artists who have truly made it, or are in the process of it. They’re either legacy acts who have a long and prosperous career behind them or they’re rising stars who have a long and prosperous career ahead of them. Important as these stories are, they represent only one stratum of the art world, missing entire sedimentary layers of its geology. We shall excavate down to the less glamorous depths of the art world searching for rare gems formed under the immense pressure of the industry bearing down on them.

Plus, none of the rich and successful artists like Yinka Shonibare or Kehinde Wiley or Hew Locke replied to Asiimov’s correspondence, so they were out of the picture anyway.

*

Asiimov was also sitting with an artist from Peru named Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez Cambana (who goes as simply Giuseppi). On rickety foldable chairs, they sat around a cluttered table in Giuseppi’s studio in Stratford, having a vivacious conversation about the current state of the art world over ice-cold bottles of Birra Moretti.

A playful air hung over this short yet stout man of 32, the sort which put you at ease and made it seem like he’d pounce on the first opportunity to make you laugh. In black shorts and a grey t-shirt so baggy it was drooping off him like an ill-fitting skin, his look was held together by a silver chain necklace, the kind of item which seems he never removes from himself. Hair coiled so tight they could let electricity pass through them bounced out the top of his head, and his thin, feathery moustache accentuated his warm smile almost as much as the chocolate-coloured skin which pulled it together.

*

Asiimov was also waiting for a Brazilian artist called Goia Mujalli. Sat at a table outside Redemption Roasters on Lamb’s Conduit Street, situated in Holborn, he was fighting the scorching heatwave by fanning himself with a paperback of Heart of Darkness.

A woman in footbed sandals wearing shorts and a loose top, both light in colour and material, approached him and asked in a delicate voice, “You must be Asiimov?” They shook hands and sat down, her wavy (and slightly frizzy) brunette hair settling down with her movements. Her long and straight-edged face was like a receptacle for the light which emanated from her light blue eyes and lit up her fair skin. Though her appearance may not have, her presence and demeanour certainly matched the maturity of her age, 37.

But before they could start their zigzagging chat about the current state of the art world, coffee was needed. Asiimov went inside and got her an oat cappuccino and a latte for himself.

When she held her paper cup of coffee, Asiimov noticed the blue nail polish which had mostly peeled away, leaving these shapeless blue designs differently on each of her nails. These abstract, non-shapes somehow reminded Asiimov of Goia’s paintings.

*

Asiimov was also sitting with an artist from England named Jamie Fitzpatrick, but he actually wasn’t sitting with him, having to make do with the fact that Jamie was out of town and could only manage to meet him over Zoom.

Both Jamie’s and Asiimov’s physical rooms became tied in this quasi-union through the soft images of each other on their computer screens. Through a concentrated effort of mental projection, it took Asiimov a minute to remove himself from his room, assisted by the sight of Jamie framed on his laptop screen, and placed himself into Jamie’s poorly lit room. His walls were grey under the evening light. And in the back, a clothes rack was exploding with all sorts of coats, hangars, hats, and bedsheets, that it nearly took on the shape of a horse’s carcass. Neither in their room nor the other’s, Asiimovand Jamie were having an earnest conversation about the current state of the art world.

A man whose character is as modest as his proportions, his full face of fair skin looked almost sunken in due to the blowing volume of his hair tied back in a loose bun. At the age of 37, his personality was beyond his years, but so was his insight and erudition. His grey, collared t-shirt hinted at a plainness in his personal style, which stood as a juxtaposition to the lurid chaos of the sculptures he creates.   

In a baritone, characteristically English accent with a characteristically Scottish lilt beaming through his tender smile, Jamie asked Asiimov, “Would you like to grab yourself a drink so it feels more like an in-person meeting?”

At this, the addressee lifted a glass and jug of water to the camera while Jamie held a tall can of Carlsberg aloft in reply. After a gesture of clinking their drinks, words began streaming headlong.

*

Golden light from the waning afternoon sun poured through the tall windows of Rene Gonzalez’s studio, spilling off the leaves of the jungle of houseplants which sat tranquilly on the windowsill, and flooded the room.

There was enough miscellaneous clutter to set the teeth of any clean freak on edge; paint brushes both clean and used mingling in pots, an unplugged and exhausted Nespresso machine sitting languidly next to the radiator waiting to produce its next cup of black coffee splashed with a bit of oat milk, a pile of green Nespresso pods (used) expecting to be included in some creative endeavour, piles of exhibition catalogues, and of course, paint splatters of every conceivable colour on every conceivable surface.

A gigantic canvas, taking up the length and width of a whole wall, depicted a serene scene with two foxes and a deer luxuriating in the twilight sanctuary of a deep forest. An empty chair in front of the canvas testified to where Rene had just sat working on the painting before Asiimov arrived.

“I love animals and I love nature” Rene confessed in a light and droning voice as calm as his visage when he noticed Asiimov’s fixation upon the painting, “and it’s really sad what’s happening in the world regarding nature, so I paint these animals in a more ideal situation.”

“So what are you calling it?” asked Asiimov, his eyes locked onto the painting in a reverie.

“Nighttime Greenery. It’s going to be put up on display at a five-star hotel in Belgravia called The Hari. Have you heard of it?”

“People tend not to let me anywhere near five-star hotels, so no. What other shows or commissions are you working on?” inquired Asiimov with a smile.

“I’ve been featured in a group show at Home House which is running till the 5th of September [2022]. It’s a beautiful private member’s club where work from a bunch of artists has been exhibited. The show is called Arcadia if you’re interested in looking it up.” advertised Rene.

The unfinished painting towering over them both, and all his recent works are an ode to nature undisturbed. As if taking place in the recesses of a forest as endless and diverse as the universe, all his paintings show various, hyper-detailed scenes of animals existing peacefully in their blissful habitat. While foxes predominate throughout his works, other inquisitive creatures like owls, raccoons, wolves, and deer populate his oeuvre, grazing their way through the delights of the landscape. Sometimes his sceneries are a blend of the natural and the human-made, but only as a reclamation, grass growing out of checkerboard marble floors, deer thoughtfully wandering through open gates, and rundown, abandoned towns jutting out through the gloom of a dense forest. From the most naturalistic colours which are expected to be found in the forest, to hallucinatory visions of deep-pink rivers and kaleidoscopic flora, his colour palette has the range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Some nameless, unpaid intern at Kristin Hjellegjerde (requires some tongue gymnastics to pronounce) Gallery describes Rene’s work as, “Vibrant characters surrounded by otherworldly environments featuring echoes of forests and manmade structures, theatrical compositions filled with decorative textures, intricate details of foliage, and expressive application of paint.”

“I’m not trying to be like, ‘look at all of this pollution and global warming’, that’s just not what you see here” Rene affirmed with clarity. However, that isn’t to say that such social interpretations are completely purged from his work. One could sure as hell, through mere comparison with the world around them, read his works as a statement on our rape of the planet. But rather than having them loitering in the foreground, the connotations are deeper in the foliage of his scenes.

However, there once was a time when his work had the political charge of a Molotov cocktail hurled at a delegation of diplomats. “Politics was a big thing in my work, I used to do portraits of people that I thought were important for people to know about. I thought it was a mission of mine to tell the world what I thought was a good or bad opinion.” Rene confessed with a glint of apology in his words.

His older work, apart from the strange employment of colour and the expressive way shadows and shading are rendered, looks like they were made by someone else. Firstly, there’s a lot more meditation on people and society in his former works, the divine scenes of nature are replaced by a desolate metropolis, and where they were animals in his current work, there are now lost souls who either wear expressions of suffering, or no expressions at all. They almost look like street art made by someone in the depths of nihilism.

But to understand the work he used to create, and why he moved away from it, we must understand the things he lived through and the impressions they made on him, way back when…

In the 1970s, a poor Salvadorian man, who by the time he was 15 found himself as the commander of a resistance group during the Salvadorian Civil War, marries an upper-middle class, intellectual Costa Rican woman who was on a mission by the Socialist Party to traffic weapons into El Salvador for the resistance fighters. Her falling in love and getting married to a guerrilla commander wasn’t part of the Socialist’s plan however, which made her a target for the very people who sent her there. Running for their lives all over South and North America, they eventually find safe haven in Canada where they end up having a child in 1983 whom they name Rene.

As a Latino kid born to communist parents in Canada, an indefinable sense of otherness followed him throughout his childhood. His dissonance with his surroundings was accentuated by his parents’ teachings of the “dangers of capitalism and materialism”. But his youthful imagination was fed a splendid banquet through all the stories – fantasy and sci-fi of the Lord of the Rings and Dune kin – and comic books his mother read him. However, that imaginative feast was cut down to meagre scraps when he moved to Costa Rica at 10 years old. “Things were pretty primitive back there” he remembers, and with no book or video stores to furnish him with stories by other people, he turned to drawing to make his own.

Following his artistic trajectory, in his early twenties he’s still in Costa Rica, studying Fine Art, but never graduates. Instead, he starts rolling with a group of graffiti artists, and the proprietor at the local hardware store begins rubbing his hands in giddy excitement as the sale of spray paints sees a sudden boost. These boys were spitting right into the face of the law, painting the town all the colours of the rainbow with these garish and caricatured figures of authority. After spray tagging enough walls around the district, they made enough of a name for themselves to not just be able to curate and host successful exhibitions of their work but also managed to attract the attention of the big players in the Costa Rican art scene - granted there weren’t many of them in the first place, given the incredibly tiny art scene of the country.  However, it wasn’t just the Costa Rican culturati whose attention their growing notoriety grabbed.

The police weren’t altogether jazzed about the fact that a bunch of beer-drinking-weed-smoking hooligans were running amok around town and defacing public property. And for a band of unprincipled, power-drunk jackals who have brutally beaten up Rene and other citizens in the past over nothing, the police had all the excuse they needed to search and destroy our graffiti artists. There was this one time when Rene and his gang were trying to pull off a particularly elaborate project, a mural underneath a bridge of three life-size policemen approaching a little girl painting a flower to beat her up. Apart from the months of planning, it required Rene’s whole group, and an additional two cars – one to be on the lookout for any law enforcement and the other as a getaway vehicle. About halfway through painting the mural, Rene spotted something suspicious… A grey Toyota, driven by someone who looked like a shopping centre security guard, tooled past them as they sprayed away, and the driver managed to get a clean look at their activity. “That guy is going to rat on us!” Rene announced right before calling his friends driving the lookout and getaway vehicles to come evacuate them. The first car arrived which took away three people and all their equipment, but scarcely had the second one arrived when Rene and the remaining two were ambushed by three police trucks full of baton-wearing, pistol-toting cops. With no other choice, Rene split on foot, with the cops (some driving, others running hot on his heels) after him. After a very sweaty and tense sprint through the humid and sweltering crevices of the city, with adrenaline and fear electrifying his bloodstream, Rene evaded the cops and decided to hang up his spray cans for a while.

Then there were other times when Rene and his graffiti clique did get caught by the police to be promptly beaten black and blue, in a jail cell or the middle of the street if more convenient, and having all their money stolen. All these tense encounters with law and authority instilled and rebellious streak in young Rene, egging him on to produce work that was more garish and audacious.

Anyway, one of the high rollers of that sparse congregation which called itself the Costa Rican art scene, an artist and curator named Filippo Tattoni-Marcozzi, who attended one of Rene’s graffiti art exhibitions got in touch with Rene and talked some sense into him.

“Look man, you’ve got potential, just be a bit more serious about this. It’s awesome you’re doing this out of a young-spirited idealism which rejects commercialism, you do you. But also look at this as a career opportunity. You could get out of here, leave Costa Rica… and I can help you. You’ve already sold your work to the only five collectors here, they’re not going to buy your shit every time. You’ve got to expand!” is what Rene remembers Marcozzi saying to him along the lines of.

So Rene planned to leave the nest, but where to go? The USA was completely out of the question to the young man Rene was back then, on account of the evil devil-spawn of capitalism which his parents warned him about. What are some of the other art capitals of the world? Milan? Paris? I hear London is nice this time of year, or all other times of the year if you could call constant rain with fleeting reliefs of sunshine “nice”. London it is!

It’s 2013 now, and after applying to a couple of universities, his options came down to choosing between either Central Saint Martin’s or City & Guild’s School. His reason for accepting the latter’s offer was due to the simple romanticism of the course they were offering. “Their presentation wasn’t anything like, ‘Look how prestigious this institution is’. Instead, it was like, ‘Look; crafts, workshops, staff who care about you and your space’, and it was really magical. Like Hogwarts.” Rene added with a chuckle. Amid the hustle and bustle of City & Guilds, a fervent Rene found himself in an art environment wholly different to anything he’d experienced before. “Something that’s quite taken for granted in the art education here,” Rene went on, “is a bigger perspective on the contemporary art scene. Costa Rica has a very small and limited art scene, and I went to THE BEST art school there which is the National University, and their Fine Art program was THE BEST in the country, and they can teach you like, ‘First there was the cave paintings… then there was Medieval… then the Renaissance… then Impressionism…’ and they’ll teach you about Salvador Dali, and Hilma af Klint, it’s very basic you know. Whereas here in the UK” he continued, his volume rising considerably through enthusiasm, “they teach you like, ‘OK, so art can be everything and nothing at the same time. What even is art?’ It’s very philosophical and it focuses a lot on what’s been happening over the last fifty years. I remember when I first started university here and two weeks later, we went to Cologne, in Germany, so they could show us Gothic churches and galleries, but also some modern places as well. And the tutors were giving us lectures at these places, teaching us about the architecture and history and all of that. This is so much different to just a PowerPoint presentation in a small room where you’re being told all these cliches of art history.”

Indeed, all of this served to “expand my mind”, as Rene put it, and his ideas about his own work underwent a transformation too.

“My ideas of contemporary art back then were, again, very cliched”, Rene admitted, and as he evaluated the new context in which he found himself, the realisation shone on him that his old, hot-blooded, politically instigative work was incompatible with the person he had become.

“My art used to be explicitly political - that was me, that was my identity - and through time, it started to feel like it had become a bit too preachy, so I moved away from it,” said Rene as if speaking of a past life. Then he went on in a proud voice, “Now my work is about a feeling. It’s much more simple.”

“AND…” perking up for an addendum on his previous work, “what I realised after making explicitly political work for so long was that I did it more out of vanity, and me feeling like ‘wow I’m so noble’, than out of the actual change I was making work for. At the end of the day, I wasn’t changing any minds.”

That is a fact which can be nauseating for many artists who have just started doing this as a full-time job to confront themselves with; you’re not recognised enough for your work to have a damn given about. Artists who are the talk of the town don’t have this problem because enough people on both sides of opinion have interacted with their work to spark some kind of discourse. In many respects the circuits of the art world inhabited by emerging artists are no different to social media: it’s an echo chamber. The people who like your work will stick around to see what you make next, while the people who dislike your work couldn’t care less about your next opus.

“Speaking of the art world,” said Rene, as if picking up on Asiimov’s line of questioning before he even uttered them, “it would be better if artists were more open and honest than romantic and principled. Like, I have nothing against principles – I have my own and I live by them – but I just no longer think that it’s our job to be so self-righteous about things and to, kind-of, die on that hill, you know? And if you can make it work and that’s the only thing you’re about, by all means go and do that. Certainly, a lot of people have found a lot of success doing that.”

People like The Guerrilla Girls or Ai Weiwei have built lucrative careers out of reminding us of the new depths we’ve sunk to as a species.

“What do you mean by self-righteousness here?” Asiimov interjected.

“I mean when you’re so sure about yourself. I don’t think it’s for me.” Rene admitted, more so to himself than to Asiimov. “When artists are so sure that the right thing to do is to go and make art that tells people about inequality or whatever, AND THEN,” his volume rising in indignation, “the more you look into the artists in those positions who are famous for making that kind of work, pfffffffttt their clientele, their background, and their support systems are all supportive of the things they criticise and sometimes deliberately go against the very principles they espouse. And I don’t think I could ever do that.”

With a curious excitement, the kind which takes over one when they’re being told about some drama, Asiimov asked, “Can you name any such artists?”

“Not if you’ll mention their names, I don’t want to mess with any of my connections,” Rene replied apologetically.

“Later perhaps, when the tape isn’t running,” Asiimov conceded with some hope.

Continuing, Rene said, “My path though, led me through this different thing.”

“Forgive me for prying…” Asiimov entreated, then asked, “But how successful is your path turning out to be compared to the moral activism route?”

“Success, as in money?”

“Yes.”

With an ambivalence in his eyes, Rene said, “When I think about art as a profession, as my job, I want to sell.”

Unfolding with pity for the past, Rene went on, “I used to glorify artists as these messengers of sacred truth, or people who held society to a certain standard, but with time I came to accept that it’s just a job and I’m making something for someone to hang on their wall. Not all of my clients will be edgy and well-versed in what’s new and current in art and theory, some of them will just be people who want to buy a nice picture.”

“So, a lot of days,” Rene exclaimed, “I’m just going to work. I’ve chosen to work in something I’m passionate about and love which gives it that purpose for me. I don’t love working as a waiter, or in a call centre, or a store, I had to do all those jobs in the past, so my dream became to be able to pay rent through doing something that I love, which is painting.”

Chuckling at himself, “Of course what I said earlier about making something only so that someone can put it on their wall, I don’t advertise myself that way, but it would be pretentious not to acknowledge the reality of art as a profession.”

From the jolt of a sudden thought, Rene almost stood right up off the floor, but composed himself to say, “Once again regarding my older work, not everyone wants to buy something that’s in your face saying, ‘LOOK AT WAR!’, right?” he posed with the shrug of his shoulders, “So that would mean that I’d have to take other jobs, sometimes two different jobs, just to pay rent, which would mean that I won’t be able to paint as much, or at all, because I either won’t have time or am too tired.”

As dedicated as Rene is to his art, as passionate as he may feel about the work he creates, when all is said and done; rent’s gotta be paid. A ground floor space similar to the one Rene is using as his art studio in Lambeth County Court rents out for anywhere between £1100 and £1350 a month. Then considering the rent for his residential flat, which he shares with his wife of six years, the location and price of which Asiimov, out of respect, didn’t inquire about; but knowing the dreadful state of the property market in London right now, the rent sure won’t be cheap. Then tack on essential expenses like utility bills – both in his workspace and residence – public transport travel, council tax, and food. On top of that, leisure expenses such as nights and meals out, holidays, and spending money must be accounted for. All of which makes for a very tall order in a very expensive city, so Rene’s – and any other artist’s – endeavour to support themselves solely off their art becomes quite a tricky one.

It's also very easy to imagine that once an artist – or anyone - has been able to support themselves financially off the fruits of their passion, it would sting pretty badly if they had to return to their day job due to a bad turn in their business. Hence why Rene’s current paintings sell for anywhere between £2700 at their cheapest, all the way to £9000 at their priciest, depending on the size and complexity of the piece. A price tag which reflects not just the technical skill employed to produce a painting of desirous beauty, but also the pressing economic demands on a self-employed, working-class artist to keep their practice running, at the same consistent level of quality as well. 

“Let’s say I post something on Instagram,” Rene outlined, trying to verbally illustrate his designs, “and someone comments on it, or reposts it, whether it’s an audience member or other artists – who are also an audience in this case, right? – I’d be honoured, but also motivated and informed by that. It's this push and pull, a conversation you have with your audience, and this is something I value a lot, even philosophically, in the sense that I’m not painting for myself and to show my friends and family. It really is me going into a market and an audience having a conversation with me about what they like and don’t, me responding to them and giving them more of that and less of the other. And that really shapes who I am as an artist.”

But who is Rene, the artist?

Though he’s Costa Rican, he’s not a Costa Rican artist.

“I stopped identifying as a Costa Rican artist the year before I left Costa Rica. I just wanted to be an artist.” declared Rene. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t include my personal experience in my art, it’s just that it’s very limiting for me now, or I felt it was very limiting for me back then, to say that ‘I’m just this’. I just don’t feel that way, especially being born in Canada and then moving to Costa Rica, even in Costa Rica I had a bit of a different perspective about things than some of the people I hung out with. I would always say, ‘Yeah, you know this is only how we see things here, like, in other countries we don’t see things that way, you know that right?’ So I always had this outsider perspective. Even in Canada, when I went to school, I was a Latino kid, the son of two communist Latin Americans, so I felt like a bit of an outsider, but then do does everyone in a way.” Rene added that last bit with a tone of moving compassion.

With a vacant expression, as if flicking through the photo album of his identity, he brooded, “I tend not to think a lot about what I identify as an artist, I just try to be, like, honest. Living in London, I definitely identify as a Londoner. But with the art world,” here Rene’s voice took on a gravity so far unheard in their conversation, “I think my concern with it is much more about class than culture and nationality…”

Hold up there for a minute! More on what Rene is about to launch into later. In the meantime, a certain Peruvian oddity is itching to get a few words in.

*

The condition of artist Giuseppi Cambana’s L-shaped studio made it seem like its inhabitant unpacked half their belongings only to change their mind partway through and started packing up again. All the stuff concentrated itself to the edges and corners of this L, leaving an airy dead space in the middle. Metal shelving units were dotted around the place like signposts, each of them overspilling with a bafflingly random assortment of clutter; extension cables and wiring of a diverse sort, rolls upon rolls of prints as if a tsunami of paper were washing over the side, bottles of wine (some empty, others not) accompanied by plastic wine glasses, and enough plastic bags filled with a melange of junk to choke an ocean full of turtles.

Apart from Giuseppi, this studio was inhabited by three other artists, all of whom had been shoved in this space together – perhaps to sort out their differences, who knows? - by a charitable organisation called ACME which hook artists up with studio spaces and residencies, or in the case of Giuseppi and his three inmates, both at the same time. As he was the only one present in the studio with Asiimov, salsa music was playing freely from his desktop speakers interrupted by the occasional commercial on Spotify.

In a voice both raspy and soft, Giuseppi opened up to Asiimov, “Through this award with ACME we got this studio for a year and got a group show at the end of it. I’ve got the studio till January [2023], but the show is in October [2022] which isn’t very far. For the longest time I was like ‘yeh yeh yeh it’s far’ and now all of a sudden, ‘shiiiit it’s only three months away’. The work for the show is not done yet, and it probably won’t be done until a month before the show.”

Laughing then taking a sip from his beer, Giuseppi said, a trifle regretfully, “A year’s not enough for anything really. I see everyone enjoying the summer, but these are the months when I should be working the most, so I feel a bit anxious right now.”

Following the red threads on the pinboard of his productivity, he continued, “Ideally, I’d like a year to just play around and experiment, but that’s not the case. So my work for this show is being informed by my anxiety and it will probably take the form of a film because photography is what feels most organic to me right now. But it might not be later. I’m always in a transitional space.”

As it would turn out, two-and-a-half months after their conversation, Asiimov met Giuseppi again at the end of September when he was attending the very show he still hadn’t started making the work for here. It did indeed take the form of a film. Four middle-aged women sitting around a table have an impassioned, free-flowing conversation (much like this one) about various things from motherhood and their own childhoods to tradition and love. The entire film is shot through this restless camera which jerk-pans back and forth between the women, capturing the minutiae of their facial expressions through close-up shots so tight that in most cases the tops and bottoms of their heads are ejected from the frame. True to his word he shot the film mere weeks before the exhibition…

Take one look at the array of different disciplines Giuseppi has created work in – performance, sculpture, sketch, video, photography, virtual online spaces… – and you’d see a jack of all trades yet master of none. But that’s alright because he’s not trying to master anything, only doing what feels natural to him at any given moment in time. Yet another unnamed, slave-writer wrote this about Giuseppi’s practice for a bio on Gasworks,

“Through video installation, film and performance, Rodriguez Cambana explores the ‘theatre’ of interpreting, processing and tracing lived experience as a strategy to decipher Afro-diasporic histories. He proposes personal narratives that serve as a confessional language, which are then situated within actions or natural and fabricated environments.”

One can’t really decide whether his pieces belong in an art gallery or on a theatre stage. Two balconies are constructed on opposite ends of a gallery space. One has purple walls while the other has blue. The purple balcony has a dark green door with a window, while the blue one has a bright yellow one. The purple balcony has laundry drying on it, while the blue one has an empty chair. Both balconies have a lamp shining over the doorway, and if one pays close attention through the windows, a scene is taking place inside… Through the windows of the purple balcony, a recumbent Black man rests on a hammock in front of a tropical wallpaper, his phone on the bedside table. The scene taking place inside the blue balcony was of a baby in his crib, staring tiredly out the window. The whole scene looks like the top storey of a tight, Peruvian street has been sliced out of the landscape and inserted right into the gallery. As his first solo show in London, Giuseppi called this installation Ópera de Balcón, and true to its title, it really looks like a dialogue is about to take place between two characters on these balconies.

Incidentally, one of the pieces from the balconies was leaning against the wall behind Giuseppi in his studio while he was having this conversation with Asiimov.

A crowd has gathered in a hall with imitation Classical architecture. There’s an empty space in front of them which is promptly taken up by Giuseppi and five other men dressed in black. To the shaky rhythms of a salsa tune, they begin a choreographed dance which slowly turns into a scene. Five of the six dancers begin to surround the remaining one threateningly, literally dancing circles around him. After bullying the poor soul through the medium of dance, all six of them suddenly get up and march out through the crowd. This performance which took place in Peru was called Cara de Nińo.

Waiting for the session to begin is another sculptural piece which was left in public, at a pier on the beach in Peru. Inside a tall, black, wooden box, one can see through the windowed side, seven vinyl turntables mounted on a wall. Each of them is spinning a vinyl record with a different sketch drawn on them.  Simple sketches of a person, some sitting down, others laying, others standing up, but all of them looking restive and bored. It would’ve been curious to see what sounds the records produced, but as the needle had run all the way to the end of the records and trapped in an endless spin in the runoff groove, the only sound to be heard was a dusty crackle.

On the other end of the consummate fastidiousness in his works are pieces like The Sexy Smell of Growth Hormones. In this video, shot in a wobbly handheld through some archaic phone camera, Giuseppi is struggling with five gigantic Dalmatians on a tangled-up leash in a lush green meadow. The dogs are walking him than the other way round.

Whether he dances, performs, paints, sculpts, or stages it, he’s extracting a vivid sense of community straight out of his neocortex and transposing it onto the world. All of it; the bursting colours, the simplicity, the icons and totems of his Black-Latin heritage, they’re all filtered through a chaotic brusqueness and unshakable loyalty to the experience that is quintessentially his. Hence why his works feel like a relic from another world, one modelled after ours but sculpted by him, where there is nothing to separate the present moment and his memories.

With a flash of certitude in his eyes, Giuseppi said, “The main reason why I make work is to call in community, or people that I felt in relation to. Because even communal spaces can sometimes be classist, when you’re surrounded by muhfuggas that look like you or muhfuggas that think like you, there’s still this thing that happens where some don’t like poor people, or they don’t like people who don’t speak like them, or speak in a tamed way like them, or don’t react emotionally the same way as them, especially if the people being judged are Black or indigenous, then that shit is policed in so many ways! That’s why it’s important for me to make work around community to break down those biases. I’ve stopped thinking about it [my practice], it feels very natural to me because this is what I know.”

This free-spirited, letting-the-chips-fall-where-they-may attitude doesn’t just allow him to switch between disciplines like switching a pair of socks, but frees him up to pursue any idea, any whim, any creative impulse which shoots up to the surface, as long as it remains true to who he is.

Waving his arms mechanically, Giuseppi explained, “There are certain strategies which I like to use to understand myself better at that present moment, right? So the lived experience is my #1 reference point. I rarely look at other art to inform my work. Everything in my work - whether it’s historical, or social, or economic structures, or representation - that I want to think about, they’re all embedded in my lived experience and heavily personalised. I’d want to say that my work takes a sense of nostalgia, but that word is so white-washed now, so instead it’s more the feeling of remembering.”

“Am I making work about colonisation? Sure. Am I making work about representation? Sure. But I’m also making work about love, or my romances and shit, about my messiness, I also want to talk about that, and I feel like I should have a space to do it which is cultivated by me that allows me to push further into conversations without feeling confined or cornered.” he announced proudly.

“What’s with the emphases you’re putting on certain words? I’ve noticed you doing this since we started talking.” Asiimov asked, in a way he wished was a bit less forthright.

Not at all caught off guard by Asiimov’s abruptness, Giuseppi explained fervidly, “I really like to think about the philosophies of language. The language I use to convey a certain thought or emotion, and the spaces that can be activated through these thoughts and emotions. And my work is driven emotionally. Not technically, not pragmatically, but emotionally. I think of language as not only verbal but emotional too, which is just another form of communicating. And If I can understand that there’s another kind of communication which can happen outside of our usual existence, then that gives me hope.”

“That’s a beautiful thought. The key to any great art, I think, is for the artist to live their art. For them to live their philosophy. And it certainly looks and feels like you’re doing it.” complimented Asiimov.

“Thanks bro, that means a lot to me!” Giuseppi said effusively. “I live my life in a very theatrical way. Everything I do, the life I’ve chosen to live and the one I’ve been driven to, feels very performative.”

What’s this life he’s chosen to live? Is choice even the correct term here? That one solitary word had intoxicated Asiimovwith intrigue, so much that he was unable to resist poking his nose into Giuseppi’s past. His nose went quite far.

In 1991, Giuseppi was born to Afro-Peruvian parents in the seaside city of Callou in Peru. Being born to Black parents meant that Giuseppi was embraced in a kaleidoscopic culture which treasured community and loyalty. Such an unshakable collective bond is both an inherent aspect of the Black culture in Peru and a means of survival in a white supremacist country.  Callao’s position on the coast, making it a port city, meant that the loathsome history of slavery rolled through town during its boom. Using the city as an exchange area for slave bodies, those detestable slave masters bred Black with Latin people to produce slaves, which accounts for the ethnically mixed population of Peru.

Growing up in predominantly Black and Brown neighbourhoods he was submerged in a culture, which he called, “very complicated, very strong, and very working class.” Things like muralism, musical styles like salsa and hip-hop, and theatre, these aren’t just mere pastimes, but veritable movements in such surroundings. Things he had in great abundance during his formative years. People went out in public squares, expressing themselves in however they pleased, whether it’s covering the entire face of a building in murals, blasting music from broken down stereo systems and people dancing to it, or hosting impromptu theatre performances where men dressed like women and the other way around, such were the burgeoning and textural surroundings in which Giuseppi grew up, which incubated his creativity.

Imagine his surprise when he moved to the USA, at age 10 in 2001, and found himself stranded in a culture completely different to his own. A worse culture. Although he would move back and forth between Peru and the USA, so he gained transient relief from a culture he never felt a part of. Contrary to his native surroundings where he was growing up with people and things that didn’t require labels, in the USA things were invisible and unacknowledged until a label was attached to them, which would enter the common nomenclature like a trend, a buzzword, and very quickly fizzle out only to be replaced by the next fleeting linguistic fad. For instance, when he first came across the term “intersectional” or “intergenerational” being treated as new concepts in the US, these were already old news to him. Back in Callao, it was the cultural norm to hang out and form close familial bonds with older people. At the age of 7, he was spending time with people anywhere from 3-4 years to 20-30 years older than him, and they all lived like a family beyond blood. He’d be sharing the table with people like his transwoman aunt called Titi Juan, the roughest rogues from the hood who had killed people in the past, and hairdressers who had also incidentally spilt their share of blood; yet they all existed together in a respectful harmony without an ounce of judgement. All of a sudden when the word around Miami was that intersectionality and intergenerational are cool new things, he smelt bullshit. It was then that he noticed how deranged and senseless communication was in the West. “Language itself has been appropriated to serve a capitalist world and it’s difficult to step away from it,” Giuseppi remembers the realisation as.

Take also for example terms like First, Second, and Third World, which are meant to delineate an obvious hierarchy that places the West on top. Although in subversion of the oppressor’s logic, Giuseppi doesn’t mind using Third World to refer where he’s from because he finds the concept of a Third World which is far more multi-dimensional and complex than the First something to be proud of. Or perhaps take the “x” at the end of “Latinx” which is supposed to denote non-gender-conforming individuals of Latin descent. He sees the “x” as a useful and progressive additive at the end of “Latin”, but from a Third World perspective likens it to “a painting about colonisation done by the colonisers”, in that the “x” - or whatever the next group of people who will be recognised only once a letter or a symbol is added to the end of an acronym - feels like it’s granted on the terms of those in power. In this sense he views this current moment in language as both important as it’s allowing minority groups to raise themselves at least to some recognition through changing the language, but also as not important due to all these politically charged terms either doing nothing at all, or worse, ending up confining the people it’s supposed to liberate.

The decision to move to the US was never his, his mother having migrated there 2 years before him for the reason most people migrate there – for more opportunities. Most of the places he lived in Miami; South Florida, Fort Lauderdale, and Pompano Beach, Giuseppi described all of them as “HOOD as fuck!”, in that these places were incredibly rough, yet funnily they reminded him of similar neighbourhoods he had lived in back in Callaou.   

When not working various day jobs, Giuseppi spent most of his time in Miami either drawing, writing scripts, rapping with friends, or getting into trouble. “The whole point” Giuseppi elucidates, “is that I never had any formal art education before I went to university later. And I knew that because of it I wouldn’t be getting into any respectable schools.” Regardless of everything he was doing in Miami, only one thought bore upon his mind; to escape. “It felt counterintuitive living there. And in a lot of ways, I felt clinically depressed. So here was my plan. I applied to two schools; Cal Arts [California Institute of Arts] which is in Los Angeles, and the School Museum of Fine Arts which is in Boston, and the only reason I applied to that school in Boston was because somewhere along my experience in Florida, I met a cousin of mine. Not related to me by blood, just through marriage when my mother married my stepfather. And the dude was very white-passing, a Black dude with strong indigenous features trying to blend into a white world, prescribing to whiteness in the way that I never wanted to. But he was still a bro, an art bro. Anyway…” trying to get back on point, “he told me about this school, and I think he was very anxious about going there alone, so he encouraged me to apply and go with him. So I applied and thought ‘Let’s see what happens.’”

Giuseppi knew two things for a fact; that he wanted to make art regardless, and that he wanted to leave. Getting into this school would help him achieve both in one efficient move. Fortunately for Giuseppi, he got accepted into both the schools he had applied to, but the choice of which one to go to was obvious.

However, it was when he got to Boston in 2010, aged 19, that he got a bitter taste of how truly repugnant the art world, which was catered to and populated by the white middle class, could be to anyone who didn’t fit that category. Up until now, he had worked a multitude of odd jobs; waiter, pot washer, sushi delivery, but never had he considered art as a career option. Even at that point he still didn’t consider it as a career, mostly because he was sick of Boston and the white people he was surrounded by. He was right in the middle of an environment where his intellect and talent were constantly questioned, he recalls about it that “Everyone around me felt like they had a dominance over the language of art which I wasn’t hip to; theory, literature, names of artists, practices, they felt like they owned it all. And what I had was some real immigrant poor-people language, but I didn’t know that that shit would be an advantage to me until my second to last of my four years there.” His experiences, working-class background, and culture, all of which made that white non-culture seem drab and tasteless in comparison, allowed him to “see things these motherfuckers don’t, speak about certain things in a certain way these motherfuckers can’t.” Yet still, at the end-of-year degree show where he produced - and let’s use this term lightly – objectively some of the best work out of the class, no one cared for the work of an immigrant because they found it irrelevant. What he found most perplexing was that this typical white ignorance didn’t just come from white folk but from other people of colour too.

Here he tripped upon another realisation, that you don’t have to be white to perform whiteness. “To a certain extent” he stated, “whiteness stops becoming biological and starts being institutional or academic.”

“And people in the US,” Giuseppi recalls with a scintilla of pity in his voice, “are really good at performing whiteness. Every person of colour who socialises in a white-patriarchal society, at some point, feels like they want to be white because they see where the power is coming from. And I think that’s such a painful thing to realise and talk about. So I wouldn’t really blame a Black or Brown kid growing up in this world not wanting to be fucked with when they’re seeing people like them being fucked with around them.”

Graduating university with a BA and a good deal of clinical depression which emerged from his experiences of being marginalised and not being listened to as an immigrant in a racist country, he felt an astronomical sense of hopelessness and just an overall desperation to escape. In 2011 he found an opportunity to take a break from it all and returned to Peru to make a film with “my boy Branden” [artist and educator Branden Paillant, currently residing in China], who agreed to help out. “We got our shit together, bought the tickets, and we made this film” he triumphantly announced. What they ended up making on that fateful trip to Peru was this weird and playful ode to the niches of his culture shot in bright and dreamy Super8, something which Giuseppi would later expand into a trilogy of films called La Mar Brava. Indulging in a bit of sentimentality he looked back to this trip and said, “The product of that moment, both the work and the experience, made me feel like I could get through this shit. This was the first time I felt like I was using this language, which I felt was so inaccessible to all these white academics, to put myself forward.”

Having exhausted all that Boston had to offer him, he made a short trek to New York City where he settled down for the next two years, which he remembers with extreme fondness, as an Art Educator for children. “This was one of the best times of my life, in the way where I was teaching kids who I felt I was very similar to. Teaching them art and a language which they needed to grow but didn’t know how to access, which was a very nuanced time because I myself was still learning how to communicate using that same language.”

However, his artistic career didn’t gather the momentum that it has now until he left the US and moved to Britain in 2019. “I left all this baggage behind, and it was baggage which required me to forget some things, take accountability for some, and accept the fact that I need a new beginning.” he reminisced. Being at the cusp of a fresh start is a scary thing, especially when you’re in your late 20s and have a turbulent past behind you, but if you’re as smart and crafty as Giuseppi is then things will turn out alright in the end. Furthermore, determined that he wouldn’t give into whiteness the way some fools did in the US, and knowing the rules of the game that needed to be played, understanding art as a business where he would sometimes make work for himself and sometimes for others who would potentially buy his stuff, he felt confident that a better life lay ahead.

The jury is still out on whether life was any better in the UK…

“I have managed to make a living off art” Giuseppi stated happily, “all of this year and a bit off last year from grants, commissions, and shows. I’ve moulded my practice over the last few years to work off of these things. A gallery that wants to exhibit me would usually offer me an artist’s fee plus a budget to go towards the making of the project. I’ve been negotiating my practice around this, trying to discuss a fee and a budget which works for me. I don’t necessarily make objects that sell, but I do make objects which can inhabit an installation. However, these objects are more difficult to make any profit off of. Financially my situation is tight, but I’m happy to not be working an 8-hour shift. This is a very big change in my life.” With a brilliant gleam in his eyes, he added that last bit.

Giuseppi opened his mouth to say something, words came out of them, they were heard by Asiimov’s ears and processed by his brain. But those words won’t be written down… here. Those words will be chronicled once we’ve heard from a patient Brazilian woman.

*

The sun was burning down on the Earth; cooking the pavement, scorching the soil, and superheating the air during this mid-July heatwave and making it quite unbearable to be outside. Asiimov and the artist Goia Mujalli were regretting having hot coffee during this weather, but it's not as if they could take their half-drunk cups of coffee back inside and ask the already stressed-out staff at Redemption Roasters on Lambs Conduit Street to exchange them for iced-drinks. They’d be scowled out of town.

Lambs Conduit Street is this tight thoroughfare in London which runs between Holborn and Russell Square. It’s also one of the many one-way-street parking traps which ensnare countless London motorists on a weekly basis. This meant that every so often the same car or moped would drive past Asiimov and Goia multiple times, sending billows of hot smoke curling up into the oven-like atmosphere, as it sought both a way out and a place to park.

“Is it stupid to ask an abstract painter to describe their work?” Asiimov asked.

“Not at all,” she replied good-humouredly.

“In that case do you want to describe your work to me?”

Goia half laughed and unfurled the kaleidoscope of her work to him.

“I see my paintings as a way of celebrating life, celebrating being here, and celebrating nature. Even though nature is being destroyed, I’d still like to celebrate it, because it would be really easy to fall into the negativity that is coming from our destruction. So long as we’re alive and continue our contact with nature, I see it as a way of celebrating it.” she proclaimed with a hopeful gleam in her eyes, one which against all instability rests on the possibility that, just maybe, one day we’d come to our senses.

No matter how hard I try, you won’t get a true sense of Goia’s paintings through my, admittedly lacklustre, description alone. That’s an occupational hazard of trying to put abstract paintings down into words, what you’ll read is only a mere interpretation of something that can’t be quantified into text. That being said, a haphazard attempt will still be made towards describing just what kind of beatific things Goia presents on her canvases.

Her paintings are a playground for the shapes, colours, and textures of nature. Under the embrace of a resplendently tropical colour palette, the kind one would find in the deepest of jungles or the most bucolic of beaches, are shapes which approach some of the forms found in nature; leaves, clouds, fruit, ocean waves, flowers and petals, fish,… all of them dancing ecstatically around the painted surface. A carnival of movement is spurred up in her paintings. Using brushstrokes and formless marks layered freely upon one another, the composition becomes a veritable parade of textures and colours marching boldly out of the painting. Goia isn’t content with limiting herself to just paints either because showing up occasionally are flourishes of embroidery; the outline of leaves stitched with threads of blue, red, and green here, embroidered grass sprouting up from the bottom of the canvas there, and in some cases elsewhere, more thread on the canvas than there is paint when she does everything I’ve outlined above in describing her paintings, but with thread embroidery instead of paint.

Some poor soul who probably isn’t being paid a penny for their internship at Art Gazette wrote this about Goia’s paintings:

“Mujalli’s paintings of fictional tropical spaces reach out for longed-for realities. Her process begins with intuition, colour, rhythm, mark making and movement, which create room for her tropical memories to reappear.”

Staring at any of her paintings for long enough pulls the viewer into the odd effect of not just perceiving the movement within them, but feeling their body being pulled along the current. Like the moving images of a zoetrope, all the parts are there before you, all that is needed to see the sum is an action.

“It’s all there” Goia echoes, “I also give space to the process and the celebration which is the enjoyment of making the artwork. I’ve always found something which is very important to me as an artist is to discover things through making and allowing magic to exist.” 

Much like Rene, Goia’s work is an endeavour to portray nature in her most exalted of states and to preserve and celebrate the little that is left of it. They’re both creating alternate histories of what becomes of nature in their own way, with wildly different outputs, but the same impetus for preservation. However, the act of creating an alternate history is at once an implicit statement on the version of history we’re all living in now, and Goia makes her thoughts on how history is unfolding very clear… But before she begins voicing those thoughts, it would be insightful to glance at her own personal history.

37 years and an unverifiable number of days before, in 1985, Goia came into the world in the city of Sao Paolo in Brazil. Unsatisfied with the concrete claustrophobia of this metropolis, her family moved to the natural paradise that everyone knows as Rio de Janeiro.

Two features about this place would leave an indelible mark on the rest of her life. First, something already mentioned was its drop-dead natural beauty. “I grew up a lot around rainforests, beaches, waterfalls, going to quite a lot of other places around Brazil, and being in the middle of nowhere” she reminisced. “It was quite raw, all I remember are coconuts, mango trees, and the occasional fish, all the way up to my early twenties.”

The second worldly feature to impress itself upon Goia’s personality was the people of Brazil who are in perpetual celebration. She was surrounded by constant carnivals, lavish parades every few weeks, the colourful, rough worn-down houses illuminated at night under the luminescence of fireworks and party lights; things which would fill even the most despairing soul with beatific joy. “The colours which you see in my paintings” she explains with the same rainbow hues flashing through her eyes “are the vibrancy of Brazil, especially Rio. You go there and it’s a completely different atmosphere. Although there are all these issues and problems, there’s something within the culture that no matter how down we are or how problematic things get, the people are still in a celebratory mode. We live by the day and celebrate what we have.”

At 15, living in the tropical palette of a painter, she decided to take the colours from around her and paint for herself. It was a feeling like nothing she had experienced before, it plucked her straight out of this world and transported her into one which required no effort or calculation, just pure creation, and she couldn’t get enough of it. Wanting to nurture this new-found passion she later took painting classes, and a style began to develop.

Once the thoughtless strokes making up rudimentary shapes became more confident, she began making landscape paintings, often of a quite political nature, which cast a caustic and entreating glare at the destruction – deforestation, famine, political chaos – of her much-beloved paradise. A genesis of the commentary in her current paintings because sadly those problems still drag on today. 

When it began to look like the ruthless exploitation of the land would come to no end, she turned her focus onto figuration – bodies and objects – in an attempt to capture the people behind this land rape. Tired of that, she began to deconstruct space in her canvases until she was painting full-on abstract. Decoding the hieroglyphs on her canvas, Goia unveiled, “The abstraction relates to the extraction and destruction of nature, but I see them as rebuilding something else too. From all this removal and disintegration there’s a different world being built, which we might inhabit next. So, my paintings are a transformation of what we have now.”

At the boisterous age of 27, with an inherent and automatic style which inhabited her canvases like a spirit, she decided that Brazil, her treasured haven, had nothing else to offer her in terms of developing her craft, so with a blinding glimmer in her eyes she set forth for Britain in 2012 to study at university. She chose Slade School of Fine Art for her BA, after the completion of which she wasted no time in getting her MA done at the Royal College of Art.

Coincidentally, Goia arrived at a revelation in her artistic development similar to Rene Gonzalez’s, in that the process and outcome of creating in-your-face political pieces was beginning to feel ineffectual to her, so instead, during her MA the subjects she painted gravitated more towards migration, identity, and colonialism, submerging herself into the deep waters of research on these topics. Taking Asiimov down one of the many research rabbit holes, Goia explained with beaming enthusiasm, “I researched fruits and plants as a form of transportation and displacement to understand how certain fruits travel and what kind of symbolism they had in specific countries, you know? So now I’m using even more plants in my works, creating symbols and abstracting them through paint, but I’m also using a lot of embroidery and stitching, so I’m mixing all those mediums together.” Her vivaciousness reaching a passionate pitch she continued, “When I researched the plants, I realised there’re a lot of tropical plants in the UK, and many are being sold, so it’s funny how they survive here in the cold.” Checking herself for a moment she interrupts her speech, “I’m not sure how long they survive here though, but it’s still interesting how plants have migrated to a cold country and continue to survive even though they don’t belong here. I think it speaks a lot about humans and how we travel and adapt to different places and climates.”

Running through all her styles and phases like a silver thread has been her adoration of nature. And on a more literal note, the threads which she runs through her canvases to embroider or stitch patterns and fabrics is her attempt at patching up the rips we’ve torn in the world, as she exclaims, “Stitching is a form of repairing, adding the fabrics and either hand or machine stitching them is a way of repairing history, you know?” 

When it comes to business, it’s going. Unlike Giuseppi Cambana who makes artworks that aren’t really sellable, Goia’s paintings are definitely the kind of object people would want to buy. A selection of her paintings from 2018 are on sale on Artpiq.com - an online portal for buying and selling artworks - and they run for anywhere between £1050 for Purplegages, a relatively simple composition, and £4325 for Night, a piece more complex in execution and size. A couple have even sold. However, like Giuseppi, and any other artist who is being exhibited, she will also be making money from artist’s fees, commissions, and budgets given to her from galleries, organisations, and people. 

Having lived here long enough, Goia decided that it was about time to apply for British citizenship. Plus, she could finally get those immigration scoundrels off her back once and for all. So on a grey April day in 2022, Goia sat down to take the Life in the UK test, a compulsory step in the citizenship process made entirely out of hopelessly esoteric pieces of information about Britain which will never cross her path again. While browsing through the questions she noticed something amiss. Great gaps in history!

For example, she recalls in one of the questions Brazil not being recognised on the Allied side during World War II, where anyone with even the most basic understanding of high school history can remember that Brazilian expeditionary troops were sent all the way to Europe to fight alongside the British.

“How did that make you feel, seeing that in the question?” asked Asiimov.

“Forgotten. It was as if our contributions were being left out of history.”

“History is written by the victor, but at the detriment of others. It’s also a highly selective telling of events designed to convey a particular, and often embellished, narrative about a place and its people” stated Asiimov with confident certitude.

“The only interest the UK had in Brazil” declared Goia somewhat indignantly, “was during the Falklands War with Argentina which is when they contacted Brazil to set up spying agreements with them. But you know there are stories of gold still being taken out of the mines of Brazil, and then all these issues of deforestation and mining, that’s because the UK and other Western countries are still involved, but in a very hidden way. Nobody outside of Brazil really knows about this because it’s happening to us.”

Gold and wood aren’t the only things Western nations have been stealing, and Brazil isn’t the only place they’ve been stealing from. When visiting an art institution like the British Museum for example, one gets the sense of just how much of Britain’s history - those cherry-picked parts of history which that institution wants the world to know - is built upon stolen loot from other nations. Art historian Alice Proctor calls art institutions places of “remembering and misremembering”[2] as however they are arranged, two or more objects create a narrative, and the person(s) arranging them is shaping that narrative, whether this be in a bedroom, a museum, or in history itself.[3] Proctor continues to enlighten over the nuances of foreign art objects, in that “the process of collection always involves a level of appropriation, that is to say, the act of taking an object out of its original context and placing it in a new one.”[4] But the possessive bravado with which this loot is exhibited, with little regard for their original contexts, tells a twisted story of these objects and cultures as if they didn’t come into existence until a white man came and touched them.[5]

“Where do most of the West’s resources come from? Third World countries,” exclaims Goia without a hint of surprise. “These resources are stolen, sent to the West, and turned into products. But as these products are made in the West, no one knows where the materials came from.”

Her remarks sent resounding reminiscences through Asiimov of something Frantz Fanon wrote in his scathing takedown of a book against colonialism called The Wretched of the Earth, “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The riches which are choking it are those plundered from the underdeveloped people.”[6]

In a slow and deliberate tone, as if treading carefully through what she was about to say, Goia said, “With the growing awareness of colonialism, especially its impact on Black communities, I’ve found that Latin America isn’t considered, especially here in the UK, it isn’t recognised. Latin Americans are kind of forgotten, and that’s a personal experience I’ve had since moving to the UK 10 years ago.”

This ethnic amnesia which Goia speaks of is better represented nowhere than the Office for National Statistics’s official facts and figures sheet on ethnic groups living in Britain[7]. Laughably arbitrary categories of “Asian”, “Black”, “Mixed”, and “White” and their further sub-categories represent these major groups, while all the rest are relegated to the club of “Other”. Apart from laziness written all over this list, its attitude reeks of an expired and outdated stench which insinuates that all ethnic groups apart from the big four aren’t worthy of individual recognition.

Britain’s obliviousness to Latin America and all the “Others” is easily explained by the fact that it has no explicit interest in their affairs. This perception of the world is quintessentially of The West where unless they get involved with a place or people financially, diplomatically, and as is often the case, militaristically, it just simply doesn’t exist. Take for example what Goia said, with the same discretion as earlier,

“With the treatment of Black communities, the history of slavery is being addressed, the gold and artefacts which were stolen from them, and other indigenous communities are slowly being sent back, but I feel like little is being done for other ethnic groups. It’s the same with the art world which is giving more shows to Black artists because it’s dominated by white people. But then they don’t think about other nationalities and groups that aren’t necessarily Black.”

“I think it’s a very visual thing because then it becomes a skin colour thing” continued Goia in a speculative tone which belied her certainty on the topic, “I’m going to give you an example of Jewish people and what they’ve gone through. My ex-partner is Jewish and because he looks white, he isn’t considered a minority because he doesn’t look like a minority.”

Narcissus of The West completely enamoured by its own reflection became agonisingly apparent for Goia when the USA regressed further into its own filth by overruling the Roe v. Wade case this year which removed access to abortions from the constitutional rights of the American people. Like a brick hurled into a peaceful pond, the laments and opprobrium this disturbing act set off rippled far and wide.

“This is something I’ve already spoken to a lot of people about, said Goia in the tone of voice which suggested, from its exhaustion, that she had indeed spoken to a lot of people about it, “they’d come up to me and say ‘Oh! They’re eliminating abortion rights in the US’ and then I was like, ‘Do you know that abortion is fully illegal in Brazil? Did you know that that is something I have gone through, as a woman, and all my friends have been through, and nobody cares to even bring up like ‘Oh! It’s actually illegal to have an abortion in Brazil’’, you know? And women are having to do illegal and unsafe abortions because they’re going to have to do it anyway!” After taking a breath to compose herself, she concluded, “So when I see people sharing the news about abortion rights being cancelled in the US, it’s only because it’s happening in the West.”

Those last words landed with such a weight that no reply was required from Asiimov, and both sat for a few seconds in reflective silence. The direction in which the conversation took off once they started talking again will be picked up later, right after we’ve mollified the next, and final artist’s anticipation to speak.

*

The artist Jamie Fitzpatrick’s moving image and voice were coming loudly out of Asiimov’s laptop. Throughout most of the conversation, Jamie kept his muscular arms folded and rocked back and forth in his chair as if this was some physical manifestation of listening to the words he was hearing. He’d unfold his arms every so often to emphasise a point with a gesture of his hands. One evocative description after another of his work did Jamie furnish Asiimov with when asked the most basic existential conundrum of all: why?

We all know by now that all of us live in a world so spectacularly unjust that its antithesis has all but disappeared. There’s nothing new about this painful fact yet the salt still burns fresh in the wound. Trapped, for the far foreseeable future, in this human meat grinder, only three options present themselves; (a) give up, (b) live in a state of blissful ignorance which may not be able to outrun the brutish realities of a world so dreadful, or (c) deal with it.

Jamie’s garish sculptures, which look like what would remain of the wax figures at Madame Tussauds after a blazing fire engulfed the building, are his way of dealing with it.

Men and women of the empire and aristocracy are mutilated so far out of shape in his sculptures that only the most basic of facial and bodily structures suggest that these denizens represent something insultingly human. Military badges pinned somewhere barely insinuating a breast, hats or perukes sprouting like tumours out of their heads, military uniforms and period dresses of proportions so bizarre draped around their corpulent, grotesque bodies hint at their position in society. Their unspeakable shapes - some with multiple heads, others with hands bigger than the rest of their body, one with gigantic blocks for feet – and violently scarred texture make them look like they’ve been blasted, twisted, fucked, stabbed and burned multiple times over. Frothing at the mouth with their own bile, the matter which makes up their being bursting out of their seams, these blighted caricatures are the true appearance of power stripped of all its fear and intimidation.

Some pretty violent language is being used to describe Jamie’s work here, really nasty stuff like “repulsive” and “garish”, which they are, but when you look at them there’s still a level of indulgence to them. Despite their eviscerated appearance and monstrous proportions, his works are strangely nice to look at. This goes for a lot of violent artworks like the blood bath of Hermann Nitsch paintings or Cy Twombly’s crazed blood loops held in the Tate Modern’s permanent collection. “The violence of them, they’re made through process” Jamie intoned with a distant look in his eyes as if his mind were currently going through a vivid flashback of that same process, “The making of them has this performative aspect. The moving of materials, there’s a physicality to them. I guess how I place myself into these works is the engagement with a figure of a bodily form. The materials I tend to use are quite quick, things like clays and wax which have an impermanence to them, they have to be dealt with quite immediately, and on top of that, once you make them there’s no going back, no erasure and go-again, I have to commit to things. I’ll often spend a lot of time making something quite beautiful,” here he unfolded his arms to use his hands in delicately sculpting the air into something beautiful, “in a traditional sense, something refined. An arm, a face, something which looks nice. Then I’ll rip it apart,” then here his hands lost all their deliberate delicacy and started waving around in convulsive attacks, “I’ll tear off a finger, scratch down the face, destroy it.” Folding his arms back, “It always takes quite a bit of psyching up to affect and ruin the beauty of it. It’s part of the whole process.”

Our sympathies go out to the struggling unpaid intern for Vitrine Gallery who wrote this little nugget of text on Jamie, describing his practice as, “dealing the relevance of the figure and how objects and totemic gestures such as flags, statues or plinths are used within the work to impose forms of power and control. The sculptures are influenced by Wilhelm Reich’s ideas on power-infatuation, cultural conditioning and sexual suppression, the works are built from foam, coloured wax, alpha plaster, scrim, wood, gold leaf, and simply some transgressive acts.” As far as slave writing goes, this is one of the better ones…

Jamie professed further, “I’m interested, essentially, in the symbols of authority, and how works of art are kind of built on a structure of symbols…” Here he unfolded his arms to demonstrate with his hands that base structure “…which often will be used to reaffirm structures of power, whether patriarchal or racial. So I guess the works I’m most known for are the ones around London statues.”

London is a veritable twisted cornucopia of power symbols, and anyone who has walked through the city can see that. What else can really be expected, as Goia Mujalli would say, of a city which was built by slaves and using the product of slavery overseas? You may have seen these statues around the city yourself, dear reader. There are far too many to list all of them here. Whether it’s King Charles I’s status near Trafalgar Square, which itself has the statues of Admiral Horatio Nelson, King George IV, General Charles James Napier, and Major-General Henry Havelock erected on plinths, the Duke of Wellington statue in Hyde Park, or the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace, what do all of these statues have in common? The men are in uniform and brandishing swords (some even on horseback), the women wearing lavish dresses, and all of them are invariably raised high above the walking public.

“They’re often wearing hats or boots or are on horseback, I’m really interested in the symbology of their costume. And my work strips these figures back from their historical reference, I don’t really care who these people are,” Jamie confessed unabashedly, “and I don’t tend to look into it too much. What I’m interested in are the tropes of authority, where if they have enough aesthetic symbology on them to make kind-of feel like this is someone who I’m supposed to feel inferior to, BANG! they’re in.”

Although he’s been sticking authoritarian figures in a food processor to make these sculptures for the last 10 years, his work gained greater currency when the public temporarily woke up from their state-induced stupor in 2020 and began toppling commemorations of figures belonging to an incredibly loathsome creed. There goes the slave trader Edward Colston into the waters of Bristol. Off with Christopher Colombus’ head in Boston. Paint that bastard Leopold II in Belgium red and get rid of him too. Jamie sees this wave of statues tasting the floor around the world as a thing very pertinent to today because it confronts the meaning and motive behind putting a statue of any person up. 

“What happens when you place a figure in a public environment?” Jamie asks, only to answer himself, “You’re making a political statement, but not about the person itself. For me, the interest isn’t that he’s Edward Colston, the slave trader from Bristol. It’s the case of what happens when you have, what is ostensibly, a public square which is this democratic space and then you put this figurative person which is an allusion to a person of authority.” Unfolding his arms and using them to shape a triangle he continues, “You create this literal hierarchical thing where the figure is placed above someone and an apex triangulation is created which meets at this person’s head, their brain. This is the kind of symbology I’m interested in, what these decisions represent.”

When this conversation between Jamie and Asiimov took place, the former was engaged in a project which focused on patriarchy rather than colonialism. In research for it, he spent quite some time wandering through the repugnant backwaters of the internet, places such as message boards and chat rooms run by alt-right groups like the Proud Boys. Riding on the rising tide of disgust as he read through their junk came a realisation. “The alt-right is so very image literate,” reported Jamie. “Everyone always says ‘the Nazis were awful, but they had lovely uniforms.’ It was Walter Benjamin who said that fascism is politics aestheticized. This image literacy of right-wing politics is even more present now, so looking into the symbology of political imagery is what I’m interested in.”

One cursory glance at any Right-wing movement will allow you to identify a clear visual language which unifies the masses under whatever twisted ideal they’re peddling and imbues their presence with power. It is in the ecstatic appropriation of this language that Jamie’s work becomes a class apart from your usual political commentary.

With a thoughtful expression, Jamie explained, “I quite like using the language of authority, or the sculptural language of the right-wing but reapplying it in this degraded way. I find it more interesting to lean into these tropes, for example, take the statue, which is this hot point political-artistic object. Rather than making work about how these things are bad, I’d rather make a sculpture which is the thing itself but repulsively garish and overblown with the volume turned up because when you use the language of authority and turn the volume up, you expose more and put light in the shadows. It’s fairly obvious where I stand politically on these things however, I’m definitely being critical of them.”

From whence came such a fascination and inquisition into the structures of power in Jamie? To find out, the clock must be wound back quite a lot, 37 years to be exact.

In 1985 Jamie was born in Southport, an English seaside town which you wouldn’t hesitate calling ‘quaint’, but as far as Jamie let on, this place would never come up again in his story. Instead, he did his growing up between the areas of Hertfordshire, North London, and a great leap across the country away in the West Coast Highlands of Scotland.

It was in that latter land where the air is thin and the alcohol kicks that Jamie experienced certain things which would reach forward into the rest of his life and influence things.

He ventured into this aspect of his past with arms still indefatigably folded, “I grew up with my dad and step mum who looked after a big manor house on the West coast of Scotland, so I grew up basically as a chambermaid. I would have to make the beds and clean the bathrooms and wash the dishes on a daily basis for very wealthy people. And from a very early age, I was 13, it put a chip on my shoulder if I’m being absolutely honest. I was very aware of power structures growing up in that environment because what we were made to do as a family was making these rich people’s lives even easier, and that awareness has stuck with me for a long time.”

Noteworthy of Jamie’s family is that they were extremely practical people who would just get stuck into using their hands to get things done without a moment’s thought, so when Jamie’s hands weren’t being controlled to carry out all these chores for his rich scoundrel-lords, he was staving off boredom playing around with tools, glue, and wood. All of this confounded tactile work, he didn’t know at the time, was sowing the seeds of an unconscious affinity with sculpting in him which would blossom into something, paired with his cynical mockery of class structures, that looks like an aristocrat being mauled by a grizzly bear.

Another thing which was unable to escape Jamie’s attention was the way he spoke. “Growing up in Scotland with an English accent you’re quite aware of a sense of, well I suppose yes, colonialism, because it was essentially the same practice of land-grabbing which went on in the Celtic regions,” Jamie told Asiimov, slightly getting ahead of himself as that awareness of colonialism probably didn’t even enter his childhood head until a very later date, instead it’s safe to say that he felt different from the kids around him. Alas, his leap was not completely unwarranted either because his realisation of Britain’s colonial greed, which in turn produced the class systems which Jamie despises so magnificently, emerged out of that sense of difference.

Once art began taking up considerable space within his soul, Jamie decided to hitch his horse, so to speak, to a university degree in it. Studying his undergraduate in Dundee, he graduated with a degree in Fine Art, Philosophy and Contemporary Practice from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (wow what a mouthful) in 2009. After that, he zoomed all the way down to London to get his Masters done at the Royal College of Art, from where he graduated in 2015 with a degree in Sculpture.

Upon returning to London after completing his undergraduate in Dundee, Jamie ditched using the Tube to get around the place in favour of the humble bicycle. So far his experience, and that of millions of others, of travelling through London would be to descend underground, take the Tube to where they were going, and then breathe fresh air again on the street at their destination. Once he started spending more time cycling above ground, it didn’t take him long to notice a pattern behind where these symbols of state authority were usually present. Long and wide boulevards, lined with trees or Georgian apartments or both, lead down to these great ornamented gates which separate the common folk from the pristine palaces. (The Mall, Piccadilly, Pall Mall…) Large public squares, where people gather in flocks, with towering statues of “notable” individuals whom the state thinks deserve commemoration, or a historically “significant” building which shadows over the people. (Trafalgar Square, Victoria Monument, Parliament Square…) These places have, as Jamie calls it, the “potential for manifestation”, as in you won’t ever find a moment when these places are empty. Their grandiosity, elaborate architecture, and the historical presence of these landmarks ensure that there is always movement and presence in and around these spaces. And it’s those visual and historical qualities which inspire feelings of awe, curiosity, fear, and smallness all at the same time. Jamie thinks that expertly mixed cocktail of emotions is the “reaffirmation of the class system.”

Wasn’t it Frantz Fanon who wrote that “the colonist is an exhibitionist”[8]? It’s difficult not to see these monuments of a former empire as persisting displays of power and authority. Fanon continues to write, “The colonist’s world is a hostile world, one which excludes yet at the same time incites envy.”[9] When common people look at these statues/buildings/monuments and feel like they would love to have a taste of the power which had these built, but also know that not only would that probably never happen, but that they are the very people on whom that power is subjected, this ambivalence of emotions is where the class-system asserts itself.

Take for example any anti-war demonstration which invariably ends up in Trafalgar Square; a space reserved for the eternal celebration of Britain’s warfaring exploits. Regardless of the solidarity in the crowd of thousands, an unbalanced dynamic asserts itself between the masses and the statues of past heads of state and military generals looking down at them. The statues are always at an elevation and it’s quite impossible for the public to raise themselves above these figures (unless people stand on each other’s shoulders but that won’t prove as stable as bronze or concrete). This left an unshakable impression on Jamie of a “proto-CCTV system” where on the street these symbols of elitism and power kept the people in their place by watching them and asserting their hierarchy.

“I’m pretty much a middle-class, white, straight, British man” announced Jamie with the air of someone who knows that he isn’t the most vogue identity combination to be, “I am the most centralised, normalised thing, especially when you take colonialism into account, around which all these hierarchies are built. So I’m trying to take a step back from that culture-centrist-normative position - not remove mind you because I am what I am you know what I mean - to address and investigate it.”

“What is equality?” Jamie rhetorically asked himself, “It’s when everybody finds equilibrium. It’s all well and good trying to increase cultural power to sections of society that have been predominantly subordinated, but with that, everyone has to assess where they are, which means there also has to be an inquiry and interrogation into those portions of society – British whiteness – which have done the subordinating.”

That might prove to be a bit of a challenge. “It’s really difficult,” Jamie declared with a shrug of his broad shoulders, “to have a conversation about British whiteness without it turning into this very, kind-of, toxic conversation very quickly. And it’s an emotive thing, you know what I mean?” That’s because ‘White’ or ‘Caucasian’ are not neutral physical descriptions of certain persons but a political project of securing and protecting privileges in a society whose ideals would seem to forbid them”[10], writes political theorist Joel Olson in his shockwave of a book, The Abolition of White Democracy.

“Like even when I say that my work is about British whiteness, people get all uuuuuuuuuuurrrrgggghhhhhhhhhhh, they get really nervous,” said Jamie while contorting his features into mock-astonishment. “I’ve had curators who tell me, ‘We don’t want to show your work because we’re scared of the backlash.’ I don’t think of the work as being particularly troublesome or problematic. It’s very much a left-wing thing, so I find it really interesting the reception my work sometimes gets.”

Another attitude, according to Jamie, which runs rampant in the art world, especially among many white artists, is that they’ll displace themselves from their identity and completely disown the fact that they’re white as if they can take off their skin and change it like an overcoat. These artists are among a horde of white middle-class artists who shout from their soap boxes, in typical the-end-is-nigh fashion, that the art world is run by white middle-class people as if they’re the only ones who’ve noticed this. “We’re all part of that white middle-class art world” Jamie put it, “It would be silly and disingenuous for me or anyone else to pretend that they are anything else. I’m just trying to be honest and the more honesty in the art world, the better, because that’s where I think the true levelling up to equality will be if everyone was just honest.”

Thus remains an aim of Jamie’s work, “To divert British whiteness away from this political touchpaper which elicits these visceral arguments between people so that we can calmly address everything wrong about it. Because to not interrogate it is to allow these power structures to exist.”

So, how much of a business has Jamie been able to make out of defacing systemic power structures? In a perverse sense, his objects are indeed sellable, and people have indeed bought them. A number of his sculptures and busts are on sale on Artsy.net, an online buying, selling, and auctioning platform for artworks. The price for each sculpture is available on request, however, at the time of writing this, no reply had been received to my inquiry of the price… All of this is on top of the artist’s fee he has received for the many exhibitions (solo and group) he’s had so far, budgets, and grants. Currently, Jamie is engaged in a residency with the Royal Society of Arts, and an upcoming group show called Monuments on Paper is slated to open on the 12th of November 2022 at Vitrine Gallery in Basel, Switzerland. Seems he certainly isn’t short of work.

Jamie’s lips formed some words which were about to leave his mouth until the narrative of this retelling adjourned his speech. What he said will be recounted in due time. Have patience.

*

While Rene Gonzalez, Giuseppi Cambana, Goia Mujalli, and Jamie Fitzpatrick were having their conversations with Asiimov about the general state of the art world, unbeknownst to them, they were also having a conversation with each other.

Rene, Giuseppi, Goia, and Jamie sat there ponderously, yet anxious to break the ice. Befitting Giuseppi’s gregarious nature, he came out first with the words, picking up where he left off last, “I’m kind of right now balancing this thing between being a practising artist and navigating these very white and middle-class dominated art circles, on all levels, you know? Even among the people that aren’t famous.” He chuckled and continued, “Even among the people who don’t have any capital, even among students, educations, and other shit, on all levels it’s white and middle-class.”

An expression of agreement formed on Rene’s face, and he shared with the group, “Because the art scene in Costa Rica is so limited, and whatever art scene there is derived from American culture, it’s hard to find an authentic Costa Rican artistic identity. Even for myself, the desire to become an artist and all of my early influences came internationally” then correcting himself with a bit of shame, “actually from Britain and America mostly.”

“Well…” began Jamie, his words striking chords of harmony with Rene’s dialogue, “when you look at the ivory towers of the art world, in an institutional sense, they all exist in white western countries don’t they? They’re American institutions [MoMa], British institutions [Tate], German [Städel], Swiss [Kunstmuseum], and French [Louvre]. These places are at the very forefront of taste-setting and artists who tend to have shows here will go on to have shows in all the others. There’s nowhere in… I don’t know… Ghana… that has that same global power where all the cultural attention is.”

“It’s obvious why there aren’t any of these cultural palaces in places like Ghana,” stated Goia flatly, “it’s centuries of exploitation of the land and people by the West that has left them hundreds of years behind the rest of the world.”

“Western art institutions inevitably control and decide what art is or isn’t,” Rene declared with an edge in his voice, “it can be malicious, but I think it’s probably mostly not. There is a stamp that history has left on the art world. So colonialism is definitely one of the things which shape the art world now, there’s other things as well though, like class systems and elitism. But the art world isn’t explicitly racist or pro-colonialism or pro-slavery. It’s super gender-fluid-feminism and all that great stuff. But we’re acting like we’re fighting for these things in a platform that isn’t about these things anymore.”

Rene continued after letting his previous words settle, “The level of the art world that I work in, I don’t think I know anyone who would outwardly promote colonialism.”

Goia’s excitement prompted her to interrupt Rene and say, “You’d get crucified for that. The world is almost being exposed to the truth. You’ve got the white guilt where white people feel guilty for the past of their ancestors, their present money coming from a legacy of the slave trade. It’s all rising. It’s not able to be hidden anymore. Maybe more things are going to rise to the surface.”

“Absolutely!” erupted Rene, then resuming his speech, “And if anything, the few people that I know in my personal life who sometimes feel a bit shady about what they believe, regarding really basic stuff like racism, are like the people who are doing really well in the art world. Look at these people’s Instagram and you’ll find the WOKEST shit, and they’re celebrated by the art world as bastions of modernity and wokeism, but when you talk to them, they’re pretty ignorant on some things, and sometimes even more than ignorant.”

“One of the first things I was told when I came to the UK,” reflected Giuseppi, “was, ‘Oh you’re smarter than you look.’ That’s such a white, middle-class thing to say to a person of colour, you know? And someone else told me, ‘If I didn’t know your educational background, I wouldn’t be talking to you.’ And then someone, just recently, said to me ‘Your work is only successful because you’re here.’ Shit like that! All of these phrases pretty much mean to me ‘I’m white and this world is catered to me, what the fuck are you doing here?’ The UK in a lot of ways,” Giuseppi further reflected, “is unprepared to have a more nuanced conversation about people of colour, not just generally about the spheres of people of colour, but also culture, class, and how you sustain these people in these spaces. It’s one thing to invite you to the party, but if you’re not made to feel comfortable at this party; people not connecting to you, no one giving you a drink, you just get lost in the sauce, you feel me?” 

Jamie added derisively, “That’s because white is treated as the default. A lot of artists try to explore where their identity fits on a global scale, and I guess I’m trying to do the same thing but from a place of investigation because my cultural identity is so normalised in nothingness. It is the most default position, globally speaking, and a lot of people’s practice investigates themselves in relation to that default position, whereas when you’re that default you sort of feel like you’re the beneficiary of centuries of horrors which created these horrible hierarchal institutions. That’s essentially what I’m doing, investigating an identity which is the benefactor of the bad guys.”

Nodding his head upon hearing this, Rene said, “Race relations have played a part in practically all aspects of human existence. Look, I don’t think the Egyptians were not racist towards someone, I’m sure they were… If humanity comes from a barbaric origin where tribalism was essential to its social structure, then I don’t think there’s any aspect of our current structure that isn’t somewhat related to that fact. However, to say that race relations are the only thing that affects the art world is slightly arbitrary. To say that chauvinism is the only thing that affects it is to take one thing and ignore the rest. There is a stamp that history has left on the art world. So colonialism is definitely one of the things which shape the art world now, there’s other things as well though, like class systems and elitism. But the art world isn’t explicitly racist or pro-colonialism or pro-slavery. It’s super gender-fluid-feminism and all that great stuff. But we’re acting like we’re fighting for these things in a platform that isn’t about these things anymore.”

“I’m sorry to say that I don’t completely agree with you Rene…” interjected Goia with calm indignation, “Just because the art world is less racist and sexist than it was before, doesn’t mean that it’s all good all of a sudden. There is still a lot to be done.”

“That’s right!” chimed in Giuseppi.

Jamie nodded his head in cool agreement.

Rene didn’t at all look like he lost faith in what he just said, the way many people do when their arguments are refuted with such suddenness, instead, he listened respectfully with a composed expression on his face as Goia continued talking, “But I agree that elitism is definitely a problem in the art world. The art world is very selective among the elite and only lets a few people intellectually engage with the work by making the work so overly complex that only well-educated and privileged people can understand it. That I think is a very elitist thing.”

“This is coming from a white, straight, middle-class guy, so don’t take this with complete authority,” forewarned Jamie before saying, “but I do think that in the art world socio-economics is more of a hindrance than race is. It’s all to do with where you’ve grown up, unless you grow up in an area where the idea of being an artist is even a thing that you can think of, then you won’t become an artist. I can think of a few Black artists, that I’m not going to name, who went to extremely privileged private schools and have grown up with the socio-economic benefits which aren’t representative of, what one would call a ‘Black cultural identity’. I mean the whole private school system, historically, was about fucking shaping men and sending them over to govern the colonies, it is literally about creating a governmental elite…”

“…you don’t have to be biologically white to perform whiteness dawg.” interrupted Giuseppi coolly, and with a gesture of his hand apologised for his interruption.

With a similar gesture, Jamie forgave his interruption with a smile and continued, “Anyway, but what I’ll also say is that racial inequality and social inequality go hand in hand.”

Assuming an air of complete agreement, Goia said, “You’re right about the area in which you grow up Jamie. I did a workshop for kids living in the favela, they were like 8 years old, and they had never held a brush in their life, and had never seen paint or a canvas before. We had two musicians playing the violin in the background and it was a whole party with these kids painting on the canvas and even all over each other. It was amazing to see this.” Her voice then lowered as if burdened by sadness. “There are many people in Brazil who are starving, can’t read or write, and the only interaction they have with the world is through a broken-down TV. That is a pretty big problem, especially considering that art should be for all. That was when I realised how divided it is and started thinking about how to bring this privilege, which is art, to these people.”

“Because these are the first few years where I’ve been working only as an artist,” Giuseppi said with a heavy sigh, “I sometimes feel disoriented. I’m building things in a slightly arbitrary way until they’re “done”, I’m in constant play, and it’s weird, especially for people like us, because I think ‘shit, do I deserve this?’” he burst out with confused laughter, “Or ‘why am I allowed to do this?’. Sometimes you feel bad or guilty too because not everyone is in your position where you’re getting paid to have fun and follow your passion. I think there’s also this idea of merely surviving, you stop doing that and you’re finally given the license to live, whatever the fuck that means, and because we’re not given that license often, it’s very disorienting.”

“The way in which I’ve personally experienced it during my art career, socioeconomics has been the driving factor,” exclaimed Rene, rehashing the point in order to add something. With a critical air, he stated, “Connections are so important in the art world, and these connections aren’t random occurrences, you don’t just get connections. There is a way you can make connections, and there’s a game to be played here and some people have an enormous advantage at that game while some have an enormous disadvantage to the point where they’re entirely excluded. So if you don’t think that class and socioeconomic systems play probably the most important role in the art world then I don’t understand what you’re seeing because I notice it every day.”

Jamie hastened to get a word in, “I think it’s a cynical way of looking at it as a game, but there is a truth in it. It’s a networking thing more than a game I think, which again goes back to social power structures because the better you are at networking, the better the network you have.”

Rene heard this, processed it, and proceeded to explain himself, “When you have a lot of opportunity, a lot of money, a lot of connections, and a platform it’s easier to delve deeper and become more educated to create. Obviously that’s not very fair…” giving his shoulders that characteristic shrug anyone gives when faced with something that’s beyond their power to influence “but it is what it is though. Do I want to be more educated? Absolutely! Do I want more opportunities and connections? 100%! And my focus isn’t on criticising this system, it’s on noticing it so that I can manoeuvre it with the cards I’ve got. Right? These are the cards I have, so how can I best play with them given the structure I want to be a part of? A structure which I know is entirely unfair, but that’s what I’ve chosen as a career. Usually, when I see people who are happy to make art only to show it to their friends and family and don’t care about the money side of it and are happy working in a call centre or as a waiter, I think that’s perfectly fine and awesome, but I’m not doing that. I’m trying to pay rent and keep my job as an artist. And what we call the art world is just a bunch of people trying to do that.”

Jamie declared, arms still confidently folded, “The art world is driven by the art market which is driven by sales which is driven by who is buying these things essentially. And success depends on a commitment to be known and seen in the art world.”

“Too right!” said the expression on Rene’s face when he heard this and went on to relate, “Sometimes I go to so many shows where things are quite garbage, and everyone at this show is in agreement and knows why it’s garbage, but we’re all there to shake hands and clap and all that, and we know that’s why we’re there. Sometimes you just go ‘Wow! this one’s a hard pill to swallow’ but you clap anyway because it’s part of the game!”

“And it don’t matter who the artist is, sometimes there’s brown artists, Black artists too, whose work I can’t stand. I don’t like where they’re coming from and what they’re doing.” Giuseppi said with excitement mixed with disgust.

“Yes!” erupted Rene. “Art can be great or garbage no matter where it’s made. For example, I can be very critical of art from Costa Rica, and I’m not going to be super forgiving about the things I dislike about it just because I understand the context that it’s from. So sometimes I’m super critical of Costa Rican art, I’ll go to a small art fair that’s on the street and not like a single work. But even in Costa Rica I have connections to maintain, so I’m not going to be a dick and tell them that.”

“So why do you guys keep up this routine even if the stuff you engage with is crap?” inquired Asiimov after a long silence, who up until this point had been following the conversation, staring from one speaker to the next like a film camera.

All four of them seemed to have forgotten Asiimov was there, so engrossed were they in their dialogue with each other, but the expressions on their faces were that of gladness to see him get in the way.

Rene looked thoughtfully at Asiimov for a moment, then said, “Let me use a sports analogy, take basketball for example, you’ve got the ball in your hands and you’re at the three-point line. If you manage to shoot the hoop from there, you’ll get three points. It’s not easy, you could do something else, but you know that if you practice it enough and get better at it then you can make the shot. It’s a tried and tested strategy that allows you to get better at the game. So that’s what we’re all doing, we’re just trying to play the game as best as we can. Sometimes, as a strategy for their own career, even if unknowingly, people will absolutely trash the shows they go to and make their true opinions vocal and, over time, due to their contrarian attitude become favourable among people. But it can’t be an act, there has to be some truth in that routine otherwise you can’t keep it up for long, certainly not for your whole career, or at least long enough where you make a name for yourself as ‘that contrarian artist’. But not everyone is like that though. I’ll go to shows and keep up my connections because it’s better for my career and I don’t want to sever any opportunities for myself, do I?”

Jamie wore an unconvinced face and replied, “I’m still not won over by it being a game though. A game implies that there’s a single winner at the end and we’re all trying to reach this single finishing point, but I think the art world has multiple finishing points and all people involved in it have different goals.”

Jamie’s reply struck a chord in Giuseppi’s soul, such that the resonance lit up his eyes. With ecstasy, he stared at Jamie and intoned, “Just like what you said about the art world does not have one single finishing point, and one single winner,” then directing his eyes to the rest of the group, “I am, and I’m sure you all can say the same, not only an artist, but also this being that does other things. The art thing can sometimes take a back seat, right?” After a short pause, during which his fervent ecstasy was replaced with a dignified gravitas, he continued, “Similarly, when we people of colour are put into this narrative where it seems like whiteness is the only thing we’re fighting against, it’s not. There are other things too. And I feel like in our attempt to antagonise whiteness, we end up centring it again and again.” he said while scratching his head in befuddlement.

Picking up on Giuseppi’s frustration, Jamie included a word of affirmation, “The canon of Western art has such a cemented centralised point in the world view of art. I remember when I was a kid at school and was taught about the paintings of India, or Chinese calligraphic works, or West African works, it was always in reference to Western art in a kind of comparative way. I still feel like there’s a lot of comparison going on, even if it’s resistive comparison, before it was how similar or how they mirrored Western art, now it’s how they’re different, but it’s still comparative. There’s this slightly seditious centralisation of Western art even in the way we view other art. I would absolutely love to be dropped into a culture that I know nothing of and to see things as they were and not have to view them in a way which places them in a hierarchy like an institution does. Look at any show put on by the Tate about ‘insert-indigenous-culture-here’, it’s presented in a centralised Western way, and that’s the only way I ever get to see things because that’s where I live.”

“Another reason why whiteness is constantly centralised,” added Giuseppi, “is because Black and indigenous artists, in any context, get stuck in this pattern of celebration without a critical eye. There is no further landscape beyond appreciating where they come from, or something like that. And this partially happens because people have been so misinformed, and because capitalism is so, what’s the word, incompetent,” Goia’s eyes lit up with curiosity upon hearing this, Giuseppi went further, “that it makes education incompetent, the academy incompetent, and the art world incompetent, that’s why the muhfuckas don’t get paid, and you have to do shit for free for a long time. So people be like ‘Ooooh they’ve been doing this for free for 10 years, maybe they’re worth getting paid now.’ You know, shit like that.”

“What do you mean by the incompetence of capitalism Giuseppi?” inquired Goia when she finally had the earliest opportunity.

Giuseppi elaborated with the clarity of a seasoned orator, “When I say incompetence, I mean there’s never a clear direction for these institutions, not only is there no clear direction, they don’t know what to do with it. They don’t know what to do with the buildings they’re in, the actual structures, - physical structures - or the spirit of the institution - the non-physical structures. When I was in New York, working as an educator, we had office spaces, well… not actually office spaces but more like short walls dividing up the room. With office jobs like these, you have a shift of 6-7 hours, and most people would usually get their work done in 2-3 hours, and you’d have all this time dragged out to play busy among other people playing busy. So it’s this whole building playing busy and nothing really is getting done. People aren’t stepping out of the bare minimum that’s required of them because no one gives a fuck enough to do it and because the institution doesn’t give a fuck about them.”

Cocking his head to the side slightly which spelt slight disagreement, Rene felt like playing devil’s advocate. “Is capitalism perfect? Fuck no! Is it the best socioeconomic structure this world has seen? Probably. I can’t think of one that’s been better so far. It beats communism, dictatorships, and what we used to have which was imperialism. It’s better than those. Don’t just dismantle capitalism because it’s not perfect, try and build it up from the structures, the great structures, the…” Taking a long pause here Rene assiduously began pulling words out of the ether and slowly articulated, “…the fucking…anti…entropic…miracle…structures that it has provided us, beautiful things like human rights. It’s no coincidence that it’s the capitalist side of the world which has put these into place. If we were to dismantle capitalism, we’d be dismantling some of the only good things we have.” Plunging deep into his memory and taking everyone with him, Rene ventured on, “When we used to be graffiti artists, we used to really idealise the indigenous cultures of Costa Rica and we went to visit some of the indigenous people and I realised that because they never modernised, they are super misogynistic, they’re very racist, and they’re anti-science and stuff, and that’s not good for them. That is why they can’t survive and are dying out. The men were usually super drunk, and the women used to serve them, and whatever money they did earn they spent it getting wasted.”

So indignant at Rene’s remark that his dark skin took on a reddish tint, Giuseppi replied quite brusquely, “The idea that women should only reproduce and that men should only be with women, all these very conservative and homophobic ideas are colonial. Gender itself is a product of colonisation. In Black indigenous cultures, in these tribal spaces, people were not prescribed to a specific gender, they were non-binary. So when a white guy tries to tell me about pronouns I just say ‘Listen muhfucka, we were non-binary. Ya’ll took that from us and now you want to teach me?!’  So what ends up happening, and this is the tragedy of colonialism, is that over time we end up reinforcing these colonial ideals all by ourselves. The countries that are quite ‘underdeveloped’ are this way because of the ‘development’ of other countries.” Before continuing he takes a pause to ensure everyone is following him, “Imagine a white person goes to Peru and sees how the culture is ultra-misogynist in certain contexts, or that’s how they might perceive it and may see it as the only thing they see, but there’s so much history behind it which they’ve been so misinformed about.”

In a placating yet resolute tone, Rene tried to restore the composure of the conversation while still furthering his point, “I’m not saying that the situation of the indigenous people is entirely their fault, or that colonialism plays no part in that, absolutely it did. But what I’m saying is it sucks how we got here but it’s great that certain things have been created, like democracy and other structures that capitalism thrives on. Sooooooo instead of looking to the past and trying to make a thesis of who to blame and point a finger at, how do we build upon these great structures to make a better tomorrow?”

“How indeed?” asked Asiimov, more to himself than to the present company, after which all fell into a brooding silence while staring into their drinks.

*

On his way back home from Kennington, Stratford, Holborn, and his laptop on his table, Asiimov felt as if he was leaving all these places simultaneously. That great fiery orb in the sky was checking out for the day and its residual light was scattering and breaking upon a stony shore of clouds and painting the sky like an Edvard Munch piece. Everything which Rene, Giuseppi, Goia, and Jamie had shared with Asiimov throughout the previous few days had by now drowned so deep in the pandemonium of his head that it would be useless retrieving them on recollection alone, like trying to fish a corpse wearing cement shoes out of a lake. At any rate, their entire conversation was safely recorded word for word on his tape recorder anyway. The one thing which did successfully stay buoyant on the surface of his memory though, which no doubt would eventually sink later, was what each of them had said to him last at their roundtable conversation around a table as big as London. That thing still floating in his memory held on not just because of its recency, but because of its poignancy.

With a sardonic quizzicality, Jamie expressed, “Isn’t that the whole point of art, even now, to perpetuate authority? You only have to go to Central London, or Frieze, to see how it’s used to perpetuate power and authority, even when it says it isn’t. Because authority is power is money. Which is why I use art as my preferred language to investigate these things. You see a person shouting in a crowd of people, he’s drawing attention to himself. That’s what my works attempt to do, draw attention to themselves, to be like ‘looks what we’re fucking doing here!’”

Halfway through Jamie’s monologue, Rene opened his mouth as if wanting to say something but held his tongue, waiting for the polite moment, and once Jamie finished, Rene finally got the chance to say, “But sometimes, I think we tend to lose sight of how far we’ve risen. 100 years ago, nobody cared about equality or human rights or the LGBT community or feminism. We’ve been around for a hundred thousand years, right? Never before have these things existed, and it took a lot of work from a lot of amazing people who were obviously not perfect because look at where they came from, and the societies they lived in. They worked so hard to create a better tomorrow and they did it in a way which was so powerful and effective that it boggles the mind to think how people can do the things they did, to give us the things which we take for granted today.” There was a hint of sadness in that last bit from Rene. “All our freedoms, we just take them for granted and complain. Complaining is what it took to get them, I mean, that’s how we got here, but now we complain more than we acknowledge how far we’ve come, and instead of embracing our progress to spread it, we create animosity and conflict, and it makes us very tribal. That’s why I’ve stopped making obnoxiously political work because there’s enough social dissonance in the art world already and I don’t agree with that one bit.” Rene’s timbre which started off as very celebratory had by the end of his piece reached a despairing register, but he immediately shook it off with a melancholy smile as Giuseppi began speaking.

“I don’t think it’s a requirement for your work to be revolutionary, especially for people of colour, but sometimes, and especially again for people of colour, I think it’s inherent in their work. But what is black art, what is brown art, what is art from people who are made by ‘marginalised’ people? What defines them? That’s for them to decide. And what is revolution? I think my fucking mom is revolutionary, you know what I’m saying, because she survives as a single Black mother, and for me, that’s revolutionary as fuck! I think the waiter who works in a restaurant in Elephant and Castle from Monday to fucking Sunday is revolutionary. People are revolutionary in their lives when they’re doing something to move forward, and I think that’s important.”

Shaking her head in the most resonant of agreement Goia exclaimed, “When I started using stitching in my work, my dad told me this story about his mother. She used to do a lot of stitching and workshops and commissions without my grandad knowing because he didn’t want her to work. So she was working and earning money throughout both their lives without him knowing, and then my dad found out after they both passed away. I guess men stitch now too because there are plenty of great tailors, but stitching was a traditionally female thing to do, they would get together in circles and create stuff because women were excluded from all other circles. So my grandmum was there resisting, you know, and I want that to come through my work. Her doing a prohibited thing was her way of existing and resisting and doing what she wanted to do.”

With a 100,000-watt smile exploding off his face upon hearing this, Giuseppi couldn’t help but say, “Now that’s fucking revolutionary as fuck dawg!”

[1] Wolfe, T. (1975). The Painted Word. Picador: New York, NY. p.18

[2] Proctor, A. (2020). The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museum & why we need to talk about it. Cassell: London. p.216

[3] Ibid. p.15

[4] Ibid. p.28

[5] Ibid. p.132

[6] F, Fanon. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Damnés de la terre: Paris. p. 58

[7] Office for National Statistics. (2019). Population estimates by ethnic group and religion, England and Wales: 2019. URL: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/populationestimatesbyethnicgroupandreligionenglandandwales/2019

[8] F, Fanon. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Damnés de la terre: Paris. p. 17

[9] Ibid. p.16

[10] Olson, J. (2004). The Abolition of White Democracy. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, US. p.xviii