Chamonix July/August 2025
Gaza Body Bag RCA 24/25 Cancelled art work. Granite, paint, rope wool, cadaver bag.
‘Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.’ Pablo Picasso
Sitting at my desk in view of these great mountains. I feel calm and relaxed but aware of an impending tempest creeping toward me. I’m ordering canvases and pigment paid for by my host. I wonder how these nascent feelings will make themselves known.
I can’t help mulling over my time at the RCA. If I hadn’t been on anti depressants these past five years I would have reacted very badly to the way I was infantilised by the tutors at the RCA.
I might have laid on the floor and screamed like the baby they thought they were poking.
Sitting in the office like a naughty boy because… I didn’t say ‘they’ rather than she. Because… I took up wall space. Because… I chose a 9 by 9 canvas to paint. Because I had frank conversations about sex. Their beady eyes, condescending eyes… enjoying their opportunity to admonish the confident, award winning, accomplished film maker and performance artist. I felt like I was in a petting zoo with these curious animals nipping at me to see what I was made of.
Goading me. Will he strike back?
Ok, I made a deep dive into the fetid world of academia. I escaped… and am happy to breath fresh, mountain air. In all my days I had never been in such a toxic, competitive environment.
‘Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.’ Andy Warhol
I started taking anti depressants after I contracted covid in 2020. I stopped taking anti depressants the month before last. The veil lifted. The brain shocks took a while to fade. I want to fuck again… I began having deeper, less controlled emotions. I am far less patient and very snappy. Regardless of all this… I am pleased to be back in the world of full fat feelings… with a solid desire to express myself. Somehow I was less motivated to write and make art when I was under the chemical cosh.
Ross and others shared they were on anti depressants. I wonder what their art would be without the mind altering drugs?
I have been in and out of hospitals for decades… as and when my mental health gets the better of me. The longest time I spent in hospital was a whole year. The mentally ill are far better understood now, than we used to be. However, I never really felt my mental health was taken seriously in the RCA petting zoo. Did they expect me to be rational?
The angry Chinese guy who challenged me after my first RCA blog raised an interesting point. He suggested… I didn’t want to learn anything at the RCA and just applied to the school for ‘validation’. The first part is easily debunked. The second part of his comment is more interesting. Do I crave validation?
Well, yes… I do. I write to be read. I paint to be appreciated. I crave applause from the audience. I desire film reviews. The tears and laugher from those who watch me tell my story (flay myself) at an AA meeting. I love when people comment on my blog. I love the attention… good and bad.
That boy threatened to ‘drag’ me and I came in my pants. I love it when you tell me I’m a great cook. I love it when you praise my garden and the way I decorate my house, the art I have chosen.
I am unashamedly a validation junkie… I faint with pleasure when you hate me as vigorously as you love me.
I am the jouster and a jester… a validation junkie.
‘Art isn’t about the creator, what they think, or how they interpret their own work whether it’s poetry, music, or paintings. It’s about the spectator and how they interpret it.‘ Oscar Wilde
As the RCA recedes and the people I met… who I didn’t know a year ago, I will not remember a year from now. I can scarcely remember men I have had months long relationships with.
I am a stone skimming over the surface of life. I have little interest in knowing people for long. To meet them once is enough. Or to boast… I was there.
10 convivial moments.
- I saw Joni Mitchell play Fez under Time Cafe on Lafayette in NYC. 1995
- I saw Ivan Lendl play Boris Becker, Wimbledon. 1986
- I stomped divots with the H.M. The Queen on Smiths Lawn. 1984
- I had dinner with Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams and Ian Drew after a private Prince concert at The Roosevelt Hotel. 2007
- Fred Hughes introduces me to Andy Warhol at The Factory. 1985
- Rufus Sewell calls as I am driving my F150 up the PCH from Malibu to Topanga. Our friend and massage therapist DL discovered our friend Heath Ledger dead in his bed. DL doesn’t alert 911, DL calls Ashley Olsen. 2008
- Jim Ede at Kettle’s Yard with Ricky DeMarco. 1988
- Dinner with Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, his wife and daughter at The Mercer describing the moment Timothy Geitner calls, the banks are failing, asking what to save: The people or the banks? 2015
- New Years Eve, Mercer Kitchen dinner with Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Sporty Spice, Fran Leibowitz, Alan Cumming, Calvin Klein, Martine McCutcheon and Matt Goss. 1999
- Province Town, my birthday party thrown by Michael Cunningham. Guests include Jennie Livingstone, Andrew Sullivan, Douglas Friedman, John Derian, Ken Fulk. 2015
I don’t currently have communication with any of the people mentioned above. I don’t need to. I knew them as much I needed to know them, at the precise moment I met them. I didn’t need to go to Wimbledon again, I didn’t need to know Sporty Spice… and she didn’t need to know me.
Although… quite unexpectedly, I was taken to the home of Joni Mitchell by her ex husband on Laurel Canyon the night we thought we saw Elizabeth Taylor dining at the Chateau. It wasn’t Elizabeth.
Jennie Livingstone Provincetown MA 2015
The friends I have are on borrowed time. I will know them… until I tire of them. I suppose that’s why gay life suited me, the transitory nature of gay life, one night stands… casual sex… anonymity. The social mobility of my gay life, one day a Duke another a dustman. Listening to their stories then passing on… cum in my beard.
This is why AA suited me… the constant flow of desperate people with desperate stories flushing through the rooms of AA. Never settling, skimming… like me, over the surface of life.
This is why Hollywood suited me, meeting people but never engaging with them for anything than the duration of the ‘meeting’. I am at Leo’s house showing my movie in his very own cinema… I will never see him again. I am on Malibu Pier with Jen and Brad having breakfast… I will never see them again. I am walking with Channing on the beech… I will never see him again. All I am left with is the story of a fleeting moment and that’s all I want to be left with.
I was at the RCA with Xavier, I’m bound to say… when he is a huge star. ‘We drank hot chocolate made with oat milk at Parker’s as he fretted over which major gallery to sign with.’
Gaza After Guernica 2024/25 RCA Paper Graphite Oil Stick
2.
Every day I see the most atrocious, sickening and heartbreaking images from the killing fields of Gaza. The mass murder curently happening in my name to the people of Palestine. Kids murdered. Kids starving. Kids full of hope over a bag of lentils then shot in the head. A five year old child shot in the head holding a bag of lentils.
The UK government is fully complicit in these murders. Starmer, our sinister Zionist leader, makes dreary, unemotional speeches promising action but does nothing. He and other European leaders like Macron, are making Israel’s genocidal dream come true. I tried to address this in my work at the RCA but it was removed by Harold Offeh, like the work of another anti Israel artist Zina Karaman… controversial elements of her work removed by the staff.
Art. Making art. I just donated 40 years of diaries to a national diary archive. The rest of my archive and all of my finished movies are held at the UCLA Library Film & Television Archive.
I have never stopped making work. Perhaps my most audacious artistic endeavour is this blog. First a diary… now a blog. There are huge gaps I am trying to fill, playing catch up writing the missing years by hand.
My friend has an atelier I will use as my studio. Tomorrow I’ll clear it out. I want to finish the series of black paintings. Paintings to remember the burned Malibu garden.
Cactus Tree
by Joni Mitchell
‘There’s a man who sends me medals
He is bleeding from the war
There’s a jouster and a jester
And a man who owns a store
There’s a drummer and a dreamer
And you know there may be more
I will love them if I see them
They will lose me if they follow
And I only mean to please them
My heart is full and hollow
Like a cactus tree…’
© April 1, 1968; Siquomb Publishing Corp
