It isn’t that we don’t deserve a future with 2023 so close. It could be that we haven’t earned it for all of the racism, colonial tactics and imperialism that have plagued the last twenty years and forever really. That is why I keep going back to see what went wrong. I am not reading history but a little bit of art history through artists from the past, oh sorry not the past but the future past.

As Chuck D said in the song Earthizen, it is the war of art against the art of war which western countries mastered for their own ends. The war of art is ongoing, desperate, and determined. It doesn’t have to be commercially valid or uncommercial, just actively engaged and ready for the past to never end. The future will arrive eventually though, we will accept that we are the aliens we need to meet.

When we meet ourselves on common ground that is uncommon, different, alien, unfathomable, and beyond words we can see how unique the differences are. We learn to accept our different philosophies, we learn something about alien humanity, We find the alien within ourselves and outside of ourselves. We stop trying to be one but the many. The never ending infinite differences.

I suppose my goal as an artist is to hopefully find as many differences within myself as outside of myself, humanity is the diamond with billions of faces. We must try to fathom so many ideas that if anything we realise that the effort of trying is more important than thinking that we know anything. Vivienne Westwood summed it up with “You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.”