Make Art or Die Trying

Stuart Semple, Robert Mapplethorpe and me.

This is a self portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s the last photograph he ever took, shortly before his AIDS related death. You can go and see it at the V&A, Fragile Beauty exhibition, where it’s currently on show. Of the hundreds of photographs in the exhibition, this was my favourite.

I love the way he gazes at the camera, unapologetic and strong, frankly facing up to his own mortality. I love the way that the skull on the stick in his hand echoes the planes of his face as the pain etches his flesh back into his bones. I love that it’s just a photograph of his head and hand, the two things most responsible for him being able to translate his unique world view into art. It looks like the unreliable, frail body that was daily letting him down, has gone on into death before him, swallowed by the inky void between his head and his hand. I imagine that once he had taken the image, he just let go and stepped back into the velvet darkness around him and winked out of life, falling gracefully into death. It’s a brave and beautiful thing, even if it is a lie.

In the photograph I took of it, you can see me taking the photo in the reflection of the glass. I didn’t want to see myself. I wanted the photograph of everything I described above. Instead I got something entirely different. I was quite annoyed. I changed my mind about this after reading Stuart Semple’s Make Art or Die Trying.

Semple is the artist most famous for going head to head with Anish Kapoor over the right to use a paint called Vantablack, which at the time it was created was the blackest black paint on the market. Kapoor did a deal with Vantablack which gave him sole right to use it for art. Semple believes that art should be freely available to anyone who wants to make it. He developed a paint that claims to be the pinkest pink and sold it to everyone except Anish Kapoor. If you buy the paint you have to promise that you will not supply it to Kapoor. Since then, Semple has made a blacker black and the world’s most glittery glitter, also forbidden to Kapoor.

I enjoyed this story immensely, but didn’t know much else about Semple as an artist. I was curious to see what else he had done, which is why I was excited to read his book. What I loved most about it though, was not just finding out more about his work, but that he shows you ways to find out more about your own work in the process. Each chapter introduces you to an artistic theme or school that has inspired Semple. He then shows you how he used those ideas to inform his own work. At the end of each chapter are some questions and exercises about your own creative process that prompt you to incorporate these ideas into your work. Obviously, it is focused on the visual arts, but you can apply it to any creative expression and living a more creative life if you don’t consider yourself an artist.

I loved how simple some of the ideas are and yet how powerfully they change the way you can think about and do things. Much of it is about letting yourself experience art in a bigger way. A lot of the exercises are about expanding your mind enough to find that you are making art all the time, even by accident. Maybe it’s the way you juxtapose items on a shelf. Maybe it’s the way you dress. Maybe it’s the way you take a photo of something that moved you and find that you have put yourself into that picture. Maybe in this new photo I am seeing through a glass, darkly. Maybe the new picture I’ve made is about how only a thin, pane of glass separates my experience of life from Mapplethorpe’s experience of death.

The title of the book is taken from Semple’s near death experience in 2010, when he suffered a severe allergic reaction that actually caused him to flatline for a few moments. During his recovery, he realised that art was the most important tool for self expression that he had. He felt compelled to ‘make art, or die trying.’ When I read this section of his book, it took me back to the reaction I had looking at Mapplethorpe’s last self portrait. The drive to express ourselves creatively can supersede almost every other thing in our lives, or our impending death. That’s kind of beautiful.