Telegram Sam

Exhibitions of the Witch Star project are sponsored by the Southern Counties NHS Foundation Trust [through its East Sussex Recovery Centre Art Therapies Unit at Merrydown Park Hospital] and facilitated by community mental health support workers Dan Ronson and Sharon Watney.

One of the ATU's outpatients, Tsam 'Telegram Sam' Cамиздат is currently street homeless and sometimes sleeps in an old Brighton tram shelter.

Following an assessment of his needs, Tsam was offered accommodation [at the Lemon Tree Guest House in Russell Square, Brighton] but Tsam says he won’t be sleeping at the Lemon Tree until certain unspecified curses have been irreversibly revoked by someone called the gut knife prince.

Tsam believes, on a clear night - from lying on the floor in that shelter, looking up at some patch of heaven through one of its broken windows - he can see a group of twinkling stars in the Constellation of David.

Tsam believes those twinkling stars are messages in  Morse code, sent in response to our terrestrial television transmissions, which have been radiating out from Earth into space since the 1930s. 

According to Tsam, countless alien civilisations are continuing to enjoy our arts & science documentaries, but they're finding a lot of our modern art hard to understand and conceptual art completely baffling. 

As a consequence, Tsam’s been sending messages of his own to the BBC and to Channel Four Television. He wants to know if their commissioners would be interested in broadcasting an idea he’s had that would help to explain conceptual art to the cosmos. But so far (and unsurprisingly) the BBC and Channel Four have not been respondeding to his calls.

It’s only recently been the case that one’s been able to phone a homeless person. Until the late 1990s, phone lines had led only into offices, homes and vandalised telephone kiosks. These days, however, a donated iPhone is a good deal cheaper to maintain and they can also be used as a video camera and radio receiver.

Whilst reclining on the floor in that shelter, Tsam’s been listening to a radio play on his phone. It's about the artist Marcel Duchamp's attempts to exhibit the world’s very first documented example of conceptual art – a porcelain urinal, which he’d bought, called Fountain and signed as R. Mutt in 1917. This reminds Tsam of Tracey Emin’s controversial exhibit, My Bed - which he’d seen at London’s Tate Gallery on the 27th of November 1999.

He remembers inspecting that date on his admission ticket before he’d stealthily scrunched it up and kicked it across the gallery floor, to join a collection of detritus that’s always deliberately arranged to the left of that exhibit.

Tsam - who still regularly visits public exhibitions of art – rolls onto his side to face a substantial quantity of litter gathering under that shelter’s single and crumbling wooden bench. Amongst the litter are many flyers and leaflets, which Tsam habitually collects from every show he attends. 

He turns his camera to video that trash, which a critic might call his readymade tribute to the famous plastic bag scene in American Beauty. That particular movie was somethiing else he'd seen in 1999 - at a local cinema, along with his friend, the artist Bonita Harrison (who sadly died [in 2019, following an apparent accidental overdose of prescribed medication at the Lemon Tree Guest House] before finishing her piece for a long-planned artistic collaboration with Tsam).

It’s been pointed out to Tsam that television arts documentaries are often made and broadcast to celebrate the anniversary of an event such as the first appearance of some famous work of art. For example, in 2017 quite a few programmes were shown to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the first appearance of Duchamp’s Fountain. So, it might be reasonable to assume that in 2024 the BBC and/or Channel Four will be broadcasting something to celebrate twenty-five years since Tracey Emin’s Turner Prize nominated exhibit appeared at the Tate. And someone somewhere will have to make such a programme. So, why couldn’t that someone be Tsam? Tsam, however, would have to sell himself and his idea to an audience of commissioning editors and, unfortunately, Tsam’s not very good at selling himself, and especially not in a world where - as Germaine Greer once famously said - Marketing is our greatest art form. *

During 2019 Tsam had been exhibiting his work at the Ditchling Road tram shelter. After he had approached several large national institutions (such as the Arts Council) Tsam had been encouraged to exhibit his art during the 2019 Brighton Festival. But Tsam had then rejected that idea of inclusivity since (he has said) it would cost £134 to register and be included in a Festival Fringe brochure; applications for bursaries would require access to a word processor and a shower before interviews; and Artist Open Houses require that one should own one’s own home or pay that festival’s organisers £25 merely to ask if one could exhibit one’s work in some other artist’s home. So, Tsam had decided to exhibit from his tram shelter. He had approached the city council, but they had demanded he should submit a ‘comprehensive risk assessment’ and a substantial fee for the event he was proposing.

Tsam called his first show Marketing is Our Greatest Art Form. This show appeared at the tram shelter from March until May 2019. Most of its pieces had been put together by Tsam whilst attending workshops at the ATU. Some of those pieces featured a selection of images printed on cards produced by University of Brighton MA Inclusive Arts Practice students for their Final Year Show in July 2018. According to Tsam, one of those MA graduates had given him an envelope stuffed full with their show cards whilst explaining, "This is an inclusive celebration of your response to our research."

Another feature of Tsam’s exhibition was his reconfiguration of a Maxfield Parrish painting, which he describes as an evocation of some hoped for better view through what is now left of that old tram shelter’s windows.

Predictably, each of Tsam’s exhibits remained in situ for only a few days before it was either stolen (by an art collector) or removed (by someone from the city council's street cleaning team) or vandalised (by an excluded school child, or by a loitering drug dealer). One exhibit survived there for less than one day, while another remained in situ all week. For a while, Tsam would immediately replace a removed or vandalised exhibit with a new one, until all but one of his pieces had been used or disappeared. That remaining piece - a reframing of an original print given the title Three Atomic Bombs by Tracey Emin 1928 * - was later auctioned during a Witch Star project meeting in the pub (The Abattoir Arms on the corner of Florence Place in Ditchling Road) that also serves as Tsam’s restroom.

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