Here on the Last Day We Don’t Always Get

The 29th of February, time is a made up thing, and how to make art right now

from a 1910 feature in American Homes and Gardens magazine on the art of ornamental orange peeling, source The Public Domain Review

Making Art at the End of the World is a monthly newsletter from Los Angeles Print Shop

Welcome to another end of the month at the end of the world. We’re here on the last day we don’t always get, the 29th of February. How sad and curious to be in the “correction.” So much of how we slice things is imprecise, is not exact. How often are we making a cut and then amending it? Today, we are in the amendment. 

It’s a little bit like living on a day that doesn’t exist, except of course it always exists. Time is a made up thing.

This month, Esteban and I have been thinking a lot about the practicalities of being an artist who is aware of the larger world around them. How do we do it? Like, literally, concretely. How do we promote the opening / print run / book tour, how do we caption a post / publish a newsletter / update a website right now, knowing what else we’d like to make visible, make different. 

How can it be done, we are asking. Who is doing it?

Ty Chapman is doing it, posting poems in progress on his Instagram, hoping a draft can teach some hearts to beat again. Natalie Loveless’ artist website is doing it, now a locked door with a welded on acknowledgement and a warning cry. Rachel Lyon in her Substack is doing it, promoting her new book while recording how impossible it is to be promoting her new book. Sydney Krantz in their Instagram caption asking “what do people put in captions when the world is on fire?” is doing it. Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo in her interview this month with The Offing discussing her work, and specifically her poem “Why I’ll Never Again Advise Poets Against Publishing on Social Media,” is doing it. 

We printed the chapbooks for the A-B Projects show Xochitl talks about in that interview, and it was a turning point for us, too. Not only in reconsidering which institutions we were waiting on to anoint our work, but also the ways we were participating in keeping people out, too. She changed the way we think about art making and gatekeeping at the print shop. It is fitting we made those leaps — A-B Projects itself offered an answer when Nicole Seisler asked to similar questions about institutions and who gets to be in them, who gets to create them. 

Turns out we teach each other how. 

Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe

In the shop, we've been listening to El Dia De Mi Suerte by Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe. It feels too fast, like it's going to trip over itself. And its joviality feels both exactly correctly and completely off — if we lose our joy, we’ve lost something too. 

In it, Héctor sings the timeline of a person growing up — every verse he ages through a trauma, a loss, another trauma, loneliness follows him into adulthood, and near the end of their life they wonder who they crossed to end up here. And yet, and yet, and yet, they watch for the day their luck will change. 

The other day, trimming glassine and packaging prints at the shop, Esteban and I were feeling something so strong we couldn’t name it, and looked at each other and said, We must find the poem that names it.

There has to be a poem that says this. 

My brain answers Refaat Alareer’s poem, “If I Must Die” — a global poetry club I wish we weren’t all a part of, at least not like this. It tells us at the worst of it to make art. Make a kite, it says, “my kite you made.” Find the cloth, the strings. We are willing to listen to instructions. It’s a start, it’s almost everything.

The titular line from Marie Howe’s poem “What the Living Do” repeats in my mind, too: “I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do.” Oh, the grief in the poem, and the living that happens even still. What courage, what craters.

After all, this is what the living do: we pay the parking meter, we wait in line, we spill the coffee, we wait for our day, we get the groceries. Unless of course, you can’t get groceries, and then what do you do, there on the edge of the living and the living dead? I’m annoyed sometimes at this daily work, then grateful for it, but still fatigued by it all. How we wish we could come over to your orange orchard and say hello as you toss us a piece of fruit, how we wish we had something to toss you back. 

In many ways, what we have to toss is art. We keep making it, we keep devouring it. We’re learning how. 

Soundtrack for editing a novel

This is what I listened to as I edited my novel, this 26-minute Fred again.. live set. It’s beautiful, exploding. And the first time I’d ever encountered his music. I felt like I could feel the novel’s heartbeat in that set, the truth of it. After I finished this latest edit pass, I couldn’t listen to it anymore. It was like the sound itself changed. Maybe you’ll hear what I heard before, or maybe you’ll hear what I hear now. 

Documentation the earth reclaims itself

Still from Sarasota Half in Dream by Derek Murphy

A movie we saw years ago now helps us remain hopeful, Sarasota Half in Dream from 2012. Florida, that enigma, so ripe for making art, with its humidity and colors and heat and excess and vulnerability. There’s a tennis club in the movie, actually a country club (fuck that), that was once the place to be for presidents (fuck that) and the elite (fuck all that). What satisfaction to see it overtaken by the trees and the mold and the grass and the graffiti and the bugs. How fast the world can reclaim itself, how impermanent our present moment. 

A strategy for making art this month

Do something tiny, take some small action. Like, go outside and line up two pebbles. Express yourself in some little way. And then tomorrow, do it again. Add another pebble. The first day is expression, the second day we’re making art. 

By the time we talk next month, I’ll have turned in my novel edits to my publisher. I’ll have figured out how to be on Instagram (or not), or what to say on my website (or not). Esteban will have taken photographs every week and posted them to the portal where he and his students share their photography, will have printed artwork for old friends and new ones, will have maybe figured out how dark to make the trees on this one print he’s working on (maybe not). 

Crop from the 60” x 40” of Esteban’s tree print in progress

We will have gotten groceries, though, probably four times, and even when we are tired of it, can’t believe we have eaten all our bananas, we will think about how amazing and heartbreaking it is that we can drive over and get some more bananas. And a poem, again, resounds, What price bananas?

Keep going, we say. And tell us what you’re working on. 

This newsletter is brought to you by our print shop, Los Angeles Print Shop. As always, we make pay-what-you-can prints for artists and individuals and pay-the-list-rate for institutions and those endowed with capital and power — all are welcome and when you’re ready, get in touch.