How impossible it would be to live all of this without art
On art-making, quitting, and a song that could go on forever
Today is June 30, tomorrow July 1 the people of the city will go on a citywide strike. We will too.
Earlier in the month we started a day at the shop with a raid outside at the warehouse next door. And today one in our neighborhood where members of the community were kidnapped. And even before the raids, we had been talking about for how many issues can we talk about whatever the current fucking crisis is. That is, should we stop the newsletter — I don't know how much responding to crisis this will be meaningful for.
We have a friend, an organizer, an artist that showed us how to carry the intensity of the fight with us everywhere but to do it with triumph and I think of this every time I hear this song.
We knew that we’d be writing at the end of the world, but we didn’t know that it’d be actual new angle on the apocalypses every month — that we’d be still reeling from a fire when outside the window of the print shop there’d be a raid. We had a full slate of finished prints ready for pick up that day, which is every time such a victory to make into an object something that existed only digitally — when someone said, “There are people with guns are outside.” There’s a question in our minds sometimes: Are we going to work through the revolution?
So, instead that day and today the community and I were together outside supporting families of people who were being kidnapped by so many agencies all working together, guns so big you’d think they were facing armed opposition, the kind of guns that remind us how the Panthers have always been right.
I came home and it was only June 6th and Andy and I both said, I don’t want to write about the end of the world this month. How much can this email or that call or even when I make a photograph — what will this do for the revolution? What will this do for the family that just got fucking split up?
There’s a podcast, Visual Quitter, that asks two questions only:
1. Have you ever thought of quitting?
2. What might you be doing, if not art?
A few days ago we listened to the episode with Susan Klein, who Andy met at Vermont Studio Center. I learned about Susan’s work through Andy then curated a solo with her work at 3433, a gallery I ran with some of my cohort from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago (Sean Lamoureux , Tony Favarula, Nicole White, Caleb Sheridan). We appreciated the duality of her thinking — the this and also this: I can’t live without art and I think about quitting all the time. // The country is a pile of shit and also we live in relative safety. // I need time to make art, but feel like kind of an asshole asking for that — I argue that everyone should have more time. // What is an ethical life? And also, what does my brain need to function as a human on a day-to-day basis.
Which centers me to the question of how impossible it would be to live all of this without art?
Things that make it possible:
We saw something this month that said: Make art like a kid. Edit like a scientist. We don’t even know where we got that from (let us know if you do).
Some art we printed this month
Photographs by Violet King of mundane peculiarities of the world. A bit like what it is like to be a live and move through the world.
SkyQuajus Turner brought in a few photos, including these of musician and organizer, Mike Flood. When we were talking about his work, he said this:
as far as me I just want people to know that I make art to represent the culture showcase who we are as people in a positive yet beautiful way instead of the negative narrative they try to throw on us. we are more than the streets we are human, we are love, we are art, and so much more but yet we get treated like the enemy and I feel its my job to help change that narrative
When things are shitty, find one group that you mostly agree with that’s already doing things and go do those things with them. It will not be perfect. Sarah Schulman’s The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity talked about that on LARB Radio Hour. For us it’s the Los Angeles Tenants Union, but we could have easily chosen Food Not Bombs or Stop LAPD Spying or Aetna Street Solidarity or Palestinian Youth Movement or Union del Barrio.
This month had one of the many Hallmark holidays built to create wealth in the already wealthy, monetizing our love for one another and antagonizing the hurts of so many with shit fathers. Well, Andy wrote a book about that, and this year she received from readers quotes from her book, and no one can ever tell me that art is not the answer.
This incomplete reminder of the role of the artist:
And also, somewhere we saw that the role of the artist is to be the archivist. I imagine an archivist with a complex contraption that scores onto a gold disc a moment in history, in a language obtuse and roundabout sometimes diffused but also direct and simple and clear and sharper than anything. A contraption that only one person knows how to use, and there are many of these machines everywhere and each has a person that can use it easily, with grace. It’s that person, influenced by moment and time that produces an object, abstract or concrete, infused by that moment in time.
Telling the truth: Here on Tongva land, the colonizers trample the protesters with horses, communities with gas in the air, sidewalks and parking lots with smoke. The US-backed genocide in Palestine persists, rubble, dust from incinerated skin. When the dust gets kicked up and you can’t see beyond your own face it’s the same, a line with different spots. I am not interested in king or no king. I am interested in Land Back, all of it. The entire world back. Complete liberation. None of us are free until all of us are free.
Still, we chop vegetables for dinner. The most delicious vegetables, the kind of vegetables that remind me of LA, of the farm workers. May they all be safe tonight, every night. May the profits be returned to them a thousand fold.
And again, Pa’lante — The last part of this song, could just keep going and going with more names and places written in. It could be 40 minutes. I can listen to it over and over. It could be forever.
I just want to keep making art and keep looking at art. Every doodle you make and thing you or I put together, half-thought photograph, or short story. Right or not. I just want to be a human on the planet earth and do something meaningful for myself and my neighbors. I want to know that you could do that too, that we could help each other do it.
At Los Angeles Print Shop we operate on a sliding scale for any artist, and pay-the-list-rate for those endowed with capital and power — all are welcome and when you’re ready you can reply to this email, or DM us on Instagram.
You can't quit! The dying world needs us hopeful artists to keep the hope alive. Thanks for battling for our city and having the right take on all of this. Con ganas! 🥰