It's really not for doing it alone
Yeah humans make F35s but we also make art
Every month a million things happen out in the world, to people there, to people here. To you to me. One thing a person (me, you) can do it's to give the space to feel the urge to continue the eternal thread of making art for others to see.
There’s this piece of art that was de-installed this month, this super simple mesh thing by @la_intermundial_holobiente. Click through and watch the video. It’s so satisfying — the scale, the way the sky stays, the way the trees move.
It’s about nature and connecting and making alliances with the non-human — that’s the wall text, sure, but it’s about us. Us seeing and in our hearts and brains saying, Oh there’s a forest of a forest right there. We humans are so capable.
A thin sheet of just what is there, presented right before it.
We make the Large Hadron Collider or the Three Gorges Dam. But we also make art.
Are we not dominating, so entirely, our environment and the nature around us? We can make F35s. The fields of the Permian Basin are pockmarked, so carved apart. Zoomed out it looks like what it is: a disease, a blight, something that should be stopped.
We do this to the earth. We do worse than that too. But we also put some ink on a mesh sheet that we hang it. And it’s powerful.
This sheet with printed trees amongst the trees isn’t for the trees. It’s for us. It can be a Claude glass, a black mirror, a mediation helping us see what is already there, and maybe also it’s a reminder of our immense power. That we can wield it so powerfully that we only need a mesh with some halftone.
Like divacorp_usa pointed at and Oscar Wilde wrote, and Jeanne Randolph wrote, art is not the end, it's the starting point for something new. It is the amenable object that the artist makes then everyone else fulfills its existence with meaning. Give me that space to fill, I will give it to you too.
I almost cannot ever listen to Apex Twin on a speaker. It is just never intimate enough. Earlier this month though, I did listen to this on vinyl, laying down on the ground helping build toilets and garbage trucks out of lego bricks, it was beautiful. I read once that Richard David James doesn't necessarily care about maintaining the integrity of the order of songs on an album, these are so comforting though when listened to two or three at a time back to back. Try #19, #20, #21.
We paused at the print shop for two weeks while we thanked one of our printers and welcomed another. The new one is part of the shop now, papers profiled, custom media settings set. It came on a double pallet and it took one forklift, one 20ft truck with almost nothing else in it, four people to lift, two other people on standby, six donuts, one tech on his back guiding the printer to its stand from below. And that’s just how I’d want it. It's really not for doing it alone. Nothing should be. It all takes a village, and it should.
One afternoon last week we were getting some ink flaking on a print. When you drop too much ink too fast on the wrong kind of paper, it can flake. Max resolution isn’t always going to work, especially if you’re doing fast head passes. And, like lots of things in art and actual life, it’s a metaphor. For what? Slow down and find your pace. The best quality might not be the best dpi. The passes across the paper might need to be 0.1 second slower.
I had made this plan to take the camera out to photograph on a three-day trip into the San Bernardino Mountains and then when I was at the mountains, the camera was at home. I saw all these tableaux form themselves into existence. I watched one after another beautiful and sad affirmation. We’re grateful for the printer for dialing us in in that way.
It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about printing, getting very technical about it all. Like how much time the ink should get to sit before we ask the paper to accept more.
There’s something about the keyboard that’s like the opening of a science video played in a high school classroom, lights off, worksheets out — but it keeps going, ominous and so slowly, only sort of building. I think too of the railroads being built here in the United States. Who built them, where did they go then and why. What do they do for us now.
We’ve been doing a lot of shipping and mailing prints and tests. Check out William Gordon’s in-progress tests below that we mailed out to Petaluma for his upcoming solo show, “We are Silhouettes.” Shipping prints always reminds us how small the world is, how a person having a piece of your art in their hands is just days away at any moment. Who lives far from you who should live near your art?
There’s a book we read a lot to our kid, Darling Baby, that has a page about a sea turtle on the beach. At first the narrator is happy to see it, then they realize it is not moving. They feel very sad. The water washes the turtle back into the sea. The narrator says, “I am telling you this because I know you will understand.”
We feel the same: We’re telling you this because we know you will understand.
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.
I needed all of this today thank you ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️