Make Art Like It’s a Sword
When everything is on fire and everyone I love is doing beautiful things.
Some prints from this month will stick with me, I know it: prints for an artist’s solo show; so many absolutely necessary and thrilling test prints to dial in a paper choice for a series of 54” x 72” prints; and a print for a dear friend, taken not on his 100MP but his pocket point-and-shoot, which turns out to be the one everyone agrees should be made big and hung on a wall, bigger than the tiny file thought it could go at first. The world can be so giving.
Make art like it’s a sword
And right at the end of the month, when we thought we knew what we would write about here — American Apocalypse by Demian DinéYazhi’, Shelleyne Rodriguez’s essay “The assimilation of Hip Hop, hegemony, and the Empire State” — Rafaat Al-Areer’s daughter, Shaymaa, her husband, and their newborn child were murdered.
Rafaat Al-Areer wrote the poem “If I must die” to his daughter, asking her to continue the work of the kite, of the poetry, of the lineage of being humans: “If I must die / you must live / to tell my story”. When I heard that Shaymaa is dead, the poem seemed wrecked — she has died now, too — and still in the next breath, the poem revives itself and carries on, now not just if I must die, but if they must die. As the Palestinian Youth Movement said about their death: “If they must die, then we must live.”
We must make art like a sword. Do I know anything about swords or how to use them? How heavy they are? No, but when the poem breaks because his daughter is dead, it falls on us to heed the call no one expected to get. We must live and make art — make art like it’s a sword. Even if we don’t know what we are doing, even if we are afraid of its blade, even if it is heavy and makes no sense. For Andy and I, it is raising our kid and making art.
Find the sword you want to pick up and use it. Fucking swing it. Do it even if it’s not perfect. Like the students show us, it is no longer enough to just live.
Our part at Los Angeles Print Shop is to help others do the same. If you have art you’d like to make, specifically prints on paper, let us know. We are here.
Put this one on loud, feel it through the table
Early one morning at the shop, before there were even any other cars parked outside, I turned this on and turned it up loud. Loud enough that when I placed my hands flat on the work table, I feel it rise up in my palms. And when at 1:30 what sounds like a synthesized organ starts circling, I finally feel it in my body, in my face. I envision Close Encounters of the Third Kind when they finally communicate with light and sound or Phillip Glass playing in a sports field. The loops scaling up and down. I’m nostalgic and I don’t know for what, maybe a world like this one but different. The rest of the album R Plus Seven by Oneohtrix Point Never is a similar voyage of new familiarity. Little tales that leak from one song and between songs, of this planet and not. Each shift is unexpected but I never feel unwelcome. Like this, through the rest of the album and on, I make twenty-three 8x10s and 11x14s that morning. Each their own tale.
Two minutes I could watch for hours
In the first two or so minutes of Love Lies Bleeding, the camera floats looking upward through a primary red canyon up into a dark starry night sky then slowly floats back down to a warehouse on the outskirts of town, a gym. I could watch that lit up gym at night with that music for hours. And sure, the trucks and cars, too. The ingredients are so good they hold up the writing, the acting, and the plot, and carry the entire experience. It’s enough to see the day light in this place, the building lights at night, to listen to the music. I’d have stayed in the opening shot without going anywhere, watching it like it was one of those “A Rainy Day in 4K Cozy Coffee Shop ❄ Background Instrumental to Relax, Study, Work” videos (which I have also watched all four hours of, soft piano jazz and all — it’s what makes them what they are).
Kinan Azmeh On Anxiety
I first listened to clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh during the spring of 2020, when a lot of our world was in agreement to Zoom everything. Every week, Andy and I met with a group online to listen to music and talk with musicians. Kinan was one of them, a generous teacher that made every answer feel intellectual, emotional and intimate, and plain and simple. A person who instantly felt like family — so much so, we nearly named our kid Kinan.
When he shared this performance of his new work “On Anxiety” the caption resonated with me:
“This all feels so irrelevant in the face of a genocide but I will hold on to the only tool I know how to use. This is my new work “On Anxiety” performed by Fuse” — Kinan Azmeh
The end of that first line, especially: I will hold on to the only tool I know how to use.
Can I tell you again, how this is the only truth I really know? I will hold on to the only tool I know how to use. Nikita Gill tells me this, too, in a second way.
Air conditioners running in empty motels
This 2021 short film, which opens with a mesmerizing shot of clouds from an airplane and compiles more scenes of American hyper-reality with text from Jean Baudrillard’s America travels through the same America in Love, Lies, Bleeding. The scenes are nothing novel to anyone that has been on a plane or been in a car on a long trip across made up borders — and still they are moving. This place, lights on at night, the machine never shutting down, the air conditioners running in the empty motel rooms of the desert, all symptoms and signs, powerful and concerning. Are they the artifice of living, are they the requirements for surviving a crumbling world? Or are they just all part of the fakeness of the western existence, all of it a bunch of hats and decorations worn by the ants on the hill trying to live. We hold up the simulation.
You can take my body / You can take my bones
The resolve in this song! The steadfastness, the acknowledgement of what can and has been stolen, and what cannot.
Day by day I work the line
Every minute over time
Fingers nimble fingers quick
My fingers bleed to make you rich
You can take my body
You can take my bones
You can take my blood
But not my soul
The pounding of a builder’s tool, the beat while we find the sturdiness to say no, there is something we will not agree to and I will tell you about it.
I will be processing and editing and printing and sharing the photos I took this week, then picking up my camera to do it again and again. Andy will be writing what’s next, so far it’s 20 minutes at a time, trusting that it will accumulate, and reading, likely Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! — have you read it? It sounds so good.
Things Can’t Go On Like This Forever
We’ll leave you with this song. Is this song hopeful or is it a meltdown, we can’t tell? It’s absolutely Tiffany 1987 performing at a mall in / bopping around a bedroom in slouch socks and it’s also 2024 almost asking for a confirmation, that right, things can’t go like this forever, right, right — things can’t go on like this forever?
As always, we’re here making prints as Los Angeles Print Shop. Let us know if you’re ready to make yours. We operate on a sliding scale 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 you can reply to this email, or DM us on Instagram.