On the generation ship together
It’s nice to be a human among humans a lot of the time.
Another end of the month, more end of the world, more art.
It feels sometimes like being on a boat rocking back and forth in the pitch dark of the ocean at night. How can making art still be meaningful? How can it not be??
We printed Lena Rudnick’s Helio Romantica, a body of work for a solo show pondering possession and emotional inheritance. She shared a story of how when she was young her mom excitedly gifted her her first camera — a way for her mom to share a passion with her daughter. But Lena really wanted a Super Nintendo and methodically convinced her mom to get her one. We know this jarring crushing feeling so well. Now though, two years since losing her mom, Lena finds her in her own photography.
Would you believe me if I told you Lena and Esteban went to the same high school? When they finally first met in January of this year, they made just one of these prints, working super closely on it. Like surgeons placing a heart in the exact right spot without ever cutting anyone open. That print led to a few more (including the beautiful 44 x 60 inch above), all wonderfully spreadsheeted and organized, then a few more, and then it was a complete body of work. Isn’t that how it works? It isn’t something until it is one, then a few, then there it is, as inevitable and whole a thing as a pomegranate.
Back in January, Lena wasn’t sure there was a whole show. Seeing one printed, an object in space, though, she saw how one print could be more. The first print was a portal we witnessed open for Lena and then Lena walked through and now a whole exhibition of carefully selected and produced prints exists and the show is up.
If you have not printed your work recently, try it, see if it is a portal for you. You probably also know a friend with a portal they don’t know about yet.
We’re also turning this essay over and over, Weird Nonfiction by Clayton Purdom in the Los Angeles Review of Books. His essay is an encyclopedic journey, wondering if he will make the real art that he wants to make instead of what the world pays him for.
I worked with Clayton back in the 2010s when I also wondered, as he writes in this essay, “if I wasted too many of my prime writing years producing internet slop rather than something more substantial.”
Back then, a customer called in and left a voicemail they sent to the entire editorial department. The sound of it is as clear in my mind today as the day I played it on those laptop speakers in that open office floor plan. On the voicemail a woman, wheezy and gruff, as if said to us across the room over the sound of a margarita blender, feet snug in the green carpeting of Larry Sultan’s parent’s living room: Your talents are wasted at Groupon. Still, I stayed. Reader, I stayed four more years.
Clayton’s essay is like when Sonic the Hedgehog runs into something and a bunch coins fall out — and the coins are all this art that’s sticking to his brain. Reading it is picking up the coins, clicking all the links, making a syllabus of the sources. There’s Sans Soleil, there’s Unedited Footage of a Bear, there’s “My house walkthrough” a video tour of someone’s house where they walk around in loops giving the tour over and over, each time the house getting messier and fleshier and meatier. And of course it does. Part of our visual landscape is now similar but with very real images in great detail. It’s our own self-destruction, the death of the planet, the ouroboros of capitalism, it’s the way we’re all glitching — what else can we do but also allow it to melt into our art?
Ten years ago Clayton wrote ”The golden age of ‘Turn Down For What’” about the song by DJ Snake and Lil Jon of course, and they better not ever delete it from the internet. He is exactly right about what the song is, how it works:
There are three minutes and 33 seconds of it, technically, but what everyone is thinking of when considering the song comes at roughly seconds 10 through 40: a hint of build, Lil Jon activating his special “holler” preset, and a bit of the beat’s spring-powered bounce.
That’s the song’s entire legacy. The remaining two minutes are all comedown, relatively speaking—a bunch of sci-fi squiggles, left-turns, and echoes.
We went to a wedding once, where the bride and groom re-emerged to everyone’s hoots to Lil Jon’s “self-contained, self-fulfilling party rattling on indefinitely as if in proof of the fact that even a downward spiral is fun if you’re going too goddamn fast to think.” Grandmas rising to their feet, looking unsure if the sound was music or not.
When I think of the song, I think of the essay. This is what art is like for me.
In the last days of the month we took the Sixth Street bridge home from the print shop one day (our first time yet, because our bridge, the Seventh Street bridge was blocked off filming a goofy car commercial up and down, up and down) and as we drove we got to talking about whether art is meaningful or not. Esteban said it’s like a sci-fi generation ship — an idea I’d never heard of — a ship where you will never get to the destination; your kid’s kid’s kid’s kids will (if they do). It’s a lifetime of set-up that not even the next generation reaps. Maybe making art is a slow burn to create more meaningful connection from one human being to another.
But then again, sometimes it does feel instant, total, and complete.
It’s Tierra Whack’s Whack World, her album of fifteen one-minute songs, concentrated like a bouillon paste. The single minute is a self-imposed constraint.
Naomi White this month in an interview makes her way through related thoughts — “People are dying. So, who am I to be in the studio making art?” — when talking about her upcoming group show Landscapes of Illusions and Possibilities: Maps, Materials and the Lens. Another connection, another past floating up to inform us now, Esteban taught photography with Naomi at the start of the pandemic. In the interview Naomi said:
That’s the power of art — to help you feel what’s actually happening ... That’s what I just told one student who said, ‘I don’t want to talk about beauty. It doesn’t mean anything. People are dying.’
There have always been wars. There have been wars my entire life. People have been dying and people have been dying your whole life too. There’s all kinds of injustice but art is powerful, when wielded the right way.
I have loved this song so long that once I wore a Kimya Dawson t-shirt to my on-campus job walking/escorting patients around the student health center — a job that only existed because of an architectural glitch in which the building had four waiting rooms all on the same floor — and my boss asked me what was on my shirt, so I unzipped my hoodie and showed her, and then my boss said it wasn’t an appropriate shirt for work and I told her that was why I had my hoodie zipped up.
I loved it then, I love it now, maybe even more because Kimya was right then and is still right, righter than I knew.
At the shop there is one of our printers that just isn’t working right. Not on all prints, but on some. We are giving the printer the care it needs, fixing it or replacing it, either way we will soon be in the solution of this problem, for now we’re here.
The Tech came in recently and we tried lots different solutions, one even involved melting some plastic tubing with a match. The Tech will be returning again soon any day now, and we’re still printing even as the printer is deciding is it tired or old or just ready to retire. Or maybe it needs only “a hot acid bath” as the Tech said in those exact words.
Once after a maintenance visit, halfway into his car, the Tech asked me if I liked baseball cards. Before I could even answer he put in my hand a stack of baseball cards and drove away. It’s nice to be a human among humans a lot of the time.
This one is in the Public Domain, which is to say it has outlived its commercial life and now lives durationally its art life. Tell us the size, we’ll print you one.
Clayton ends his Weird Nonfiction essay like this:
There is sometimes a reading of works like the ones I’ve mentioned above as fundamentally hopeless, as a response to a broader dimming of possibility in the world. But I feel no despair these days.
When I experience artwork that sets out to explain a corner of reality and instead contorts itself to reflect the very unease I brought with me upon entry, I feel less alone. I feel how I hoped to feel when I began this essay eons ago: linked, at last, in.
I’ve never felt more like something in an image than when I saw Man Leaving Universe After Dying in It (2024):
It evokes the same resonant hum I felt when I read what Rachel Kushner told Lisa Allardice, “Currently, we are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is: how do we exit the car?”
I feel compelled to tell you about a time when only art and very literally nothing else made sense, but the time is a personal one, one I won’t put on the internet today. I hope one day we’ll be in the morning sun, sitting, and I’ll have a cold brew, and you’ll have what you have, and I will tell you what happened before I sat in a car outside the hospital and I looked at a mural on a wall and felt grateful a human made it, that there it was, evidence.
The earth is not well. The people with the bombs are not well. The amount of realtime horror overlaying the realtime horror is a lot a lot a lot. As badschoolbadschool posted, “Who does despair serve, if not your enemy?” and “Rage and sadness can be a start, but they cannot be the end.” and “Use them as fuel, but you have to have other sources of fuel as well, because there are going to come times when your emotions don’t match what is needed.”
So much of this month is people rising up from our past worlds to our current world. We’ve known them and here they are visiting us, their art, their thoughts, their connections. We’re happy to have them, happy to have had them before.
This world is small and I hope you are making art.
We hope you’re making art. We hope we get to print some of it soon. If not yours, then whose? Send this to a friend you wish would make more art. Who is on the generation ship with you?
At Los Angeles Print Shop we make meticulous fine art prints with a pay-what-you-can model — so there’s no gate on these tools for making art. Say hi to get started.
Beautiful! And I love Loose Lips. My friend and I memorized it when it first came out and I still find myself able to recall most of it and it continues to ring so true.
So nice to read this!!!