We’re a blip that is part of a larger river, a river that lasts
This ecology has lived longer than any of us
This month we finished printing Rio Asch Phoenix's solo show at Monte Vista Projects. The show, While Light Still Falls Here, might (but hopefully not) be the last views of land in the Verdugo Mountains (Fernandeño Tataviam and Gabrieleno Tongva land) that will hopefully not become flattened streets and houses and garages that could house hundreds but only house two or three. They are not nostalgic defeated photographs, but warnings. This ecology has lived longer than any of us and it still does, it vibrates now.
In text for the photographs Rio says: I sit here in the shade of the chamise forest and feel desperate. I want to roll my body up and down every inch of this space, to feel it cutting into me.
Working with Rio on his prints, it was the land and its story that were centered and any of the work we did on light or color or details were always in service of that. I can’t wait for y'all to see these prints up on the wall over at Monte Vista when it opens.
Here’s someone that has been in the Print Shop with me lately: William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops IV. Every track sounds so much like the last one, a bit different, but so much the same. I actually don’t even know if that is true, if maybe every song is the same or only just has a small change. When I put it on the other day as I worked on prints and on tasks around the shop, it was like I had an old friend there with me. We didn’t need to say anything to each other about anything — we just already knew.
We’ve been writing this newsletter for a year and it’s become so essential for us — to come here to this same space and think about these things with you. In so many ways, that’s what any art practice is. Come back to the thing and work it again.
We listened to the LARB Radio Hour with writer and translator Forrest Ganders earlier. They talked about his book, Mojave Ghost — a long walk, 800 miles long, following the San Andreas fault toward Barstow, where he was born. He crosses time and space, follows the fault line, which at times cannot be seen but is still there. A book that embodies desert looking. As Forrest describes it: ”Desert looking disconnects us from temporal expectations we’ve developed in an age of spectacle.” We have wondered why the desert does that. He writes about fossils of Miocene-age camels, his mom trying to “find words for the feeling of the Mojave Desert light,” and his partner of 30 years, the poet C.D. Wright, who died unexpectedly in her sleep in 2016.
After, we went to read C.D.’s poetry. Here’s some of one:
Living
If this is Wednesday, write Lazartigues, return library books, pick up passport form, cancel the paper.
If this is Wednesday, mail B her flyers and K her shirts. Last thing I asked as I walked K to her car, “You sure you have everything?” “Oh yes,” she smiled, as she squalled off. Whole wardrobe in front closet.
Go to Morrison’s for paint samples, that’s where housepainter has account (near Pier One), swing by Gano St. for another bunch of hydroponic lettuce. Stop at cleaners if there’s parking.
Pap smear at 4. After last month with B’s ear infections, can’t bear sitting in damn doctor’s office. Never a magazine or picture on the wall worth looking at. Pack a book.
Ever since B born, nothing comes clear. My mind like a mirror that’s been in a fire. Does this happen to the others.
A year ago we fantasized about moving to Whittier, Alaska. The town with 263 people with only one way in or out. There are still bathtubs there waiting for people to fill with bubbles. Art nearly ready made, the artist to just point at. Not us, not today at least, but the future sprawls ahead of us full of things we are still practicing imagining.
That moment a year ago was like nothing we had ever experienced before, at least in scale of what-the-fuck-do-I-do-ness.
Now this year, it's there and yet we have also felt and experienced so much meaningful art. We have printed so much wonderful, meaningful art, and worked with more than 50 new-to-us artists, half paying what they can and half paying the list rate, making it possible for everyone to print. And, we will keep helping artists make prints until we can’t or it's not the right thing to do anymore. Right now, today, we are cranking the printers (there’s four now!), there is an apprentice and a shop tech, ourselves (a writer and a photographer), and every single one of you that has printed with us, ever showed us your art or made art with us, or read this letter in any way. Thank you for that.
To get to see so much first hand, and get to hear about how it came about, we are just so grateful. That the thought you might have had and then turned into art to show to others, can be bouncing around in our shop and in our household.
It has come up so many times this month, the way that it feels to experience a piece of art and to feel a feeling so completely that it feels like we understand the artist — and that understanding makes it feel like we’re understood, too.
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We watched this on a loop so many times, amazed and nodding. This is what folk music is for and what it will always be for. Some may try to take the land, but they cannot take what is not theirs.
Note from Andy: We previously had an artist here that it turns out we may not want to be sharing, so we removed the mention.
We made a print recently for Gabe Rojas, and something he said keeps turning over in my head: I just want to make this big beautiful print of a photograph I made so that when I have a friend over and they say, Hey! Cool print! I can just unpin it and give it to them. I loved the entire gesture. Out of the printer into Gabe’s hands and to person not yet identified, chosen by their own interest made audible.
This is the first time we’ve written a December edition of Making Art at the End of the World — and while we’ve been sitting here at the end of the month every month, always with art, this month we know the world also notes the end, even if to just keep living like nothing ends. We have a few traditions: 12 grapes at midnight and to put in a bag or suitcase what you want to take with you next year, what you want to have happen. Make everyone get up and take a bag outside and go around the block, then come back in. We’ve done it in the depth of blizzard snow, with friends and alone, done it sneaking onto the university president’s looping driveway our wobbly wheeled suitcases behind us passing the president’s motherfucking portico, with bags small and bags big, and walking out to the beach. Andy’s always put a book in her’s — this year, she’ll put her own inside. This is what we have right now and we are grateful. We are not certified fortune tellers (a glimpse of how that might work from artist Matt Empson), but put something in the suitcase and see.
Oh, and if you’re in Los Angeles and reading this in time, on the first day of the year we will be eating ozoni Japanese new years soup at Noguchi plaza in little Tokyo. It’s free from 9am onwards. Come and let’s eat some soup.
We look back, and we look ahead, even if it’s foggy like it was here on the last day of the year, even if the future we are imagining must be so different from the templates we’ve been holding. We are looking forward to seeing you next year when we open again (which is just in a few days, so make an appointment).
Happy New Year! Thanks for the lovely words and the inspiration to take stock and make plans today. We miss you guys.