What Can Be Wrung from a Dry Sponge?
8-foot prints, the choir for our commute, bidirectional gestures of intimacy, and more
Welcome to the end of March at the end of the world. We are thinking about the part of art that’s the intake. The listening, reading, watching, noticing. What can be wrung from a dry sponge and what can be wrung from one just pulled out of a bucket of suds? We also lost a friend. It was very slow and then it was was. I know that in crisis, my body and mind want to react and so often it does that by creating. But lately, just watching the birds and the slugs feels like enough. One slug crawled across our window at lunch. It was slow and also very fast. We looked away and it was already gone.
We printed a lot of art this month, so we spent a lot of time looking at art. A lot of beautiful art. Touching, beautiful, intelligent, and juicy. It is beyond an honor to get to spend our days looking at and putting this art onto paper.
Only God Knows
On the ride in to the shop, I’ve gone back to this song a lot. It’s somehow a reminder that I am alive. I think it’s the celebratory jubilant singing that counters the lyrics that mark the end of something. It’s the choir too. A message sent over from elsewhere via the individual voices singing as one, just for me, in my car, while I’m feeling it all.
i want to climb inside every word and lick the salty neck of each letter
We printed an 8ft x 8ft print for Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s solo show at REDCAT, which was both personal and universal. In the show text, she writes about the origin of the show’s title i want to climb inside every word and lick the salty neck of each letter, how the title “emerged during a poetry reading when I suddenly desired not to hear the poem but to transgress the limits of the moment to taste the poem.”
When she writes, “These bidirectional gestures of intimacy are what animate the reading and writing process,” we are reminded of this quote that came to us by way of a children’s book we read so many times around here, Mr. Bear’s World of Food, from poet and translator Ryoko Sekiguchi, “Among the various ways of ‘touching,’ taste is the most intimate, because the exterior world enters your being.” In many ways, we feel that way about all art. Rasheed’s show is up at REDCAT until August, so you have some time to visit and ingest it.
I’ve dreamt of running a small restaurant — turns out, in some ways I do
It was a welcome feeling to lift a giant 64” roll of paper and then to feel that roll so much lighter at the end of the day. One of Andy’s calming watches are those mini documentaries of a day in the life of someone, someone with some high level of excellence in some other field, someone with a sense of severity to them. Watch one and the algorithm will never forget. This week, she watched one about a chef de cuisine, one of those trying to keep their Michelin star (what a gauntlet), and saw them open up the restaurant, receive the fish delivery, and cut the fish, and plate it, and then at the end of the day clean everything up, their chef handing them small but so obviously extraordinary one-bite snacks along the way. That is also what we all do every day. Sometimes imagining the documentary of it helps us as we go. At the print shop, the shots are: at the end of the day unloading the roll from the printer and packaging it safely back up for its next print, bundling up the paper trimmings into a paper tumbleweed, covering up the printers and the tables before turning off the lights. Gone is the print, in someone else’s hands now, on a wall, in a tube, in a custom cardboard box, a wooden crate.
A Love Supreme
John Coltrane recorded this in one shot they say. The record is made up of four parts — Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, and Psalm — and is the kind of record you might want to listen to all the way through, sitting sometime when you know you have about 32 minutes straight. Some say that it was John in the most explicit way proclaiming his belief in god. It starts off in the first part pretty jazzy, cool and bright like a sunny winter New York City morning and eventually spins itself up into something more complex and wild seeming. The saxophone speaks and it starts to speak the same words over and over and it’s not until the last fourth of the song that a voice (I think it’s John) speaks the words out in English, a love supreme. By then it’s a mantra, a willing something into being. When we listened to it recently, Andy asked how many years was this before he died. Two years. Just two.
One painter leading us to another
We also looked at a lot of paintings, one painter leading us to another. Danielle Roberts whose neon dark that is exhilarating and scary and hopeful, Matt Bolinger whose people all feel like someone I’ve known forever someone who went to my public school or their dad, Camille Soulat whose work is intimate, visceral, but also appears to be evaporating as you take it in, Tù.úk’z transports us to alternate universes that feel so strange and so familiar, Laura Krifka what skin, what light, what questions I have, Elizabeth Glaessner we were all birthed from this swamp and our burden is not the swamp, it is something external, Rebecca Ness with such specificity in the details and such honesty. Part of this art quest is that Andy’s been working on her novel cover — did you know they might let you put a painting on the cover of your novel? it’s exciting and so cool and really surreal. Everyone should get to have a book of their own with their choice of painting. Just as everyone should get a birthday cake (if they want one).
Fiction shows, True to life
We watched Chicken Nugget, about a person whose love turns into a chicken nugget. Sure, it is absolutely madcap but it is a damn truer feeling than maybe anything else. I mean when you look around and consider it, does the world around us not feel as surreal or absurd? Watch and tell us what you think. We are also enjoying the 3 Body Problem. It is not the book series (which I think about all the time) and everyone has great hair and fresh wardrobe, but it does get to the existential thought about human history on Earth, how we are just ants on an ant hill, but we’re fucking it up so bad, when we could actually just be ants on an ant hill living in harmony, eating fruit together and making art.
Sometime soon we are planning to watch Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, spreading out those 2 hours and 43 minutes across the weeks as we are able. It’s not how it was meant to be watched we’re sure, but we do what we can. Late one night this month we tried to watch the single shot Boiling Point and then we stopped because how could we splice it up, when they didn’t? So we’ll wait until we have one sitting for that one.
Taking in
As for the art-making strategy, try taking in. Like, that’s it. It was raining when we wrote this and we watched that translucent slug move across our window. Doing nothing is still doing something. Our art is everything we have seen and done and taken in right up until the moment we make it.
What will you see or read or listen to? What living artist can you support, can you send a message across the transom that says, Thank you and I’ll be here for it if you make more and also this much was already enough.
Sadboy
We’ll leave you with this song which is almost all lasers and smoke machines timed to the music. It’s not about desire, but about knowing one’s own faculties and capacities.
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.
I love that these land in my inbox on the last day of the month, they feel like rumble strips ahead of an intersection bringing me back to where I am. Thanks for making them! 💕⚡️
Was just listening to this album and your book came to mind Andy. Not sure exactly of the connection but feels in the same world...
https://www.mediumbuildmusic.com/#/
https://open.spotify.com/album/6DUyohk95eun9LArJtHyF7?si=byevXWdGTiCGT4CWqhzfRA