Quitting Art
Via @artreviewpower100
Somewhere I absorbed the notion that encountering something twice is a coincidence, but a third occurrence makes it a pattern. As a superstitious spiritual person, I am always on the lookout for signs— or synchronicities, as witches like to say— that offer direction and guidance, often to a fault. In the past weeks not two, but three friends of mine have expressed a visceral desire to quit being artists. Everyone I had this conversation with described wanting to do something more “effective”: becoming a therapist, going to social work school, leaving New York City for good. I riffed with a friend last month that if my art career tanks for supporting Palestine, joke’s on them, I’ll become a farmer or something else useful instead.
The current political nightmare has produced an existential anguish for so many cultural workers, who are reckoning with questions around what art does, what makes art art to begin with, what effective cultural interventions look like, and how to be principled as makers. In the last two weeks, an anonymous action targeted art galleries in the Lower East Side, splashing building exteriors with red paint and wheatpasting posters with statements demanding the galleries commit to PACBI, the cultural boycott arm of the BDS movement. Pace Gallery was also hit in retaliation for their recent work by Israeli artist Michal Rovner, a large-scale Times Square video installation that called “for the safe return of the more than 100 Israeli hostages still missing” with no mention of ongoing Palestinian deaths. A gallery I was in talks to show with pre-pandemic showed up in the comments section decrying the Chinatown gesture, saying it was misguided and targeting sympathetic spaces and people, managing to piss off even the unofficial mayor of New York, Patia.
Image via Writers Against the War on Gaza
The online reactions brought me back to the Defend Boyle Heights movement of Los Angeles in 2016-2018. Boyle Heights, a neighborhood marked by a long history as a site of Latinx cultural organizing and resistance, was home to a series of newly-established art galleries, which the barrio viewed an early step in the process of gentrification bearing down on them. Actions by DBH generated the same flavor of critique at the time— galleries new to the area insisted that art was a necessary and benign cultural addition to the Boyle Heights area, some of them focusing on the diversity of their programming and their work with Los Angeles-based artists. Despite their promises of benefitting the neighborhood, Nicodim Gallery met a protest of the space by DBH with retaliation by pressing hate crime charges against the group.
The thing is, DBH’s tactics worked, at least in the telling of a born and raised LA artist friend. Making it unattractive and consequential to work with these art spaces—for anyone, regardless of identity— created the intended result of galleries closing and leaving the area. Reading back, what I found noteworthy about the coverage and narrative created by mainstream art reporting and gentrifying art spaces was that they fell back on tired, reliable messaging: the protestors were an unreasonable fringe group of young people (perhaps even outside provocateurs) who carelessly directed their ire at anyone who dared disagree with them. How often have we heard this?
The reality was that a broad coalition of groups were unified in their opposition (from Hyperallergic on the groups present at a protest staged against Gavin Brown and Laura Owens at the Whitney: “Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement, Defend Boyle Heights, Chinatown Art Brigade, the Brooklyn Anti-gentrification Network, Equality for Flatbush, Take Back the Bronx, Decolonize This Place, Defend Corona, Mothers on the Move, People’s Cultural Plan, and ICE FREE QUEENS”). It was easy for galleries to cast young anarchists and socialists smashing windows as villains; less so the mothers of Boyle Heights who wanted a laundromat instead of an overpriced art gallery. Solidarity in cities on both coasts highlighted the ways artwashing is used to culturally displace longtime, working-class residents, from gallery spaces making neighborhoods suddenly “desirable” to murals commissioned by real estate companies drawing in tourism.
“Many people tell us that we don’t want art in our community, but we tell these people that they don’t want us in our neighborhood and that is why they support the galleries.”
-Boyle Heights Alianza Anti Artwashing Y Dezplazamiento
Delmira Gonzales
Ana Hernandez
November 8, 2017
Photo by Ryan Roco
In the last few months, the art world has revealed itself to be even more spiritually and morally bereft than those of us who participate in cynical good faith wanted to believe. Art has always wanted to position itself as inherently liberal (a laughable conceit), but we are deeply mired in a mask off moment. A friend of mine in LA described something as “cooked” recently and now I can’t stop using that to describe the state of the Art World at large. Please enjoy, as evidence of this, the absolutely fucking cooked correspondences sent to culture workers in the past week alone (and their brilliant responses, worth visiting and reading the threads):
Via @lanabasta
Recently an art dealer, in the course of a phone call about why none of my work had sold, asked me to explain the Chicano movement, citing a Los Angeles painter friend of mine as his primary association. I left the conversation wondering if this dealer was aware that the Chicano movement was, in fact, a civil rights struggle, not just a set of popular painters. Another gallery owner asked me last year, in a virtual zoom visit, to explain anarchism to him in a way that left me more than a little paranoid. An artist and gallerist friend of mine once told me that all money comes from violence; the only difference is whether it’s fast violence or slow violence. That friend has yet to say anything publicly about Palestine that I’ve seen.
I suppose all of this is to say that “art” does not feel particularly revolutionary to me at the moment. Barely in the studio the past few months, I brought in someone to split my space with me rather than let my rent dollars languish. Making things with my hands feels like an exercise in tactile grounding more than worthwhile cultural production. After a month of feeling aimless and unsure of how to spend my time other than attending more and more organizing meetings, I realized the unfamiliar feeling was unemployment. Until last week, I had only had five days total of tattooing work in January, and no show deadlines or freelance deliverables to be chipping away at. Here is where well-meaning friends come in to tell me that art is for myself, not for anyone else, and that I should use this time to produce work free of external pressures.
Except I don’t feel freer. I feel as if the brief moment I had in 2023, where for the first time in my life I had enough art sales for my practice to pay for itself rather than operate at a loss, is over. One friend who came by the studio to deliver a pep talk is, it should be noted, very wealthy and does not have his circumstances made or broken by a single sale of work. My reaction to the censoring and boycotting of pro-Palestinian artists is one of refusal, steadfastness, and of being glad to know who not to work with. Those choices are easy. But—and I will be very, very honest and vulnerable here—it is scary when my carefully tended ecosystem of support, one in which I never had to rely too heavily on a single gallery or grant or tattoo appointment through a multiplicity of projects—starts to buckle without each section holding up its small part.
But cultural fronts matter, and I am constantly reminded of this. We see this in the darksided social media influencers being bribed to make pro-Israel posts, in college student organizations being infiltrated by informants on Israel’s payroll, and even in tattoo artists being flown to Israel to appear in propaganda videos gushing about how beautiful and friendly the occupying force is and how much they love the hummus. Meanwhile, Palestinian artists have film screenings and retrospectives cancelled, and those like Randa Jarrar who dare challenge the platforming of Zionist violence are dragged out of so-called “free speech” events by their chairs. I think of Jasper Diamond Nathaniel’s retelling of a memorial mural destroyed by IOF soldiers:
Nearby, soldiers painted over a refugee camp mural of young men they had recently killed there. When they couldn’t find the artist, they arrested his father and announced he’d be detained until the boy turned himself in (there is a name for this act). He repainted the mural and then received a call from the IDF that said, “Paint over the mural, or we’ll bomb it over your heads.”
(Via InfiniteJaz on Substack, article linked below.)
I paid my first visit to Interference Archive this week at the invitation of a new friend who volunteers there. They have on view a collection of Palestinian archival materials including posters, zines from the PFLP, books, and music. The collection is vibrant and moving. Earlier that morning I had been trying to find a used copy online of Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, a rare publication released by Critical Resistance in 1976. While scanning the bookshelves at the archive, I found it, sitting right on top of a row of other books on prisons and abolition— synchronicity.
Cultural workers as a whole are now and have always been doing critical work. Despite myself, in assessing where to identify my allegiances I keep landing on “artist” first: Artists Against Apartheid, Writers Against the War on Gaza. I think of the larger-than-life puppets blockading streets, of painted banners dropped from bridges, of teach-ins held during art exhibitions and of novels written entirely by hand in prison. What I am concluding here, and reminding myself of, is that the “art” that feels most valuable right now is against, outside, and often in spite of institutions, even those that wish to posit themselves as free and in favor of beauty and truth. I don’t feel excited by the prospect of a museum retrospective or a biennial, no matter the proposed politics or identities of those featured. I feel excited by scanning drawings in the archive and holding a handmade pair of black leather boots from the EZLN and reading about all the ways people used art to nourish their spirit from behind bars. I feel excited by printing zines for free and making a hundred empanadas to feed people and by doing the unglamorous work of movements like taking notes and learning digital security.
This morning I cried twice on the B43 bus: first while reading Margaret Killjoy’s newsletter on her familial lineage of Irish socialist resistance, and again while watching a video about a Stop Cop City action where two protestors chained themselves to construction equipment at the site of the developers slated to build Cop City. I cried at the hard lock their arms were cemented into, wrapped in red duct tape and stenciled with the words VIVA TORT in memory of Tortuguita, a forest defender murdered by Atlanta police. I’m crying again just typing this and thinking about it.
There is an outside of the empire, I’ve learned since. But when you’re in the imperial core of North America and western Europe, you have to find it in the cracks. Behind the 7/11, where the stream runs through a storm drain, you’ll find yourself outside the empire. Inside crowded apartment buildings in the cities, you’ll find yourself outside the empire. In shacks in the hollers of Appalachia, you can step, however briefly, outside the empire.
-Margaret Killjoy, Birds Before the Storm
I wept while feeling acutely that so much of this is familiar to me from the movement work I encountered at a very young age, and being angry at myself that I should know more by now. That I should be braver, that I should be more willing to lead, that my own truths should be clearer and more uncomplicated. If I have learned anything from the last few years, and from the last few months especially, it’s that building the capacity for revolution is a practice (or hope is a discipline, as Mariame Kaba says). We have to do things that challenge us and expand what we are able to show up for. We owe that to Palestine, to the Atlanta forest, to resistance movements the world over. We have to create the conditions for collective endurance. We can do more than we think we can, and we can do even more together. Every day is a new set of extreme highs and lows, of simultaneous wild grief and resoluteness, but I have been working to challenge the feeling that I can’t do one particular thing by finding something I can.
THANK YOU to everyone who entered the raffle! I drew the winners last week and got the work sent out to its new homes. The support means the world. Another small piece of news is that I will be gone for five weeks in March and April at a residency, so if you’d like to get tattooed before then, please reach out via email. I have a lot of ceramics currently available for purchase, including these Flower World mugs that I’m very happy with.
Reading + Upcoming:
Within Our Lifetime’s report The Crackdown on Palestine: Unveiling NYPD’s Repression Tactics
Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories from North American Political Prisoners edited by Josh Davidson and Eric King
Watching the Resistance News Network on Telegram
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimon on artists as truth tellers
My friend Cody Cook-Parrott on their name change
On Wednesday Jan. 26th Nassim Dayoub and I offered another installment of our teach-in on Prison Abolition: NYC to Palestine at Mayday Space, with our friend Jasmine of the New York Crimes newspaper. You can read the slides here.
February 2nd at the People’s Forum: The Trinity of Fundamentals Book Launch
Jasper Diamond Nathaniel – It’s Worse Than You Think on Substack
Palestine Forever mix with Din. And Mohamed @ The Lot Radio Thank you to my friend Arash for putting me on to this one
Help Mona Ameen and her family evacuate Gaza.
Artist friend Jordan Nassar is raising funds to help friends evacuate Gaza and they can use all the support they can get. Donate here.