For her birthday in early March, BX and I get a handful of fabric paint pens at an art supply store downtown and a bunch of blank long-sleeves wholesale. In late April of last year, we made a similar plan out at the bar on a friday night, dancing after a show she’d played up the street: “let’s make shirts, merch for the show next week!” We draw slogans through the afternoon and evening that saturday but the paint is acrylic. At the end of the set, BX charms the crowd with her usual banter and announces, “we’ve got shirts — you just can’t ever wash them!”
At the party, J and I are the first one's down on the floor, cross-legged next to the drum kit wedged between the fireplace and the window, everyone standing around us with glasses of mezcal and bottles of beer, eating salad and pasta from paper bowls, slabs of brownie in hand. J paints a precisely articulated praying mantis in a grove of swirling plant-like tendrils, SZ invents her own series of runes in red, I riff off my favorite corners of Julie Mehretu and Nasreen Mohamedi drawings, and MT paints a baritone sax unambiguously labeled “BARI” and an enormous lifelike portrait of Anthony Braxton’s face.
Painting on a shirt at a party fragments our respective art practices by switching up the medium. Rather than writing longform essays, playing in a band, shaping flatware and sculpture in the pottery studio, composing orchestral and experimental pieces, designing and fabricating jewelry, constructing furniture, designing buildings, writing song lyrics, printmaking, dyeing clothes, performing solo shows, or any of the other work with which we are variously involved, we’re in proximity to each other’s drawing process, demonstrating texture and technique, comparing stylistic and spatial choices, laughing at how bunched fabric thwarts straight lines. It’s a practice in immediacy and experimentation that keeps me loose in a specific way.
The compulsion to perfect or refine is conspicuously absent from this collaborative context. The childlike act of making without preoccupation reminds me of MB paraphrasing Zhuangzi’s story of the useless tree one night while we’re out dancing. In one anglicized translation of the Taoist parable, “uselessness” is defined as freedom from “striving to become something, to be anything special,” to be “without goal or attainment.” The parable details that the tree’s gnarled form protects it from being cut down and used for anything profitable:
“A boat made from it would sink, a coffin would soon rot, a tool would split, a door would ooze sap, and a beam would have termites… [The tree] is planted in the wasteland, in emptiness. People walk idly around it, rest under its shadow. No axe or bill prepares its end. No one will ever cut it down.”
The fungible interpretation of value in this story suggests that to commit to uselessness is to guard against commodification, conventional success, or any use towards profitable ends; to instead stay rooted in the process and practice of living.
At a show in early March, a longtime friend and collaborator of MT’s pages through my sketchbook and describes my drawings as “so musical.” In recent months, several friends of mine have described MT’s drawings as “so architectural,” although if we are to be understood colloquially by the work we get paid to do, much of what MT does is musical while what I do is spatial. I’m sketching during each act, and the idea that a more concretized relationship might exist between the forms and sounds only occurs to me when MT whispers in my ear that I’ve drawn “retroactive graphic scores.”
MT reminds me that, months prior, I had told them about late nights in the studio with T, MI, A, and MH in our early twenties. I would describe the geometric complexity of transit infrastructure, the layout of park benches, building facades, and other urban anomalies using a series of idiosyncratic noises, a singsong onomatopoeia for the shape of the built environment, drawing with sound, crossed wires and unanticipated through lines across years of fragmented mediums.
Painting shirts at parties and half-baked sketchbook ideas at shows has loosened fragments of an older practice, a graphic expression of psychogeographic belvederes overlaid with hand-drawn maps, an effort to depict placeness. Hand drawing renders distance and relative scale slightly off, altered by my perception, and altered again by my inescapable imprecision.
I’m trying to draw out the particular chill of riding through the concrete-walled channel of the LA river at sundown, groceries in my milk crate bike basket, still dressed for the golden hour but the sky has deepened and the wind picked up. I draw the bridges and overpasses that trace the Schuylkill up my bike route through Philly during pandemic lockdown, in the humid heat of high summer, living well on unemployment cash while doing contract work remotely in New York, rooted locally as an artist in residence on a small Roxborough farm run by movement artists working with doulas to provide meals to postpartum mothers.
MB and I mock our internalized conception of the “archetypal artist,” a person we imagine as so thoroughly committed to their practice that they disregard the pragmatic concerns or indulgent hedonism of everyday living, setting aside everything for the sake of perfecting and refining their craft. This imagined person is entirely consumed with outputs: the act of making, rather than inputs: the marinating, the inspiration and influence of our surroundings and those around us. The archetype is absurd; inputs and outputs are a false dichotomy. But I imagine that many people who struggle to commit time and energy to their art, in a society that demands their labor be redirected and commodified, fantasize about this type of singular focus.
Among friends and collaborators, a jointly-coined phrase has emerged to affirm that this is “a safe space for disgust and wretched feelings;” our anxious preoccupations with our art practice are openly discussed, our compulsion to be comparative and competitive in our creative work can be transmuted to inspiration and motivation. When BX poses an open-ended question, “What’s it all braiding towards?” I think of SS quoting Leonard Cohen, “keeping some kind of record.” I consider the archive that I keep, art fragments to lean back on as proof of self and proof of practice. Many good things are textural details before they are crafted into entire ideas.
It’s a balm to embrace fragmentation, to change the medium, to collaborate, to put art in service of a collective. J paints a banner for a friend’s record release show by borrowing another friend’s studio space, SZ, MT, and I gather spontaneously to paint with watercolor and gouache on a weeknight, S and O paint cloth with lettering tall enough to be seen from freeway overpasses by cars passing quickly, commemorating the thousands martyred in Gaza and calling for a free Palestine, B, CZ, and I design spaces for racialized minority and economically disadvantaged communities to gather in public parks, access amenities, and be housed affordably, T and KC invite me as a guest critic to give and gain insights from student projects for cooperative housing and community markets, M and AB lend their voices to ceasefire choir, joining up with protests and rallies to sing for an end to the occupation.
This slow saturday in early spring, there’s a hot haze sitting heavy and low over the San Gabriels. I break from incessantly painting and line drawing to psychoanalyze the act itself, an acutely neurotic and self-conscious exercise. Let the record, the archive, show that I have produced value through fragmented uselessness. The palms of both hands itch to get back to drawing and I think that aphorism holds, to take advantage of inspiration when it strikes, since the only predictable thing is its unpredictable ebb and flow. My interpretation of value —in the process, the practice, the inputs, the outputs— stays subject to change.
i love this latest edition of your newsletter. is a balm to feeling particularly uninspired and in pain physically and psychically. reading the words while soaking up all the art work is a brain treat. yes to this:
“uselessness” is defined as freedom from “striving to become something, to be anything special,” :)
wowowow yes 🫡💖 I’m always saying we’re humans first before anything else, meaning I gotta take care of my brain and body and soul needs and desires, sometimes to the detriment of showing up to my art practice… but imo it’s delusion/privilege/unsustainable to act like we can give our whole beings to any one thing!!