Art On the Run

In the nineteen-twenties and thirties a man named John Heartfeld traveled Europe with a portable studio and pioneered the art of photomontage while evading the increasing hostility of the Third Reich during it’s rise to power. The technique had been used in politically subversive art since the war to end all wars, World War One, most notably by the Dadaists. The movement was vanquished to obscurity by the fury of another world war, but also, and more tragically, by the faithful guards of the European Art Canon. And so it was thought to be dead.

Now I find myself living out of a van filled with a portable studio, making photomontages of pirated materials in an ink poisoned delirium in a different town every week with nothing to call my own in a country overwhelmed with the sentiments of violence and racism. My disgust combusts, my pulse quickens, and I create because if I didn’t I would lose my mind, left to float around forever moaning about the panic and deep disappointment in my heart. I must make. It is the imperative of the D.I.Y. We make or we die.

You learn things from working like this. You learn them fast.

You learn the people, what they want to say and why they want to say it, why they come to see you and what it is they think they need. You learn to talk softly and to listen. You learn that in every person there is a story which testifies to the big story, the real story. They are the truth of our situation. You learn how to work around them and how to not disturb their space. You learn to leave things cleaner than when you left them. You learn what they want to show you and how they go about their business.

You learn about the machines, how they work, what their capacities are, what are their strengths and what are their weaknesses. You learn the rhythm of the process and you learn the sweetness of success. You also learn the self-abasement of failure. You learn to work fast and to work quick. You find the easy middle between perfection and completion. You learn the threshold of the images you can produce.

Printing machines are fascinating machines. They vary between the type. There are letter presses and etching presses and offset presses. Each press has a character of its own too. Learning printing machines is like learning people. If you learn the rules and get a good understanding for the variables you will be fairly well prepared to have a successful interaction with either.

You learn to be resourceful. One must be almost infinitely clever to walk into any situation with any kind of resources and be confident that you can make something worth while out of them, something that might be considered art by more than just yourself.

You learn to see the world through artist’s lens’, constantly prepared to see the moment as something both magical and hilariously banal at the same time. You must see in every moment the glimmer of some heavenly light, but also the sickliness of the sin which lies at the heart of everything, that thing which is rotten at the very core of us. You learn, as you wrestle on so many cold floors with this rotten thing inside of you as well, to deal. You learn, in a way, to welcome this thing into yourself for tea, or some other comfortable ceremony, because when you are this poor this constantly you learn that at least nobody can take even your demons from you, so you’ll never truly have nothing.

You will learn the War and the people who think there is not a War. You will learn what all of the people have to say about the War. You will hear so many opinions that you will come to hate opinions because they are platforms for inactivity. You will see the War in everyone you meet, in every dollar spent, in every college student on a cell phone. You will pass through a long and shadowy valley of hate for those who do not understand the horror of this thing which is inside each and every one of us. In the end you will learn to simply be amused by the whole situation. This is being human, this is what we do.

So leave your job and your things, your bills and your car. Leave your lover and your family and all of your friends. Leave your country and your national identity. Leave everything behind you. Leave Dada, leave D.I.Y. and leave political activism. Pack up everything you own and go learn as fast as you can. There is nothing out here half as scary as the dangers of complacency in a society as mad with rage and bloated with psychotic desires as our own. Be free of the whole thing. Stop consuming and start producing. The discipline could do you some good.