#38
1/ 14/ 2022

On Paper

This week I went to visit my friends Chen and Gerald, two of the nicest most genuine folks I have ever had the pleasure of meeting (ok lets face it I feel that way about most anyone who is honest). Later on I learned that Gerald used to be a roommate of one of my closest childhood friends, Evan, who I grew up across the street from.

Small World. Small Works.

Synchronicities make me feel like God is near. I like that feeling because the world is too confusing for me to understand. I am organized dust, waiting to become dust once more.

Anyways, we got together and they showed me the ropes of risograph printing.

Afterwards I sent them a bunch of questions.

So, Small Works is many things: A series of small workshops, a resource for small print runs, a social space, a meeting house. It's your way to using the skills you have to help our immediate community... What drives you to be so generous with your time and expertise?

There’s this quote by Andrew Steeves, one of the operators of Gasperau Press, that goes something like “It’s become radical to take interest in your own life and community.” and we think that’s true. We’re interested in making a living very literally—making a space where work, and living, and community can exist. 

We also want to make sure that we’re doing equal parts work and good in our practices. Design is mostly evil. It is the horseman of capitalism, and we want to investigate how to acknowledge how that is happening, and how to avoid it. 

We put an emphasis on being generous with our time. For ourselves, this is a chance to practice skills that are important to us.

While we were printing we were riffing on the idea of "being here for a good time..." Where is here? What is a good time?

“We’re here for a good time” is the tagline of our design firm, Teikaut, which only takes clients that are explicitly contributing towards a culture in a positive way. 

“We are here for a good time,” good as in enjoyable, good as in literally, biblically, good. Here as in where we are. Here is our community. Not our peers, not our comrades in printing, but our literal neighbors—it is most uninteresting (not to mention impotent) to just serve those already invested in what we have to say. Time as in now. Time as in from now until the unforeseeable end.

Talk to me about the importance of archiving and intergenerational knowledge around printmaking:

We will answer as designers in general. Nearly everyone that was good at producing design work that is now iconic—Arts & Crafts through early Modernism, is dead. Most of those tools, those heavy duty tools of making, are also gone—replaced with box store toy versions of their former selves. We didn’t have to do this—it’s just come about as a problem of the value of knowledge. We (royal we) are taught (through capitalism) to believe that our elders are all curmudgeons, and they’ve got nothing good to say, and that they’re full of boomer or beat nonsense, and all of their ways are outdated—which is untrue. The truth is somewhere in the middle, that some of the old ways are harder to learn but easier over time, and the only ones who know are those of the generations before us. 

What we can learn is: For what reasons does the technology that we have now exist? Why did it evolve the way it did? Was this better? Is there a way for us to use both old and new technology in harmony? Is there a way to continuously reservice equipment, to fight obsolescence?

Can you imagine a cellular phone that you could get upgraded? That you buy the shell for, and just keep getting the insides replaced—the same phone forever. You can, because it’s totally possible. Phones could last as long as cars. Cars could last as long as houses.

Oscar Wilde once said, "life imitates art far more than art imitates life." It is clear that your studio practice and ethos come from an honest curiosity around making. Without pressing you to be overly existential (though I am so willing to go there) can you talk about how your individual spirits relate to making?

Small Works isn’t our studio practice—it’s our overt public service. We are like street magicians, or buskers. We want to bring joy. 

In our studio practice—so—we are curious, we like to observe just for the sake of observance or joy.  Sometimes this lets us find new meaning—even if it doesn’t work out. Results can be absurd, or funny, and that is a strong part of our identity. We eschew ideas of individuality in this space—we want to get away from that narrative.  We want the work to be the focus of both our practice and service.

When you asked me how many prints I wanted made I said 33. Chen told me it had to be 66 because it needed to be an even number and let me know 6 was a lucky number in China. The exchange reminded me how lucky I am to be in the presence of the wide ranging interpretations of the human experience we all get to live in. What do you think can bring the world together?

The end of capitalism. Alienating the self & familiarizing oneself with others.

Depending on who I spent the day with I either think the world is becoming more siloed and binary, or more open and understanding. When I hung out with you I felt extremely open and far from duality. Where, in your opinion, do designers fit into breaking open spaces for honest dialogues around the myriad issues facing humanity today?

We don’t think that they do, for the most part. Someone designs political propaganda. Someone designs city infrastructure campaigns. 

Where designers should be is in that space—designers have so much power to change the world, but that is also most unlikely, as there is no inherent money in happiness.

We talked about how humans pick the easy way (economically, socially, politically, personally, I may have been talking about a professor I know who researches migrants and refugees but happily has stock in Pfizer, who won’t release their patent of the COVID-19 Vaccine so that the whole world can have it for their use.) Chen chimed in "what they think is easy". What are we doing as a species? Do we have amnesia? What is the hard way? What is the point? Do we make excuses for ourselves so that we can exist in a system that seeks to endlessly consume (materials, spirit, knowledge). Should we be consumed? Can we subvert consumption?

People forget what’s good, what they enjoy—instead they think about what they remember as being advertised as good. Think about the process of finding out about things. How often do we call three friends to ask where the best place for dinner is these days? When we do that, how often do people respond, “I saw this on the screen, I read this on a blog.” So much of what we do is parroting of what we see and hear, but so little is what we know empirically. 

Subverting consumption is not impossible—it just means we have to go slower. It means we have to sacrifice choice, immediacy, for quality and meaningfulness.

It is clear that the commodity art world is a speculation bubble that exists in the economy as a means for the ultra-wealthy to at once buy tax deductible item (if donated to an institution), build cultural clout, and create a positive story about their benevolence as stewards of culture. Is there a way out? Is this OK?

This is not okay—there is a way out. You just don’t do it.  You don’t participate at all. This commodity art world needs the attention like sunlight, like a sunflower following along. Without it, it will disappear. 

Art in the context of the art market is not real—is something that happens when enough people decide that something is valuable enough to fight over. It is a nice thought to entirely abandon art, and just make things that we want in the world, and normalize supporting that behavior.

What is the future for your studio?

We are going to buy land, even though the concept is absurd. (It is no one’s land, and if it was, it certainly wouldn’t be ours) We’re going to put a building there, that holds our practices. We will spend some time paying the building off, and once finished, we will spend all of our time working on our studio practices.

In this increasingly digitized experience of being, why is analogue important? Aren't you just being a luddite?

Well,  I think that is a misinterpretation. We aren’t interested in being analogue at all—we’re interested in economy and quality. We want equipment that is the hardest working, easiest to fix, most common, and of the highest quality that we can get. 

The long term is really important to us. We want to have equipment that will last our entire lifetime, so that we will have enough time with it to truly know it. We want to be forty, fifty years good at something. We want that kind of craftsmanship. 

However, we use all kinds of modern equipment, and we are always looking towards technology to make what we do more approachable and affordable.

I am calling the print we made together, “A Reminder You Are Dust,” I will happily mail one to you, dear reader.

What I ask for in return is that you share my newsletter with 6 of your closest friends and ask them the hardest question you can think of.

Honor System.

Email me your preferred address.

Maybe see you next week…

Might take the week off to work on something that is not this newsletter.

Be well!

-niki

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