Lawless
On a case of resistance and its joyous gathering, even now
Art appears when what is made feels as if there is a profound misunderstanding at the heart of what it is, as if it were made with the wrong use in mind, or the wrong idea about what it is capable of, or simply the wrong set of assumptions about what it means to fully function in the world. A work works by not working at all. By not obeying the law of any system or authority external to the process of its own making, a work emphatically expresses its own right to exist for itself and in itself, and questions—by merely existing—the rule of law that works to bind all to a semblance of the common good. Art is a lawless proposition.
Paul Chan
In my class last week, we spent a long time talking about an essay by Paul Chan. In it, he is describing the ways that art exists in a kind of contradictory, resistant, even non-functional space. In and of itself, art’s very existence pushes against rules in the world, he writes, feeling its only allegiance to its own making.
And yet, in the sentence immediately following the quotation above, Chan adds a significant caveat: “no artist,” he says, “creates lawlessly.”
This tension between breaking certain ways-of-being-in society and yet maintaining organized systems within our work seems to me to be particularly rich. To be insistently lawless, even in one’s very existence… and, yet, to abide by particular internal rules: that balance is a kind of ethos, no? or at the very least, it offers a challenge to take back to our studios, as we’re thinking about the work.
From that text, I might propose these simple questions for your creative work: What are the rules inherent to the making of what you make? And, what are the ways you see what you make grappling with misunderstanding, with misfiring, with not obeying systems of authority? Where is it in tension with some kind of presumed normalcy?
Last weekend, I crossed the bridge to Ciudad Juárez from El Paso for the first time. It’s startling how easy it is for U.S. citizens to walk across that border and how difficult it is for non-citizens to cross in the other direction, but here we are in the border surreality.
The occasion was a book launch for a project developed by Minerva Cuevas in conversation with curator and artist Elizabeth Shores and in collaboration with the Rubin Center, as well as many artists, writers, organizers, and others. Or, perhaps I shouldn’t even mention those names, since as the cover page makes clear, this is a project that resists the conventions of authorship and distribution: Este es un libro migrante y de distribución gratuita. Ha sido el trabajo colectivo de muchas personas. (This is a migratory book, freely distributed. It has been a collective project of many people.)
And then, an invocation that it find its reader:
Te pedimos mantengas circulando este libro
entre quien lo pueda disfrutar,
entre quien lo pueda hospedar,
entre quien lo pueda necesitar,
entre quien valore la comunidad
y la libertad sobre todas las cosas.
(We ask that you keep this book circulating
among those who will enjoy it,
among those who can give it a home,
among those who might need it,
among those who value community
and liberty above all other things).
The book is called La Sección Amarilla de la Migración (The Migration Yellow Pages) and it offers resources for people attempting the journey across the border, to the north.
Apart from resisting the tradition of singular authorship, the book blurs how we might understand the necessities of the border-crossing. Of course it provides advice for interacting with customs and immigration enforcement officials, lists of documents to have and safe places to stay, provides some general legal advice, and includes drawings of poisonous and medicinal plants that people might find in the desert, but it also includes narratives of people crossing, drawings by artists, poems by local writers, and stunningly beautiful artist projects in resistance to the border’s policing and violent enforcement. Maps show global movements of people, and a drawing of a bird includes the text: migration is life / open the borders. People need resources for the crossing, but they also need to have the kindness of strangers, the support of communities, the belief that the crossing is not only possible, but part of an ongoing reimagining of how we move through the world. Indeed, the book insists that their migration is part of millennia of human experience: that they are rooted in something much bigger than themselves.
Like a classic phone book you might have found in a phone booth of the past, the pages are printed on cheap newsprint, intended to be torn out and shared, posted, or kept. The book itself is an object ready to dissemble, ready for its fragments to have other lives, too. It betrays the way we might want the object-ness of a book, insisting on the work its pages do in the world, allowing their own unpredictable and endless circulation to mirror the movements of people.
And, this weekend, hundreds of people were there to celebrate its making.
To celebrate, I underscore, because I think it has been a useful reminder to me of the necessity of gathering and of insistently joyous shared rituals, even in the most devastating realities of the day-to-day. To celebrate, with games of table hockey, with children running around, with a DJ playing and people dancing, with a guitarist singing in the street, with an endless stream of fresh homemade pizzas coming out of the oven, with an exhibition of the yellow pages protected by candles bearing the drawing of the Virgen Migrante, a young woman in the likeness of the Virgen, but carrying a backpack and wearing travel clothing as she looks back across her shoulder. It was absolute community magic.
Perhaps I’ve been despairing in isolation for too long, but the project still gets me choked up as I page through it, as I think about the people who were there to celebrate its making, about the people who contributed to it, about laughter and music and dance and friendly welcome, even and despite so much. About its insistence on joyful support, as part of the information it wants to provide to the people who find it.
This kind of activist praxis isn’t what Paul Chan was describing, to be clear. His words are about artistic process and its relationship (or un-relationship) to the world. And, in fact, I think a strong case could be made that his words are insisting on the right of a work of art to not do this kind of work (which I also believe!) But, my own reading of his text happened to overlap with the yellow pages project, and it seemed worth pairing them for a moment, as a productive space between lawlessness and an internal insistence on certain human truths. Or, perhaps, just to share two things that brightened my week.
Maybe what I want to say to you this week, then, is this: lean into breaking the rules of the structures and social systems around you. Please. Invite that lawlessness that Paul Chan describes, welcome it, make a space for it, insist on it. Do it to honor your deepest intuition about what makes us human, even and always in spite of.
abrazos from here,
Laura
Laura August, PhD makes essays and exhibitions, lumpy pots and wild gardens. She has curated more than 20 exhibitions as an independent curator working between the U.S. and Central America. In 2021, she was named an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City has been recognized with an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Alongside her consulting practice for artists and writers, she teaches a process, practice, and professional strategies class for artists at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She currently makes her home on the edge of the Chihuahua Desert, and she is Curator at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso.