The Locust Arts & Letters Collective is an association of radical, critical irrealist and socialist artists that publishes Locust Review and Imago, and helps organize a number of other projects including the Locust Radio and Swarm Stories podcasts. For Locust Review’s fifth issue (in accordance with its theme “Working-Class Art Against the Slow-Motion Apocalypse”) the Locust Arts & Letters Collective decided to publish a series of statements explaining contextualizing our work as individuals. We will be adding statements from comrades who have joined the editorial collective after issue five.
lalc members
Laura Fair-Schulz was born in the 1960s in central Canada, and has lived in Canada, the United States and Germany. She is an artist and an adjunct art professor in Potsdam, New York.
Omnia Sol is a cartoonist, digital/analog glitch artist, and musician residing in Chicago, Illinois. They are the host of the glitch art video podcast The Omnia Sol Art Show (also known as TOSAS) as well as the creator of the silent dream narrative comic strip ZZZZZZ. Some of Omnia Sol’s artistic influences include alchemy, left wing politics, esotericism, op art, kinetic art, visual noise, glitch art, as well as comic books and pop culture.
You may recognize Leslie Lea as the hostess from the Country Cajun commercial, but probably not, because the joint was shit and went belly up. Today you may find her deep in the bowels of the Corpus Christi Trade Center vending her wares for coin. Or, You may catch her selling roses at dirty night clubs on the weekends . She is the mother of hens, a dumbass dog named Louie and a Venus fly trap named Baron Harkonnen (which were adopted because she cannot give natural birth to chickens, plants or dogs). Some call her a Goddess. But most call her a bottom ass witch. She spends her days creating soaps, candles, poetry and art. She is engaged to the goddamned Marxist, poet and artist Mike Linaweaver because she is way too hot to break up with. Together they do kick-ass karate shit in the backyard, make up and share inside jokes with people that don’t get it, and argue about who the most heinous cast member on 90 Day Fiancé is. Hint: it’s Chantel.
Tish Turl is a writer, artist, and a founding member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective. They are the author of the serialized novella, Sound, appearing in Locust Review, as well as an ongoing poetry series, The Toilet Key Anthology and the franken-prose-poetry project, Stink Ape Resurrection Primer. Tish is a co-organizer of the Born Again Labor Museum with Adam Turl. They are also a co-host with Adam Turl of Locust Radio, produced by Drew Franzblau and Alexander Billet.
Alice McIntyre is an organizer, writer, and graphic artist based in the South Puget Sound. After graduating from The Evergreen State College she did a brief tour of proletarian duty as an industrial baker, and now wages aesthetic war against the regime of alienated labor from the front lines of the dole queue. She is a member of Olympia DSA and the Revolutionary Education Distro. You can find Alex in your walls.
Alexander Billet lives in Los Angeles, and is a writer of prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, a visual artist, a musician, and an aspiring underachiever. His written work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Salvage, Jacobin, In These Times, Chicago Review, Radical Art Review, Historical Materialism blog, and other outlets. He is a founding member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective, helps edit its publications Locust Review and Imago, and is a producer of its podcast Locust Radio. He screams into the void at alexanderbillet.com.
Adam Marks is a writer and socialist living in the United Kingdom.
Anupam Roy writes: “I consider myself as a propagandist, whose objective is not to propagate any preconceived ideology as it is conventionally understood, but the propagation of truth that evolves from people’s movements in India and elsewhere. I consider this as an urgent political and ethical task, as the world in general and India, in particular, are taken over by authoritarian and populist forces, creating conditions for the return of fascism.” Roy received his BFA from Indiri Kala Sangeet Vishwavidyalaya, West Bengal (2008) and did post-graduate work in Visual Art at Ambedkar University in New Delhi (2016). He received a Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship in 2019 to do work on a second master’s degree at De Montfort University in the UK. His work has been exhibited in India and internationally, including at the 2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage at the New Museum in New York. They are the recipient of the 2018 FICA Emerging Artist Award. Their third solo exhibition, Denotified Land, was held at Project 88 in Mumbai in 2019. For the past decade and longer, Amupa Roy has been part of various social and political movements, working with the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist (CPIML)-Liberation, as a campaigner, organizer, and propagandist. He is part of the editorial team of Locust Review and a member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective. “They help me to self-reflectively approach my artistic practice and sociological location,” Roy writes, “creating a space for more discursive and collective engagements questioning the presuppositions of contemporary art and politics.”
Adam Turl is an artist, writer, founding member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective, and co-organizer of the Born Again Labor Museum with Tish Turl. Turl was born in upstate New York sometime in the previous century, and grew up in southern Illinois. They spent portions of their adulting years in Chicago, Las Vegas, and Saint Louis. Turl’s father was a Baptist preacher and their mother was a public school teacher. One of their earliest memories was going to the union HQ while their mom was on strike. The steam and smoke from the crockpots, chain-smoking teachers, and coffee urns turned into clouds beneath a fiberboard heaven. In their youth, when the Internet was still for military officials and STEM academics, they made zines by hand at the copy shop with other artists and delinquents. When Turl became a revolutionary in the late 1990s they dropped out of art school to focus on the emancipation of the working-class. When they got fired from their job at the International Socialist Organization in 2008, they went back to school and got a BFA at Southern Illinois University (SIU) and an MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art. They have exhibited at the Brett Wesley Gallery and Cube Gallery (Las Vegas), Gallery 210 (St. Louis), Project 1612 (Peoria), and Artspace 304 (Carbondale). In 2016 they received a fellowship and residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Turl is also a co-host with Tish Turl of Locust Radio, produced by Drew Franzblau and Alexander Billet.
lalc member statements
THE IDEA of the space between what was possible before and what could be possible after — after a crisis or a major historical event, is part of the territory of my art practice. A ‘crisis’ can be understood as an inner struggle (thesis) and an ‘historical event’ as an outer socio-political struggle (antithesis). The instantaneous contradiction of each (inner-struggle and outer-struggle) allows me to engage with an unknown outcome — synthesis: a body of work. If we can identify these connections with social hierarchy, and if we critically investigate our individual relationship with the ‘dominant mode of production,’ then we can unfold their complex positionality in relation to power. Once the limitations and contradictions of art practice have been determined, the obligation is to express the incorporation and expression of these limits. The art must embody a state of reflexivity — at once thesis/synthesis/antithesis.
THE DOMINANT “propaganda model” of the state — the current fascist regime, the capitalists, the privileged groups, Brahmins, white supremacists, patriarchal-military-nation — supplements physical coercion with a calculated “manufacture of consent.” Therefore, if the truth of contemporary reality lies in much-censored narratives of violence and corporal suffering, the ethical and political task of the propagandist is not merely to report or represent them from a comfortable outsider’s position, but to leave oneself exposed to the brutality of the world in the course of transforming it. However, limits of the self, as well as the limits of the art practice, and the art world’s institutional superficial criticality, has provoked me to rethink interrogating other models for counterpropaganda. This would not simply be a tool in the hands of an organized ideology, but a fearless propagator of an unsettling truth, which no discourse can contain without collapsing itself. What ‘I’ think of as ‘truth’ is a product of the internal contradiction in the subject of engagement. I am aware of the need to find new aesthetic strategies of ‘with-nessing’ and testifying the truth. I intriguingly find myself trapped between the mutually contrary acts of violence and testifying truth, victimization and witnessing. Thus, the productive tension unleashed here tests — expanding and materialising — my artistic capacities; which are the basis of my material production.
MY RESEARCH mostly consists of taking visual and written notes on my journal, which incorporates the experiences gathered from the socio-political resonances of my quotidian journeys, as well as social media information and interactions. Making digital/handmade posters, festoons, banners, signages, graffiti etc. for different socio-political movements, where I try to articulate and give form to my visual propaganda, are at the core of my practice. Apart from displaying in demonstrations and public places, my works have also been strategically shown at art gallery setups. However, through these strategical locations of my work, I am bound to create ‘Excess’. ‘Creating’ for me is not revealing the potentiality, as ‘potentiality’ in every compass is determined by the forces of capital. Rejection of this given potentiality can be called ‘impotentiality’; resistance against the underlined normative in art practice. ‘Excess’ comes out of realizing the representational impossibility of the subject. The subject is a synthesis of form and flux. Here carving impossibility, is precisely an act of understanding one’s own limits. This generates ‘inarticulateness’ of the subjective-self and subject-scheme. Representational impossibility is an amphibological proposition. Through this proposition, my attempt is to dismantle the contemporary hegemonic discourses and the existing empirical validity of the propaganda model.
I primarily draw-paint images on cheap and mobile surfaces. Through organising images and texts with different size and surfaces I create my poesis. Space, as I imagine, is an irreal entity of contrast and diversity; a world within, paralyzed and blurred by the very notion of it. Space where the idea of diversity incorporates multi-layered foliage, while the idea of ‘unity’ has been moulded to become a canon that ricochets.
Interaction between ‘text’ and ‘image’ is central to my work’s visual presence. In terms of the plastic quality of my pictorial surfaces are expressionistic but I defer from the historical ideological specificity rather such an approach allows me to draw faster, which is utilitarian or requirement for everyday basis propaganda making but aesthetically I chose certain formalistic genre to capture the contemporary ‘precariousness’ of the working-class body. This expressionistic approach allows me to address ‘incompleteness;’ the ‘Incompleteness’ of my ability to understand the ‘Other;’ or the power of ‘Other’, the excess of emotions and experiences of the precarious subject’s inarticulateness. Imagining ‘power’ in relation to ‘equality’, which is inherently absent, therefore thinking towards ‘counter-hegemonic power’ lead me to seek a different path to my propaganda practice.
Anupam 07.05.2021
GENERALLY, THE concerns of my work as an artist and writer revolve around the meanings of artistic expression, historical memory, and radical geography. Another way to put this would be that I am highly preoccupied with the intersection of time and place, and how human beings’ imaginations are directed toward mediating the frictions between them. I’m highly influenced by the situationists and their ideas about psychogeography: finding new ways to interact with our environment in ways that put our critical and imaginative faculties first.
Over the past year, most of our worlds have shrunk dramatically, even as the world outside became stranger, more eldritch, spun further and more wildly beyond our control. In some ways it has forced me to zoom in on these preoccupations, but also their contradictions and questions. What will the world look like after this pandemic passes? What futures will be on offer? What will the frictions between them yield in terms of what we can see, hear, touch?
It’s no surprise then that my art, poetry and fiction have a chaotic, panicked feel to them. I’ve also been experimenting with having my poetry and my visual art be in something of a conversation. Between the media of visual and literary, it’s an attempt on my part to construct a “total world” that is both ours and not ours, real and not real, experiencing in the now the consequences that are sure to come from climate collapse and rising authoritarianism but also still trying to grasp toward the dream of something better.
The piece “To Mayakovsky (While Australia Burns)” is intended as complementary to my poem of the same name that appeared in issue two of Locust Review. It was from those innocent days before most of us knew what Covid was, when all we had to worry about was an entire continent burning.
I will also likely soon paint something to complement the poetry I have in this issue: “Weekly Planner” and “On Hearing the News That George Floyd’s Murderer Was Convicted.” I won’t over-explain these as I think the intent behind them is fairly self-explanatory. I’ll just say that both try to illustrate different experiences of the same world, a world we are currently in, will be in, hope to be in. Which brings me back to what I wrote earlier in regards to the situationists and psychogeography. Do we have the capability to reimagine our environment as it actually is? Are we able to put our hands on the map and try to locate the points of rupture in our world that can stop these kinds of terrors from becoming reality? I have no idea what our chances are for a “yes” answer to these questions, but at this point we don’t really have any other option than to try and find one.
Alexander Billet
2021
THE OMNIA Sol Art Show also known as TOSAS is a weekly glitch art video podcast that explores the vast and wondrous, psychedelic worlds of digital and analog glitch art technology. The audio content of TOSAS explores various topics ranging from the esoteric to the mundane. The show exists as a “living sketchbook” or digital time capsule to highlight my own existential artistic subjectivity. I made my first piece of glitch art around five years ago. I started with opening images as text files and messing with the code. Deleting lines, copying and pasting code, writing in gibberish or statements of intent before saving the file again and seeing if I could still open up the image. As my interest in the aesthetic of glitch art grew, so did my accumulation of techniques. I now make a video podcast using the technique of circuit bending signals from AV cords. Outdated technology such as VHS and DVD become source material for my aesthetic plundering. For the most part glitch art is an outdated term for an even more outdated aesthetic. But like vaporwave and my own VHS collection, I can’t seem to let go of the past. The aesthetic and esoteric possibilities still seem limitless to me.
Omnia Sol
2021
WHEN CREATING art, or when in the process of creating art, I am attempting to pit my ego against itself, internalizing, on the one hand, the basic need to create, and on the other hand, externalizing the resulting expression. Somewhere in the spaces of the fractious ego, I find liberation. The process becomes liberatory - liberating me, at least for a period, from the demands of domestic life and the constraints of capital. In this way, my ego is reconstituted, reformed, renewed. Through art I am reminded of, and further defined by, my inherent humanity, myself as an individual and as a social being.
In my work I deal with the themes of love, loss, guilt and mortality, or immortality. Crudely put: love, sex, and death. These are fundamental elements of the human condition and key features of the social conditions for all people.
I try to examine these things through the lens of working class life. I am a working class artist and there is no veil that separates my work from the conditions I experience personally.
As a working class artist I hope that my work serves to inspire others - other workers like myself - to explore and re-explore their own imaginations, and to own them, and their humanity, and their identities, to find in art the liberation that is so desperately needed in our time. It may be that in the sparks of all those kindling imaginations lay the foundations of the world that we both need and desire.
Leslie Lea
2021
I LIKE building characters and worlds. Rather than give in to the Self Doubt Voice, built by capitalism and trauma, I use automatic writing. I write from my subconscious and that expression builds on itself. Creating microfiction to stitch together in a “Franken-prose-poem” about the working class and our eventual immortality has been incredibly liberating. Shorter fiction means more characters which means a fabric of stories; “differentiated totality”. It has also been liberating to give up on what I should be writing, or how long things are supposed to be and create things the way that I want to. Giving up on expectations, self censorship, and progress leaves more room for the actual making.
Tish Turl
2021
THE BOURGEOISIE has abandoned its historic ideologies of art — such as “art for art’s sake” —in favor of a weak avant-garde tethered to an ethos of capitalist realism and a utilitarian relationship to gentrification and finance capital. The weak avant-garde is largely devoid of both emancipatory politics and transcendent exaltations. The weak avant-garde is suspicious of meaning, self-expression, and class politics.
THE OFFICIAL art world is increasingly hostile and inaccessible to proletarian and socialist artists, deeming all work that prizes larger meanings, social solidarity, and individual expression as “outsider art.” It does not matter if we have BFAs and MFAs. If our expression is proletarian it is outside the normative weak avant-garde. We embrace this rejection and situate our evolving installations and interventions in physical and cultural proximity to the class, taking care to be out of gentrification’s reach.
CAPITALIST REALISM holds that nothing can be imagined that conflicts with the overall logic of capital accumulation. Against this we propose an art of critical irrealism, an irrealism that is in conflict with a realism that is a reproduction of capitalist ideology. The first task of critical irrealist art is to interrupt the cynical disbelief of capitalist realism that limits an oppositional imaginary. This flows from working-class experience. The intolerability of everyday life eventually compels the non-capitalist subject to imagine new worlds.
WHEN THE subject imagines new worlds it does not automatically follow that they do so in a critical irrealist manner. As capitalist realism falters, along with its material and ideological base in US imperialism and neoliberalism, a competition is triggered between critical irrealism and fascist occultism. The primary difference between critical irrealism and fascist occultism is in the positioning of the subjective. The fascist occultist subordinates the individual to a newly (re)mythologized capital. Critical irrealism situates the subject in a social kismet.
OUR ART is in both practical and impractical solidarity with the exploited and oppressed. When we can be part of the practical struggles we are. But we also create irrealist agit-prop, spaces for irrealist reflection, and work that intervenes at the point of expectation. We engage in practical work because the emancipation of the working-class is the act of the working-class itself, and nothing will raise expectations more than successful struggle. But we also engage in impractical work because the class and the socialist movement struggle against an internalization of capitalist realism.
MAKE THE low high and the high low. When the far right claims Impossible Burgers make us queer, we turn them into a communist eucharist. When the rich white liberals perform their hatred of “white trash,” we wrap our communism in real tree camo. We weaponize these signs as punk did in its heyday, as Hip Hop did in its Bronx origins, against bourgeois ideology. We weave together all signs considered low in a quilt of solidarity.
AGAINST THE capitalist death cult we propose communist resurrection. Apokatastasis is the theological concept of the redemption of all lost souls. Walter Benjamin brought this concept into Marxism when he argued that the revolutionary generation redeemed all past generations of the exploited and oppressed. Russian Cosmism held that the human race should dedicate all its resources to solving the problem of death and the resurrection of past ancestors. After the October Revolution, Bolshevik and anarchist revolutionaries lobbied the Soviet government to undertake this “Common Task” — fusing Cosmism with working-class revolution. Critical irrealism positions communist resurrection against the capitalist death cult. Moreover, in our art we preserve the irreal performances of the class to help future comrades redeem lost generations.
WE REJECT a teleology of progress -- irredeemably linked to European colonialism and racism. History is Janus-faced. The auric image of the past may be a gothic image of working-class emancipation. The image of the future may be a dystopic catastrophe. But the converse is also true. Resistance and oppression are equally reproduced backwards in time (until we reach our idyllic-but-precarious origins in primitive communism) and forward in time (until we reach the end of civilization or its redemption in revolution).
THE DIGITAL promises democracy but delivers reification and surveillance. The analog promises authenticity and expression but delivers rarefied and increasingly bourgeois spaces. The analog may provide aura but this is denied to most artists. The digital may seem to provide a platform for mass politics, but its mediation by capital negates this outcome. Brechtian cybernetics responds with the use and exposure of both the digital and analog.
THE WHITE cube gallery space actively dissociates the art object and image from social context. On the one hand this reproduces bourgeois ideology by elevating the object as an isolated example of “genius,” paralleling the bourgeoisie’s narrative about itself. On the other hand this elevates the auric art object as a fetish recording past human performance. This contradiction is central to understanding how to use installation in a Brechtian manner; utilizing the auric valorization of an installation to reassert social context and meaning, especially the valorization of those deemed superfluous by capital. This makes the exhibition space a theatrical space, where the relationship between different objects, images, gestures, and performances, recuperates social meaning.
THE USE of found objects is not counterposed to the use of traditional art materials. Abstraction is not counterposed to representation. Conceptual art is not opposed to expressive art. Each of these gestures evokes an aspect of being that is incomplete without the others. The painting, surrounded by conceptually situated found objects, readymades, assemblages, or performances, acts as a sacral object to be read with and against the other objects and gestures, to assert by relations of form and genre, an “ensemble of social relations.”
SOCIALIST CULTURE (anti-capitalist democratic culture) is neither reductive nor unmoored from social class. Not only is the working-class composed of various identities, oppressions, and sectional interests, it is composed of billions of unique individual human beings. These unique subjects can only make themselves free in combination, through the collective class-conscious organizing and actions of the working-class. This is the differentiated totality of the working class. It can be expressed within work, via strategies of democratic composition and conceptual configuration, reminiscent of the chaotic totality of the carnivalesque. But it must be, in the end, represented by the combination of multiple artistic expressions from larger and larger layers of working-class artists. Our endgame is an infinite evolving mosaic of a differentiated working-class expression.
THE WORKING class cannot expropriate Elon Musk (yet), but Aelita — the Queen of Mars from the 1924 Soviet film, reimagined as a queer proletarian hero — can execute him as he arrives on the red planet. We are dying, but the space comrades resurrect our martyrs; from Haymarket, from the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, from the Paris Commune. Critical irrealism proposes and begins to create an evolving mythology as varied as the working-class itself. In this way it is both prefigurative and strategic. It prefigures the anarchic-collective evolving mythology of a post-capitalist democracy, while weaponizing this imaginary in the present.
Adam Turl
2021
