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“All Good Pictures Are About the Future” A Statement by Artist Keith Walsh r d f a
My work is a proposition about a world of possibilities projected through the power of drawings and their political content. Wrought from cautious optimism, they live within the current of revolutionary liberation teleology that projects victory over global racial capitalism. My work is a researched recovery and a renewal of the Left Radical Tradition in Los Angeles and the United States—a multifold historical and cultural space where liberation and socialist activism unite to prepare us for today’s struggles. These cartographies embrace the generational struggles of people and organizations that have united or parted while pavingthe road to an egalitarian society within shifting contexts. Whether these works appear chart-like or not, they utilize cognitive mapping methods that synthesize my subjective but earnest interpretation of researched historical (objective) elements. The historical matter (facts) disciplines and guides my subjective political and creative processes, as well as my relation with communities and humanity. The red lines in my maps diagram the trajectory or intersections of activists and groups according by my reading of their political line. The cognitive map is essentially a collage--an aggregate of histories within a limited visual field, caught in the midstream of time. Collage as a technique is used for my mockups, and is often referenced in a drawing’s multiple medias. I utilize collage as a conceptual and temporal methodology that overlays my contemporary graphic interaction with the multiple times or hands that the source document passed through (such as a Black Panther Party image later grafted to an SWP flier, then reproduced in an FBI or Congressional report). My years of self-study and art production is motivated by the need to understand these histories against our context and possible futures. Drawing makes history visible in its own contradictory ways by simultaneously reviving and transforming the classical didactic function of art. The denotative character of a cognitive map or a temporal collage-text-image, however, becomes re-coded through drawing into a connotative object that builds the bridge between my audiences. Drawing is my personal means of working through the content, empathizing with my sitters, considering language and rhetoric, and concurrently experiencing different senses of time. This is the zone that un-alienates my labor and concretizes my revolutionary consciousness. It stands as a reminder that all good pictures ask the question, “Where do we go from here?”
Los Angeles Socialist Network 1950-2019 (2019)
Huey P. Newton Equality Principle (2020)
Socialist Workers Party and its Descendants (2021)
Possible / Alicia Garza (2020)
Bolshevik Tendency Trotsky Third International (2021)
2020, Remember 2045 (2020)
Radical Power 1917-1936 (2019)
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