By Matt Dagher-margosian
Asia Art Tours
February 2nd, 2022
We spoke with Artist N.O. Bonzo on illustrating the beauty of Mutual Aid & Abolition
Our conversation & their artwork is below.
Asia Art Tours: As someone who is instinctively resistant to institutional settings, most of how I see the world is self-taught. For your own artistic techniques and sensibilities, where have you both used and had to resist institutional schooling to access your true artistic voice?
N.O. Bonzo: For better or worse my all of my artistic process is self or collectively taught outside of any formal or institutional structures. I didn’t even make it out of high school to be honest.
As a result I developed most through more DIY rooted scenes. Scenes that seek to increase access and distribution to skill and practice rather than enclose it behind an institutional wall. Mostly punk and graffiti scenes where you encounter far far less people who see technics as a certain type of capitol to be accumulated and hoarded and more as impossibly exciting things to share with other people.
This isn’t to say people who pursue formalized art education are trying to create little fiefdoms, one of the most impactful people on my own personal development in printmaking went to school and then came back to his friends and shared what he learned and even stole equipment for us we didn’t have access to. Amazing person and though I won’t mention his name a truly stupendous master printmaker and I’m still using the bougie hinges he racked for me almost 17 years ago now.
I’m not really sure how I would have been impacted by a more institutional pedagogical framework honestly. I know currently I do what I want when I’m interested in it (outside of time, money, and equipment restraints of course.) I’m not worried about having to write manifestos expounding on “the work” which is frankly a blessing after hearing some of those things. I’ve never received a grade. I never had to fake agreement with a person I had no respect for just cause they were in a position of power over me in an institutional setting when it came to art. Never been told I HAD to do something a certain way just because that is the way it was done. It just feels like such a wildly different world of experience its hard to think of how I would have been impacted by it. Though when I remember what hell school was I doubt I would have made it very long, having to pay for it, even with the additional freedoms you enjoy in college.
I’ve never received a grade. I never had to fake agreement with a person I had no respect for just cause they were in a position of power over me in an institutional setting when it came to art.
Asia Art Tours: How do we create communal art as individual artistic talents? And for the art we create, do we need to be better about making the ‘audience’ an artistic participant in the work that’s created?
N.O. Bonzo: I suppose I see this question through the lens of how I have experienced a good deal of radical art. Where the work exists within a creative commons which is being used, bootlegged, and reproduced endlessly. There are so many images I grew up with that feel half way impossible to track authorship to nowadays. For example I’ve seen the multi-sided die crushing the cop car image endlessly and only just realized who the author was by total accident the other day. Or the artist Walter Crane, I had seen countless images of his and recognized they were coming from the same individual before I had any clue who he was or the social movements he participated in.
I humbly hope this is what happens in the long term with a lot of the stuff I’ve made. It becomes un-anchored from authorship and just exists within the larger visual library people pull on.
I think encouraging and embracing the DIY ethos that is so present within so many scenes is one of the strongest ways to encourage that participation. This was always one of the criticisms of the graphic designer Shepard Fairey. He took images that existed within the commons, slapped the word obey on them, and then copyrighted them. As an incidental aside, one time he was jumped by punks after he painted peace doves on an anarchist squat that had been violently evicted. These might be related, ha.
I feel that DIY ethos that so much of scenes that I am most familiar with are being lost and replaced with something that echoes academia to me. Something formalized and regimented rather than collaborative, participatory, and horizontal.
I feel that DIY ethos that so much of scenes that I am most familiar with are being lost and replaced with something that echoes academia to me. Something formalized and regimented rather than collaborative, participatory, and horizontal.
Asia Art Tours: Right now I work a ‘Bullshit Job‘ to survive as an Anarchist. In a world where we must work (as alienated selves) or die (as no selves), how do you balance the pragmatic and utopian in your own daily thinking and practice as an artist ?
N.O. Bonzo: Oh golly, so much of my pragmatism comes from my actually inability to do all the things I dream of. I am a very simple punk with a very simple punk set up. I would absolutely love and jump at the chance to be able to make all sorts of fascinating and interesting things but am absolutely restricted by funds and space, as most people I know are, though we’re doing our ramshackle best. Like one of the main reasons I work in black and white is because doing multi-colored prints is expensive and purchasing a bunch of paints to learn color theory is expensive. Only time I painted in color was when I shoplifted honestly (Dick Blick you had it coming.)
Which sadly most of the things me and the folks I know want to do aren’t even that zany right? Like “I want to learn to embroider and become specialized in the skill. But damnit I have to spend so much time earning my living at some bullshit job I am restricted in this creative pursuit that would definitely bring me a lot of joy.”
This is one of the things I enjoy so much of the early Arts and Crafts artists is those vocalizations identifying how unappealing and ugly the world made by “work” was and the effects that it had on art and creative pursuits itself. This idea of art being separated from everyday life and put into a specialized and restrictive domain for people. On the note of the book Bullshit Jobs by Graeber one of my favorite running themes is his constant observations that someone being in a cover band or writing bad poetry creates so much greater social value than working a bullshit job.
My utopianism comes from dreaming of all the things we all could be doing and enjoying if we weren’t stuck having to earn a living. And all those beautiful or ugly or even totally useless things we could spend our time pursuing free from work.
Sadly, most of the things me and the folks I know want to do aren’t even that zany right? Like “I want to learn to embroider and become specialized in the skill. But damnit I have to spend so much time earning my living at some bullshit job I am restricted in this creative pursuit that would definitely bring me a lot of joy.”
Asia Art Tours: Your art brings to mind the famous ‘68 saying, “Under the Pavement, the Beach!” helping your audience realize that utopia is already here, it’s just buried. Could you discuss how Mutual Aid reveals the utopia underneath this cruel and atomizing world?
N.O. Bonzo: Mutual Aid from Kropotkin is just a really simple recognition of principles of cooperation at play within behavior. There is such a heavy focus for behavior and even just human and non-human animal behavior to be viewed in a light of struggle, competition, even down to our very genes. Mutual Aid proposes that there is actually no fundamental essential thing we can say about anyone or anythings natural tendencies. It further goes on to detail, with many numerous examples, all of the ways that mutual cooperation underlies a lot of choice in behavior and that this cooperative tendency often increases the health and well being of its participants.
For Kropotkin, the thing that most restricts or disrupts this tendency is the state. We can go farther as we’re 100 years past him and contribute to that list of disruptions to include all the the things reinforced or imposed by a state such as white supremacy, transphobia, sexism, classism, etc etc etc as well.
It is kinda impossible to cast around in our own lives or the environments we find ourselves in and not find endless examples of this tendency in practice. In the same way that it is impossible not to see this tendency being disrupted.
Those moments we can look at, of the tendency in action, especially when coupled with other anarchist principles like solidarity and rejections of hierarchies we can see the potential for a world with a wildly different set of social relationships
It [Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid] further goes on to detail, with many numerous examples, all of the ways that mutual cooperation underlies a lot of choice in behavior and that this cooperative tendency often increases the health and well being of its participants.
Asia Art Tours: Rather than a settler-colonial relation to nature as something to be dominated, or a “Green New Deal” mentality that proposes cold technocratic management of living systems, your work instead proposes something far more symbiotic.
Is your work intended to compliment more technocratic relations to nature (like the Green New Deal) or do you imagine a radically different direction between humankind and nature?
N.O. Bonzo: Oh radically different. I mean….hooowww does one even look at the Green New Deal and believe this is in any way a transformative proposition to the crisis we exist in now and how we got here?
I think most of my work is rooted within principles that seek an end to relationships based on hierarchy and domination. For all living things.
And if we take that framework of “okay we are against and actively seeking to not replicate relationships of domination and we have a responsibility to investigate how our actions could replicate those things” and extend that beyond just our relationships with other humans, it is going to include a discussion of our relationships with non-human animals and the whole world of living things. And hopefully create better understandings of how narratives have developed which see humans as fundamentally separate from nature or why it is okay for some to suffer and die under the impacts of poisoned water or irradiated soil.
I think my particular orientation towards how we are situated in the world comes out more from the things I am drawn to illustrate, I have a love and deep commitment to lush, mossy, green, flowering, and organic things. Less interested in the aesthetics of plastic or hunkering metal, though rust and decay are of particular interest I’ll admit. It actually feels like the most boring thing in the world to illustrate everyone being marched into a “Green Jobs Program” when you could instead illustrate someone monkey wrenching a ski resort or rats burning down a vivisection lab. Or even just folks and their animal buds chilling in a forest and gleaning from the trees.
It actually feels like the most boring thing in the world to illustrate everyone being marched into a “Green Jobs Program” when you could instead illustrate someone monkey wrenching a ski resort or rats burning down a vivisection lab. Or even just folks and their animal buds chilling in a forest and gleaning from the trees.
For more of N.O. Bonzo’s work, please see their Twitter, Instagram or Etsy. The illustrated book, Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution , can be purchased from PM Press.
N.O. Bonzo is an anarchist illustrator, printmaker, and muralist based out of Portland, OR. They are the creator of Off with Their Heads: An Antifascist Coloring Book
