ALEX LUKAS
2023 - Now
CA53776V2.gallery
CV FOLLOW
Your Flag: Print-on-Demand and an Emergent Aesthetic of the American Right, 2024
In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, "This Machine Kills Fascists'' stickers were affixed to Risographs, laser printers, and relief presses across the country. Broadsides featuring the phrase were posted in the windows of cooperative and academic print shops alike, and my social media feed was peppered with repurposings of Woody Gutherie's famous slogan. Print, the adage supposed, would save democracy.
Flash forward to the first 2020 presidential debate, where then-President Trump urged the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by." Merchandise pairing the phrase with the hate group's name was available for purchase online almost before the debate concluded. Three months later, insurgents storming the Capitol were outfitted head-to-toe in Trump gear, draped in Trump flags, carrying dye sublimation printed Q-anon banners, and (improbably) sporting facemasks custom-printed with anti-masking slogans. In contrast to the hand-painted and carefully crafted placards of 2020's Black Lives Matter marches, January 6th was awash in low-run, professionally made swag. It's all quite simple and quick to have printed.
Despite e-commerce sites' efforts to deplatform far-right makers, easy-to-use mockup software and no-overhead drop-ship services continue to aid the speedy manifestation of slogans, iconography, and memes into custom t-shirts, lapel pins, embroidered patches, coffee mugs, and countless other formats. Direct-to-garment print shops, often clustered in tourist destinations like Keystone, South Dakota, or Gatlinburg, Tennessee, offer lightning-quick wearable quips responding to the latest political talking points.
Amidst this proliferation, a new aesthetic has developed. This coded look, readily apparent in the marketing and advertising of print-on-demand services, unmistakably brands these offerings as aligned with far-right ideologies. Distinct from leftist visuals, which remain rooted in analog printmaking technologies like serigraphy and relief printing, this emergent visual style builds on the popularity of memes and other digitally native imagery. Uniquely suited to bring CMYK images into the streets, print-on-demand has proven an effective visual tool for the right.
An expanded version of this text appeared in Issue #9 of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture (Feb. 2024), edited by Josh MacPhee and Alec Dunn, published by PM Press, Oakland, CA.
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