New Prints: Summer 2003 Essay

Butterfly Morning, Wildflower Afternoons
New Prints 2003/Summer

Butterfly Morning, Wildflower Afternoons, which is the title of one of David Rathman's cowboy prints in this exhibition, is a phrase that can suggest the rapturous delights of a glorious summer day or the wonder induced by a great garden of recent prints. Like Alice in Wonderland whose curiosity increased when she encountered the messages "Eat Me" and "Drink Me", so she ate and drank to find out more, many who wander in a "Print Wonderland" seek tantalizing images that say "Stop and Take a Really Good Look at Me." Once arrested by such an image, then one MUST examine, ponder and "devour" what is really "going on" in the print. I usually make a mental tally of what impresses me. Is the image realistic? Expressionistic? Nostalgic? Or completely abstract? Non-Objective? Can I relate to the image as an aspect of daily experience? Is the print about stress due to city life, or the "bliss" of suburbia? Or is it a response to an aspect of art history, an aesthetic style, a social issue or an actual event? Perhaps the image is humorous or more deeply satirical. Sometimes I get to wrestle with symbolism and iconography, and that's fun for the brain to tackle. Or maybe the images prompt insights into nature, the cosmos, or other scientific forces. If the print I am scrutinizing is more about technical virtuosity, gesture, or color, then I might note nuances of line, marks, or surface texture. I like prints that are deliberately simple, but I also appreciate prints that are densely complex. Sometimes prints are about structural relationships or symmetrical patterns; others are about asymmetry, improvisation, chaos, and chance. A really good "Print Wonderland Feast" includes a kaleidoscope of prints depicting a multitude of captivating visual ideas and aesthetic explorations.

For a juried exhibition, the art submitted for review by a Selections Committee may be about ANYTHING. Some artists even create works that defy categorization. A jury for a contemporary print exhibition is also apt to see images done in a wide variety of traditional or innovative printmaking media: relief, intaglio, lithography, screenprint, all sorts of photographically derived or digital media. Nuances of inking and paper qualities also affect the impact of the realized print. The power of black inking on white paper can be as penetrating as words on a page, or as delicate as a sheer veil. Printers have ways of applying an immense range of colors-- from subtle hues to dazzling brightness. Many images include exciting experiments in unconventional combinations of media. For this IPCNY exhibition, there was no way to anticipate what would be in the pool of works up for consideration. That's the fun unpredictability of the process - the artists (some collaborating with printers) are working away doing what they do, and then some of them (or their publishers or dealers) submit slides, totaling about 800 recent works for the Selections Committee to review. It is a crowded "round up" of prints jostling for attention, and the jury does its best to oblige. Is there any rhyme or reason why this group of prints is displayed together here this summer? Not really, except that these are the prints that the Selections Committee* as a group selected. We all agreed these 54 prints (including artist's books and printed objects) by 31 artists impressed all of us for their power in wedding graphic excellence with compelling imagery.

David Rathman's captivating series of five intaglio prints done in sugar lift and spit bite feature sepia-toned silhouettes of cowboys which are like hazy apparitions from old western movie scenes - and the series plays on America's nostalgia for the "rough and ready" frontier days (or maybe its just a hankering for those old movies). Each image is partnered with a particular phrase or colloquial saying that Rathman feels is the most appropriate. The image captioned "I Forgot It Was Sunday" shows a lone cowboy seemingly ready for a "High Noon" kind of gun show down in a deserted place. One looks at the image and is transported to those vast "Big Sky" Western spaces, and then the caption adds another level of meaning with a twist. In another image, a cowboy on horseback is slowly riding away from a lynched man hanging from a tree in the background; the caption declares "That's as Fair as I Can Make It." Whoa! What's happening here? Is this about righting a wrong, or about someone abusing justice? Or what? The ambiguity of meaning compels the viewer to get involved beyond the lyrical execution of the image.

Another example of print images evoking one thing, but the title taking it to another level, is J. Noel Reifel's refined color relief etchings with monotype: one sees starry points of light as a geometric dot pattern on the expanse of paper (half shaded in deep blue, the other half in dark green). The prints looks like constellations in the sky; but wait a minute, his titles say Worm Holes. What is this about? Evidently, Reifel was inspired by the pattern of holes made by worms boring their way through very old, rare books (he actually saw and copied such worm hole patterns from a rare book he saw in a Frankfurt library). But then one also has the possible duality of further meaning that is more profound: perhaps "worm holes" are meant to suggest the form of black holes in outer space. Wow! You think so? From bookworms eating their fill to black holes is a pretty big leap.

In the "iconic objects" category, Willie Cole's two Iris prints Ahead of its Time and Quick as a Wink (both done in 2002) masterfully present yet again new ways to look at an everyday appliance, the steam iron - this time transformed into sleek machine-age or sci-fi masks (or possibly phallic codpieces) transcending the tribal into a new cult of futuristic design. The titles layer the image with concepts of ejaculative time: eye-flickering speed, or how the situational present is not always ready for what occurs. Even though these are anthropomorphized object "portraits" of a pair of irons in the artist's own collection, the prints indicate more profound meanings can be gleaned from the utilitarian. In a different vein, other prints depicting singular objects, or figures, in isolation are by Lothar Osterburg, Michael Barnes, and Shu-Min Tung Kaldis. Osterburg usually photographs models or small sculptures in staged settings. His soft-focus photogravures Beached Cargo Ship in Montauk and Cargo Ship in Storm suggest North Atlantic shipwreck scenes from America's past when tall trading ships had to navigate weather's vicissitudes. Kaldis' Float I is monumental self-contained form in linocut-a tour de force of the sculptural and textural- that hovers "in" the deep "space" of a sheet of earth-colored paper. Barnes' lithograph The Wandering is a more troubling image of a trussed and hooded animal or fowl carcass perched on a spindly limb.

James Nares' Three Aces (2002) is a trio of triumphant swooshes: a single, gestural brushstroke appears in each of three screenprints, one in blue, one in green, and one in purple. Like fine calligraphy, these prints exhibit Nares' skill to mediate control with a sense of spontaneity. As a further example of gesture as fluidity of line, but with very different results, Richard Tuttle created his three-part paper piece, Dawn, Noon, Dusk (2002): the imprint of a bit of undulating, colored thread making lovely, sinuous lines on each sheet suggesting the serpentine course of a river seen from the sky in the colors occurring at different times of the day. Handwritten lines that form letters and words require more calculation to manipulate, as shown in Suzanne McClelland's cotton candy-pink print Pussy (a 2002 collaboration with Dieu Donné, as was Tuttle's piece). Using a post office motivational sign "How to Get Along with People" as her point of departure, she re-fashions words so they become a pattern full of flourishing motifs, beyond mere units of meaningful verbal language, and then adds some surprising phrases, such as "skid chains on your tongue."

The joy of ornament plays in the prints of Stefan Kürten and Nancy Friedemann. Kürten's Gate (a 2003 lithograph, shown in black and white as well as in color) is a lovely close-up view of flowering blooms in a garden as if seen through the "scrim" of an elaborately filigreed gate. The effect is like a lush tapestry. Friedman's untitled monotypes (2002) recall dainty Rococo ornament prints (like those that goldsmiths or lace makers used for decorative ideas), but hers are in a much larger scale. Sometimes the arrangements of lines are more angular and structural (instead of being curvilinear arabesques) as in Ann Conner's woodblock, laser-engraved prints, Beams 4 and
Beams 6 (resembling rows of wrench-like configurations) or Heather McGill's digital- cut image that looks like a circuit network.

There are strong images of compartmentalization and structural construction. Carte Blanche 2 (2003), a photogravure and etching by Jean Shin, suggests an elaborate house of cards forming a tenement of multiple dwellings. Rob Voerman's 2003 etchings present "architectural blueprints" for a high-rise building complex, a faucet-like tower, and a solid lozenge-shaped object. Geraldine Lau's stunning Information Retrieval #78 and #79 (2003 screenprints in gold on deep blue paper) evoke the elegant patterning of topographical mapping systems that define, organize, and graphically visualize the terrain of earth or the configuration of matter in outer space.

For zany humor, leading the pack is Peter Saul's color lithograph Self Portrait with Haircut (2002). Done in his characteristic Mad Magazine-esque style, Saul's pepto-bismol-pink-faced alter ego, with a distorted head and two ears on one side showing his head literally "bent out of shape," is thinking "Art Critics Did This to Me." Sara Varon made a set of amusing mini-prints in letter press: her "Chickenopolis" Postage Stamps (2002) feature a set of playful cartoon figures (e.g. a rabbit, a turtle, a raccoon, a rooster, and a snowman), colored in light greens and purples. Each is linked to different postage rates; the entire set is perforated like a real set of stamps. Roy De Forest's Ode to Rin Tin Tin (a 2002 lithograph, woodcut and pochoir print in his characteristic untamed, funky style) is part shrine to revered dog of television yesteryear, and part zodiac with canine superstar. Each of Yoshitomo Nara's color etchings (2002) shows a cute, but rather uncuddly, scowling child, in a style inspired from Japanese comic books: On the F-word and Stay Good. (Methinks they probably prefer misbehaving.) More light-hearted and playful is Takashi Murakami's colorful screenprint Champignons (2003), depicting eye-bedecked mushrooms in a fanciful style also inspired by Japanese comics and computer-generated animated films. Yuji Hiratsuka's prints re-translate and update traditional figurative styles of Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts of kimono-clad actors into angular figures without eyes, but with accentuated lips and eyebrows, exaggerated hand gestures, and typical Japanese kimono textile patterns reprised. Beverly McIver's unfunny color lithograph Pretty is… a Little Black Girl (2002) uses the pathos of a clown face as the underpinnings for racial satire: A black clown-faced woman, in a maid's dress, holds a doll.

Some of the artists defy easy categorization, of course. Musical instruments, as well as the splices of sound, have been frequent features in Christian Marclay's art and videos. His print Minneapolis (2003) shows a red drum on its side lying on the ground next to a bright blue suitcase near the wheel of a trailer or van --a nondescript scene so ordinary few would notice it. Yet Marclay's focus on these "displaced" objects hints at a humdrum "on the road" reality of objects between performances. John Newman's lithographs are rhapsodies in color and trompe l'oeil texture: Bluish Free Fall conjures a feather "floating" between the tips of a pair of encircling wings (or plumage), and Rusty Curtain Lecture may be an updated variant of an old-master drapery study drawn in red chalk. The exhibition also includes prints by Liliana Porter (a "tiger, tiger burning bright"), Noriko Shinohara (a dash of surrealist imagery à la Chagall and more), Katja Oxman (a still life as a harmony of patterns); strong book works by Art Hazelwood and Lisa Young; and dollhouse-like rooms to fit in a box by Liz Zanis.

Each season brings forth many amazing contemporary prints that present a broad spectrum of images as diverse in creative impact, character and appearance as the people who made them. Such prints, many of which involve the physical act of making an impression, have to also make an "impression" on the viewer to be fully successful. These prints impressed me and the rest of the Selection Committee. We hope they cause you to stop, really look, and ponder, too.

Marilyn Symmes June 11, 2003
Independent Curator
and New York Area Collector, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

*2003 Summer Exhibition Selection Committee:
Alyson Baker, Executive Director, Socrates Sculpture Park; Judith Brodsky, Founding Director, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, and Trustee, IPCNY; Gabriella de Ferrari, writer; Gerrit Lansing, art historian and collector; James Siena, artist, and Marilyn Symmes, curator.