Np Summer 2004 Essay | International Print Center NY

New Prints 2004/Summer
The Assemblage of Incomplete Parts into a Fictitious Whole

I am partial. As only one of six Selections Committee members for this exhibition, I realize that my background, tastes, and political opinions might differ considerably from those of my colleagues. I don't write this as a disclaimer, more as an acknowledgement that what you read here is only part of the story, that the five others who are also responsible for what you see are silent.

The essay is divided into four loosely related parts. The structure echoes the segmented nature of printmaking techniques, as described below. It also reflects what I see as one of the dominant sensibilities in the exhibition.

1. A large percentage of contemporary prints are made through multi-plate processes. What distinguishes these prints from single-plate prints is the lack of a 1:1 relationship between the printed image and its source. What appears coherent in the final artwork is, in fact, an assemblage of incomplete parts, individual matrices-plates/screens/blocks-with only portions of the ultimate image embedded in them. For non-printmakers, looking at each matrix is often a confounding experience. The fragment divorced from its context is an image unto itself with its own curious personality and temperament. At times, the information on the matrix is so slight that its importance seems negligible.

Over the past decade, there has been a lot of attention paid to the falsity of photographic images, about their ability to convince and deceive. But the print's final form, its relationship to its source, and the manner in which its image comes into being, is often more deceptive and complex. In a "straight" photograph, the final image has a direct corresponding relationship to the real world. In a multi-plate print, the final product is the reconstitution of a splintered reality, ranging from photographic traces to hand-drawn creations. Nothing lies quite like a multi-plate print. Its fundamental essence is technical fabrication.

2. On a Monday in mid-May, I and five other jurors convened at IPCNY in Chelsea. Over a four-hour period we looked at 700 submissions by 151 artists. The jurors included a printmaker, a contemporary art collector, a print publisher, an art professor, a television producer of art programs, and an art editor. Our varied backgrounds and experiences translated into a diversity of tastes and interests. What we had in common, if anything, was a curiosity to spend the day out of the office looking at a broad swath of contemporary printmaking, with the hope, perhaps, of making a personal discovery.

The jury reviewed all the submissions twice before lunch, gaining familiarity with the character and quality of the submissions in the first round, then voting in the second. We used a points-based system that relied heavily on consensus. Each of us had an unlimited number of points, and each assigned points to artworks according to a scale that ascended from 1 (low) to 3 (high). The prints with the highest totals were included in the show. In many cases, we reached a consensus with little debate, with everyone either not voting or voting generously. But many prints did not receive the requisite number of points for inclusion, so after lunch we reviewed those prints for a third time. A handful of these works were selected. The result is an exhibition that represents the domain of common interests amongst the six jurors, the intersection of individual tastes.

3. Each viewer will find patterns in this exhibition, piecing together her or his selections to create a recognizable theme or dominant sensibility. For me, the inadvertent theme is aesthetic fragmentation-not the stylistic cacophony of the show as a whole, but the disintegrations and divisions that are manifest in individual works.

Jane Hammond's new color lithograph/collage entitled My Heavens! (2004) is an imaginary portrayal of the night sky, bifurcated into northern and southern hemispheres and densely packed with colorful renderings of fictitious constellations, among them a ballerina, a lobster, and a dolphin. Divined from apparent patterns in the sky, the idiosyncratic figures, which appear as though they had been excised from a story, are of the artist's own making, her effort, perhaps, to give form to the unfathomable.

Tom Burkhardt's submission looks like a landscape turned on its head. In the lower half of the print is an ethereal blue sky. Overhead is a dense landscape of abstract fragments sprinkled with carpenter's tools. While the juxtaposition equates the two-the abstract shapes are viewed as graphic tools in Burkhardt's trade-the jumble of elements also evokes a world in desperate need of repair, or the modest rejuvenation of a symbolic scrap-yard.

Ellen Price's ink/gum transfer monoprint consists of a two identical photographic images of a man's well-dressed upper torso-sporting a white shirt and bow tie, and truncated just above the lips. The use of repetition and fragment in the work foregrounds essential qualities of photography itself, but also influences our understanding of the subject: the black man in America. The subject is further defined by the print's sepia color, which is both descriptive and nostalgic. The duplication of the fragment evokes W.E.B. DuBois's "double consciousness," the notion that Americans of African descent carry within them two distinct and often conflicting identities: American and African American.

4. Trying to divine meaning from structural similarities evident in a large variety of artworks is a challenge. What do patterns of fragmentation, differentiation, and repetition tell us about the artistic psyche in printmaking over the past year?

Fragmentation conjures up notions of political, social, spiritual, and economic polarization, all of which are increasingly present in our daily lives. Metaphorically, a handful of prints in this exhibition can be thought of as windows, or fictitious visions of a seamless world. But the majority of them are shard-filled and kaleidoscopic, reflecting our multi-faceted world to our multi-faceted selves?broken mirrors in an empty room.

--Peter Nesbett

Peter Nesbett is Editor of Art on Paper magazine and a Co-Director of Triple Candie, a non-profit contemporary art space in Harlem, NYC. The other members of the Selections Committee were Bobby Foshay-Miller, Site Santa Fe; Andrew Raftery, Print Department, Rhode Island School of Design; Susan Sollins, Art21; Sarah Thompson, Dia Center for the Arts, Chelsea; and Diane Villani, Diane Villani Editions.