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US $25 The Global Journal of Prints and Ideas March – April 2014 Volume 3, Number 6 Artists Against Racism and the War, 1968 • Blacklisted: William Gropper • AIDS Activism and the Geldzahler Portfolio Zarina: Paper and Partition • Social Paper • Hieronymus Cock • Prix de Print • Directory 2014 • ≤100 • News New lithographs by Charles Arnoldi Jesse (2013). Five-color lithograph, 13 ¾ x 12 inches, edition of 20. see more new lithographs by Arnoldi at tamarind.unm.edu March – April 2014 In This Issue Volume 3, Number 6 Editor-in-Chief Susan Tallman 2 Susan Tallman On Fierce Barbarians Associate Publisher Miguel de Baca 4 Julie Bernatz The Geldzahler Portfoio as AIDS Activism Managing Editor John Murphy 10 Dana Johnson Blacklisted: William Gropper’s Capriccios Makeda Best 15 News Editor Twenty-Five Artists Against Racism Isabella Kendrick and the War, 1968 Manuscript Editor Prudence Crowther Shaurya Kumar 20 Zarina: Paper and Partition Online Columnist Jessica Cochran & Melissa Potter 25 Sarah Kirk Hanley Papermaking and Social Action Design Director Prix de Print, No. 4 26 Skip Langer Richard H. Axsom Annu Vertanen: Breathing Touch Editorial Associate Michael Ferut Treasures from the Vault 28 Rowan Bain Ester Hernandez, Sun Mad Reviews Britany Salsbury 30 Programs for the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre Kate McCrickard 33 Hieronymus Cock Aux Quatre Vents Alexandra Onuf 36 Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance Reconceived Jill Bugajski 40 The Art of Influence: Asian Propaganda Sarah Andress 42 Nicola López: Big Eye Susan Tallman 43 Jane Hammond: Snapshot Odyssey On the Cover: Annu Vertanen, detail of Breathing Touch (2012–13), woodcut on Maru Rojas 44 multiple sheets of machine-made Kozo papers, Peter Blake: Found Art: Eggs Unique image. Printed and published by the artist, Imatra, Finland. Photo: Jussi Tiainen. <100 45 News of the Print World 46 This Page: Nomi Silverman, detail from Living Rough (2013), a portfolio of five litho- International Directory 2014 55 graphs and a title page in a hand-made paper Contributors 66 portfolio. Printed by James Reed/Milestone Graphics, Bridgeport, CT. Co-published by Guide to Back Issues 67 Milestone Graphics and the artist, Glenville, CT. The series “Treasures from the Vault” Art in Print was made possible with the generous 3500 N. Lake Shore Drive support of the IFPDA Foundation. Suite 10A Chicago, IL 60657-1927 www.artinprint.org [email protected] No part of this periodical may be published without the written consent of the publisher. On Fierce Barbarians By Susan Tallman rints, we are often told, are political screenprint Sun Mad employs the graphic P animals. If knowledge is power, then dynamism of agit-prop posters, but as the distribution of knowledge through Rowan Bain reveals, it is simultaneously printed images is a redistribution of the personal statement of a Chicana art- power, which is what political rebellion ist raised by farmworkers, a Pop parody is all about. Paul Revere’s The Bloody of falsely folksy corporate branding and Massacre, with its perps in uniform and a call to attention on the issue of pesti- victims on the ground, its incendiary cides and human health. The works in couplets, mass-market circulation and the Geldzahler Portfolio, de Baca points impassioned “speaking truth to power,” out, make no overt political arguments; is an archetypal “political print.” Con- their political content exists in elegiac ferences, catalogues and exhibitions representations of loss—both public and have established the form’s contours: a private—and their implicit critique of the repeatable image that aims to expose indifference and homophobia of the sur- an injustice, right a wrong or instigate a rounding society. change of power. (Though Robert Nan- Art is a social agent, and the print teuil’s engraved celebrations of the ancien especially so. The Renaissance print pub- Paul Revere after Henry Pelham, The Bloody régime’s high and mighty are certainly Massacre Perpetrated in King-Street Boston lishing house Aux Quatre Vents, the prints and are clearly political, they are on March 5th 1770 by a Party of the 29th subject of a recent expansive exhibition rarely categorized as political prints.) The Regt. (1770), hand-colored engraving, and catalogue (reviewed here by Kate fact that Revere stole his composition in 11 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches. McCrickard and Alexandra Onuf, respec- its entirety from the artist Henry Pel- tively) was not a political endeavor; it ham, or that the three years following its Unhappy BOSTON! see thy Sons deplore, did not even have a social agenda to the publication actually witnessed a decline Thy hallowe’d Walks besmear’d with extent of the Geldzahler Portfolio. Instead in colonist-redcoat conflict, has done lit- guiltless Gore: it was the heterogeneity and accessibility tle to diminish the print’s standing as an While faithless — and his savage Bands, of its publications that expanded knowl- icon of American liberty. (Its standing as With murd’rous Rancour stretch their edge and experience and changed the art is a different question.) bloody Hands; face of Europe. Suffice it to say, the social This issue of Art in Print looks at mul- Like fierce Barbarians grinning workings of print extend far beyond tiple strategies through which art serves o’er their Prey, what musters under the flag of “the pol- political ends, ranging from purpose- Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day. itical print.” built propaganda (the British Muse- The artist William Kentridge put it um’s Art of Influence: Asian Propaganda, this way: “I am interested in a political reviewed by Jill Bugajski), to community art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, reconciliation through papermaking but also its ability to bring home the contradiction, uncompleted gestures and (Jessica Cochrane and Melissa Potter), to bacon: Gropper’s lithographs were sold uncertain endings, an art (and a politics) intimate, subjective responses to political by subscription to supporters at a time in which optimism is kept in check and events (Shaurya Kumar’s case for Zarina’s when all other avenues to making a living nihilism at bay.”3 quiet paperworks as a visceral reaction to were denied him; Twenty-Five Prints and Prints may argue for change or stasis, the partition of India). Geldzahler were designed to raise money or they may simply put things on the table The portfolio as a tool of social change for specific causes. This does not say any- to say, “look—there is this too.” Patriots, is at the core of three articles. William thing in particular about the quality of redcoats and a small confused dog. Gropper’s Capriccios (1953–56), surveyed the work (most art is made to be sold), by John Murphy, is the cri de coeur of a but it indicates a strategic awareness of Susan Tallman is the Editor-in-Chief of blacklisted artist destroyed by the anti- the print as, in Vito Acconci’s words, “an Art in Print. Communist witch-hunt of Senator instrument in the world.”1 Joseph McCarthy. Makeda Best rediscov- The painter Franz Kline once dis- ers Twenty-Five Prints For Artists Against missed printmaking as concerned with Notes: 1. Acconci in interview with Robin White, View 2, Racism and the War, a Boston-based con- “politics and a public… Like the Mexi- nos. 5–6 (October–November 1979): 18. tribution to politico-art events in 1968. cans in the 1930s; printing, multiply- 2. Kline in Thomas B. Hess, “Prints: Where His- Miguel de Baca examines the more gilt- ing, educating. I can’t think about it. I’m tory, Style and Money Meet,” Art News (January 1972), 29. edged Geldzahler Portfolio, produced 30 involved with the private image.”2 These 3. Kentridge in William Kentridge: Drawings for years later in the midst of the AIDS crisis. days we tend to see public and private Projection, Four Animated Films (Johannesburg: All these projects exploited not only the as interpenetrating fields that cannot Goodman Gallery, 1992), np. print’s potential to broadcast a message be so neatly divided. Ester Hernandez’s 2 Art in Print March – April 2014 The Geldzahler Portfolio as AIDS Activism By Miguel de Baca Fig. 1. Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney and Jeff Goodman from “Out of the 60’s” (1997), lithograph, 50 x 75 cm. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund, M23965. Photo courtesy Imaging Department ©President and Fellows of Harvard College. he Geldzahler Portfolio is a collec- hoods of artists with HIV or AIDS, many of cancer in 1994, was a major figure in Ttion of 11 artworks—ten prints and them gay, and therefore an especially mar- the New York art world for nearly three one film-to-video transfer—by prominent ginalized group. In that sense, the Portfo- decades, and his namesake portfolio com- contemporary artists, published in 1998 to lio called greater attention to the fight for memorates both his professional and generate funds for the Estate Project for AIDS awareness and the closely entwined charity work. He was a curator of Ameri- Artists with AIDS, an organization estab- issue of gay liberation. Second, though can Art at the Metropolitan Museum of lished to promote the artwork and legacy there is no overt political content in the Art and a founder of its Department of of artists with AIDS.1 The Estate Project Portfolio, a close study of its constituent Contemporary Arts (later renamed the is resolutely not a political organization, prints reveals allusions to the argot of gay Department of 20th Century Art). In 1977 but dissent is nonetheless at the heart of iconography and HIV/AIDS protest, con- he left the museum for city government, the Geldzahler Portfolio. It can be read as verting otherwise innocuous imagery into assuming the post of New York City Com- an activist gesture in two ways: first, the an engaged social critique.2 missioner of Cultural Affairs.