Art in Print September – October 2011

A Matrix You Can Move In: Prints and Charles Schultz

Fig. 1. John Hitchcock, detail of They’re Moving Their Feet—But Nobody’s Dancing (2007), large scale, variable size, 24-hour screenprint action at the School of Art and Design, Coyne Gallery, Syracuse University, New York, ©hybridpress.net.

rintstallation” is not a pretty word. and collectives, and a smattering position to mechanical reproduction. P Coined as a neologism for “print- of literature dissecting a multitude of In contrast to the innate multiplicity of based installation art,” the term arose emerging formats and styles. Joining a prints, installation art defiantly reiter- among printmakers and has been em- very recent art phenomenon (installa- ates the traditional concept of a work braced in academic circles, though as tion art was described as having a “re- that exists in just one location; it is of- evidenced by Sarah Kirk Hanley’s es- cent pedigree” and “relative youth” as ten site-specific and ephemeral, bound say, “The Lexicon of Tomorrow: Print- late as 1994) to techniques of mechani- as much by place as by time. The print, based Installation” on the Art21 blog, cal reproduction that date back to the on the other hand, enjoys the protec- it is beginning to circulate in non-aca- late 14th century in Europe (and as far tion of the multiple: one copy may get demic art journalism as well.1 However back as the 7th century in China,)2 the crumpled or burnt, but its brethren can clunky the term, the phenomenon it form is both innovative and grounded still travel the world. Installations are seeks to describe is becoming a vital—if in art historical precedents. designed to emphasize a singular expe- difficult to define precisely—aspect of In some ways installation art—with rience: be–here–now. Prints offer the contemporary art, replete with dedi- its emphasis on direct, enveloping ex- gift of the archive: a window into some cated blogs, a growing number of active perience—developed in purposeful op- other place, some other time.

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At the same time, however, the of Pop Art.) It also featured an environ- sion, but “a thing layered in groups, a development of installation art was ment, created collaboratively by Ham- community of like-minded things past- driven by the concerns with social con- ilton, John McHale, and John Voelcker, ed or sewed together…”6 In early works, text and ephemerality that motivated that was physically constructed of pop- he disrupted the book’s flow by cutting a variety of 20th century print forms, cultural images recycled from maga- out segments in the shape of squares from the ’s book to street posters. zines and films. McHale, a self-declared and circles. He alternated paper pages The early 20th century utopian ideal, Constructivist, described this work as with pieces of colored transparent plas- articulated by groups like the Russian “a complex of sense experience that tic and often bound the work in ring Constructivists, of fully integrating is so organized, or disorganized, as to binders so the viewer/reader would art and life necessarily embraced the provoke an acute awareness of our sen- be able to take the book apart and re- world of mass-produced images. By the sory function in an environmental sit- arrange the pages. “Artist books,” says 1950s advances in technology and the uation.”5 Hamilton and his colleagues Marshall Weber (founder of Booklyn, discourse around avant-garde art prac- recognized the conditioning influence an artist book production house and tices had merged in the phenomenon of printed and projected imagery and gallery), “are about controlling the to- of “the spectacle” identified by Guy they went a step beyond the Situation- tality of your experience in an environ- Debord. ists by using those spectacular images ment created by a book. They’re meant Debord’s spectacle was a conse- to create a physical space. Though the to engage more than your eyes. Your quence of mechanically (re)produced Bauhaus had promoted interdisciplin- whole body gets involved.” Roth’s Co- images (photography, film, etc.) -com ary collaborations decades earlier, pley Book (1965) (Fig. 2) was not bound ing to dominate social trends and in- “This is Tomorrow” was one of the first at the spine, but stapled in the center fluence artistic practices. In the 1957 exhibitions structured to challenge so that anyone wishing to engage it Situationist manifesto, Debord sought conventional modes of both art cre- would have to remove the staple and to disrupt the overwhelming author- ation and art reception. separate the book into loose-leaf pages. ity of this burgeoning mass media: “we Concurrent with Debord and Ham- Like Hamilton’s environment in “This must try to construct situations, that is ilton’s investigations of image recep- is Tomorrow”, the Copley Book required to say, collective ambiances, ensembles tion and space, Dieter Roth was con- viewers/readers to make their own de- of impressions determining the qual- ducting similar experiments but at the cisions about how to engage the images ity of a moment… The construction of hand-held scale of the book. For Roth, and the physical experience. Instead a situation begins on the ruins of the the book was not a narrative progres- of passively absorbing information, modern spectacle.”3 As scholar Tom McDonough notes, these situations relied on “the practice of arranging the environment that conditions us”—they did not require anything to be physical- ly built.4 Nonetheless, they contained an essential germ of installation art: the desire to redirect human attention through interventions in the environ- ment. A year earlier, the exhibition “This is Tomorrow” at London’s Whitecha- pel Gallery explored these same issues through a merger of integrative design and a large-scale use of printed matter. Conceived by the writer and architect Theo Crosby, “This is Tomorrow” was a collaboration between artists, ar- chitects, designers, and theorists, or- ganized into twelve creative teams. It included Richard Hamilton’s famous collage, Just What Is It That Makes To- Fig. 2. Dieter Roth, page from the Copley Book (1965), 112 loose pages of various sizes. day’s Homes So Different, So Appealing Published by the William and Noma Copley Foundation, Chicago. © Dieter Roth Estate, (commonly described as the first piece courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

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is site-specific: as critic Michael- Ar cher has observed, “what a work looks like and what it means is dependent on the configuration of the space it’s in. In other words, the same objects displayed in the same way in another location would constitute a different work.”7 Certain artists—most notably Daniel Buren—have made this reality a fundamental subject of their work. But site-specificity necessarily entails exclusivity; prints, with their inherent multiplicity and portability, are non- exclusive and difficult to make site-spe- cific. Buren, however, devised a strategy for print-based DIY installations that both responded to the site and could go anywhere. Each member of the edi- tion Framed/Exploded/Defaced, (1979) Fig. 3. Nancy Spero, Maypole Take No Prisoners II (2008), steel, silk, wood, nylon monofilament, was a unique color variant of Buren’s hand print on aluminum, installation view at Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, 2008, ©The Estate signature stripes, divided into 25 small of Nancy Spero, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York. frames, and accompanied by a precise set of instructions for installation: for the audience was invited to contribute in circulation for decades, but it was in any given wall the 25 parts had to be creatively to the artwork’s conceptual Nancy Spero’s epic multipanel pieces placed in a grid stretched evenly over resolution. of the late seventies and early eighties the full extent of the wall; any parts All these precursors of installation that hands-on and instal- that met an impediment (window, art attempt to negotiate—in some lation structures achieved a kind of for- door, radiator) had to be removed for way—between printed images on the mal merger. In works such as Torture of the duration of the installation. If the one hand, and physical experiences Women (1976) and First Language (1981) prints were not displayed as instructed on the other, and to break down the Spero used letterpress plates to hand- the piece was neither complete nor au- distinction between ‘art experiences’ print images on paper that scrolled thentic. and regular life. Happenings—or as around the gallery walls in the manner For many artists in the 21st century, Jim Dine called them, “painter’s the- of a Greco-Roman frieze. Like a book print is simply one option on the menu atres”—sought immediacy of experi- writ large, Spero’s work required an ac- of strategies and materials, and those ence through multi-media perfor- tive engagement from viewers—it was who define themselves as printmak- mance works that were immune to the not enough to stand still and observe, ers often see installations as one op- distortions of value inherent in sale- the viewer had to move through the tion on the menu of structures. The able objects. But even here, printmak- story. (Fig. 3) critical arena of overlap is the social: ing played a part: their connection to In addition to printing directly on printed matter is a way to engage with the market made them part of real life, paper, Spero adhered cut-out texts the world and to distribute power. The but with overtones of cheapness and and figures to the paper, evoking the print, as Buren discovered, has the ephemerality. Dine’s first lithography heterogenous collage aesthetic of ear- potential to adapt to a variety of sur- series, Car Crash (1959-62) was based on lier avant-garde movements. In the late roundings. It wouldn’t have taken a he had made as props for his eighties Spero began to print her im- great leap of imagination to turn Roth’s 1960 Happening, The Car Crash. Olden- ages directly onto walls, making works Copley Book into an installation, and burg’s first editioned print, Legs (1961) that were both site-specific and ephem- more recent artists have run with that was a bijou version of the objects he eral. Rebirth of Venus (1989) was printed idea. “The exhibition in a book” called made for The Street, a Happening that directly onto the curving walls of a sky- Resourced was released in 2010 by the was effectively an installation in which lit cupola at the Schirn Kunsthalle dur- multinational artist Just performances could take place. ing Prospect 89 and, like much of her Seeds, a socially conscious group of These conceptual affinities between later work, was later painted over. printmakers and designers who work installation art and printed matter were To some extent, of course, all art in a panoply of styles. Resourced con-

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tains 26 artist prints, executed using a the templates are created is not par- range of techniques on a variety of pa- ticularly relevant to the content of the pers. The book is bound with steel bolts installations they produce. A handful and can be unbound and mounted on of contemporary artists, however, have walls, as the collective did last summer applied the ethos of site-specificity to in a concert hall in Montreal. the production of printed matter, em- Rob Swainston, co-founder of the phasizing the social role and cultural collaborative studio Prints of Dark- baggage of particular locations and ness, builds modular installations that processes. are designed to accommodate any site: The German artist Thomas Kilpper as Swainston explains, “the individ- is best known for enormous ual panels are designed in such a way matrices into the floors of abandoned that they can be installed in larger or buildings and then printing them. smaller formats. There are a number of What distinguishes Kilpper’s work, linkage points built into the drawings apart from its sheer scale, is the ex- that allow for easy addition or subtrac- plicit elucidation of social and political Fig. 5. tion.”8 The work is not designed for any histories in his sprawling imagery. His Thomas Kilpper, State of Control (2009), particular location, but can respond to first major project,The Ring (2000), was linocuts on paper, exterior façade of former Stasi headquarters, Berlin. the specificities of any site. Swainston executed on the tenth floor of Orbit calls this “non-site/site-specificity” (no House in Southwark, London, where relation to Robert Smithson’s concept Kilpper carved a 400 square meter later temporarily famous, and con- of the “non-site”.) woodcut into the mahogany parquet cludes with newspaper images from the Swainston, like Spero and Buren, floor. The visual narrative begins with Falklands war, a reference to the Min- employs prints as pre-fabricated ele- the octagonal Surrey Chapel, which oc- istry of Defence’s secret printing office, ments that can be deployed in different cupied the site of Orbit House in the situated in Orbit House. Kilpper hung ways in response to the physical prop- 18th century; it continues with images the enormous print produced from the erties of specific sites. How and where of boxing, for which the location was floor on the building’s exterior, while smaller excerpts were hung inside and the reception for the work took place on the floor that Kilpper carved. Kilpper’s State of Control (2009) (Fig. 4) was even more impressive and disturbing: its matrix was the lino- leum floor of the former East- Ger man Ministry of State Security (Stasi) headquarters in Berlin. At 1,600 square meters, State of Control is the largest linocut ever made—a third of an acre of image-driven history, detailing state projects of surveillance and repression from Nazi Germany to the present day. Again, Kilpper covered the façade of the building with the prints and hung them individually from the ceiling in the reception hall. Kilpper’s work extends, in intriguing and dramatic ways, both the physical impact of the print and its social and procedural accessibility. The ‘how’ and ‘where’ of print production are often frustratingly invisible to viewers—in Fig. 4. Thomas Kilpper, State of Control (2009), carved linoleum floor of the former Stasi Kilpper’s work these things are not headquarters, Berlin. only evident but are the basis of the

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the art work and that—however many parts it contains—the artwork entered constitutes a “single unity.” Borofsky’s concatenations certainly created an environment that engulfed the view- er, but he was less adamant about the work’s unity: buyers could take home the whole installation, but they were just as welcome to purchase a print on its own. Kiki Smith’s various adventures in print presentation similarly run afoul of Bishop’s precise definition of instal- lation art: in Peabody (Animal Draw- ings) (1996) Smith covered an expanse of gallery floor with layered prints on top of one another. Though the indi- vidual prints comprised a single whole, viewers could no more “enter” into the space of the work than one can “enter” Fig. 6. Regina Silveira, Irruption (2005), laser-cut adhesive vinyl, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a carpet. Smith’s 2010 exhibition at the ©Regina Silveira. Brooklyn Museum, Kiki Smith: Sojourn was billed as a “site-specific installa- work’s content. American artist John 80s (nearly all of which incorporated tion,” but each component was a fully Hitchcock also focuses on the activity prints of some sort,) suggested that that realized, independent work of art. of making prints as a locus of content, an idiosyncratic display of materials is And what are we to make of Regina working in a participatory manner precisely what defines a work of instal- Silveira’s print-based works? Over the that echoes early Happenings. In 2007, lation art. Clair Bishop, who authored last four decades Silveira has experi- Hitchcock collaborated with students an authoritative text on installation mented with silkscreen, lithography, from the of Syracuse Uni- art,10 proposed two key stipulations, offset, photocopying, and blueprint, versity to create They’re Moving Their that the audience “physically enter” but she is best known for her installa- Feet—But Nobody’s Dancing, a “screen print action” in which everyone made images.9 Other interactive installa- tions, such as Ritual Device (2006), in- corporated games to be played—ring toss, dart throwing—with prizes to be won. During the most recent Venice , Hitchcock joined forces with The Dirty Print Makers of America to produce Epicentro/Epicenter: Retrac- ing the Plains (2011), an installation in which prints were given away. Projects such as Kilpper’s and Hitch- cock’s take prints out of the frame and operate in the socially interactive and environmentally scaled way we asso- ciate with “installations,” but are they “Installation Art”? What distinguishes an exhibition of eccentrically installed prints from a work of installation art? Jonathan Borofsky’s sprawling multi- media installations of the 1970s and Fig. 7 John Hitchcock, Epicentro Retracing the Plains (2011), Venice, Italy, ©hybridpress.net.

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Fig. 6. Orit Hofshi, If the Tread is an Echo (2009), woodcut, ink , and stone tusche rubbing on carved pine wood panels and handmade paper, 136 x 287 x 36 inches. tions of black laser-cut vinyl adhesive. in exact ways. Bishop’s definition is of his striped posters on billboards and For Irruption (2005 and 2006) (Fig. 6) useful for distinguishing many instal- advertisements across Paris. Such street Silveira applied thousands of black vi- lation works from general exhibitions, art strategies continued in Paris in the nyl footprints to a gallery space at the but is less helpful when dealing with 1980s with artist groups such as Frères Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The printed components that often are ca- Ripoulin, and more recently in cities following year she adhered the same pable of leading double lives, the same throughout the world, as stencils and black footprints to the exterior of the component behaving one way in one pre-printed images have become the Taipei Arts Museum during the 6th place and another way in another place. media of choice for artists choosing to Taipei Biennial. In Bishop’s terms, the The increasing presence of “street work on the surfaces of city walls. work in Houston would be an installa- art” (or at least street artists) in muse- In recent years wheat-pasting artists tion while the one in Taipei would not, ums and galleries [see article, such as Swoon and JR have been invited though the artist considers them both this issue] is another manifestation of off the street and into the museum, manifestations of the same piece. print’s fluidity. When the Situationists where they have received accolades for Other well-known print-installa- pasted posters and slogans over adver- their print-based installations. In an tions, such as Xu Bing’s Book from the tisements, they called the practice de- event for the 2009 Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Sky (1987-1991), Nicola Lopez’ three- tournment (which translates roughly as JR completely covered the walls, ceiling, dimensional printed jungles, or Gu- “hijacking”) and championed the activi- and floor of a long corridor with photo- nilla Klingberg’s window dressings, ty as a form of protest through which art graphic portraits of local people. More are equally problematic. As always, the becomes active rebellion. In the spring recently Swoon installed The Ice Queen problem lies not with the art, but with of 1968 Daniel Buren followed suit with (2011) at LA MOCA’s “Art in the Streets” our post-facto attempts to parse work Affichages Sauvages, pasting some 200 exhibition. Roughly fifteen feet tall,The

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just glimpses of the imagery, and the Ice Queen was a gigantic tent-shaped Notes: jack-o-lantern whose intricate paper dark liquid basins reflect the imag- 1. The first documented use of the term (that I cuts appeared as projections on the ery in turn.12 could find) was for an exhibition in 2007 titled enveloping fabric. This move from the “ and Prinstallation” at the Green Door Gallery in Kansas City, MO. The exhibition was street to the museum has been lament- his is an installation about print- making itself. It reformulates the organized in conjunction with the Southern ed by some commentators as the insti- T Graphics Council (SGC) International Confer- tutionalization of an art form born to historic perception of the image as an ence. The SGC is organizing “a large-scale be radical and subversive, but it is worth index of experience while drawing at- collaborative printstallation” titled “Uncharted tention to its mutation over time and Territories: A Printscape” as part of a larger ex- considering that Swoon spent nearly a hibition that will accompany its 2012 printmak- month creating The Ice Queen—a type across mediums. Work that is inher- ing international conference. Since 2007 the of extensive execution that could never ently self-reflexive, as Convergence is, term has come into greater use in academic circles, most notably at the Savannah College have occurred on the street. necessarily incorporates the aspect of memory as it considers itself in order of Art and Design (printstallation.blogspot.com), Swoon’s work—on or off the the University of Montana-Missoula (printana. street—is characterized by an old-fash- to become a different version of itself. blogspot.com), the Stephen F. Austin State ioned sense of singularity. Though she The image of the cascading rocks re- University (sfaprintmkaing.blogspot,com). mains the same, though each medium Syracuse University printmaking program is working with repeatable elements organized an exhibition entitled “Monumental in the form of printing blocks, each it- gives it a unique character. If the Tread Printstallation” in 2010, and Fanny Retsek, eration proclaims its uniqueness. This is the Echo touched on this concept master printer at the San Jose Institute of Con- temporary Art teaches a course in “Printstal- tension between repeatable devices by exhibiting the prints and matrices together. Convergence goes further by lation” at the Santa Cruz summer workshops. and the absolute specificity of a place, Non-academic blogs and networking websites a moment in time, and an array of hu- demonstrating a threefold transfor- such as Printeresting, Inkteraction, and Hot man labor, runs thread-like through all mation that culminates in a reflection Iron Press have also embraced the neologism that is both literal and symbolic. The and begun documenting artworks that fit into its these diverse endeavors. categorical boundaries. The Israeli artist Orit Hofshi cre- viewer may experience the installation 2. Michael Asher, Installation Art, Eds. Nicolas ates monumental woodblock prints as a narrative, though it’s presented all de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petry, (Lon- don: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1994), 8-9. using large pine boards from construc- at once. Convergence may refer then not only to the intersection of stages ori- 3. Guy Debord, “Toward a Situationist Interna- tion supply stores for her matrices. tional,” in Situationist International Anthology, If the Tread is the Echo (2009) (Fig. 8), ented around processes and material, Ed. and Trans., Ken Knabb, (Berkeley: Bureau created for Philagrafika, was Hofshi’s but also to the metaphysical relation- of Public Secrets, 1981) 24-25. ship between memory and nowness. It 4. McDonough, Tom, Ed. Guy Debord and the first three-dimensional work. Her- in Situationist International: Texts and Docu- tention was “to create an experience suggests that memory is always a func- ments, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 91. viewers can physically be part of and tion of the present moment, and that 5. ohn McHale, This is Tomorrow, Ed. Theo Crosby, (London: Print Partners, 1956). Pub- [in which they can be] collaborators through memory the past is always present. lished in conjunction with the exhibition “This is in the conceptual outcome.”11 Hofshi Tomorrow” at the Whitechapel Gallery. built a small shed of pine-board matri- Convergence also works as a meta- 6. Dieter Roth, Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Ret- ces, which she attached to a large wall phor for the “printstallation” as a form, rospective, Eds. Bernadette Walter, Christine at once exceptionally contemporary Jenny, Theodora Vischer, (New York: Museum installation of prints and their matri- of Modern Art and Switzerland: Lars Muller ces. Convergence (2011), which will be and thoroughly rooted in both historic Publishers, 2003), 48. Published in conjunction installed in Swarthmore College’s List processes and the ambition of the 20th with the exhibition “Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Retrospective” at the Museum of Modern Art, Gallery this fall, draws deeply upon the century avant-garde to merge art and life. If the print-based installation is an New York. materiality of the printmaking process, 7. Asher, Installation Art, 35. incorporating prints and pine-board art form of the moment, perhaps it is 8. From an email exchange with the artist. matrices as well as containers of dark because this moment is permeated by 9. Alexia Tala, Installations & Experimental the growing power of images and the Printmaking, (London: A & C Black, 2009), 55. ink, representing the passage of the im- 10. Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical age from plate to paper. As Hofshi ex- machines and networks that create and History. (New York: Routledge, 2005). plains: disseminate them. It should be no sur- 11. From an email exchange with the artist. prise that artists feel the need to inves- 12. Ibid. [the] synthesis of these elements goes tigate the reception and production of

beyond process and matter. Paper is images in the physical world, to call our also typically a product of wood. The attention to the occupation of space by imagery of cascading stones [printed images, and to look at both how we got on the paper] is a visible testimony here and where we can go. of the physical carving of the wood. Darkly inked wood panels surrender Charles Schultz is a New York-based .

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