A Matrix You Can Move In: Prints and Installation Art Charles Schultz

Art in Print September – October 2011 A Matrix You Can Move In: Prints and Installation Art 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. artists 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. 11 Art in Print September – October 2011 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 artist’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 physically built.4 Nonetheless, they contained an essential germ of installation art: the desire to redirect human attention through interventions in the environment. 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, organized 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. 12 Art in Print September – October 2011 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-specific. 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 printmaking 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.

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