Prints and Precedents • Prints and Installation Art • Wiener Werkstätte
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September – October 2011 Volume 1, Number 3 Street Art: Prints and Precedents • Prints and Installation Art • Wiener Werkstätte: Changing Impressions South Africa at MoMA • Nancy Princenthal on Image + Text + Books • Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered September – October 2011 In This Issue Volume 1, Number 3 Editor-in-Chief Susan Tallman 1 Susan Tallman On the Corner Managing Editor Gill Saunders 2 Julie Bernatz Street Art: Prints and Precedents Reviews Editor Charles Schultz 10 Jessica Taylor Caponigro A Matrix You Can Move In: Prints and Installation Art Associate Editor Annkathrin Murray Heather Hess 18 Changing Impressions: Journal Design Wiener Werkstätte Prints and Textiles Julie Bernatz Jay Clarke 26 Creative Direction The Politics of Geography and Process: Chris Palmatier Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now Annual Subscriptions We have three membership levels to Book Reviews 29 choose from. Subscribe via Paypal on Nancy Princenthal our website or by post. See the last It is Almost That: A Collection of page in this issue to print the Image+Text Work by Women Artists Subscription Membership Form. & Writers Basic Susan Tallman PDF Journal (6 issues) Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered $50.00 Contributors 35 Professional PDF Journal (6 issues) Subscription + 6 online ads Membership Form 36 + 1 ad in the PDF Journal + Directory listing $120.00 Institutional PDF Journal (6 issues) + 12 Online ads + 3 ads in the PDF Journal + Directory listing $250.00 For library subscriptions, please contact us. Cover Image: Art in Print Robert Dighton, detail of A Windy Day— 3500 N. Lake Shore Drive, Suite 10A Scene outside the shop of Bowles, the Chicago, IL 60657-1927 printseller, in St Paul’s Churchyard (c.1785), www.artinprint.org watercolor, 32.5 x 25 cm. The Victoria and info @ artinprint.org Albert Museum, no. D.843-1900. This Page: No part of this periodical may Detail of stenciled graffiti on the West Bank be published without the written barrier wall at Bethlehem, Israel, 2009. consent of the publisher. Photograph by Tantum Collins. Art in Print September – October 2011 On the Corner By Susan Tallman nce upon a time, prints were ity. The beauty of the electronic image and Textiles”). In all these places, the O critical, socially dynamic—even is that it can be everywhere and no- print acts as a bridge between the par- dangerous—things. All those tiresome, where; street art, installation art, and ticular and the repeatable, the populist indirect and time-consuming print artists’ books on the other hand drama- and the esoteric, the difficult message processes were developed and toler- tize the specific: this place, this thing, and the appealing surface. ated (and yes, sometimes adored) be- this moment in time. If the contem- The politics of all this are intrigu- cause they could get the word out: the porary plenitude of pixels is a logical ingly convoluted: as street artists have teachings of Buddha, the mendacity extension of printing, it would be easy been welcomed into the museum, for of the king, the imperial tax code, the to think of these forms as anti-prints. example, their work has become both price on Jesse James’ head. Prints have a And yet, rather than being deployed more exclusive (most museums cost great reputation as tools of democracy, against multiplicity (as, say, much Ab- money to enter; printrooms have an but the truth is that both the powerful stract Expressionist painting was) they unstated cover charge paid in cultural and the powerless, the crown and the frequently employ it. capital) and less exclusive (prints in a throng, have turned to prints to press museum are not going to be painted their point of view. over, rained on, plastered over—they The Museum of Modern Art’s ex- will be available to all the people who hibition of prints from South Africa, could not get to that particular street reviewed in this issue of Art in Print by corner on that particular week.) Simi- Jay Clarke, demonstrates that prints larly, most print-based installations can can still be vital tools of social change. only be in one place at one time, which Printeresting.com observed, during the puts them into the same snootily ex- protests in Wisconsin last spring, that clusive category as oil paintings, but “while Twitter and Facebook may be frequently they are made up of mod- amazing organizational tools, holding ules that allow them to be recreated in up your iPhone at a political rally to other spaces, and to be responsive to share a political graphic is less effective those spaces. Is this exemplary power [than…] old-fashioned paper and ink.” Stenciled graffiti on the West Bank barrier wall sharing between artist and audience, or There is no doubt that—in the right at Bethlehem, Israel, 2009. Photograph by just a further indulgence of the already circumstances—prints still have a so- Tantum Collins. over-privileged consumer? Which is cial role. more admirable—the total (and neces- That said, their original raison This issue of Art in Print looks at this sarily unique) design schemes imposed d’être—broadcasting information—has conundrum in urban streets from 18th by the early Wiener Werkstätte, or the been taken over by other, vastly more century London to 21st century Los An- bits and bobs of Werkstätte fabrics that effective technologies, and this has geles (Gill Saunders, “Street Art: Prints American clients added at whim to been the case for close to a century. and Precedents”); in the trajectory of their mish-mosh interiors? Digital technology just exacerbated the installation art over the past forty years Prints have always operated at situation imposed by analog devices (Charles Schultz, “A Matrix You Can the crossroads: market-friendly and from radio onward: the disembodi- Move In: Prints and Installation Art”); rabble-rousing; elitist and egalitarian. ment of the message as a condition of in the hand-held intimacy of book At a time when cultural and politi- its distribution. works (Nancy Princenthal, “It is Almost cal discourse seems so impossibly en- So now we live in a world awash in That: A Collection of Image+Text Work trenched, the borders of each camp so potential pictures. It is probably no ac- by Women Artists & Writers”) and in cleanly drawn, one can only be grateful cident that this rising tide of ethereal the odd transformation of the Wiener to the print for—as ever—mucking up images has coincided with the rise of Werkstätte from high-minded reform- the edges. strategies such as street art, installation ers to purveyors of cozy, domestic con- art, and artists’ books—forms that em- sumables (Heather Hess, “Changing Susan Tallman is the Editor-in-Chief of phasize physical locality and corporeal- Impressions: Wiener Werkstätte Prints Art in Print. 1 Art in Print September – October 2011 Fig. 1. Robert Dighton, A Windy Day—Scene outside the shop of Bowles, the printseller, in St Paul’s Churchyard (c.1785), watercolor, 32.5 x 25 cm. The Victoria and Albert Museum, no. D.843-1900. 2 Art in Print September – October 2011 Street Art: Prints and Precedents By Gill Saunders Fig. 6. Ben Eine, Scary (2008), screenprint, 30 x 80 cm. The Victoria and Albert Museum, no. E.319-2010. ©Eine. raffiti, street art, and their printed offered their wares on the street; such anonymous caricature (attributed to G progeny, now ubiquitous, may ap- things were part of a public dialogue Bartolozzi) shows the window of Mat- pear to have sprung fully formed from about newsworthy events, religious thew Darly’s shop in which prints were the spray cans and stencils wielded by belief, morality, and politics. Cheap, under violent attack from the drawing a new breed of artist, operating outside accessible and topical, such prints master, printseller and caricaturist Wil- the system and eschewing the tradi- were also disposable. Political and so- liam Austin, who was offended to find tions. But like any other art form, street cial satires in the form of cartoons himself the subject of a print mock- art has a rich vocabulary of sources and and caricatures circulated in much the ing his ambition.2 Robert Dighton’s precedents. Its motifs, graphic styles same way, and were also available from charming watercolour of a windy day and references are drawn, wittingly print-sellers. In 18th and 19th century in St. Paul’s Churchyard shows a crowd or otherwise, from sources as various London, the shop windows where tumbled and tossed by gusts of wind, as skateboard culture, album covers, newly published prints were displayed against the backdrop of Bowles’ print comics, film, protest posters and ’60s were a source of public entertainment shop, its window plastered with rows psychedelia, Mexican Day of the Dead for those who could not afford to buy, of prints. (Fig. 1) ephemera, Renaissance vanitas and and even for those who were illiterate In the 19th century, with the appear- danse macabre imagery, printed ballads, but could nevertheless recognize the ance of letterpress posters and notices broadsides and caricatures, and the monarch or politician lampooned in and the rise of lithographic advertising work of artist printmakers down the exaggerated guise. The interaction of posters, print enjoyed an increasingly centuries. prints and their audiences can be seen dominant presence in public spaces. By It is not only older print imagery and in George Woodward’s Caricature Cu- the later 20th century this presence was styles that serve as precedents, but an riosity of 1806, which shows a plump perceived to be oppressive as advertis- earlier print culture itself. Print has a clergyman and a skinny volunteer of- ing sites multiplied in number and size.