THE CALIFORNIA PRINTMAKER THE JOURNAL OF THE CALIFORNIA SOCIETY OF PRINTMAKERS ISSUE NO. 1, MAY 1998 Karen Kunc, Riddle, 1997, woodcut on shaped paper, 16˝ x 11˝ INSIDE: Reversals; In Pursuit of Culture; Makeready; Sightlines; Street Prints; Rauschenberg; Web Tour; Misch Kohn; John Ihle; Annual Meeting … Herlinde Spahr, Cracktal Composition II, 1993, collage of lithographs on formica, 5’ x 8’ (Photo: Joe Schopplein) About Reversals in Printmaking by Herlinde Spahr After the guide had told us the meaning of the smallest between the time before and after printing, between the details in Van Eyck’s The Adoration of the Lamb, I asked him private perspective in the studio and the public print in the why the gold lettering on one of the side panels was writ- museum, between the unique and intimate nature of the ten upside down and backward. “Oh, that’s simple,” he matrix and the reversed vision in the print. said, in his heavy Ghent dialect in which the g sounds like Although photographers and sculptors also experience an h, “that’s simple. Those letters are not intended for you, this moment of reversal, with the flopped negative and with they are painted for God who is looking down from the inverted cast, only the print artist creates a work of art above.” I was immediately charmed by that medieval God by imagining it from the outset as an object in a world in so bodily present as a viewer of the panel. But that simple which all the values are reversed, where any vision must thought of a second, opposing point of view, looking back first manifest itself in its negative form. Rather than look at at the artist and the viewer is unforgettable. Painted as an prints, one should look through prints, because in the depth act of worship, the rotated text of gold in turn challenged of every print is the artist looking back from within. A print- those looking at the panel to adopt a different perspective, maker always describes the world as seen from a eclectic to try to decipher the world from God’s point of view. vantage point, a world in which high and low, black and In the medium of prints it is not Van Eyck’s God who is white, right and left have no fixed value. looking back at the viewer but the printmaker himself, an The Beltir, a people in North Asia, believe the lower artist whose medium demands an imagination capable of world to be an inverted image of this world. They bury radical reversals. The printmaker’s vision is always split their dead with the reins in the left hand of the corpse 2 The California Printmaker rather than in the right one, and the objects they place on perhaps the most moving and poetic image preserved of the grave for use of the dead are either broken or turned that most bloody of wars. Imagine a gardener at the time, upside down in the firm belief that they will emerge whole working inside this chapel of glass, with the sun slowly in the other world. These striking rituals are not unlike the drying the emulsion, the bloody images quietly cracking activities of printmakers who anticipate the way the press and peeling away, the tomatoes ripening in the heat. Look- will reverse and transform their images. Why do so many ing up to the sky he would see, staring back at him, black of the print techniques remind us of forms of torture? Take soldiers turned white, gaping wounds emitting light, an the expressionist artist fiercely attacking an innocent block army of hollow-eyed ghosts, the poetry of stained glass. of pine, ripping and splintering the wood in search of the Yes, this, too, is the workspace of an artist, a fragile chapel truth, or the etcher’s perverse delight in disfiguring the in which visitors from the real world must learn to look smooth skin of copper by incising deep furrows with tools with different eyes. ranging from burins to dremels, by eating into the metal I often think of the Beltir and their graves. What would with poisonous acids, Dutch mordants: are these acts of be left of their culture if the belief in a different and better disfigurement not similar to the distorting rituals of the world would gradually fade and die? Their empty ritual of Beltir? As artists, we dream of high ridges while digging reversals would only leave behind a collection of tombs away in the trenches. So much of our craft that remains with left-handed corpses, a scattering of cracked vessels. hidden from the public defies the pristine, serene, framed Also the process of printmaking is doomed to become but a and tamed works of art that are called “prints.” So much of strange ritual, a series of empty procedures and techniques, our craft is geared at obscuring the reality of that violence unless its language of reversals compels the imagination to done in the privacy of our studios: these activities are the look at the world from a different perspective. rituals that will guarantee the final print to emerge whole, A printmaker is not someone who produces prints, pure, restored. rather an artist who is looking at the world from the van- But why should all this matter to a novice looking at ishing point. prints? Imagine a viewer, unfamiliar with Christian mythology, looking at Grünewald’s panel of the resurrec- Postscript tion in Colmar. Is it possible to admire the triumphant body In 1993, the year I became an American citizen, I was of Christ rising skyward without knowing what is painted awarded a Kala fellowship in Berkeley and set out on an on the other side of that panel? There that same body lies ambitious print measuring five by eight feet. It was a large dead, a green corpse with a skin covered with pustules collage of torn lithographs printed on Formica and shaped oozing pus, with bruises and gashes disfiguring the flesh, with a router into the contours of the United States. But with fragments of thorns embedded in clotted blood. Some rather than depict the map as seen from the sky as is usual prints are not worth admiring if we remain ignorant of that with maps, I chose to imagine a point of view looking miraculous process of transfiguration at the core of the upward from deep within the earth. California now faced printmaker’s imagination. To look at a print always implies the Eastern seaboard, and New York was banished to the looking at two prints, to try to imagine a rotating point of Far West to endure the storms of the Pacific. And rather view that twists the truth around once more. Darkness in than depict the man-made borders of the different states, I any print has a light all its own. I once heard of a gallery applied on the stone cracking varnishes invented for the owner refraining from exhibiting the new prints of one of forgery trade to create a natural network of meandering the artists in his stable “because the work had turned so lines cracking up the face of this reversed map of the Unit- dark and somber.” Let us not be fooled. The language ed States. When this work was recently reproduced in a indigenous to printmaking tends to explode that vocabu- book, I discovered to my dismay that the map was scanned lary, its dance around the values of darkness and light, of in reverse, making it once more conform to its traditional the left and the right, of highs and lows will never be a lan- format. Apparently, the printer flopped the image at the guage that benignly underwrites the status quo. How last minute. I hereby dedicate these brief thoughts to that much light does it take before darkness comes into view? printer who reversed my reversal. In the final episode of Ken Burns’s documentary The References: Civil War, he zooms in on a neglected greenhouse filled Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton, with weeds. During the war, photography was the new NJ, Princeton University Press, 1964. medium of choice. But when the bloodshed of battle was The Best of Printmaking. An International Collection, Selected by finally over, people no longer wanted to look at pho- Lynn Allen and Phyllis Mc Gibbon, with an introduction by Ruth Weisberg, Gloucester, MA, Quarry Books, 1997. tographs recording the horrors of that war, and thousands of glass negatives depicting proud uniforms and bloody Herlinde Spahr is a Bay Area artist and writer. Her recent monograph corpses were sold to be salvaged as greenhouse panes. This Open Studio: Work from 1977 to 1997 is reviewed in this issue of The silent greenhouse of the period, now rank with weeds, was California Printmaker. May 1998 3 Ariadne’s Thread—Memory in Pursuit of Culture: Claudia Bernardi in Discussion with Moira Roth at Artists Forum by Fran Valesco Artists Forum presents work in the context of conceptual concerns and features various events such as artists’ talks, critical lectures, panel discussions, and workshops in con- junction with exhibitions. On October 29, 1997, Artists Forum presented a conversation with artist Claudia Bernar- di and art historian Moira Roth, titled “Ariadne’s Thread— Memory in Pursuit of Culture.” The event took place in the gallery at 251 Post Street in San Francisco where Claudia’s exhibition, “Bajo La Piel” (“Under the Skin”) was mounted. That evening’s conversation was the result of an initial gift by Claudia to Moira of a spool of thread, which led to other gifts, phone calls, faxes, and handwritten notes.