March – April 2013 Volume 2, Number 6 Image and Text in Crisis: Rauschenberg & Robbe-Grillet • Comics and Art after the Graphic Novel • Jürgen Partenheimer Stephen Chambers • Louise Bourgeois Between the Lines • David Musgrave • <100 • International Directory • Reviews • News History. Analysis. Criticism. Reviews. News. Art in Print. In print and online. www.artinprint.org Subscribe to Art in Print. March – April 2013 In This Issue Volume 2, Number 6 Editor-in-Chief Susan Tallman 2 Susan Tallman On Words and Pictures Associate Publisher Mark L. Smith 3 Julie Bernatz Image and Text in Crisis: Rauschenberg’s and Robbe-Grillet’s Managing Editor Annkathrin Murray Traces suspectes en surface Associate Editor Amy Peltz 8 Amelia Ishmael The Visual Turn: Comics and Art after the Graphic Novel Design Director Skip Langer Exhibition Reviews Manuscript Editor Paul Coldwell 15 Prudence Crowther Stephen Chambers: The Big Country Christina von Rotenhan 18 Louise Bourgeois: Between the Lines Edition Reviews Catherine Bindman 20 Jürgen Partenheimer: Folded Spirits M. Brian Tichenor & Raun Thorp 23 David Musgrave Amelia Ishmael 25 Eva Bovenzi Onsmith & Nudd Maru Rojas 27 The WITH Collective Elleree Erdos 28 Willie Cole Book Reviews Susan Tallman 29 Gert and Uwe Tobias: Dresdener Paraphrasen / Dresden Paraphrases <100 32 International Directory 2013 33 News of the Print World 38 Jürgen Partenheimer, cover of the artist book Folded Spirits (2012). Edition of 15. Co-published Contributors 48 by the artist and David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, Cape Town & New York. Guide to Back Issues 49 Deb Sokolow, detail of You tell people you’re Membership Subscription Form 50 working really hard on things these days (2010), graphite, charcoal, ink, and acrylic on paper, mounted on panel, 7 × 25 feet. Art in Print 3500 N. Lake Shore Drive 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 Words and Pictures By Susan Tallman Detail of The [Cha]mpion; or Even[ing] Adver[tiser] by Capt Hercules Binegar, of Pall-mall (1744), etching and engraving with stipple and roulette, 28.9 x 35.9 cm. Published by George Bickham the Younger. ©The Trustees of the British Museum his issue marks the second full year word-and-image form that has been fight- Bourgeois’ many word-and-image prints T of Art in Print. Some of the issues we ing for space since the 1960s. Its current (reviewed p. 18) and a number of Gert and have published in that time were planned territory is a kind of art-world Kurdistan, Uwe Tobias’ Dresdener Paraphrasen wood- around particular themes—the legacy of bounded by literature on one side, street cuts (reviewed p. 29) employ words and Stanley William Hayter (Vol. 2, No. 3) or culture on another and the museum on a images as allies rather than adversaries, the materiality of early modern prints third. While the recent embrace of graphic fiddling with the design of each to pro- (Vol. 2, No. 4)—others reflect the vibrant novels by English departments around the duce meanings independently available to miscellany of endeavor that is printed art, world suggests a rapprochement on the neither on its own. mixing contemporary and old masters, literary front, Peltz suggests that younger This issue also includes reviews of art- historical analysis and on-the-ground artists are leaning toward greater visual works that sport no words, like Willie Cole’s reporting. Sometimes, however, a theme invention and looking for a different kind Beauties (p. 28) and David Musgrave’s Golems arises serendipitously, as it did for this issue, of future. (p. 23), in which image and object form a when a number of authors approached us Mark L. Smith, meanwhile, looks back self-sufficient entity…and yet, the purpose with different subjects that all touched at Traces suspectes en surface (1972-78), the of Art in Print is to add words—words that upon the troubled marriage of word and provocative and under-recognized col- fill in background information, that dem- image in printed matter. laboration between Robert Rauschenberg onstrate how that image caught and stuck It is a marriage that goes as far back as and the French Nouvelle Vague novelist in the writer’s mind, that describe what it print itself, though until the invention of Alain Robbe-Grillet. This unconventional, was like to be in the presence of the real moveable type it was more like the relation- unbound book manifests a desire to set thing (as opposed to just the reproduction). ship between conjoined twins than between words and images at odds, allowing each to Words and pictures carry distinct meanings spouses. Even after Gutenberg, when they operate as a goad to the other, and leaving that do not add up neatly like two columns were no longer forced to share the same the viewer/reader to sort it all out. of numbers joined in a single sum. As the template, words and images continued to More blithe in spirit, Stephen Cham- essays here make clear, sometimes they reit- divvy up space on the page in illustrated bers’ architecturally scaled print The Big erate, sometimes they elaborate on, and books and livres d’artistes, in the inscribed Country (reviewed p. 15) mimics the ambig- sometimes they contradict each other. That copperplates of engravings, the graphic uous ambitions, at once decorative and complexity is one of the greatest assets of engineering of fin de siècle posters, and pedagogic, of map labels and illustrations, art in print. more recently, in all the photographs, paint- while the WITH Collective’s new publica- tion (reviewed p. 27) attempts to do away ings and installations that have arisen from Susan Tallman is the Editor-in-Chief of the Postmodern desire to throw sticks in with the image altogether, leaving the text Art in Print. the spokes of accepted meaning. embedded in the physical object it produced. In the pages that follow, Amy Peltz looks Finally, Jürgen Partenheimer’s recent at the current state of alternative comics, a livre d’artiste (reviewed p. 20), Louise 2 Art in Print March – April 2013 Image and Text in Crisis: Rauschenberg’s and Robbe-Grillet’s Traces suspectes en surface By Mark L. Smith n 1983, the French novelist Alain Robbe- I Grillet described his vision of the ideal relationship between image and text: …the work that contains both an image and a text is going to be not an illus- trated text, but an ensemble of contra- dictions in which the text and the images are going to play antagonistic roles. In short, the role of the text is to put the image in a state of crisis.1 Robert Rauschenberg, he said, had been “the first painter to accept the game…of confronting images and text.”2 Rauschen- berg and Robbe-Grillet collaborated just once, on the deluxe artist’s book Traces suspectes en surface (1972-78), a work whose words and images overlap, echo, double back, and refuse to adapt to expectation. In its final form and in the process used to reach that form, Traces suspectes mani- fests the penchant for discontinuity and multiplicity that was so essential to both artists and that made them both so repre- sentative of their time. Despite the singular importance of this collaboration, however, Traces suspectes has (like many artists’ book projects) been largely overlooked in discus- sions of both artists’ oeuvres. Robbe-Grillet observed that, “for someone who might like to make a careful study of the work, it really is a surprising ensemble.”3 This essay seeks to elucidate that surprise. The oeuvre of Alain Robbe-Grillet was a keystone of the French nouveau roman liter- ary movement.4 Dispensing with standard chronologies and descriptions of the pro- tagonist’s psychological experience, they concentrate on narrative fragments and detailed poetic descriptions of environ- ments and characters in the urban world. For Robbe-Grillet, the significance of the objects he described resided in their mate- Robert Rauschenberg, page 11 from Traces suspectes en surface (1972-78), lithograph, sheet 40 1/4 x 27 1/4 inches. Edition of 36. Published by ULAE, West Islip, NY. Harry Ransom Center, The University of riality, not in their ability to signify some Texas at Austin. Art ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. larger truth. He pointedly observed, “the world is neither meaningful nor absurd. It simply is.”5 Robert Rauschenberg, meanwhile, had about…if you can recognize something, In its fracturing of narrative conven- been employing found materials and col- then it has distinction. It has uniqueness. tions and its ennobling embrace of banal laborative strategies since the 1950s. He Anything that has uniqueness deserves subjects, the nouveau roman can be seen to aimed to “work in the gap between art and respect.”8 His abiding interest in collab- echo both Cubism and Pop Art (or its French life,” like Robbe-Grillet, creating poetic orative processes had led him to work with cousin, nouveau réalisme).6 Robbe-Grillet, a objects out of the seem ingly banal detritus musicians, dancers, engineers and—most former painter, was particularly interested of the urban environment.7 Rauschenberg productively—print shops. In 1962 he began in the interaction of art and literature. said that objects were what “my work is all working in lithography at Universal Limited Art in Print March – April 2013 3 Art Editions in West Islip, NY, at the invita- his earlier work (indeed, portions of the with the signatures of artist and author, and tion of the print shop’s visionary founder, text had been published in his 1976 book, signed by both in pencil.