US $25 The Global Journal of Prints and Ideas September – October 2015 Volume 5, Number 3 Art in Extremis • Damon Davis in Ferguson • Dresden 1945 • Erwin Fabian & Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack • León Ferrari in Exile Japanese American Internment • Love and Labor Under Apartheid • Mail Art and Surveillance • Prix de Print • News artists’ books, and multiples The Tunnel NYC 269 11th Avenue (b/w 27th and 28th Streets) 212.673.5390 [email protected] www.eabfair.org @eabfair @eabfair @eabfair September – October 2015 In This Issue Volume 5, Number 3 Editor-in-Chief Susan Tallman 2 Susan Tallman On Survival Associate Publisher Art in Art in Print Number 2 4 Julie Bernatz Damon Davis: All Hands On Deck (2015) Managing Editor Johannes Schmidt 10 Isabella Kendrick Dresden 1945: Wilhelm Rudolph’s Compulsive Inventory Associate Editor Julie Warchol Stephen Coppel 16 Behind Barbed Wire: Printmaking in Manuscript Editor Australian Internment Camps by Prudence Crowther Erwin Fabian and Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack Online Columnist Charles M. Schultz 22 Sarah Kirk Hanley Paper Planes: Art from Japanese American Internment Camps Editor-at-Large Catherine Bindman Elizabeth C. DeRose 29 León Ferrari’s Heliografias Design Director Skip Langer Daniel Hewson 32 Love and Labor Under Apartheid: Webmaster An Interview with Yvette Mutumba Dana Johnson Zanna Gilbert 36 Art in Contact: The Mail Art Exchange of Paulo Bruscky and Robert Rehfeldt Prix de Print, No. 13 42 Katherine Alcauskas Rebuilding the Unbuilt [Y Block] by Sumi Perera Exhibition Review Paul Coldwell 44 Bruce Nauman Prints Book Reviews Elleree Erdos 46 Syria: Frontlines and Online On the Cover: Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, detail of Desolation: Internment camp, Orange NSW Peter S. Briggs 48 (1941), woodcut on thin paper. British Museum, Underground Art and Commerce London. Purchased with funds from the Friends News of the Print World 50 of Prints and Drawings. 2010,7075.1. ©Trustees of the British Museum. Reproduced by permission Contributors 68 of the artist’s estate. Guide to Back Issues 69 This Page: Robert Rehfeldt, detail of “ART- WORKERS UNITE” (1977), one sheet com- muniqué posted from the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Art in Print 3500 N. Lake Shore Drive Suite 10A Chicago, IL 60657-1927 www.artinprint.org Art in Print is supported in part [email protected] by an award from the 1.844.ARTINPR (1.844.278.4677) National Endowment for the Arts. No part of this periodical may be published Art Works. without the written consent of the publisher. On Survival By Susan Tallman ne of the most poignant images with mad city plans and human activ- Oin the British Museum’s 2011 exhi- ity stripped of purpose. Zanna Gilbert’s bition “Out of Australia” (see Art in Print study of the mail art exchange between May–June 2011) was Ludwig Hirschfeld Brazilian Paulo Bruscky and East Ger- Mack’s Desolation: Internment camp, man Robert Rehfeldt illuminates the Orange NSW (1941) reproduced on our critical function of mail art for artists cover. A few lines slashed into a rough isolated by their national regimes. board describe a lone figure silhouetted Daniel Hewson interviews curator against a tall wire fence (nervous ticks of Yvette Mutumba about the remarkable the knife make clear the wire is barbed); collection of prints by black South Afri- five stars twinkle above in the black sky. can artists acquired by the Weltkulturen To northern eyes the constellation looks Museum in Frankfurt during the Apart- like a misshapen Big Dipper, but an Aus- heid era. Yuchen Chang’s essay on wood- tralian would instantly recognize the cut and the Cultural Revolution has had Southern Cross. The stars seem to glit- to be postponed and will appear in a sub- ter with something like hope, even while sequent issue. anchoring the figure in a definitively In her review of the book Syria Speaks: foreign land. Art and Culture from the Front Line, Elleree Mack, a Bauhaus-trained artist, had Erdos considers the new importance of fled Nazi Germany for England only to social media for distributing art and for find himself transported halfway around connecting sundered communities in the world and interned as an enemy alien. diaspora. In other reviews, Paul Coldwell By any objective measure he was the vic- contemplates the importance of Bruce tim of political injustice, but Desolation Chiura Obata, detail of Seasons Greetings from Nauman prints at Sims Reed in London; is not a political work of art. It points no Topaz (ca. 1942), relief print and watercolor on and Peter Briggs reviews the social, visual paper, 2 3/4 x 4 3/4 inches. Gift of the Obata fingers at good guys or bad guys, shows no family. Topaz Museum, Delta, Utah. and economic styling of The Graphic Art visible abuse of power, argues no call to of the Underground: A Counter-Cultural action. Its supreme quality might best be History. The winner of this issue’s Prix described as existential stubbornness: The articles that follow look at art made de Print, chosen by curator and scholar “Look. I am here.” in exile, behind barbed wire, under subju- Katherine Alcauskas, is Sumi Perera’s The idea for this issue of Art in Print gation and amidst smoldering ruins. paean to visionary architecture, Rebuild- arose from conversations with the British In the days and weeks following the ing the Unbuilt [Y Block]. Museum’s Stephen Coppel about works firebombing of Dresden in February Finally, as the second iteration of the like Mack’s and about the broader ques- 1945, Wilhelm Rudolph recorded scene Art in Art in Print series, we are very tion of art created in extremis. There is after scene of craggy black blobs, the pleased to have in this issue Damon a lot of art about trauma, but relatively new, objective reality of the street cor- Davis’s All Hands on Deck, a project born little made within it. This stands to rea- ners and addresses he had known most of on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in son: making art in the midst of crisis is his life. Johannes Schmidt tells the story the aftermath of the shooting death of difficult—time, materials, stamina and of Rudolph’s compulsive catalogue of Michael Brown one year ago. As the chant concentration are all a struggle—and if destruction and the uses to which it was “Hands up, don’t shoot” spread around art in general is hard, prints, with their later put. the country, Davis understood the pro- particular materials and processes, are Stephen Coppel writes about the art vocative power of the associated gesture: that much harder. The recent exhibitions produced by Mack and Erwin Fabian in raised hands may be used to acquiesce, to marking the centenary of the outbreak of Australian internment camps during protest or to rebuild. From our earliest World War I were full of pictures of suf- World War II, while Charles Schultz sheds childhood, however, they are also used to fering, but the vast majority were made light on the work made by artists such as say simply, “Look. I am here.” at a geographical or chronological dis- Chiura Obata and George Matsusaburo tance: Otto Dix’s War etchings record the Hibi in the American internment camps Susan Tallman is the Editor-in-Chief of trenches in the most visceral and har- to which Japanese-Americans were forci- Art in Print. rowing terms, but they are dated six years bly relocated during the war. after Armistice Day. León Ferrari’s Heliografias, discussed The focus of this issue is not on trau- here by Elizabeth DeRose, were made in matic memory or the evil men do or even exile during the Argentinian Dirty War of the suffering that ensues; it is on the part the 1970s and ’80s. These large and pro- that art can sometimes play in surviving. vocatively fragile diazotypes are abuzz 2 Art in Print September – October 2015 ANNOUNCING AN ARTIST BOOK THE LULU PLAYS Earth-Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904) by Frank Wedekind with sixty-seven drawings by William Kentridge In fall 2015, Arion Press publishes The Lulu Plays with South African artist William Kentridge. One of Arion’s most ambitious projects, it contains 67 Kentridge prints bound into the 176-page volume, which is printed by letterpress in black and red (edition of 400). Four larger images, linoleum block prints, are available in a port- folio (edition of 40). The text is the original telling of the mythic Lulu saga, by German author Frank Wedekind, whose plays are the basis for the silent cinema classic Pandora’s Box and the Alban Berg opera Lulu. The prints are derived from drawings for projections in William Kentridge’s new production of the opera, opening at the Metro- politan Opera on November 5, 2015. Kentridge and publisher Andrew Hoyem will hold a conversation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 13. Kentridge drew his Lulu images on the pages of a dictionary and reworked them as collages that evoke moving pictures. On the opera stage, these bold images loom large and are distorted by the varying surfaces of the set. Sometimes only a detail is projected. On the pages of the Arion Press book, readers experience the entire image, on an intimate scale. Arion Press’s The Lulu Plays can be viewed now in San Francisco and in New York at the IFPDA Print Fair at the Park Avenue Armory, November 4 through 8, 2015. To obtain further information and request a printed prospectus, contact: THE ARION PRESS 1802 Hays Street, The Presidio, San Francisco, California 94129 415-668-2542 • [email protected] • www.arionpress.com Art in Art in Print Number 2 Damon Davis: All Hands On Deck (2015) Damon Davis, All Hands On Deck Project (2014), Ferguson, Missouri.