A Legacy of Diversity: New Prints 2003/Winter

This is the third time I have juried, along with a genial group of art-world colleagues, IPCNY's New Prints exhibition. Each time the submissions have grown more numerous as artists, print workshops, and publishers grow better acquainted with the IPCNY exhibitions, which have all been remarkable for their quality and scope. Indeed, there were so many submissions to this latest competition that IPCNY decided to divide the selections into a two-part exhibition, of which this is the first installment. What is notable in the submissions is their diversity, providing a mirror of the wider world of contemporary art. We are reminded in each of these exhibitions that prints should never be viewed apart from that world, of which they can often be as much harbinger as symptom.

Though we can safely mark the demise of postmodernism in many of its more subtle characteristics, its obvious legacy is to have fostered a diversity of artistic styles and practices. This condition has neatly dovetailed with the situation of printmaking today. The so-called print renaissance in the United States established innovative workshops that trained many printers, who fanned out across the land as ingenious problem-solvers ready to figure nearly anything out. They, in turn, trained (in workshops or at universities) a new generation of printmaking artists, and so on. It is probably safe to say that nowhere else in the world has printmaking become as widespread and as innovative an endeavor as in the United States, with its open art market hungry for affordable commodities. Ironically, this (usually) more affordable commodity often remains hidden from view, for the art market must limit what gets seen and sold. Prints are, in this context, tainted goods: seemingly tied to the market, they are neither expensive nor monumental, and mainstream (non-print) art dealers expend little or no energy on them. We have to search hard for them, as most are produced in venues independent of the prevailing gallery system. It is sometimes even a challenge to find prints by well-known "blue-chip" artists, despite the fact that they can produce prints of great interest.

IPCNY has attempted to rectify this situation by creating a public viewing space and regular juried competitions to bring to light this scattered production. No wonder that so very many prints are now finding their way to the eyes of IPCNY jurors: it is a measure, alas, of the general neglect of the medium. Yet, in fact, prints might be seen as the optimistic excess of the market in contemporary art, the symptom of its capacity for a material and creative inventiveness that will not be hampered by tough economic facts. Artists continue to find in prints an outlet for impulses that they can vent nowhere else and ideas they can embody in no other way. Prints get made, whether or not they are sold or even seen.

In a condition of great diversity, it is difficult to isolate trends. We jurors noticed a few, however: the tendency to work in cartoon or childhood idioms, for example, here seen in work by Aya Kakeda, Marguerite Karl, Karin Bos, and Adam Pitt, whose rather irresistible work has been selected for several previous New Prints exhibitions. It is no coincidence that "Comics and Animation" was one section in the recent, much-praised exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Queens, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, curated by Laura Hoptman. The artists in the MoMA show were better known, but something is clearly stirring in the Zeitgeist. Ever since the nineties rehabilitated underground Comix in several key exhibitions and began to look seriously at Japanese manga and anime, there has been a steadily mounting number of artists who have found in those genres a satisfying expression of our cultural anxieties and neuroses. Among the New Prints, two little costumed figures forlornly seated in a vast forest of tree stumps or raising a lantern to view a creepy haunted house of silhouetted bugs and ghouls show artist Aya Kakeda to be keenly aware of this propensity, like her contemporary Layla Ali (not represented here); while Adam Pitt always finds a way to lance the frustration and rage pent up in our corporate high-rises.

Another section in the MoMA show was "Visionary Architecture," and, sure enough, a number of print entries showed an interest in architectural fantasy (Francis Cape, Amze Emmons, and Gesine Jenzen are represented here). With a little stretch, we could place Tomas Vu-Daniel's remarkable Studies for Opium Dreams, arguably this exhibition's show-stopper, into Hoptman's category "Cosmogonies." In these large prints we are confronted with a surface that comprises both botanical specimens and constellations, microscopic specimens and a tiny parachute, all adrift in a smoky, translucent spiral tipped up into a vertical plane. Suzanne McClelland's Annunciation is a kind of cosmos of art history and technology, and Barbara Takenaga's hallucinatory Night Visitor could be the universe either inside or outside our heads.

Never loathe to experiment technologically, American printmakers have turned increasingly to digital modalities in the past few years, either for preparing or outputting their works. We should recall that one of the characteristics of Pop Art was its embrace of technological modes of producing images to imitate the look of advertising. How much more pronounced the trend is today, as it becomes increasingly difficult to discern any difference at all between the art and the ads! Such is especially the case with digital art. So it is interesting that a number of the digital prints in this show-McClelland's Annunciation, Claude Kent's untitled abstractions, and Amze Emmons's dreamy Baggage Carts-look so incredibly handcrafted. McClelland exploits the characteristic marks of digital drawing to create an ambient ground of expressionist lines and "drips." Opening the composition like a book jacket, she punches up the color by using pigmented inks, printing an irreverent "title" along the spine and distorting her appropriated images. Kent's geometric forms, arranged in a row and printed in cool, matte colors, have the simple clarity of an early modernist composition. And Emmons's carts remind us of the impasto-rich confections of an early Wayne Thiebaud. The technique might be the most up-to-the-minute, but these artists have spurned the slicker effects of the digital medium.

Several of the artists in this exhibition have seized on prints to stretch beyond what is most readily expected of them, based on their work in other media. Leslie Wayne, in a screenprint produced at Durham Press in Pennsylvania, has photographed and made color separations of details of her own paintings, which are clustered together like an exotic coral in the bottom corner of a white field of screens printed on vellum. This gives the work a very different feeling from the weighty materiality of her paintings, with their thick slabs of paint applied like relief. Jean-Paul Russell, Durham's founder, seems to have a penchant for encouraging artists to step outside their signatures: the Wayne print is related to her other work more in concept than in look. The same is true of Polly Apfelbaum's Durham Press prints. Known best for her installations of hand-dyed fabric scatter pieces, she here shows several prints from a series of straight-on renditions of a 19th-century French manual on color. Marguerite Kahrl has produced, at Dieu Donné Papermill, large, ungainly stenciled paper-pulp editions of heavy dirigibles scanning remote skies and vitiated landscapes: how do we relate these to her remote-controlled vehicles pieced together from landfills or her video of "Meek and Timid Action Figures" moving through dicey post-industrial industrial terrain? The point is not that these elements resemble each other, exactly, but that they inhabit the same universe.

On the other hand, in his skillful rendering of a temporary altar-like structure he installed last year at Amherst College, Francis Cape has provided nothing more, or less, than an elegant memorial to a work that no longer exists. And Joanne Greenbaum's recent screenprints made at the Lower East Side Printshop are only somewhat more rollicking versions of the rickety bright-hued structures that teeter and tip within the white ground of her paintings. None of the artists are using prints to make exact copies of their works in other media, but some show closer ties than others.

The temptation, still, is to create beautifully crafted works, some of which betray the hand at a certain remove. Richard Serra has continued to work faithfully at Gemini G.E.L., here on etchings somewhat smaller than usual and with a more open composition, his characteristically thick ink printed in rough, loose coils, as if in a single gesture that flings accessory marks into the atmosphere. Pepa Busqué exploits the clumsy woodcut line to produce jittery drawings in white on a slate-gray background, in which the vaguely figural and botanical images hover like graffiti. Most exquisite are the etchings of Aleksander Duravcevic, who has illustrated a heartbreaking series of poems by the late Harry Kondoleon, who died of AIDS in 1994. Duravcevic's delicate botanicals, set quietly into the white page or printed on tissue bound into the book, provide the perfect match, in their teary ambiguity, to Kondoleon's poems confronting his own demise.

Bleeding effects are achieved, too, in poetic color spitbite aquatints that Peter Doig has produced at Crown Point Press, images of an island glimpsed at night across an expanse of streaked water and of a white horse grazing in a vast field that seems to shimmer, mirage-like, before the gaze. And Brian Lynch has laid down a black line so thick and gloppy that the flat litho seems to rise from the surface. The subjects are ordinary: a man with a moustache, two workers carrying rebar, and a woman wearing a puffy down coat. Lynch gives them a portentous quality, a sense that they somehow mean something more than what they are.

There is a nice blend in the selection on view of artists who show their hands and artists who don't; of those who tend to do the same things again and again, inflecting them subtly, and those who try something completely new each time. All print media are represented, and imagery ranges from the representational to the abstract, the conceptual to the observed. I have not mentioned all the artists in the show. But the display demonstrates the sheer diversity that is possible in print, a fact that gives the medium a timeliness that is possible perhaps nowhere else.

Faye Hirsch, Member, Selections Committee

© IPCNY, 2003

Members of the Selections Committee for A Legacy of Diversity: New Prints 2003/Winter were: Ann Fensterstock, Joseph Goddu, Laura Steward Heon, Faye Hirsch, Leonard Lehrer and Judith Solodkin.