
Statement, Bio, Press Releases, and Q&A: scroll down
STATEMENT
The basic print on paper remains the
core of my practice even as I mix printmaking with installation, sculpture,
painting, drawing and video. Printmaking process—woodcut, etching,
lithography, silkscreen, inkjet—are both artistic and social media. While
artistic concerns are aesthetic, formal, and material, the social use of print
media relates to image production, image propagation, image use, and image
meaning (the icon). What we now call ‘traditional’ print processes were
once cutting edge technologies. Printmaking’s innovative history
continues today with photography, video, photomechanical, and digital
printing. These technical accomplishments also have parallel social
innovations—the rise of mass culture, mass media, and the visual display and
ordering of knowledge within our visually saturated society. I was first
attracted to print media through my interest in social sciences and political
philosophy. By working with prints and the multiple I could cut up,
overprint, combine, repeat, and reassemble work in multiple ways. I
embarked on a constant rebuilding and reassembling of work while adding new
components and destroying old. I see this artistic process as an analogy
for how our social world is constructed.
As I continue to work in print media,
mastering new processes, teaching and mentoring students, and working with
other artists as a master printer - I have become more focused on the printed
image as a key concern in understanding our contemporary condition.
My current work encompasses large-scale
installations (indoor and outdoor, gallery and public), as well smaller works
on paper, and fabric. I am interested in the meaning of the image; image
use, the icon, propaganda, mass media, the artistic field, the politics of
representation, the ubiquity of the image, the spectacle perfected as image,
and ultimately the fragmentation and disappearance of the image. Print media is
a deep reservoir, a wellspring for intellectually rooted practice, with easily
forged links to active material/process-based practices. I am
using this dual approach to ask the question: ‘what is the significant
image?’
BIOGRAPHY
Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, Rob made his first relief print
"Hippopotamus" at age five.
He studied art and political science at Hampshire College, and
subsequently lived and worked in Central Europe, pursuing postgraduate studies
in political science at Budapest’s Central European University. He received his MFA from Columbia
University in 2006, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in
2007, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program in 2009-10, and is alumnus of the
Philadelphia art collective Vox Populi.
Rob is a cofounder and master printer of Prints of Darkness, a
collaborative printmaking studio in Brooklyn, NY. He has had solo shows with Esther Massry Gallery, Albany
(2011); David Krut Projects, NYC (2010); BravinLee Programs, NYC (2010); and
Vox Populi, Philadelphia (2008 and 2009).
Rob has been in group shows at Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY
(2011); Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2011); NADA Hudson (Canada Gallery),
Hudson, NY (2011); Mason Gross Galleries, New Brunswick, NJ (2010);
Philagraphika at Seraphin Gallery, Philadelphia (2010); Canada Gallery, NYC
(2008); The Queens Museum at Bulova, Queens, NY (2008) and the Frederic Snitzer
Gallery, Miami, FL (2006). He has
been featured in V-magazine, as well as the Printeresting, and Art21
blogs. Rob recently finished a
fellowship with the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center for the winter 2011-12.
Press Release Below Orion’s Belt
FAWC’s Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, MA
January-February 2012
In the Provincetown night sky, somewhere Below Orion’s Belt, is Wall of Noise
Nebula and its mixed print media Star Cluster Orchestra. Join artist and Fine Arts Work Center Fellow Rob
Swainston for a journey in spaceship Hudson
D Walker Gallery to visit Wall of Noise Nebula, a 20x17 foot woodblock
print/soundstage/lightshow/video.
Misbehaving actors attempt to tear down Wall of Noise, but the video
cannot touch the impermeable topography of the printed image. Guy Debord tells us the spectacle
perfected is power consolidated as pure image. If Wall of Noise is Debord’s Spectacle Capitalism, then its
Star Cluster Orchestra is Naomi Klein’s Disaster Capitalism; master printer is
replaced by disaster printer.
Master printers are technocrats, proto-machines and image-smiths in the
Spectacle-Image order. Star Cluster
Orchestra posits a new printmaker, the disaster printer, with a series of mixed
experimental woodblock, lithography, silkscreen, intaglio, collagraph,
monotype, digital, and offset prints produced at FAWC’s recently hopped-up and
fine tuned Michael Mazur Print Studio. The disaster printer resists
instrumentalization and recuperation.
He/she does not say ‘this is image’, rather they ask ‘what is the
significant image.’
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PLEXUS Press Release
Printmaking processes—woodcut, etching, silkscreen, lithography, along with photography
and digital printing—are both artistic and social mediums. While artistic
concerns are aesthetic, formal, and material, the social relates to image
production, image propagation, image use, and image meaning. The
technical innovations of the printshop parallel the rise of mass culture, mass
media, visual display and ordering of knowledge within our visually saturated
society.
A Plexus describes a dense convergence of networks, an intersection place, and
a conduit of multiplicities. While all the parts of a plexus are linked,
a plexus does not synthesize, order, or homogenize its components. This
show—PLEXUS—is comprised of five parts: Propositions, Mirrors, Machines,
Mountain, and Cascade. While all the parts are linked, each component of
the Plexus has a different set of attractors at work; attractors that germinate
order, pattern, structure, and sense out of what otherwise would appear to be a
chaotic mishmash of dissociated and reassembled imagery.
Propositions feature the most heterogeneous set of attractors. These
mixed-media collages merge numerous processes, imagery, and materials into a
uniform 24”x32”x1” ‘proposition box.’ Drawing from both Rauschenberg’s
Combines and Deleuzian architectural theory, the Propositions emerge from an exploratory
process of mixing, matching, printing, and overprinting to generate new visual
components. These are re-sampled and recontextualized into existing
compositions. The process is a constant mediation, recycling, and
cannibalization of printed imagery as a means to address use, repetition,
manipulations, and ultimately the dissolution of the social image. Mirrors,
installations on the ceiling viewed through mirrors on the floor, share both
bordering and layering attractors with Propositions.
Machines are simple-to-complex rule based systems. These
Machines—10’x15.5’ and 10’x18.5’ woodblock prints—follow two interrelated
trajectories; one a technological history of advances in image representation,
and the other a social history following the pseudo-historical notion of
‘Course of Empire’ originating in 19th century American popular history.
This social narrative—from nature to mechanization, standardization,
spectacle-consummation, and recombination—is performed through woodblock relief
printing. The progression of images—from woodgrain, to linear black and
white, to multilayered color separation—traces the evolution of relief printing
technology but remains decipherable as “a woodblock.” Cascade, three 24 foot
long ceiling to floor scrolls, demonstrate that the same information blocks
used in Machines can be recoded to fit another narrative.
Mountain, a performance video presented on a small monitor coupled with one
drawing, mimics a calm domestic environment. However, the presentation is
in tension with the performance, in which the artist attempts to intervene with
a hyper-mediated landscape by drawing with rolls of paper on the side of a
hill.
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PRESS RELEASE FOR DAVID KRUT PROJECTS
"ROB SWAINSTON--PROPOSITIONS"
September 7-October 16 2010
David Krut Projects is delighted to
present Propositions, a solo show by New York based artist, Rob Swainston. In
this new series of 38 mixed-media works, Rob Swainston merges traditional printmaking
processes—such as lithography, woodcut, and silkscreen—with digital photography
and printing to create a torrent of visual information and energy, all
compressed into uniform 24” x 32” x 1” boxes.
Initiated as an open-ended project in
2008, Swainston’s proposition boxes were first limited by a defined paper size
(22" x 30”) and the material recycling of previous large-scale print-based
installations. Inspired by Rauschenberg’s "combines" and Deluzian
architectural theory, Swainton’s exploratory process of mixing, matching,
printing, and overprinting generated new visual components, which were
re-sampled and re-contextualized into existing compositions. Central to the
artist’s working process is the constant mediation, recycling, and cannibalization
of his own printed imagery and ideas as a means to address the use, repetition,
manipulation, and ultimate dissolution of the social image.
Swainston finds printmaking uniquely
situated to address the ways in which historical, political, and cultural
factors contribute to how we experience and understand images in our society.
In its ability to disseminate information quickly and cheaply, the printed
image—historically understood to be the most democratic medium—not only
threatens the impact of other mediums, but also, according to Swainston,
"has the power to subsume all forms of knowledge and discourse."
Mimicking biological and social
processes in which the urgency of recombination is a matter of survival,
Swainston’s Propositions investigates the simultaneous desire to rebuild and
destroy. Like organisms or institutions, these “recombinant” visual systems are
forced to reconcile with the unexpected consequences of their past in order to
come to terms with their present identity.
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PRESS RELEASE FOR BRAVINLEE Centennial Drift
Centennial Drift February 5 -
March 13, 2010
Rob Swainston mixes installation,
printmaking, sculpture, drawing and video in an exploration of social and
historical processes. Because Swainston works large and in multiples he
can cut up, overprint, combine, repeat and reassemble work in multiple
ways. He is constantly rebuilding and reassembling work while adding new
components and destroying old. For him, this process is analogous to how
our social world is constructed.
Centennial Drift is an exploration of
contemporary American political and social landscape 100 years after the
‘closing of the American frontier.’ The show consists of two components: a
large woodblock Centennial and a video/print juxtaposition, Till Tomorrow On.
When the American Western Frontier was declared ‘closed’ a century ago, the
event was greeted with a certain unease among historians and political actors,
stemming from a perception that the frontier served an important distraction
from the political machinations of real power relations. Adrift in the
‘American Century’ that followed, the frontier has been replaced variously by
global empire, mass media, consumerism, the cold war, the space race, the space
age, and, more recently globalization and the digital frontier.
Centennial, a large woodblock print mural spanning three walls in the main
gallery is a black and white print, derived from a jigsaw block of distressed,
cut and reassembled plywood printed on heavy watercolor paper. It acts as
a vacant stage that once possessed the expansive hope of the American frontier
and now has been reduced to an empty wall—a ‘post-landscape landscape’, at once
evoking historiography, topography and cosmology.
The video/print installation, Till Tomorrow On, reveals the nature of the
spectacle of political machinations, and the robust reproduction of power
structures. The departure point for Till Tomorrow On is a large 16th
century multi-woodblock print by Albrecht Durer, Triumphal Arch. The
original print featured interchangeable panels in an architectural
armature. The panels, functioning as propaganda, could be removed,
replaced, or relocated depending upon political necessity and imperial
whim. Swainston has redrawn, reconfigured, and updated Triumphal Arch
positioned within the context of American Spectacle.
Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania,
Rob made his first relief print "Hippopotamus" at age five. He
studied art and political science at Hampshire College in Amherst MA, and
subsequently lived and worked in Central Europe, pursuing postgraduate studies
in political science at Budapest’s Central European University. He received his
MFA from Columbia University in 2006 and attended the Skowhegan School of
Painting and Sculpture in 2007. Rob is a cofounder and master printer of Prints
of Darkness, a collaborative printmaking studio in Brooklyn, NY. He has also
worked as a master printer and taught printmaking at Columbia University. Rob
is an alumnus of the Philadelphia art collective Vox Populi. He lives and works
in New York City, where he is currently participating in the Marie Walsh Sharpe
Studio Program.
_______________________________________________________________________
Questions
and Answers
Questions: Genevieve Lowe and Hannah
Dumes of David Krut Projects
Answers: Rob Swainston
August 2010
1) In what ways do
traditional printmaking history and processes intersect with your interest in modern
technology, mass media, propaganda and dissemination of information?
The ‘traditional’ print processes
(woodcut, etching, lithography, etc.) were all once cutting edge
technologies. The history of printmaking is both a history of technical
innovations and a social history. The technical innovations that emerge
from the print shop continue today with photography, video, and digital
imaging. The social history; the rise of the mass media, the emergence of
our visually saturated society, propaganda machines, the dissemination and
‘look’ of information, and of the visual display of knowledge along with its
ordering is also a history of printmaking. My interest with the social
side of this story originally attracted me to print media. My investigation
started with the older technologies but lead to contemporary print
technologies. Because of all the linkages, I do not separate them; and
because these linkages also connect with the social, print media is well
situated to tackle issues of the image, of propaganda, mass media, and the
politics of representation. But there is another set of linkages at play
here that connects with art history and artistic practices.
2) Please discuss the
performative nature and feverish energy of your working process. There
seems to be a balance/tension between spontaneous actions and calculated
decisions.
I consider joy and desire among the few
remaining effective and relatively untainted tools artist have at their
disposal to positively impact society. These ‘propositions’ are records
of performances in which desire and joy are major components. They are
‘fun’ and I assert this is political. There is also an artistic strategy
at work here—fast and slow. The fast is the spontaneous, the urgent, and
the feverish energy. The slow is calculated, meticulous and
planned. The tension arises from the intentionally mixing of these
actions. For example, I will perform a very spontaneous act—an urgent
brush stroke over a projected line. I will then force this mark through
the tedious translation process of hand carving the mark into a woodblock
print. Along the way I can pick up speed again; by photographing and
using the work in progress or by printing multiple copies that can be torn up
and reassembled into collage or installation. The printmaking matrix is
fruitful territory to mine with this strategy as there as so many ways to move
around and manipulate an image between the various processes.
3) These
"propositions" feel like micro-burst storms - how do they relate to
larger ideas/concepts in your oeuvre?
At the first level these pieces are
studies for larger installation work. They are also ‘micro-burst storms’
because they compress all the energy and intensity of a larger installation
piece into a 24x32x1” box. However, the relationship between the small
and larger pieces is much more complex than this. The larger pieces work
as a system of generating detritus; the failed parts, the off-cuts, the photo
documents. These then get plugged into another system—the ‘proposition
box.’ This ‘proposition box’ came out of an ongoing and very open-ended
mixed media collage project. A few years ago I gathered parts of previous
projects—mostly woodblocks and silkscreens—and cut (or standardized) everything
down to 18x24” on 22x30”paper. I then began an exploratory process of
printing and overprinting, and of mixing and matching. Once the project
gained momentum I followed its many leads and began to import new work—new
blocks, lithos, screens, drawing, photo-mechanical, digital and collage
elements. This began to feed back into the larger installation
work. At some point earlier this year the entire system of large and
small work reached a critical mass (or a sort of phase-transition). I was
reading Deluzian inspired architectural theory and I saw the larger possibility
of paper as a topography. At this point all sorts of new interesting
possibilities entered the mix; some formal, material, architectural and design
driven; others about image, duplication, repetition, sampling, and editing; and
still more about emergence, emergent properties, and emergent systems.
4) Can you elaborate on the
mediation of process, recycling of imagery, cannibalization of past projects as
part developing new ideas and imagery?
This strategy—to continue to work and
rework pieces, to mine oneself, to recycle and cannibalize, to constantly
rebuild and reassemble while adding new and destroying old—this strategy is at
the core of my practice. I have come to call it ‘recombinant,’ or ‘recombinations.’
In some ways it is related to Rauschenberg’s combines. The similarity
with Rauschenberg is with importing ‘outside’ influences and with the
collapsing of painting and sculpture. However, the differences are
important; the main practical difference is the constant recycling and
self-cannibalization. The major conceptual difference is that I am
consciously mimicking a social and even biological process. A recombinant
system, or institution, or organism, or piece of art is forced to deal with, to
reconcile, and to reconsider fragments of its own past or itself in the face of
new inputs. The urgency of recombination is the urgency of
survival. It is never possible to rebuild according to ‘plan’, or in an
‘orderly’ or ‘prescribed’ way. New inputs always need to be reconciled
with unexpected historical/biological contingencies/consequences. In
short there is no ‘clean slate,’ ‘empty canvas,’ or ‘new man.’ Some of
this process intersects with situationist strategies of détournement. In
a way, the ‘art’ becomes choosing what is significant out of this system, of
‘data mining’ and of editing.
5) How do you contextualize
your work within both art history and contemporary art?
The contemporary field of art is much
more heterogeneous than it has ever been. This heterogeneity comes after
a period in which the dominant artists and critics attempted to strangle the
definition of art to fit a narrow conception of its proper course.
However, this fictional center could not hold. As I see it, my generation
is more concerned with political, sociological, and reflexive issues, rather
than defending some meta-history about the trajectory of art. The title
of this show—Propositions—was used by Joseph Kosuth in ‘Art After Philosophy’
to demonstrate what was and what was not art. He claimed a work of art
‘is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on
art.’ He described two kinds of propositions, the analytic and the
synthetic. An analytic proposition gains validity because it references
only the symbols it contains within itself. The synthetic proposition
draws from a larger range of experiences. Though for Kosuth, the
synthetic was not art, my ‘Propositions’ contain both the synthetic and the
analytic. At stake is the social image; the use of the image, repetition of the
image, context of the image, manipulation of the image, sampling of the image,
ubiquity of the image and ultimately, the fragmentation and disappearance of
the image. Printmaking is uniquely situated to deal with these issues
precisely because it threatens to subsume all other mediums. The
analogous situation with the social world is that the image threatens to
subsume all knowledge and discourse (with the help of the print).
_______________________________________________________________________
Questions and Answers
Questions: Jamie Berger of Cranky Pressman for forthcoming PUSH/Print book
Answers: Rob Swainston
July 2011
1) Describe your work.
My work crosses from print and paper
media into installation, sculpture, and video. I cut up, overprint, repeat, and
reassemble prints in multiple ways. I am constantly rebuilding and
reassembling my work while adding new components and destroying old. For
me, this process is analogous to how our social world is constructed. Scale and
a kind of gesamtkunstwerk is
important, but I am learning that sometimes scale works better when it is
smaller and compressed, as with my recent Propositions series.
2) Early influences.
I’ve always had two sets of interests;
one social—history, sociology, politics—and the other the visual arts. As
an undergrad at Hampshire College a key social science professor of mine,
Lester Mazor (who recently passed away), influenced me enormously. He
worked for social justice. I learned from him how to be autonomous, to
surround yourself with a like-minded people in a like minded community, and to
make decisions that would enable you to see an open door and walk through it.
This is how I became an artist.
3) How did you get into printmaking?
As an undergrad I followed the social
science track over the visual arts. When I moved to New York City I
realized I needed an arts education and took many art classes all over the
city. A drawing teacher told me that I ‘think like a printmaker.’
The second printmaking class I took was a woodblock class at Columbia
University with Gregory Amenoff. A few weeks into the class I was working
late night and ran out of wood. I pillaged the kitchen shelves and kept
working.
4) What responses do you get to your
work?
My work appeals to a broad spectrum of
people on multiple levels of engagement—both experiential and intellectual.
People who have not been socialized into the dominant discourses
surrounding contemporary art have no problem entering the work. At the
same time there are also numerous access points for people who are ‘in’ the art
world.
5) How has your technique developed?
It is possible to generate content—that
elusive and very important ‘conceptual’—while you are ‘making.’ I have
learned to be hyper-observant of every aspect of what I am working on,
especially on those things that appear to lie just outside the realm of the
project.
6) What does printmaking mean to you?
The history of printmaking follows two
interrelated trajectories. One is a history of technical innovations—from
the cave handprint to the woodblock up through the current digital
technologies. This also includes photography and the moving image.
The printed image is also a social technology; a technology of control and
order, a discourse—the spectacle is image. Knowledge has moved away from
oral and written traditions toward a visual understanding of the world.
Printmaking is uniquely situated to address the ways in which historical,
political, and cultural factors contribute to how we experience images in our
society. Today this looks like the collapse of meaning around
image.
7) Walk me through a day in your
studio.
There really is no ‘typical day’—my
work rhythms are different. I’ve never been a 9-5 artist. The work
I do takes a lot of time, and a certain amount of frantic obsession is built
into the content. If I let myself go I will spend days, weeks, and then
months working on one thing. This kind of practice is neither sustainable
nor good for the work. So a good day is spent managing my
obsessions; some work for myself, some for other people, read a book, ride a
bike, make a round of the galleries. I’m also a night person. I
really get started at about 11.30pm and work till 5am. I like to fall
asleep in the studio, in front of the work, so it’s the first thing I see
when I wake up.
8) How has your subject matter evolved?
I am following the leads of my own
content, and evolution is in the nature of that content—I call this
‘recombinant recombinations.’ One interesting shift that has happened is the
material and the formal have entered into the work in ways I once resisted.
It may seem a little contradictory, but my trying to get a grasp on the
image and on the contemporary status of ‘viewing art’ has made me pay more
attention to the materials I am using (paper, print, wood, etc,) and their
shifting meanings.
9) What inspires you these days?
(Un)Fortunately my work could almost
act as a perpetual-motion-self-inspirational-machine. New York City can
both drive and break this machine. There is so much going on, and the art
world in particular at this historical moment is so huge. There is a lot
of good stuff out there, and a lot of crap. Inspiration for me is as much
in opposition to something as it is in admiration of it. Decoding why you
think something is crap can be motivational. Clear enemies help you
define your position—‘I am against that.’ This is useful not only with
other peoples work, but also with my own. I find it easier for me to work
on something I don’t like, to try and ‘fix’ it, than to work with something I
am happy with.
10) What do you enjoy most about
printmaking?
There are so many reasons why I keep
circling back to printmaking. Ever since I became obsessed by printmaking
I have been trying to break out of it. But it is just such a flexible
medium. It is really only recently that I am comfortable with taking a
stance and saying ‘yes, I’m a printmaker.’ For the longest time I would
assert I am an artist, and if I use printmaking it is in the service of art,
not to make ‘prints’ per say. For me it is silly to be making editions in the
year 2011. There was point in the pre-mechanical reproduction era where
humans in a printshop were the precursors of machines, and making exact copies
of something was interesting. But now that we have the machines, we
should use them to be humans, and not to become machines.
11) If your prints were music, what
instrument would they be?
Well, I’ve never thought of it like
this before. I can say it would certainly not be a flute or something
ephemeral like that. That Beck song comes to mind, ‘two turn tables and a
microphone.’ But maybe I would rewrite it to say something like ‘two turn
tables and an automach.’
12) Any other questions you want to be
asked/answer?
I recently read the last Tony Judt
book, “Ill Fares the Land”. In it he laments the passing of the 20th
century’s grand liberalism/social democracy project. He says that not too
long ago young people wanted to contribute to society—to become doctors,
teachers, and engineers. But now we are stuck in a culture of
narcissism. He sites a recent poll of kids in Germany where something
like 50% of the youth claim they want to become artists. He places this
against a similar stat from not too long ago when only something like 4%
aspired to the arts. For him this signals they end of people wanting to
‘participate’ in society. To me this means exact opposite of what he
posits. Many people become artists precisely because they do want to participate
in community and contribute to the accumulation of social
knowledge. The problem is not with the kids or with the artists;
the problem is with mainstream society systematically shutting down all the
arenas where alternative models of living, thinking, being, and knowing can
exist.
_______________________________________________________________________
Questions
and Answers
Questions: Charlie Schultz for ART in PRINT
Answers: Rob Swainston
July 2011
1) You’ve been combing
printmaking and installation art at least since 2005. What inspired you
to present your prints in such an untraditional manner?
There are a number of interrelating
factors at work here. First of all, and this may sound funny to
‘traditional’ printmakers, there is a logic to printmaking that, if followed,
is directed toward sculpture and installation. The printshop—with all its
machines and processes—is a 3 dimensional logic system, a logic that, like
installation, operates in space. As an artist, one of the ‘things’ we do
is pay attention to the environment in which we operate. This can be more
conceptual (i.e. institutional critique), but this sensibility can also be more
physical. There is also a material logic with printmaking that leads
toward installation. I consider paper (and through it the image) a
sculptural medium. One of the first things you learn about printmaking is
the multiple. In an environment where nothing is precious (because you
can print another one), and where you have lots of material, you can be free to
cut up, reassemble, reprint, overprint, install, deinstall. Here is where
the printmaker sheds the idea of the edition, of the exact copy, and embraces
the multiple. The multiple is repetition; repetition over time mutates
and changes. This is where we are as a society. And of course we
should be making work about this. Print into installation does this.
A third pressure directing me from
printmaking into installation is the challenge of our generation to break down
the barriers between disciplines. To me, the borders between the various
art mediums are arbitrary (as is the border of ‘art’ itself). It is good
to have a skill set, but why limit yourself to that? The dominant
pedagogy informs us to challenge the foundations of our knowledge. There
is also a stigma attached to printmaking. Where I went to grad school
there was an open hostility to printmaking. There is a hierarchy among
artistic practices, and printmakers are at the bottom. Printmakers are
the second-class citizens of the art world. They are the workers, not the
thinkers (and we know how that plays out in society at large!). It is
only recently that I would even identify myself as a printmaker, asserting
instead that ‘I am an artist first.’ But if you look around us at our
image driven society, how knowledge has become visual, how the spectacle is
image, and how the partial basis (or fault) of this condition lies with the
printed image (that is printmaking), then printmaking in the year 2011 is an
entirely defensible position in the art world. Indeed, issues around the
printed picture may be one of the most important things we as artists are
working on.
Another seduction of printmaking into
installation is how a print-based practice plays out over time. I think
it was Nancy Spero who described how this works. Every print you do is
like a word. Because you still have the material (the plates, the blocks,
the screens) these words can be combined to make sentences. Eventually if
you keep working on new words and continue to work with the old, these
sentences will form paragraphs. Now you can start making arguments,
telling stories, staking out positions, and building discourses.
After going on some about ‘presenting
prints in an untraditional manner’ I have to call in question the notion of
‘tradition’ in printmaking. I just went through a number of ways in which
I think printmaking moves into installation. The tradition of printmaking
itself challenges its own tradition. The history of printmaking is a series
of innovations. This is both technical invention (from cave hand print to
relief then intaglio, lithography, photography, and now digital) and social
innovation (the printed image as a discourse). Let’s look at the
technical. Why are some things ‘traditional’ and others not? The
lithograph is basically the photocopier of the 19th century. Why can we
not embrace the photocopier as traditional printmaking? The photograph
and through it film and the moving image came out of experiments in the printshop.
Why do we not call them printmaking? What the art world today calls
‘installation’ is a relatively recent innovation (lets ignore architecture and
the church here). Installation is an artistic innovation that relates
directly to the dominant social innovation of our time—the spectacle (the term
‘gesamdkunstwerk’ may be more palatable here because it carries less political
baggage). The 20th century artistic invention of installation is linked to the
social technology of the spectacle. And if you properly identify the
spectacle as having roots in visual society (that is the printed picture), then
it follows that printmaking moves into installation in a fundamental way.
2) As a master printer do
you specialize in one form of printmaking? Or are you equally knowledgeable and
experienced in a wide variety of techniques? Is there one you prefer or
do you find different techniques suited to different installations/sculptural
compositions?
There is a joke I have with my former
partner (and co-founder) at Prints of Darkness: He is the master printer and I
the disaster printer. This is not really true. But I do have to say
there are a number of master printers out there who have far more technical
expertise than me. There is a certain amount of fetishizing the medium
that I avoid. There are traps. The main trap is that in the middle
of the process you forget that you are making ‘art’ (rather than a technical
achievement of lithography, etc.). This trap is reflected in the
architecture of most printshops—all work tables and no wall space to put up and
look at what you are doing. The printmakers ‘disease’ makes good
printers, but kills artists. So I am always focused on my own work even
when I am working with other people. Right now this means I am kind of a
generalist. My specialty lies in mixing the medias, in using each media
for its strength and being able to see past the technical hurdle and say, ‘is
there a reason to be making this a lithograph instead of an inkjet
print?’ This requires moving away some from the idea of the edition (but
as a printer working for other people you can’t really just throw this
away). For my own installation work right now I am using the large-scale
woodblock as the starting point. But I am using it as a background
departure point for mixed media installations. I also think that
lithography links up more with the ways younger artists approach work (through
the digital platforms) than anyone is teaching right now. So I have been
working more with litho in my own work. My recent work with
‘Propositions’ is incredibly mixed in terms of print media. It pushes all
the ‘tradition’ medias together along with photography and low relief
sculpture.
3) Are there artist you
admire as pioneers or innovators of print-based installation work?
Two artist come immediately to
mind—William Kentridge and Nancy Spero. Kentridge was instrumental in
what we call ‘the return of drawing.’ He followed drawing into
printmaking, and from printmaking moved into animations and installations in a
very organic way. His recent retrospective at the MOMA was amazing.
Nancy Spero is under-recognized in the print world. Her silkscreens onto
the wall really opened up the field.
4) How important is site in
your installations?
I approach installations in a few
different (but related) ways. The first approach I will call the
‘installation toolkit.’ This toolkit is flexible and possesses a number
of different options that can be activated and modified to ‘fit’ numerous
situations. My first success with this formula was the ‘Portapocalypse’
series. The ‘portable apocalypse’—or ‘Portapocalypse’—acted as a sort of
suitcase bomb that I could take somewhere and explode it into an
installation. I printed it on rice paper not because of any ‘venerated’
tradition of the medium, but because it could be rolled up really small and
easily transportable. My current ‘Machine’ series (and Centennial before
it) follows some of the logic of Portapocalypse. But the idea that they
can be installed in numerous situations is more planned out. They are a
sort of flexible display system. The individual panels are designed in
such a way that they can be installed in larger or smaller formats. There
are a number of linkage points built into the drawings that allow for easy
addition or subtraction. Even more, the drawing itself is designed as a
sort of system upon which more and more can be built. But I know that
even with all of this you are never going to ‘erase’ a space. And I am
not interested in that. You have to leave room in a piece for the
‘local.’ So, while they are in many ways ‘non-site’ installations (not in
the Smithson sense), they are sort of ‘non-site/site specific.’ The piece
‘In Front of Behind the Wall’ borrows some from this, but also addressed the
site more specifically. I designed the piece with some very specific
features of the gallery in mind—very tall ceilings and hidden brick
columns. I then reconfigured some existing blocks to combine with new
material carved to fit the architecture of the space. The resulting
prints, 3 24 foot long woodblock scrolls, were printed entirely for that
space. There is a third kind of installation that I am beginning to
detect in the work. PLEXUS/Mirrors succeeds in visually collapsing the
architecture of the space together with the installation work in one flat
plane.
5) What are your feelings
of ephemerality vs. permanence? Installation art tends to be more
ephemeral, existing only for the duration of its exhibition, where as prints
have a more lasting quality.
This is not something I really think
about; maybe because my work sort of reverses this hypothesis. Because I
am always reusing the pieces of installations in the next installation there is
different kind of permanence going on. To me this permanence reflects the
social (in)stability that exists in the world around us. It is permanent,
yet always changing.
My cynical side wants to point out
another flaw with this question. There is a real pressure with
installation artists (and artists in general) to design work that is more
powerful as a representation of itself than it is by itself. The photo
documentation of a work has a much larger audience than the work itself
does. The lesson here is that we installation artists are making elaborate
sets for photography and video. Isn’t this a kind of permanence that a
print by itself can never have?