Snap, Click and Yodel

"Photography has meaning only if it exhausts all possible images."

The March/April issue of Art on Paper contained a wonderful treasure, a fictional story called The Adventure of a Photographer by Italo Calvino.* The editors chose to reprint this fictional story on its 50th anniversary. It is a cleverly insightful text on photography within a fictional story.

The main character, a skeptic Antonino Paraggi--attempts to capture and create the perfect photograph. He questions the pursuit of the perfect photograph by his friends and family, that snapshot capturing the perfect moments, rather than the often sticky, dirty unflattering moments of daily life.

Calvino reflects that "Photographed reality immediately takes on a nostalgic character, of joy fled on the wings of time, a commemorative quality, even if the picture was taken the day before yesterday. And the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself."

Last week, I was amused to read an article by Michelle Slatalla in the New York Times, Lights, Camera, Inaction - which shows that human nature's need to capture images hasn't changed, while the technology with which to do so has. The new Flip video camera - allows seamlessly simple video capture, which truly is just about idiot proof. Take out of box, push record button, plug into computer - voila, you're you-tubing down the video stream.

I find myself wondering, while family videos of Slatalla's article seem to have the same nostalgic quality as Calvino's snapshots, does the new and constant stream of public voyeurism wash it away? The DIY look from the quality to the abrupt editing of this endless supply of video doesn't feel nostalgic to me. I love to feed my gluttonous appetite--spending hours clicking from images of hula-hooping to yodeling french bulldog puppies to screen print demonstrations. (This also contributes to my ever-increasing attention deficit disorder.)

Taken one step further, my studiomates at Space 1026 have started communicating in emails with YouTube links - video streams are becoming a vernacular. It can feel quite peculiar, but also brilliant if you have patience. Whole jokes are told through an email message thread simply through video links. I wonder, could we develop a new way language for communicating based on a constant metaphorical form video stream?

Phew, forgive me for the digression into a metaphysical utopia of technology. I need to look at more puppies.

Goodbye for now,
Caitlin

*I encourage you to support Art on Paper magazine, but the story is also readily available on the internet through google searches.

PS: I'm starting to feel like this puppy... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw0Yu76rb-4

We're not curing cancer...but...

I am really excited by new advances that science offers as possibilities. Here are the things I'm excited about today in the world of print...

Oldies but goodies are new ideas again...Polaroid announced their new digital photo printer - which will be the equivalent to the polaroids of yesterday. It will print using a new thermal technology - no ink cartridges or chips...the image is developed using print heads that interpret the image into heat -which in turn heats special paper ...wow. click here for instant mobile printer which can be used with cell phones and digital printers. Though, sounds like there are concerns about finding a niche - since we are all getting used to looking at pictures in the virtual screen, web world.

Next, printable skin...inkjet printers are being hacked to be able to print human tissue cells to grow new organs. The first bladder created in a lab using this technology was actually transplanted here in Philadelphia at Thomas Jefferson hospital! Heart cells in ink jet printers - these are exciting times. I saw this story on CBS Sunday Morning and it was mind blowing... The Future Is Here: Regenerative Powder, Ink Jet Heart Cells And Custom-Made Body Parts

While at Southern Graphics Council Conference - we met up with Steve Hoskins who is in Bristol, England at the Centre for Fine Print Research. "We recognise however, that print is inexorably linked to industrial development so therefore we are also equally comfortable with conducting research from an industrial perspective." Another location here in the US is Eyebeam gallery in New York is also supporting art and technology endeavors.

And, just to show that I love the history of print as much as the future of the media, here is a trailer for the movie, Goya's Ghosts which I just watched recently. The opening to the movie features Goya's prints and there is a wonderful scene where printers are etching Goya's copper plates and printing them. The Holy Inquisition is unhappy with the "filth" that Goya's prints depict, and uber weasily bad guy, played by Javier Bardem is explaining to them, it is not the artist who should be blamed, but the people the artist is portraying...which ultimately leads down a dreadful path. I enjoyed the cinematic power to allow those powerful prints to occupy a space other than a print study room. Here is the movie trailer which features some prints and even a copper plate!

Southern Graphics Conference 2007

Philly was represented proudly at the 2007 Southern Graphics Council Conference graciously hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University at the end of March. Philagrafika 2010 Curatorial Team members José Roca and Shelley Langdale presented in panel discussions, as well as Daniel Heyman who presented a fabulous panel about art in a time of war. It was exciting to see Shelley and José introduce some of the ideas for 2010 as content.

Shelley Bancroft and Peter Nesbitt of Art on Paper and Triple Candie gallery were the conference keynote speakers and delivered a wonderful summary of what trends develop around prints and in works on paper - including the trend for print shops to either create huge editions or very small but large scale editions to cater to the current markets. (image of Shelley and Peter's presentation above)

Daniel Heyman presented with Sandow Birk and Paul Mullowney on The Printmaker in Wartime: The Influence of Callot and Goya on 21st Century Art. This panel focused on Heyman's current project of documentation of interviews with detainees from Abu Ghraib prison and Birk's series Depravities of War
created with Paul at Hui Press in Hawaii. (photo: Daniel, Paul, Cindi Ettinger and Sandow Birk)

Shelley Langdale of the Philadelphia Museum of Art presented on the conference thematic panel, Command Print. Each presenter took a different tack, tying themes they saw develop during presentations throughout the week. Fellow Command Print panelists included artist and critic Johanna Drucker; artist and educator Steve Murakishi; and artist and critic Mark Harris. Each panelist looked at the state of the field of print from a different angle - Johanna from a theoretical; Mark from a science fictional future looking back; Steve from a pop culture angle and Shelley from a curatorial perspective.

The Bits and Atoms panel organized by Deb Cornell featured José Roca - who took a different tack on the digital by talking about the opportunities the internet offers artists for dissemination of ideas - exemplified through artists projects such as Superflex. He also spoke of the latent print - the possibility for print that the digital practice offers.

Philadelphia will be hosting the 2010 Southern Graphics Council Conference. If you would like to find out more about this exciting opportunity, feel free to email me cperkins at philagrafika.org.

And, it wasn't all theory and talk, as you can see by the images below - there were plenty of dirty hardworking printmakers showing their stuff all over Richmond. Including this fantastic new woodcut by Dennis McNett of a Snow Leopard attack - and these amazing printed bedsheets by the Hancock Brothers.

Collotype and Photogravure - Traditional Process in the Digital Age

Opening March 13th at the Project Basho Gallery at 1305 Germantown Ave. in Philly is “Time: Exhibition of Contemporary Collotype Prints.” The title of this exhibition references both the lengthy process involved in the production of a single print and the anachronism of the use of this technique in today’s totally automated times.

Also working today are artists using the photogravure technique, a process similar to collotype. A recent exhibition curated by photogravure artist, Peter Miller, can be viewed at Luminous-Lint. Contemporary artists using this technique include John Goodman, Lothar Osterburg and Glen Rubsamen.

The photogravure process emerged in 1829 and the collotype was developed in 1839 during the developmental stages of photography. At the time, these processes appealed to both photographers and printmakers because of their aesthetic qualities, available tonal range and resistance to fading.

Today, artists have a unique opportunity to explore the combination of traditional methods and emerging digital technologies in the production of artwork. This phenomenon particularly affects printmakers as the advent of digital printers creates new, less process-oriented methods of printmaking and increases the general public’s ability to produce printed images.

“Time” is a particularly interesting project because it deals with these contemporary printmaking issues through the use of a process that was developed initially as a method of reproducing photographs. It features artists Emmet Gowin, Eikoh Hosoe, Graciela Iturbide, Koichiro Kurita, John Pfahl, Ryuji Taira, George Tice and Auther Tress.
To learn more about the exhibition and the history and process of making collotype and photogravure prints, follow these links:




Time: Exhibition of Contemporary Collotype Prints at Project Basho

Collotype Historical Information from the Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Collotype Database at the Bristol School of Art Media & Design
- To enter database, click the given link. Username: collotype, Password: collotype.
- Contained are articles explaining in detail various collotype processes.

Art of the Photogravure Blog – A Comprehensive Resource Dedicated to the Photogravure


Images: Top – Glen Rubsamen, Chaos a few feet away, 2007 Photogravure
Bottom – Artist working on a collotype from Project Basho’s “Time”

Written by Dana M. Osburn - Philagrafika Blog Intern

Print and Web2.0 - its Elemental!

I am really intrigued by the possibilities of the wealth of online tools that printmakers are just beginning to explore. Printmakers by nature and medium are a tribe - and the web2.0 tools like blogs, websites and photoblogs offer these artists a way to connect. They are often clumsy - very rarely elegant, but I like the fits and starts of this new technology--making it feel so much more human.

This morning while drinking my coffee, I came across this print project this morning - The 2007 Periodic Table of Elements Printmaking Project. The website is great - offering a simple to navigate selection of thumbnails arranged in the form of, what else? - the periodic table. The producer, AzureGrackle also created posts on Etsy and another link to the related flickr site creating a multilevel project - with several entry points.

This project involved 96 printmakers from 8 countries - and it was started only last March - this kind of process is only feasible because of the internet (or innerweb as I really like to call it.)

More DIY high tech printers

Adding to my collection of website stories about people's great DIY printers - here is a link to one prints images on toast.

In addition to their sublimely ridiculous toast printer, the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory website also has a posting about a sugar printer which they built for about $500 which prints 3D objects. The printer's creators were inspired by a show of Rachel Whiteread at the Tate Modern - and enormous installation of white cast boxes, which resemble sugar cubes. The Tate's website has a great video of the installation being created in time lapse video. Whiteread has often come up in curatorial discussions at Philagrafika as an artist who works with multiples and works from a variety of matrices, for example her watertower project.

Here is the toast being printed:

Cardboard Carpets

One of my favorite materials to screenprint on is cardboard. (As part of an installation at the ICA last year, Space 1026 printed over 3,000 shingles of recycled cardboard!) So, I was immediately drawn to this design idea of printing cardboard with designs to create cardboard carpets by Wendy Plomp on the Free People blog today. An entirely new idea for urban installations - creating beautiful patterns, laying them out in the street and creating your own living room outside!

And, when you are finished laying out your carpet you could furnish your outdoor street installation with cardboard furniture by Cardboard Robot.

Here are some more links to blogs about the cardboard carpets

Wendy Plomp design site and another blog with article after seeing her in Domus magazine
http://www.wnd.nu/works/show/64/message-in-a-box.html

http://bloesem.blogs.com/bloesem/2008/01/message-in-a-bo.html

A Small Call for Entry

Small print shows happen all over the world - part of the nature of print, but I just came across an interesting call for entries for a print show at possibly the smallest gallery I've ever heard of.

As part of the 2008 Southern Graphics Council Conference at Virginia Commonwealth University the Locker 50B is seeking print entries. In March Locker 50B celebrates it's sixth year with "Inkling", a print exhibition, will be installed for that month in conjunction with the Southern Graphics Conference. Please note, no entries can be more than 4" in diameter.

Locker 50B homepage

Article in the Washington Post

Call for Entry

Southern Graphics Council Conference

By the way, Peter Nesbitt and Shelly Bancroft from Art on Paper will be the conference keynote speakers. The conference runs March 26-29, 2008 in Richmond, Virginia.

Reproduction Controversy in the News

Two exhibitions are sparking controversy and raising questions about the power of the print about Jacob Lawrence and his seminal work, The Migration of the Negro which completed in the 1940s. Triple Candie and the Whitney both have exhibitions up - the Triple Candie show is raising controversy in that they are showing the entire series as reproductions while the Whitney is showing only 17 of the 60 images. Lawrence conceived of the series as one work. The debate is interesting in that the reproductions shown in their entirety are more powerful than the singular images removed from their original context. Somehow, the ghost of Walter Benjamin's aura argument continues to circle.

Related Links
Triple Candie exhibition: Undoing the Ongoing Bastardization of the Migration of the Negro by Jacob Lawrence

"Visions of a People in Motion" by Holland Cotter, New York Times, December 28, 2007

Whitney Museum exhibition

And The Trains Kept Coming Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series on Tour funded by NEA

Jacob Lawrence at the Phillips Collection in DC

other blogs on exhibition
greg.org

Printed Image in the West, an Online History

I came across a lovely resource this morning in my search for material relating to the teaching of the history of Graphic Arts. For a little background, I am particularly interested in the lack of this curriculum in the US - and realize that I was lucky at the University of New Mexico to have taken O.J. Rothrock's, History of Graphic Art. I am collecting syllabi from classes that I do find, and if you come across any - please send them to me at cperkins@philagrafika.org

The Printed Image in the West: History and Techniques
put together by Wendy Thompson from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Drawings and Prints, includes wonderful illustrations and has information on woodcut, engraving, etching, drypoint, mezzotint, aquatint and lithography.

Two Views of the Head, 1746; Jacques-Fabien Gautier-Dagoty (French, 1716–1785) Plate 4 of Myologie complète en coleur et grandeur naturelle; Multiple-plate color mezzotint; Plate: 16 3/8 x 12 3/4 in. (41.6 x 32.4 cm)

Print-Bot

Yes, here it is, the best DIY hack/mashup i've seen this morning. The iRobot mashed up with a dot matrix printer. This little thing is no master printer and the images are very rudimentary...but think of the possibilities! This one is printing with talcum powder on a carpet.

From the instructables website located at www.instructables.com

Carvin' Block

Visit ArtintheAge.com for more info

Space 1026 member, Bill McRight is a hardworking printmaker - he's at it daily, I like to think of him as part of the blue collar artists, whose practice means constantly working without pretension--just because he can. His fellow studio mate Ben Woodward, filmed him carving a block in their studio over the course of a day and posted it on the Art in the Age website. I like his unique carving style - he lays out a patch of black and slowly builds up freeform patterns to create his fantastic lurking creatures, criminals on the lam or whatever.

Shades of Forgiveness in Multiple

THE THING is a quarterly editioned object offered by two editors, Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors to create an everyday object that somehow incorporates text.

The first edition was created by Film maker and writer, Miranda July who created a silkscreened window shade with the text: "If this shade is down I'm begging your forgiveness on bended knee with tears streaming down my face."

An object such as this could easily be trite, but the theatricality of the language plays off the whimsy of the action of pulling the shade, with a balance of humour that I find intriguing. Or perhaps it is the irony of the bathroom setting?

See more about this editioned multiples at www.thethingquarterly.com.

I've recently been thinking about how artists other than visual artists might approach printmaking - and this is a great example of a project that expands out the medium of print.

I'm looking forward to seeing more by this group.

Caitlin

The Senate has a graphic art collection, who knew?

Shown here is a very large (for a mezzotint) - over 26 by 36 inches!

United States Senate Chamber by Thomas Doney, 1847

Senate Graphic Art Collection

Letterpress is everywhere these days - and even the cover article on the December/January issue of ReadyMade Magazine. This issue has a step by step instructions for constructing your very own letterpress using simple lumber and a bottle jack. You can find the instructions here Press Kit there are also instructions for making simple polymer plates.








And, if building your own letterpress just seems a little too daunting - and you'd rather sit around and eat bon bons - check out these typographic chocolates which I found out about the blog courtesy of Art in the Age blog.

Creature Comforts USA - Art

Philagrafika friend and supporter Shelley Langdale sent me this animation - and yes, there is a printmaking reference. If you need a little cheering up - and a reminder why we do what we do...here you go.

I was just recently reminded how cool this interactive demonstration of how to make a print done in 2001 as an educational and very cool tool to go along with the exhibition of the same name.

MoMA's What is a Print interactive demonstration - check it out!

Speaking of cool tools, check out this youtube video of laser engraving a macbook, inspired by a MAKE magazine article.



Finally, for affordable prints you can put the gypsy sale at Space 1026 on your calendar for the weekend on Sunday, December16 from 12 to 7 pm.

Printmaking, often used as a political medium, is causing havoc in the New York Public Library's walls. Check out the New York Times article here:

Politically Charged Prints Cause Talking in the Library

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: December 4, 2007

Controversy has erupted from the sleepy third-floor hallway galleries at the New York Public Library, where a modest exhibition of contemporary prints called “Multiple Interpretations” is on view.

This exhibition organized by the library’s curator of prints, Roberta Waddell, has raised concerns and has appeared in Fox News along with other press. Among the artworks are prints by Philagrafika member and board of director Daniel Heyman from his Amman Series.

Fox News Story

Art in the Age of Appropriation

This recent article in the New York Times focuses on the art of Richard Prince and his appropriation of work from the Marlboro ads shot by Jim Krantz. And in light of the discussion, I will copy the image, adding yet one more layer to the copying conversation - and another facet to our debate and the necessity to constantly educate the public about the difference between the reproduction and the fine art print.

Arts / Art & Design

If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What’s the Original?

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: December 6, 2007

What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?

A Copy is Art slide show in New York Times

I was researching artists yesterday and came across the work of Gert and Uwe Tobias. They are twins from Romania who live in Germany and just happen to have work that opened at the Moma this last month which runs through February 25, 2008.

They do large scale woodcuts with immediate whimsy and an undertone of darkness that is very mysterious. Check out the Moma website and it features images and installation video.

Moma Exhibition Projects 86: Gert and Uwe Tobias

Hammer Museum in Los Angeles exhibition in 2007

Team Gallery featuring an exhibition from March 2007

The Team Gallery website includes these images: The Devil is Not Mocked and The Funeral which shows that dark folk tale feel fostered in their native Transylvania, but updated by their use of typology and graphic design.


Makes me want to go cut some block!

Best,
Caitlin