You would not find the boundaries of the psyche, even by traveling every path: so deep a discourse does it have.
Heraclitus 1

the creative intuition, is an obscure grasping of his own Self and of things in a knowledge through union or through connaturality which is born in the spiritual unconscious, and which fructifies only in the work.
Jacques Maritain 2

An artwork may re-present a no longer present place now accessible only in memory, or make present a place available only to the imagination. In the event, artworks entail a mediation of both memory and imagination. The artwork has its coming to be within a tradition of artworks possessed, if that is the term, in memory. The tradition of artworks subsumes the works themselves, the practices of a medium, the discursive fields in which the artworks are embedded. A tradition is extended with every coming to be of an artwork. The artwork, in extending the tradition in which it has its being, is necessarily a result of the imagination. Even so these lithographs by Christine Bisetto and Linda Guy. Any possible exhibition surveying the richness of lithography in the past two centuries or the past two decades would be a mere adumbration; we are delighted to have, on this bicentennial of Aloys Senefelder’s invention 3 of lithography, 4 this exhibition of works by Christine Bisetto and Linda Guy as a synecdoche of the totality of the tradition of artists working in lithography.

From its invention by Senefelder, lithography has been a means of making multiple originals; typically each print is a token, the individual impression, of a type, the edition comprised of the set of impressions of an artwork. 5 In these prints by Christine Bisetto and Linda Guy, multiple repeated units within a single work inscribe the character of the print as multiple within the singularity of the artwork. In Bisetto’s works, multiple printed units are combined to form component modules of unique works, variable in their installation in response to the particularities of site. In Guy’s works, discrete printed elements are repeated and combined within a single work, or utilized in several works.

Christine Bisetto’s lithographs reference memories associated with the lived experience of locations. Handmade papers are printed, formed into three-dimensional forms in combination with paper pulp, cotton, beeswax or paraffin, and suspended in groups of modular elements. The works are strongly tactile, both from their three dimensionality and the handmade papers and other materials used in their facture, and in the visual texture from the printing of the surface. This tactile aspect of Bisetto’s works, and the large scale resulting from the constellation of many modular unit, each of which entails multiple prints in its facture, in installation results in an instauration of place and presence in the viewer’s response to the work.

Oad is comprised of fifty eight components, each suspended by thread from a tack driven flush to the wall, forming a vertebra-like structure in suspension in a flat arc along the wall. The units are spindle-like forms, each with a larger diameter central section tapering to join with a rod-like form penetrating the central volume and extending three to four inches beyond it; the units are each suspended by one of the ends of the rod-like form. Each unit is printed in a raw sienna tint ground with light blue-gray spots and lines.

The sixteen units of Niquish are each a three-dimensional form, in plan a hooked teardrop, in section thicker at its middle, tapering to a thin, sewn edge. Suspended by a thread from the hooked end, the units form an undulating line, rising, falling, rising and falling again from left to right. The effect is of a line of hanging crustaceans, perhaps craps. The one hundred and twenty three components of Rivinh are approximately spherical forms with a concave depression at one side, forming a bud-like structure sewn at the lip of the concavity. The pink paper, printed with brown forming the exterior of the structure contrasts with the more strongly textured gray interior of the cavity. Clustered toward the center of their installation on the wall, the units of Rivinh are like a group buds or bulbs seen in plan, at once a dispersal and a concentration of attention in viewer response.

Linda Guy’s lithographs are small, intimate, quietly contemplative works. The controlled line and developed modulation of value suggest that the character of intimate, quietly contemplative engagement is entailed no less in the facture of the works than in viewer response. The motifs suggest reference to the structures of internal physiology, while the occasional appearance of leaf forms suggests these are images from the imagination, referencing the spaces of interiority. Guy’s use of modular printed elements within a single work, identical but differently oriented, and the repetition of printed elements in different printings from one work to another, enables consideration of the effects of repetition of an element in variable context, a correlative of a shifting of engagement in repeatedly taking up and repositioning a matter.

Rorschach No. 5 and Rorschach No. 6 employ separately printed modular elements, combined into a grid. Each of the modular elements is a square; rotated at ninety degree increments and placed to form a larger square with a small, approximately one-quarter inch interval between the elements, the bilateral symmetry of the modular units is reinscribed at the level of the larger square comprised of the four elements. The ensemble of four elements is adhered to a larger sheet of Japanese paper. Rorschach No. 5 has a ground perhaps of Gray Confetti Thai Unryu in which long, colored strands of kozo fibers are embedded. Rorschach No. 6 has a ground of buff paper, perhaps Kasuiri, with bits of brown bark embedded in the sheet.

Interior Window No. 1 has a ground of a gray-blue paper, perhaps Gray Confetti Thai Unryu. This sheet is printed with a very thin, transparent umber in a rectangle concentric with and proportionate to the ground sheet, leaving an unprinted margin, an inscription within the image of the gummed nonprinting margin of the lithographic stone as drawing surface. A smaller black sheet, also concentric with and proportionate to the ground sheet, is printed with a light blue- gray. Interior Window No. 2 has a ground of an earth red colored paper, perhaps Unryu T Gray Brown or Unryu T Red. This ground sheet is printed with silver in a rectangle concentric with and proportionate to the ground sheet, leaving an unprinted margin. A smaller regular trapezoidal white sheet printed in black is adhered within this silver field. The scale of mark within the silver field is larger than that in the adhered sheet, with areas of the silver field open to disclose the color and texture of the ground sheet, enabling a figure and ground reversal.

Interior Window Series is a compendium of elements from Guy’s other prints in the exhibition, along additional printed elements, assembled in a row with a common base line, as if seven objects on a shelf. The ground sheet is the same buff bark paper, perhaps Kasuiri, of Rorschach No. 6. At the left, the black and white image is repeated from Interior Window No. 1, where it is printed in a cool light gray on black to have the effect of a negative-positive reversal. Second from the left is a square module from Rorschach No. 6; here it is printed in a cool light gray, rather than the black on buff paper used in Rorschach No. 6. Third from the left is a narrow, ver- tical rectangle, printed black on a raw sienna colored paper. The trapezoidal center element of Interior Window No. 2 forms the center element of Interior Window Series. To the right of the center element, the element immediately to the left of the center element is repeated, but rotated 180 degrees and printed as a cool light gray on black. The black central square element of Ror- schach No. 5 is second to the right of the sequence, but here printed in black on buff stock, rather than in the cool light gray on black paper as it appears in Rorschach No. 5. The right element is the central element from Interior Window No. 1.

Whatever semblance the repetition, separation and combining of elements in the facture of the artwork may share with collage and with bricolage, the forming of these works entails a use of elements as parts as distinguished from fragments. 6 In the repetition, separation and combining of elements, no less than in the facture of the several elements and the Gestalt of the work pro- duced through these operations, the character of art making as poiesis, as process of cre- ating and forming, is manifested. Art as poiesis is the origin of artist and of the artwork. 7 It is also the model of thinking central to the human exterprise, as Hannah Arendt suggests:

By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question- asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It seems more likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to pro- duce those thought-things that we call works of art but also to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded. 8

1. Heraclitus, Fr. 45, Diogenes Laertius IX, 7. Return
2. Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, 1981), p.115. For the distinction of conceptual and connatural knowledge, of knowledge through the agency of the intel- lect alone versus knowledge embodied in the concert of intellect, affect, and volition, see Aquinas, S. T. II-II, 45, 2. Return
3. The dramatist Senefelder’s invention stemmed from his desire to inexpensively reproduce and circulate his plays. After experimenting with several intaglio processes during the 1790’s, he wrote his mother’s laundry list on a limestone slab he had been using to mix ink, using a composition of wax, soap and lampblack that he was using for his intaglio experiments. In July 1796 he bit the stone with dilute nitric acid, and subsequently made prints from the slightly (about 0.2mm) relief surface. The relief-etched stone in itself was not new, though his method of printing using an inking board covered with cloth and his acid resistant material were innovations. Senefelder’s invention of lithography, a planographic process, was not until another two years convinced him of the necessity of gum arabic to the formation of a printable planographic image on a limestone surface. The exact date of the inven- tion of the process is uncertain, but the year 1798 is accepted as the year in which Senefelder fully developed the planographic printing process on limestone using an etch of gum arabic and nitric acid to chemically alter the sur- face. (rather than removing a portion of the surface to form a relief). That Senefelder was working in Munich was particularly fortuitous, as the limestone from the Solnhofen in Bavaria (sometimes known as Kellheim stone) has proven to be the best suited for the process, being a very dense, very finely grained limestone. Return
4. The term lithography was first used in French on a music cover printed c. 1803; Senefelder preferred the term ‘chemical printing’ [chemische Drukerei in German, in which language ‘lithography’ is Steindruckerei]. Return
5. For the distinction of ‘token’ and ‘type’, originating with Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. IV, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1933), p.423; see Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 131, n.3. Return
6. See Donald Kuspit, “Collage: The Organizing Principle of Art in the Age of the Relativity of Art,” The New Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), pp. 503-520; initial publication in ed. Betty J. Craig, Relativism in the Arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), pp. 123-147. Return
7. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 57. Return
8. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind [one-volume edition] (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 62. Return