It is no accident that the artist comes to terms with a tension in his work between the expectations harboured by custom and the introduction of new ways of doing things. Our situation of extreme modernity, as exhibited by this kind of conflict and tension, is so striking that it poses a problem for thought.
Hans-Georg Gadamer 1
Je juge cette longue querelle de la tradition et de l'invention.
Guillaume Apollinaire 2
Printmaking in the School of Art at Washington University in Saint Louis is a locus of intersection of media and processes, techniques and conceptual approaches: a liminal zone of tradition and innovation. As practicing artists as well as teachers, the printmaking faculty of the School of Art at Washington University in Saint Louis have participated in and contributed to the pervasive transformation of printmaking, as a practice, as a medium, and as a symbolic form 3 during the last half of the twentieth century. This experimental approach to printmaking, with emphasis on large scale, mixed media and an open-ended investigation and extension of processes, has resulted in works that contribute to an ongoing redefinition of printmaking and merges its practices with the larger shift in the visual arts from the specific to the generic. 4 In this move, the print is often less a multiple resulting in an edition than a unique work, frequently incorporating multiple iterations of image elements within it, and expanding the understanding of what a print could be. Peter Marcus, who shaped the direction of the printmaking/drawing area at Washington University during his long tenure, said:
We wanted our program to take a mixed-media approach. Adding new stuff, new materials, building images in layers-the idea was to experiment with imagery and process so that each time you run a print you're adding to the body of knowledge. 5
In the collagraphs of Peter Marcus, the print challenges painting in complexity, richness of surface, and scale. This challenge to painting undergoes a literalization in the adhering of the paper to canvas mounted on stretcher. On to the surface of the collagraph printed intaglio in black, Marcus collages passages printed in blue, with small areas of other hues. In Modern Ruins I and Modern Ruins II, the inclusion of the blue passages seem particularly apt: occupying the negative spaces of the ruined structures, the blue printed passages evoke the surface of deteriorated whiteline blueprints of architectural drawings. (See the cyanotypes by Kendall Davis in the concurrent Studio Gallery exhibition for quite another use of the blueprint process.)
The works of Joan Hall on-or rather of, as much as on-large scale handmade paper thematize the sequential layering inherent in multiple matrix printing (as commonly obtains in printing color images). Separating layers of the image onto separate sheets of handmade paper, Hall achieves a correlative of the movement of light and air on water: the air currents in the gallery perturb the surface of Ocean Bed as delicately as a cat's paw on flat water, revealing and concealing the bottom as the sheets of paper move closer or farther apart. The same air currents lift the lower edges of the sheets of paper of Loop, a sail luffing in light air, while Guided By the Senses ripples with a constant progression of wavelets across the surface. The kinetic aspect of these works is not an end in itself, nor the extension of the print into time-based media for its own sake, nor again an exercise in superficial mimesis, but rather is the result of searching for an adequate correlative in which, to advert to the medieval formulation, art is the imitation of nature in its manner of operation. 6 The richness of surfaces in Hall's works obtain from the physical texture of the handmade paper imparted by the screen and the variation of fiber utilized in the facture of the sheet (primarily kozo and gampi) and the manipulation of the sheet during its formation, the use of pigmented pulp applied to the sheet, and the overprinting of the sheet. Of particular interest is Hall's use of digital collagraphs in Guided By the Senses and Loop. Drawing with a digitizing tablet and tiling the elements into arrays of smaller modules, as on the front sheet of Guided By the Senses, the resulting image is output to a plotter cutter to cut sheets of vinyl. The vinyl, adhered to a plastic matrix, is then inked and printed. The repeated modules are equiprimordially multiple iterations of the individual drawn element and as an ensemble are perceived as passages of visual texture. The motif of diagrams for knot tying reference Hall's love of sailing and, perhaps surprisingly, are suggestive of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Lisa Bulawsky overprints layer on layer of images: process and consequent image are an analogue of memory employing the delay inherent in the indirectness of the processes of printmaking. 7 Bulawsky's juxtaposition of tiled sheets in Dick-Ed Venerated By His Own Image is not simply an instance of producing a large work from the combination of small modules, but is also an instance of a visual dialectic, in which the woodcut images of mass culture celebrities Ed McMahon and Dick Clark are sublated into a third entity, Dick-Ed, in which the thesis and antithesis remain as distinct moments. Divided and joined by the embossed gold colored paper, the images in the upper and lower registers mirror each other to render their status as representations problematic, a precession of simulacra, 8 each reflecting the other, representations of a representation: "Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show." 9 Bulawsky's direct introduction of acrylic paint onto the surface contravenes the modernist paradigm of essentialism, reductivism and purism with respect to medium. Within the context of printmaking as a studio practice, it entails a shift from valorizing purity of process to the valorization of the work resulting from the process of its facture: a shift from means of facture as end in itself to print qua artwork as having its end in itself and driving the selection of the means of facture.
The prints of Thomas J. Reed composite multiple layers of appropriated, dated mass culture images, each subsequent layer entirely or partly concealing the prior layers. This accumulation of layers on the flatbed 10 of the printed surface is a mode of collage. 11 Utilizing the capacity of printed ink to range from near-transparent translucency to complete opacity, Reed's prints employ the physical layering of images as a visual metaphor of cultural sedimentation and individual memory. The small sheets comprising Reed's prints are tiled together, their boundaries sufficiently distinct to have them read as discrete; the overprinted elements sometimes are confined to the dimensions of the individual sheet, sometimes running across the edges of adjacent sheets. Like a grid superimposed on an archaeological excavation, the edges of the sheets provide a set of Cartesian coordinates, a mathematizable framework through which the sedimented layers of the image are given to perception and intellection.
Maryanne Ellison Simmons Impervious Surfaces/Concrete I uses paper pulp as mass; printed in black using a collagraph matrix, the surface assumes a density and weight in tension with the fragility of its substrate material. American Landscapes/Document Series has six lithographs derived from official documents enclosed in a Plexiglas vitrine on a base of welded rebar. Combined in installation as in this exhibition, the two discrete works form a larger unit of content, each extending and complementing the other. The two sections of Impervious Surfaces/Concrete I suggests a surface broken or torn: a synecdoche for a violated landscape, or a broken treaty. The lithographs of American Landscapes/Document Series incorperating the ur-texts make similar references: to the cleanup of dioxin at Manhattan Beach and to treaties with Native American peoples. Installed together, the two works are more than the sum of the parts, with the more abstract general case on the wall in Impervious Surfaces/Concrete I and the particular instances referenced in American Landscapes/Document Series.
The magisterial drawings of Dawn Guernsey are at once powerful and chilling. The scale of the three drawings is such that the figures are approximately life size, contributing to the viewer's empathetic response and transcending the abstraction inherent in the materials and conventions of drawing. The drawings are stunning in their execution, and repelling for their content. The developed, controlled modeling of form in the faces of the young girls, one in each of the three drawings, contrasts with the violent application of charcoal in the drawing of the adult male figures, parallel to the static gestures of the girls and the active gestures of the adult male figures. There is no question of who has instigated the sexual abuse depicted in the drawings, or the horror it imposes on its victims, notwithstanding the text in the upper right of She Has Very Curly Hair: "My fault / My fault / All My fault / My fault / All my fault." The incorporation of text embeds the titles within the works: Secrets, Girl in Tub, She Has Very Curly Hair. The inscription in the upper left corners of Girl in Tub, and Secrets, and in the upper right corner of She Has Very Curly Hair of the numerals 1, 2, 3 respectively, denotes the three drawings as either distinct scenes present in temporal simultaneity as a triptych, or a temporally developing narrative. On the internal evidence of the variation in the girl's faces in the works, one suspects the former; on the external evidence of the artist's undergraduate minor in playwriting, one wonders if the latter possibility might not obtain. However that may be, the works are disturbing, though not disturbational,12 made all the more so for the mastery of the vocabulary of drawing representing such terrible violations of innocence.
The two prints by Tom Huck, Dollar Dance and Death of a Sailor, employ large scale, intricate images to explore human folly and the folklore of his native southeastern Missouri with dark humor. Huck's prints are extraordinary examples of chiaroscuro woodcut, astonishing in the facility of their execution, employing a syntax first reaching its full fruition in the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, to whom Huck has paid tribute:
Listen, the sole reason that I cut wood is because of Dürer. When I was thirteen my mom and dad took me to D.C., and at the National Gallery there I was allowed to buy one art book. Not even knowing what a woodcut was or what a print was for that matter, I saw Battle of the Angels [from The Apocalypse] on the cover of Kurth's The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer and that was it. 13
Both Huck's use of the conventional syntax of woodcut, and the use of the print as vehicle for social commentary, are situated within a long tradition of printmaking practices. Within, and not at the end, of that tradition. Printmaking, Hugh Merrill has urged:
is a tradition in which print artists have created complex imaginary worlds, worlds which are intuitive fictions generated from memory and created through process. 14'Tradition,' within the tradition of modernism in the visual arts, has long since come to be a term tainted with the notion of exhaustion. Insofar as the practice of printmaking regarded as a symbolic form seemed at the middle of the twentieth century to have been mythologized into ossified dogma, exhaustion is an apt term. But as Paul Ricoeur has urged in another context:
A tradition exhausts itself by mythologizing the symbol; a tradition is renewed by means of interpretation, which reascends the slope from exhausted time to hidden time, that is, by soliciting from mythology the symbol and its store of meaning. 15
We are very grateful to Lisa Bulawsky, Dawn Guernsey, Joan Hall, Tom Huck, Peter Marcus, Tom Reed, and Maryanne Ellison Simmons, who have generously loaned their works for this exhibition, and to an anonymous donor without whose generosity this exhibition would not have been possible.
Lisa Bulawsky
Dick-Ed Venerated by His Own Image
woodcut, photolithograph, acrylic, collage on paper
58 x 37 inches
Lisa Bulawsky
Putting the Squeeze On
woodcut, photolithograph, acrylic, collage on paper
56 x 41 inches
Dawn Guernsey
Girl in Tub
charcoal on paper
78 x 60 inches
Dawn Guernsey
Secrets
charcoal on paper
78 x 60 inches
Dawn Guernsey
She Has Very Curly Hair
charcoal on paper
78 x 60 inches
Joan Hall
Ocean Bed
handmade paper, pulp painting
65 x 100 x 1 inch, three layers
Joan Hall
Loop
mixed media print, digital collagraph, on handmade paper with pulp painting
42 x 61 x 1.5 inches, five layers
Joan Hall
Guided By the Senses
mixed media print, digital collagraph, on handmade paper with pulp painting
60 x 65 x 1.75 inches, seven layers
Tom Huck
Dollar Dance
woodcut on paper
52 x 37.5 inches
Tom Huck
Death of a Sailor
woodcut on paper
52 x 37.5 inches
Peter Marcus
Modern Ruins I
collagraph, mixed media on paper, mounted to canvas
60 x 102 inches
Peter Marcus
Modern Ruins II
collagraph, mixed media on paper, mounted to canvas
60 x 102 inches
Tom Reed
Untitled
mixed media print on paper
24 x 24 inches
Tom Reed
Untitled
mixed media print on paper
24 x 24 inches
Maryanne Ellison Simmons
Impervious Surfaces / Concrete I
collagraph on handmade paper
90 x 65 inches (two parts)
Maryanne Ellison Simmons
American Landscapes / Document Series
six lithographs, rebar, plexiglas vitrine
37 x 84 x 18 inches
Lisa Bulawsky is Assistant Professor of Art in the School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis. Her recent exhibitions include: problem plays, Artemesia Gallery, Chicago, 2001; Print Blitz, Northern Illinois University, 2001; Depictions, MatrixArt, Sacramento, 2000; Americas 2000: The Best of the Best-The year 2000 Invitational, Northwest Art Center, Minot, North Dakota, 2000; caught (side by side and in between), Lightwell Gallery, University of Oklahoma, 1999; Picking from the Bone Pile, St. Louis Community College at Forest Park, 1998. Bulawsky received the Bachelor of Art and Graduate Certification in Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Master of Fine Arts from the University of Kansas. She is represented by Kevin Quandt Fine Art, Minneapolis.
Dawn Guernsey is Associate Professor of Art and drawing area head in printmaking/drawing in the School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis. Recent one-person exhibitions include Dawn Guernsey, Lyons Weir Gallery, New York, 2002; Elliot Smith Contemporary Art, Saint Louis, 1997, 1992, 1989; Z Gallery, New York, 1995; Contemporary Art Workshop, Chicago, 1990. Guernsey's group exhibitions include: Kennedy Museum, Athens, Ohio, 1996; Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, Missouri, 1996; Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, St. Joseph, Missouri, 1995' Steinbaum-Kress Gallery, New York, 1993. Guernsey is the recipient of a National Endowment/Mid-America Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant in painting in 1996, and A National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in drawing in 1985, as well as being a MacDowell Fellow in 1992 and 1997 and a Ragsdale Fellow in 1991 and 1997. Guernsey received the Diploma in Illustration from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University (with a minor in playwriting), and the Master of Fine Arts from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, with subsequent work in lithography at Tamarind Institute. She was Visiting Artist for the 1994 Brookhaven College painting workshop class. Guernsey is represented by Elliot Smith Contemporary Art, St. Louis.
Joan Hall is the Kenneth E. Hudson Professor of Art, and area coordinator of the Department of Printmaking/Drawing and Island Press in the School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis. Hall's recent exhibitions include Land and Ecology, University of Colorado and traveling, 2002; Eleven International Artists: Paper Revisioned, Museum Art Center, Silkeborg Bad, Silkeborg, Denmark, 2001; Digital Revolutions in Printmaking, Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2001; Midlands 2000-Works On Paper, Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha, 2000; Currents 79 [solo exhibition], Saint Louis Museum of Art, 1999. Hall received two NEA/M-AAA Individual Artist grants, and the Kenneth and Nancy Kranzberg Award of the Saint Louis Art Museum. Hall was Visiting Artist for the 2000 Printmaking/Papermaking Workshop class at Brookhaven College. Hall received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Columbus College of Art and Design, studied at the Institute of Experimental Printmaking, San Francisco, and received the Master of Fine Arts from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Joan Hall is represented by Elliot Smith Contemporary Art, St. Louis.
Tom Huck is Assistant Professor in Art in the School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis. Tom Huck's recent exhibitions include 2 Suites by Tom Huck, Mary Leigh and Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 2002; Tom Huck, ARENA Gallery, Chicago, 2001; Absurdities, Slugfest Printmaking Workshop/Gallery, Austin, 2001; The Rural Absurdities of Tom Huck, St. Louis Art Museum, 2001; Ink, Paper, Wood: European and American Woodcuts from Saint Louis Collections, Saint Louis Art Museum, 2001; Thomas Huck, University Art Gallery, Fain Fine Arts Center, Midwestern State University, 2000; Woodcuts by Tom Huck, Landfall Press Gallery/Villain Editions, New York, 2000; Thomas Huck: 2 Weeks in August, Elaine L. Jacobs Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit, 1999. Huck received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale and the Master of Fine Arts from Washington University in Saint Louis. He is represented by Elliot Smith Contemporary Art, St. Louis, Cumberland Gallery, Nashville, and ARENA Gallery, Chicago.
Peter Marcus is Emeritus Professor of Art, School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis. His extensive record of exhibitions include Dakota International, Vermillion, South Dakota, 1997; Metropolitan State College of Denver, 1997; University of Southern Colorado, Pueblo, 1997; Peter Marcus, Studio Gallery, Brookhaven College, 1997; Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1996; Elliot Smith Contemporary Art, Saint Louis, 1996, 1994, 1993; Steinbaum Krauss Gallery, New York, 1995; University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, 1995; Milliken University, Decatur, Illinois, 1995, Jansen Koos Gallery, Amsterdam, 1995; Jan Cicero Gallery, Chicago, 1995, 1990, 1989, 1987, 1981, 1978; Big Print, University of Dallas, 1993; Currents 32: The Narragansett Bay Series, Saint Louis Art Museum, 1986. Marcus received a National Endowment for the Arts Senior Artist Fellowship, and a NEA/M-AAA Artist grant. Peter Marcus was Visiting artist at Brookhaven College for Summer Workshop classes in printmaking in 1997 and 1993. Marcus studied at Scuola del Libro, Urbino, Italy, Parson's School of Design, and received the Bachelor of Arts in Industrial Design from New York University and the Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College. Marcus is represented by Elliot Smith Contemporary Art, Saint Louis.
Tom Reed is Lecturer in Art, School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis. Reed was printer for Landfall Press, Chicago, and Big Cat Press, Chicago. Reed's exhibitions include New Work, Hot House Gallery, Fayetteville, Arkansas, 2001; Less Happy Times, Anchor Graphics, Chicago, 2000; Art Begins at Home, The Armstrong Gallery, Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa, 1999; Nuvola, Fahrenheit Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1999; Tom Reed Recent Prints and Drawings, American Pop Culture Gallery, Nashville, Tennessee, 1998; Misunderstanding, Eve Drewlowe Gallery, University of Iowa, 1997. Reed received the Bachelor of Fine Arts, Master of Arts, and Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa.
Maryanne Ellison Simmons is Master Printer at Island Press, the collaborative print workshop component of the printmaking/drawing area of the School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis. More than sixty artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Sam Gilliam, Juan Sanchez, Hung Liu, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Tom Nakashima, working in collaboration with the master printer and Washington University students, have produced more than one hundred editions of fine prints in the facility, which supports technically complex, large format experimental printmaking processes. Simmons received the Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan, and the Master of Fine Arts from Washington University in St. Louis.