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Southern Graphics Council Conference, 2004 After an embarrassing number of non-attendance years I finally made it to a Southern Graphics Council conference! This conference, at Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (RCIPP), may have been beginning at the top. As amazing as I'd heard SGC to be, I returned as if having been supercharged by a creative reality I had almost forgotten existed. Surrounded by great art and serious working artists together on a grand scale, amassed through a shared belief that we belong in our own small ways to something much larger than ourselves, I was reminded why I chose the path of art for my life and why I must not lose sight of my particular practice within it. The weekend was a full-scale exchange of ideas and technical methods between printmakers who represented all stages of experience. We heard stories of struggles to arrive at various versions of success and honored those who paved the way to the present through the quality of their hard work and the breadth of their mentoring. The spirit of printmaking, and its sister, book arts, are permeated with collaboration, assistance, cooperation and mutual respect for careful craft and the attentive sharing of space, along with the cycle of learning, doing, and giving back. It is no surprise that printmaking and book arts are acknowledged as being at the cutting edge of the contemporary aesthetics and critical thinking that embrace multiculturalism and interdisciplinarity and that these genres have advanced the collective creative dialogue globally. Prints and books, like women and non-white non-Euro-American artists, are no longer second-class citizens in the art world. There were many quotable and memorable moments throughout the two days I was there. In his on-stage conversation with Terri Sultan (Director, Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, TX, former Curator, Corcoran Gallery of Art), Chuck Close (Lifetime Achievement Award), commented, "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get busy." Getting busy and working hard, continually, and with grace, epitomized Judith Brodsky's (artist/educator/founder of RCIPP) life and work and the wholeness of her personal and professional involvements, evidenced by the tender and loving testaments which accompanied her entry into the ranks of SGA's Printmaker Emeriti. Ken Kerslake, honored as a particularly beloved Printmaking Teacher of the Year, wondered along with his thanks, "don't teaching and printmaking go hand in hand?" Keynote Speaker June Wayne (artist and founder, Tamarind Institute in L.A.), legend in her own time, through poignant and funny stories of her fascinating journey, urged the women artists in the audience to be true to what she and her peers in the American Women Artists Movement gave us. Faith Ringgold (Prof. Emerita, University of California, San Diego) encouraged us to hold to our visions against all odds. She reminded us that being an artist is a way of life and it should be viewed with joy every day. "Struggle when you're young (as she, and many of us in the 'second wave', did)," she humorously but truthfully advised the students, "you don't have as much energy later," and to the majority of "boomers" in the audience, she advised, "if you live long enough, you'll get everything you're supposed to." "Remember," she said, "everything that comes to you is about somebody calling your name and having no one else cross it out." The importance of content and patience with process was echoed again and again, the "what" of printmaking being in the forefront of everyone's thinking, in visual form through the extraordinary wealth of works among the galleries, hallways, and the Zimmerli Art Museum, as well as in the works of the hundreds of artists (students and professionals, alike) who participated in the open portfolio sessions. "In our culture, problem solving is greatly overrated," Chuck Close stated, "What's more important is coming up with good problems to solve." David Kiehl (Whitney Museum of American Art), while providing a thorough history of printmaking at the forefront of every major art movement, exhorted us never to forget that content is paramount. (It was encouraging that my own questions to undergraduate students at a small liberal arts college were so frequently validated.) Tools and techniques, inherently captivating as they are, are only means to an end. What do we address? What is our purpose for making the work we do? How can printmaking inform, as for Chuck Close, the rest of our work, bringing each project further along in creative and conceptual maturity? Originally an information-imparting system, how can our prints continue to speak to others through the ages? Several artists addressed the concept of visually coding a critique about the crass commercialization of the present. More than once I heard someone use the phrase, "There is nothing I want here," in reference to painstakingly produced works that dealt with the concept of overabundance. From the inclusion of free software on the outside packaging of cereal boxes and other "supermarket fine art products" (www.slopart.com) to the meticulously engraved images about homosexual invisibility within cross-sected shopping tableaus (Andrew Raftery, Rhode Island School of Design), artists were using the cultural saturation of advertising to undermine its traditional overt intentions. Regarding the viability of comics and other forms once traditionally considered to be "low art," Christopher Sperandio (www.kartoonkings.com) commented, "we're not interested in killing T.V., we just want to send it to college!" The work of Kara Walker provoked questions about the outer edges of content that many contemporary artists seek to explore. Presenter Ellen Price (Miami University-Oxford) wondered aloud, "are viewers too literal?" Within the arena of facing taboo images, artistic exorcisms, and postmodern parodies that seek to "deconstruct our racially biased subconsciousness" questions emerged about whether the edge between victim and victimizer might be too slippery. Who, in addition, is qualified to address some questions? Do well-known African-American artists and important curators who adamantly oppose Walker's works have grounds for their negative responses? Is the dialogue itself worth the controversies surrounding it? Some would say that courting the edge of what is appropriate is the most important place to be and that the edge continues to exceed one's grasp is proof that the art is in the front lines of its time. Mel Chin has excitingly explored the edge at which high/fine art connects with politically active content for many years. I first became aware of Chin's work through his project, Revival Field, in which he collaborated with scientists to produce earthwork gardens that physically healed contaminated areas of land through "hyperaccummulator" plants as they drew out heavy metals from the ground in the process of their growth. One of the most important environmental and socially conscious artists working in the last three decades, in my opinion, Chin addresses large cultural problems through his art, formally, while improving the lives of others through his results, practically. It was a thrill to meet him and hear him speak of his current project at RCIPP. Preserving and conveying ideas, according to Chin, are the most important functions of art. In Chin's works, the ideas behind the visual result are an attempt to raise the viewer's consciousness about difficult, controversial issues. "Images and ideas are being replicated constantly," he said, referring to "what we're allowed to see." "I want to point to spectrums within our world which are not expressed," he said, "and create conditions of discourse about something silent." Through his project at RCIPP Chin hopes to create work "that forms the foundation for something other to occur using the form, beauty, look and feel of the real," furthering the concept that art can have the power to "provoke a question and possibly lead to consciousness and conversation." Current artist in residence at RCIPP, in collaboration with master printer, Randy Hemmerhaus, Chin spoke about the process of his ideas, presently in their formative stages. His goal is to create printed works and a unique piece of jewelry based on the form of actual war-related wounds in order to generate funds to donate to victims of violence. His images are the result of studying illustrations of gun shot wounds from Civil War era field surgery manuals as well as looking at ads for luxury jewelry items from popular magazines. By tracing images of wounds and their surrounding patterns of powder burns he began to create delicate paper works in which brightly colored digital depictions of wounds are sandwiched between the translucent fronts and backs of differently colored hand-made paper "skins". As printed works they are lovely to behold, mysteriously concealing/revealing the secret message of their content. Chin intends to sell these works on/of paper in order to raise further funds to produce one exquisite piece of jewelry. From the image of cluster bombs, juxtaposed with the image of a body collapsing after being shot, Chin imagined the creation of a necklace based on his accurate scaling of the intricate diagrammatical formation of a certain chemical which is automatically created in a body that has been shot. Such a necklace (which likewise would fall to a heap when not actively worn) would require the same kind of production as actual designer jewelry, (and another collaboration with a jewelry maker), and would directly comment upon conspicuous consumption while furthering the cause of Chin's complexly conceived art action. The purchaser of the completed jewelry would, by necessity, be aware that the overt design refers to deaths by violence and that the act of purchasing the art would simultaneously be an act of offering. The collector, thus, becomes part of the conceptual equation and completes the circle. Equally concerned with the content of his formally engaging installations, sculptures and various forms of prints, Willie Cole reiterated the reoccurring messages of speakers throughout the conference. Though he referred to himself as a "domestic warrior," the message he conveyed was from a gentle, good-humored, and seemingly easy-going spirit. Releasing the inner power of a thing (such as his African mask-like iron sculptures and prints) is how Cole describes what he does. He advocates an open awareness to the world, and a willingness to play. "Learn to play with everything," he advised. To describe an artist, Cole said, "is not to describe their discipline, but their energy, their ideas, their passion." He spoke of an artist being like a fisherman, that "you lie on your back, cast your line into the sky, catch an idea, reel it in, but once you prepare it, you have to get rid of it." "You don't generate ideas," he said, "you attract them." In the playful approach with which he imparts serious commentaries I particularly liked a piece I had not seen before of his brainstorming on the word "America," producing sentences such as "Adam makes Eve regret ingesting contaminated apples," or "After Monday everything remaining is carted away," or "Alas, my earthly reality is changing again."
Last, but surely not least, among the particular highpoints from my memories of this conference was Rodney Hamon's (master printer, Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque) discovery that simple toothpaste makes working with Pronto Plates a charm. I owe a special "thank you!" to him for this, as he has set me sailing full speed ahead in my own work. I left feeling artistically well fed and deeply grateful on many levels. I suspect, as we each returned to our own areas of involvement I was not alone in that. We printmakers, book artists, and multidisciplinary workers are fortunate to be involved in a living art form that expands and affects other disciplines daily as we explore new tools and methods and dialogue through them. To come together in this way and take a snapshot of where things are in the bigger picture was indeed a powerful experience. The Southern Graphics Council conference was a time to honor those who opened the doors to worlds that intrigue and engage us, and who improved the paths that we now traverse. Our charge is to likewise add to the collective energy and body of knowledge and images, keep the journey invigorated and enjoy the trip. -Janet Maher |
