Show & Tell: Candy by Derek Stroup

Image Courtesy of the Artist’s Website

One of the biggest advantages of working with digital output has to be its flexibility. Once an image/idea is developed as a file, it can be adapted to different formats and media so easily. It’s an obvious observation but an image can be printed 2′x 2′ for one purpose and 2″x 2″ for another. If art is about making decisions, digital print output increases the amount of choices an artist gets to make (or at least changes the order in which some of those decisions have to made, right?).

A few months ago while browsing through the shelves at Printed Matter, someone pointed out a great book to me. A simple collection of images by Derek Stroup called Candy. Stroup’s book is a good example of this potential for reformatting. His website includes a body of work called Candy- individual inkjet prints of simplified candy wrappers. They’re quite beautiful- all text is removed and the viewer is left with “clean” packages. The images serve as a bellwether for our consumer conscience. Stroup has created a game of recognition reminding us of the branding we normally ignore. Each is listed as 16″x20″.

Stroup’s book at Printed Matter collects all of these candy images into a small accordion-bound mini-portfolio. But rather than exist as reproductions of another media (like a book of offset-printed images of paintings or etchings), there is no degree of separation. The book is just a different version of his larger digital prints.

Yinka Shonibare Produces Monsters

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Europe, Australia, Asia, America) by Yinka Shonibare, part of the artist’s show at James Cohan Gallery. As the cover image of last month’s Art in America; probably not news to you. I just want to point out the impressive taxidermy, which somehow captures the utterly weird sensibility of Goya’s hand:

Classic Hip Hop Party Flyers

This is a nice example of print ephemera becoming web ephemera. Toledo Hip Hop hasn’t been updated since 2005, but they’ve left behind a server full of amazing hand-set party flyers from the early 80’s designed by Buddy Esquire and Phase 2. The designs are pure gold – hip hop’s punk rock flyers - and the parties feature some of the most influential names from back in the day. These were produced with Letraset type, ditto machines and Xacto knives. Some of these were later featured in the book Born in the Bronx published in 2007 and other designs can be found here or floating the web. So before you send that party flyer off to Modern Postcard, check these out and reconsider.

Faux-Printeresting Tuesday: Daniel Eatock

Daniel Eatock made these images by placing some Letraset Pantone markers on top of a stack of paper, and allowing the ink to bleed through the sheets for one month.

The edition number was determined by the number of sheets the ink bled through from the possible 500. The numbering of each sheet corresponds to the position it was within the stack and also determined its value. The final sheet the ink reached, (furthest from the top) was numbered 1 / 73 and valued at £1, the one above numbered 2 / 73 and valued at £2 etc. The top sheet (the sheet the pens rested on) was numbered 73 / 73 and valued at £73.

Now, I have a liberal attitude toward defining print terms, but “the edition number”? …Mr. Eatock, you sir are a rascal and a scamp!

Urban Print Ephemera

On a recent visit to the home of typographic enthusiast Ezra Wolfe, this correspondent was lucky enough to have a chance to spend some time with his collection of letterpress parking lot tickets. following the visit Ezra was kind enough to participate in an e-interview about his collection. 

 

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Albers + Hermès = Bauhaus Chic

As anyone who’s been to a printmaking conference knows, it’s not a scene that would be easily confused with New York Fashion Week. But there are moments when the worlds of fashion and print collide. Case in point, French fashion powerhouse Hermès is paying tribute to Josef Albers in a series of limited edition scarves. Using Albers Homage to the Square series as inspiration, Hermès has created six carrès (silk scarves) in editions of 200. The scarves, which will be for sale at select Hermès stores for the bargain price of €2,000! 

Info regarding the edition came by way of Wallpaper magazine. Surprisingly, the article discusses in some detail the printing process and a new ‘edge to edge’ technique developed especially for the Albers-inspired pieces. Beyond the Wallpaper article itself, neither the Hermes or Albers Foundation websites appear to have additional info.

I’ve heard that Calder’s estate is releasing limited edition jewelry based on his mobiles. And one trip to the MoMA store will show the limitless commercial potential in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. I’m all for blurring the lines between the gallery and the marketplace but isn’t it funny to think that modernism’s greatest legacy might be in the luxury accessory industry?

MoMA’s three-ply paper cocktail napkins featuring imagery adapted from the art glass windows of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Coonley Playhouse.

Alex Dodge

The Legendary Coelacanth by Alex Dodge, published by Forth Estate.

Forth Estate produces compelling editions in “both traditional and technologically innovative print media.” The plate for Alex Dodge’s The Legendary Coelacanth was produced by an engraving machine; the work also includes a computer virus that accompanies each print on a memory chip. Such a gesture could seem gratuitous, but in this case the artist’s reasoning is really very thoughtful:

Compared to the coelacanth the human idea has merely just begun and with far more pitfalls, but our means of replication and distribution continue to evolve through spoken language, written language, the printing press, Guttenberg and so on. The means of reproducing and distributing multiples of text and images is relatively recent and though I believe that these evolutions in our means of distributing culture, all tied deeply to printmaking, are not mere innovations but were actually imperatives in the survival and maintenance of human populations and or society. The internet, in a matter of decades, has made that evolution a staggering part of our reality that continues to evolve. This print encompasses the range of that history being derived and assembled from multiple layers of imagery and culture through the use of computers and historic printmaking processes as well.
The secondary component to this edition, The Coelacanth Virus, is a computer virus that in its immateriality represents the essentialized form of that biologic/genetic/ideologic impulse in its simplistic ability or need to self replicate and self distribute itself. The chip that holds the virus however holds in itself a significance in the continuation of the printmaking process; as all microchips are in fact multi-layered photo-lithographs, so that a seemingly separate and new technology is actually tied very closely to something quite traditional in printmaking terms.

Viva Los Videos! Puppet Edition

For your viewing pleasure, some puppets watch an olde-timey print demo:

…Forget the apron, a tightly-buttoned vest is my new style.

Allan McCollum

I like to think of Allan McCollum as the Bizarro-Printmaker. Now, this isn’t just flimsy chatter about comic books (although I love flimsy chatter about comic books). Rather, it’s a carefully reasoned assessment of the artist’s work. Heck, the case is made by the work itself:

(images and text from the artist’s website)

Over Ten Thousand Individual Works, 1987/88.
Enamel on cast Hydrocal, each unique.

Drawings, 1989-93.
Pencil on museum board, each unique.

The Shapes Project, 2005-present.
A large quantity of unique shapes, one for every person on the planet.

This last project has deservedly received a lot of attention. McCollum has created a system for the producing “a large quantity of unique shapes, one for every person on the planet when the world population peaks in the middle of the twenty-first century.” He pointedly explains that this is not a ‘generative’ system accomplished by programming or scripting; it is a system by which he can individually create unique forms (in Illustrator), and monitor these forms in order to prevent repetition. The system has been designed so that a successor can complete the work, since McCollum will inevitably die before the project is finished.

Repetition, Originality, Exchange, Commodity: McCollum explores many issues that are of interest to contemporary printmakers, but through a cracked mirror. Does this explain why the artist’s actual multiples somehow fail to satisfy?

Check out Visible Markers (1997) and More Visible Markers in Twelve Exciting Colors (2000), each produced by I.C. Editions. The former piece involves the word “THANKS” embossed into a simple form, cast in concrete in an array of vivid colors; the latter is similar. Despite the hefty materiality of these objects, McCollum considers the work to be an art action of sorts, in the sense of “exchanging thanks,” or even “giving thanks.” The forms are produced in unlimited editions (although availability of Visible Markers is “limited,” and the newer edition is “sold out”).

Despite the quantities involved, and despite the beauty of the objects, neither edition packs the punch of McCollum’s other work. Formally, his art often impresses because the labors involved are self-evidently enormous, yet the presentation is breezy; he makes the whole thing seem easy. To be fair, the multiples explore exchange more than originality. If his overall creative objectives are not precisely the same, perhaps these pieces shouldn’t be judged by the same formal criteria. Still, somehow McCollum’s usual sense of scale is lost, to the detriment of the work.

…Having said that, my birthday’s comin’ up and Visible Markers would look great on my mantle.

Robert Gober

Here and here and here.