Title

Returning to Venusburg.

Author

Emmerson, Neil.

Source

Australian Print Symposium. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1987 - ongoing.

Details

1992

Publication date

1992

Type

Conference paper

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Returning to Venusburg.
byNeil Emmerson

 

I’d like to take this opportunity to show and talk about various installations of works that I've either been involved in myself or have seen exhibited in Melbourne over the past couple of years that either willingly, or unknowingly, have nothing to do with printmaking, at least the type of which we could assume we are here to discuss today. I do this to exemplify an attempt at expanding the field of printmaking to be inclusive rather than exclusive, distancing a formal practise that is at once ramified and insular, its terms of production most often technocratic and confined to the traditional politics of the ‘limited edition print’. I tend to blame art schools and other cultural institutions like art museums for this situation firstly, then I blame ‘printmakers’ themselves. Perhaps it’s a measure of how little attitudes have actually shifted over the past 25 to 30 years, in terms of how we view this media, or the visual arts in general, if it’s considered that we might need things like printmaking symposiums, or for that matter sculpture festivals and the like. These terms, this language, these practices facilitate a culture that seems to have become a memorial to the culture itself.

Printmaking seems always to have fought to keep its boundaries squeaky clean. New technologies are formally courted before being ranked and assimilated into traditional formulas. New contexts are not so easily either courted or integrated. ‘The democratic media’ works neither on this level nor any other level that might equate the notion of democracy with limited edition marketing strategies. Printmaking often plays the reproductive whore, positioning its exclusive politics where they might best be penetrated, in defence of its own availability to invasion. And, on its own terms it is frequently transgressed. So, I’d like to transgress some boarders myself and assimilate the work of a number of artists, who access multiple-making media in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes, and welcome them into this printmaking arena.

Printmaking and politics is an area that has involved this media in much debate. To be illiterate is to be blind, or, pulling out before cumming is not as safe as it looks, or, getting off at Redfern is the title of an installation by Matthew Jones exhibited at Linden Gallery, St Kilda in 1992 that ignites debate in regard to HIV-AIDS, hence sexual politics. He has produced a successful combination of minimalism, conceptualism and popular culture in a work where the coloured spots or dots of a colour blindness chart were stencilled directly onto the gallery wall, through which, in relief, coloured cast plaster braille is written. Two different forms of discourse, the visual and the tactile collide in a band across two walls of the small space. Two posters and a printed written statement are glued to the wall opposite. The work engages in a criticism of official HIV/AIDS education strategies, the intention of which Jones seeks is to create boundaries which educate and organise gay desire. In response he sets about to retain touch. I quote from his statement

put me on the otherside of safe, dancing the chocolate cha cha in the places that don't get a look in, call me blind like love, and give me the literacy of the blind which is braille, which is touch.

Sally Mannel struggled to survive ‘the printmaking department’ during her undergraduate studies. Her work engages in a subversive feminist dialogue that stresses the use of multiples and repetition, challenging distinctions between high and low art. ‘Blind Spot’ is a rigorous physical, visual and conceptual structure signifying the way in which gender is culturally conditioned to create both fetishes and lacunae in the self perception of women. Using the ready-made multiple of fringed squares from a pink chenille bedspread, decorated with stereotypical images of ballerinas, this construction overturns the patriarchal pyramid and becomes vulva. There is a heady sexuality involved in these works which negotiate the fluffy skin of the matrimonial bed. White on white might refer either to high modernist painting practices or perhaps to those sticky white substances that frequently stain these types of surfaces. Mannel’s work is at once a careful and intelligent feminist criticism of high modernist practice and a delightfully wicked poke in the ribs of both her printmaking background and her gender identity. Walking on Eggs, (an installation in Studio 12, 200 Gertrude Street in 1991), once again parodies notions of high and low cultures, the domestic, the decorative, being placed so as to force the viewer to participate in physically negotiating the work as one might do whilst being a visitor in a lounge room. The woman on the horse once again engages a sweaty sexuality in this domestic farce, cleaning it up, perhaps for the visitors, with the sterility of ornamental porcelain.

Light boxes seem to have become quite a significant device over the past couple of years both in themselves and in terms of displaying transparent material. Fritz Rahmann, a German artist from Berlin, resident at 200 Gertrude Street in 1990 developed a more platonic and philosophically speculative relationship with a horse. Phar Lap’s Heart engaged Rahmann in a dialogue between the upper echelons of medical technologies and the bureaucracy of the Victorian and Australian Museums in pursuit of the mystery, as opposed to the “truth” surrounding a national icon that only an outsider could breath new life into with a distanced gaze. In the installation 24 CT scans and one full colour transparency of Phar Lap’s heart were placed in horizontal lines across four large sheets of opaque white perspex leant against the wall. The whole room becomes a giant radiologist’s light box when illuminated by fluorescent lights from behind – across which another narrative of the heart of the horse gallops and the mystery deepens. Much of what Rahmann is on about in a work like this involves the construction of a discourse inherent in the negotiating with, or infiltration of, public facilities. The very fact of this installation might aptly describe the process of ‘getting inside’ these so called public institutions in physical, metaphoric and iconic terms. I quote the artist from the 8th Biennale of Sydney Catalogue, 1990.

The other day a sophisticated art theorist talked to me about Catholicism. He quoted an old French philosopher whose name I can’t recall. I might tell you the name of the art theorist and you could call him and ask him the very sentence I forgot. It was all about the images imprisoning mankind in the end. There was morale opposed to sensation, like two sides of a coin. Simply, we are not allowed to adore images, yet, remember the funny statement of Vaclav Havel when he recently wanted to be in prison again for three days a week to get, I suppose, some rest from actual life.

I tend to consider castings, and especially those in relief, easily assimilated into this narrative. The work of Jerri Bird becomes embossing with only the slightest of nudges. In her project of 1989 Configurations at the George Paton Gallery she created an environment that explored visual perception in a psychological sense, through a whiter than white space where six tableaux, also white were arranged on opposing walls. A small catalogue was incorporated to encourage the spectator to ‘read’ the works that appear like mirages, white on white, moulded from every day articles, architectural and decorative motifs. The catalogue combined dictionary definitions with poetic-literacy texts and set out to problematise the relations between the viewer and the works into a polymorphous language where multiple readings are encouraged. The site of a subjective reading shifts alternately from the body itself to a socio-symbolic experience. Not unlike in Sally Mannel’s work the lacunae, the missing parts or gaps in narrative, are employed in the use of inauthentic copies of actual objects and the interventional juxtaposition of authorative versus poetic text. The artist’s appearance is in fact a disappearance. In Devices for the Interpretation of Nature 1987–90 Bird seems to engage in an exploration of materiality. Sixteen cast ceiling roses were positioned in a diamond shaped constellation on the gallery wall. The various casting material used in this piece; bitumen, salt, bronze, lead, clay and straw, aluminium, wood pulp, newspaper, goldleaf, concrete, felt, marble dust, clear plastic, black rubber, pebbles and polyurethane, are like a narrative construction of a history of technology. There is a movement vertically and horizontally, diagrammatic formula becoming an alchemical chart where science and magic run parallel, once again with notions of authenticity. The mode of reading is various, this map or ensemble being the open structure that welcomes navigation.

Cul de Sac 1990 involved an installation of work by my self with an accompanying text by writer Brenda Ludeman. It appeared initially in the rear space at the George Paton Gallery where a series of square format works on paper were dispersed in a regular manner amongst the tripartite space, punctuated by smaller, circular discs. The text ‘I have chosen sanctuary’ runs along the floor of a corridor down the centre of the space. A kind of neurotically repetitious, patterned script of tangled briar, printed lithographically, covers a series of grisaille studies – illustrations of a collection of classic Freudian terms related to various psychological conditions. This collection of mythic Freudian characters dragged from respective contexts can perhaps accumulate in a singular or particular psyche. There is a playing off of the viewer’s subjective accessibility to the camouflaged images against an esoteric intent. The circular discs, worked with grisaille, printed with the mirror image of the briar pattern and then very heavily shellaced become dark mirrors, obscuring perhaps as much as they reflect.

This austere, almost clinical situation was converted dramatically into the baroque when installed in the cloister of St Davids Cathedral in Hobart. The paper panels were hung out from the walls between slender shafts of stained glass window and were lit theatrically from above. They take on contextually, the notion of illuminated manuscripts unrolled to expose specifically what they seem to deny. The shellaced discs placed on the floor in front of these pieces become shimmering pools or deep wells. The apt text 'I have chosen sanctuary' appears in red, running the length of the cloisters corridor. Portraits of founding fathers of the church, a survey of archbishops, along with rosettes from English cathedrals and other such religious relics punctuate the stone walls. British flags in shades of decay hover above head. Each relic is tagged to qualify its grace. This project superimposes itself upon this monastic, sectarian space producing an atmosphere where the implication is of magic, foregrounding the ritualistic nature of these objects. The more objective conceptual game at George Paton Gallery became a potential threat to the sanctified spirituality of the church. Needless to say, the threat was realised and the work swept from the cloister within days of its being installed. In earlier times it would have been burned, and I guess me along with it!

The range of printwork or multiple making media I’ve presented here today ranges from what’s considered the most primitive to the most sophisticated for example, blowing wet pigment across a splayed hand against a rock wall and transparent computer printouts from state-of-the-art image making machines. X-ray technology can equally leave a very personal impression. I hope that the work I’ve discussed here demonstrates and clarifies my ideas about extending the parameters of printmaking practices and what is considered “valice” within that institution. Perhaps it’s well time that printmaking welcomed works into its territory that push the media beyond itself and into a productively permissive relationship with others.

Robert MacPherson’s installation of a flotilla of newspaper boats that covered the entire floor of the front gallery of ACCA in 1991 is a good one to go out on, and an excellent example of the use to which a certain type of print media can be put.

Footnote: This paper was written specifically to follow a collection of images in the form of slides and may seem incomplete without all the visual material to reference whilst being read.

© Neil Emmerson, 1992.
Paper presented at The Second Australian Print Symposium, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1992.