Title

“Collapse of Mirror City”: Fact, fabrication and the newspaper print in Michael Stevenson’s Call Me Immendorff, 2000.

Author

Parlane, Anna

Source

Prints, printmaking and philanthropy: A symposium celebrating 50 years of The Harold Wright and The Sarah and William Holmes Scholarships. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 30 September - 2 October 2019.

Publication date

30 September 2019

Type

Conference paper

Language

English

Countries of context

Australia | New Zealand

Abstract

“Collapse of Mirror City”: Fact, fabrication and the newspaper print in Michael Stevenson’s Call Me Immendorff, 2000. Dr Anna Parlane, Art History Program, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne. This paper explores how the logic of the print underpins the installation Call Me Immendorff, 2000, by Berlin-based New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson. Call Me Immendorff addresses the historical coincidence of the 1987 international stockmarket crash with an artist residency undertaken in Auckland by the hedonistic neoexpressionist painter Jörg Immendorff, tracing the boom and bust of both the market and artistic prestige in the late Cold War period. The copies of archival newspaper clippings that appear in the installation serve to relay its narrative of expansion and collapse. However, Stevenson’s use of the newspaper print also exploits an inherent tension between fact and fabrication in the printed document. Archived news clippings occupy multiple registers of authority. Newspapers give an authoritative – because contemporaneous – report on current events, and the archive is a repository for such documentation, a time capsule that offers a direct trace or impression of a period. More generally, the mechanically faithful process of replication that produces printed documents still has a lingering association with objectivity, or at least fidelity to an original. However, far from standing as an independent authority or objective record of events, newspaper reports are implicated in the highs and lows of historical, political and economic change. Operating within the aggregate emotional state that economist John Maynard Keynes called ‘animal spirits’, they reinforce both the hype and the despair that drives market fluctuations. Call Me Immendorff can be situated within the tendency that art historian Hal Foster described as contemporary art’s ‘archival impulse’, a practice oriented towards historical research and methodologies of ordering or re-ordering accumulations of documents or artefacts. Building on this art historical framework, I demonstrate how Stevenson’s re-reading of the archival record develops the narrative implications of the documentary trace, fabricating rhetorical echoes and revealing poetic coincidence within printed news reports. [Conference Program]

Last Updated

02 Oct 2019