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Iraq, Paper, Scissors is a full length documentary in the making by filmmaker Sara Nesson. The film documents the Combat Paper Project initiated by Green Door Studio in Vermont where young US vets destroyed their uniforms, beat them to a pulp and transformed them into paper used for handmade books, screenprints, pulp prints and various other works of art.
Some words from the Combat Paper Project site:
Through ongoing participation in the papermaking process, combat papermakers are attempting to progress from creating works specific to their military experiences to expressing a broader vision on militarism and society. The work reflects both the anger of the past and hope for the future. Through this collaboration between civilians and veterans, a much-needed conversation is generated regarding our responsibilities to the returned veteran and an understanding of the dehumanizing effects of warfare.
You can also check out the trailer on YouTube.
My first exposure to Sister Corita Kent was a few years ago in Eye no. 35:
Corita regarded printmaking as “a very democratic form, since it enables me to produce a quantity of original art for those who cannot afford to purchase high-priced art.” The forms she used – serigraphs, greeting cards, posters, murals – and the way she disseminated her work – through churches, community centres, galleries and fairs – made her art widely accessible, without ever descending to an imagined lowest common denominator of visual literacy.
Although her work evolved over her career, what I always loved was her re-assemblage of advertising slogans, commercial products, headlines, etc., her distorted typography, her bold color palettes, her strong philosophical/political messages and the overall positivity and freshness that emanates from her work and has it feel as new today as it did over 40 years ago.
I’ve been seeing more and more coverage of her work over the past year and thought Printeresting would be a good place to introduce her work (most notably, her screenprints) to anyone unfamiliar. So here’s a list of sorts you might want to check out:
• The most obvious would be Corita Art Center
• Come Alive!: The Spirited Art of Sister Corita (published last year by Four Corners Books).
• Some words by Aaron Rose of ANP Quarterly.
• The above mentioned article in Eye magazine.
Plus if you happen to be in either Dundee or NYC over the next month …
Dundee Contemporary Arts will be exhibiting some of Sister Corita’s work in the show Power Up and Exit Art will be showing some work as part of the larger exhibition: Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now. In conjunction with these exhibitions, both galleries will also be offering screenprinting workshops.
If you happen to be in Stockholm before October 5th, check out Faxination at Loyal where both production and distribution of all work will be left to the same device: the fax machine. Faxination will present a series of fax tramsmissions by a group of artists creating a “Wall of Fax”. The exhibition will expand over its course as more transmissions are received.
The fax has a truly distinct quality – a combination of some of the worst ink, paper and precision – yet the fax print rarely shows up as art. There was a call for fax machine art in 1993, 1996 and 1997. Unfortunately, no images associated with these events were found. This could be that the shows/events were as disposable as the medium. This is all the more reason to check out Faxination or fax +46 (0)8 32 44 91.
About a year ago Sleevage.com featured the Bright Eyes Cassadaga CD package. The design, featuring hidden illustrations viewable only through a special focal decoder, won a Grammy that year for Best Recording Package. What’s interesting to note is that a specialty printer with one of the most uninspiring web presences is behind the technology and production of this award-winning piece.
Around the same time Dezeen featured the Podravka “Well Done” annual report. Similarly, a seemingly tacky/gimmicky print technique involving thermo-reactive ink was used to produce an award-winning design (not sure who printed this piece). Wrap the annual report in foil, pop it in the oven at 100ºC for 20 minutes and you have a collection of great Podravka recipes.
More recently the award-winning Panamap has returned. The Panamap uses lenticular printing technology in a practical application to present 3 views of the same city (currently only available for NYC and Chicago) — roads, transit lines and neighborhoods — on a single map.
So, I suppose the point of this entry is to not discredit these somewhat novelty print techniques because cheesy marketers overuse and abuse them for the mere sake of getting your attention and nothing beyond that. Bring them into a new realm and redefine them.
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.
Export to World is an attempt to maybe close the gap between real life and Second Life just a tiny bit more. So when you’re thinking: “that glazed donut looks awesome, I need that glazed donut.”, you can actually have it. Artists Linda Kostowski and Sascha Pohflepp took advantage of a couple of free apps (OGLE and Pepakura Designer) available online to export the geometry and textures of Second Life objects and then unfold them into printable sheets. From there you can print, cut and reconstruct “paper representations of digital representations of real objects”. Mmm.
Rosemarie Fiore is not a printmaker, however her one-of-a-kind works are often the result of mechanical processes that could perhaps under very controlled conditions produce multiples. Fiore creates impressions with pinball machines, lawnmowers, a Scrambler amusement park ride and fireworks to name a few. A focus of her work seems to be revealing a new life or purpose in machinery and objects that are assumed to only have a single use.
On the occasion that she would be producing a print edition with Lower East Side Printshop, one might expect that Fiore would reconsider the use of the etching press, instead she resurrected discarded subway windows as the perfect printing plate with art already applied through passengers’ random scrawled writings. The result, as is the result in much of her work, was a documentation of the beauty of the ordinary or common occurrences in everyday life.
Unfortunately, not too much information exists online about Anton Perich. Perich is a New York artist who produces large scale paintings with a machine that operates much like an inkjet printer. What’s interesting about Perich, that has his work stand out from that of similar inkjet tech projects like Hektor the Spray-Paint Output Device, is that Perich began developing these machines in 1978, long before most people knew what an inkjet printer was.
Although the works have a clear indication of the technology, they maintain a great deal of expression along with a visual resemblance to the subject matter and image quality of Perich’s early celebrity films featuring the likes of David Johansen and Lady Divine.
Watch “The Painting Machine”, a video of Perich working in his studio and note the early footage clearly time-stamped with Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good”. An interesing selection considering the unfeeling machine at work.
For printmakers, overprinting has always been a pretty necessary part of the printing process. Within the world of commercial printing, overprinting may not be so typical, assuming you exclude the overlap of dots in 4 color process printing. In either case there exist some great instances that explore overprinting from a place other than simply the need to achieve more colors.
Putting life into a low budget
In the nineties, Basel designers Muller+Hess created this series of monthly event calendars. Rather than print a one-color calendar every month (what most designers would do with a small budget), they purchased a year’s worth of paper, printed a one-color calendar for the first month on every sheet, distributed a portion, and each month thereafter, added a new color to the remaining sheets. In the end they had an amazing visual record of the year’s events. This visual concept could never have been achieved with the given budget if printed all at once.
Surprise factor
London designer Daniel Eatock invited 12 artists/designers to create a poster promoting an exhibition that would also feature these posters. Eatock’s own work, decided prior to seeing the finished submissions, was to be all 12 posters printed on a single sheet. This is pretty risky. It’s often difficult to imagine what 2 overprinted colors might achieve, so imagine 12 4-color posters overprinted. The results could be spectacular or they could be horrible. This case is questionable. But what is great is the surprise element and the commitment to an idea with no control over the outcome.
The art of test prints
As screenprinters, overpriniting isn’t really anything new for Aesthetic Apparatus. Where it gets interesting is in the test prints they create. Basically, before wasting good sheets of paper, you want to do some tests on sheets that already have printing on them. It’s likely that many of these hit the trash, but occasionally, the results are more interesting than any of the individual posters that were being test printed. What do you do with these? Sell them as one of kind works of art, of course.
Discovering space where there is none
In the May issue of the Canadian edition of Vice Magazine, BMW and Vice pushed the limits of ad space, by overprinting a BMW ad onto the cover of the magazine using glow-in-the-dark ink. This allowed the cover to live by day and the ad to live by night with no compromise to the integrity of either. Pretty much a win-win as this cover as a whole, due to the overprinting technique, is more interesting than the isolated Vice cover shot and BMW ad.
