Ben and I talk about why prints are awesome all the time (especially in episodes 7 and 8 of our podcast Platemark, which will be released later this summer). One key factor: the layers of translation from one step to another in the process. It takes planning and lots of decision-making to think through all the steps, which slows the artist down and makes them consider every aspect of the proposed work. Sherrie Levine’s portfolio Meltdown, 1989, is a perfect example of multiple transitions/translations in the making of the physical object in concert with multiple layers of conceptual ideas.
 
Meltdown is a portfolio of four woodcuts by Levine who is best known for challenging ideas of authenticity and originality. She often uses appropriation, either specifically or generally, as well as art history as a central element. Meltdown combines many of these concerns.
 
The four woodcuts were printed by Maurice Shanchez at Derrière L’Etoile Studios, and the portfolio was published by Peter Blum Editions. Each print consists of twelve squares of color. They are, in my mind, purely beautiful, but they also offer up serious layers and conceptual rigor.
 
In the project’s first step, reproductions of four works of art—paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Piet Mondrian, and Claude Monet, plus Marcel Duchamp’s altered postcard of the Mona Lisa—were scanned from art history textbooks and a computer algorithm averaged the colors in each image into twelve pixels. Those twelve colors were approximated (expertly) into various inks and rolled onto square blocks of wood that were jigged together and then printed.
 
So, we have the original artwork, the photograph taken of said artwork, the image as it was reproduced in an art history textbook (or other source), which was scanned to produce yet another derivation of the image. Only then does the human hand and eye of Maurice Sanchez step in to mix the inks. Then, to top it all off, the images that have been pushed through these multiple steps end up as woodcuts, the oldest, least techno form of printmaking.
 
Plus, think about how many actors are in this play. There is the artist of the original painting (Kirchner, Monet, Mondrian—Duchamp is a special case, more on that in a sec, plus Leonardo), the photographer of the original work of art, the person and technology that created the halftone version of the photograph that would appear in a textbook, Levine who scanned the images, the computer program that averaged the colors, Sanchez who approximated those colors, and us, the viewers who bring our own perception to viewing the prints. With the after-Duchamp woodcut, there’s a whole other level of remove from Duchamp’s starting point back to the Mona Lisa. Those are a lot of layers.
 
And let’s not forget that you are seeing a reproduction on your screen that is several steps beyond the original woodcuts. Levine is commenting on the varying nature of reproduction and appropriation of others’ images. How true is any translation of an image in one mode to another? At every stage of the trajectory the colors could have shifted to something else, either wildly or with great subtlety. It all feels extremely random and intentional all at the same time. And the bonus: in the end the prints are just so dang beautiful.
 
Maybe you CAN have it all.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that performance art is difficult to collect. Just as with dance or music, when the performance is over, there remains nothing solid. Sure, there might be a recording or video, but the thing itself evaporates as soon as it is done. With performance art, often the tangible, collectible thing is some sort of documentation of it—usually photographs. Rarely does one find a work that is a product of the performance—an indexical work, if you will. When Tru Ludwig and I stumbled across Western Exhibitions’ booth at the Editions and Artists Books Fair (E/AB) in 2011, gallery owner Scott Speh had Stan Shellabarger’s book front and center.
 
Stan Shellabarger is known for extended, endurance performances, say walking in a circle for twelve hours, marking the earth and a moment in time. Taking the idea of creating a drawing on the ground further, Shellabarger also walks in shoes outfitted with graphite or sandpaper on the soles and performs an endurance walk on paper or wood. In this way, the artwork is not only the performance itself, but also the drawing created in the process. Like many before him, Shellabarger wanted to be able to create more than one object from a given performance, and, no surprise, he turned to printmaking.
 
The method Shellabarger came up with to record a performance is known as a reductive or suicide woodcut. In this method, a multi-color print is created using a single block by carving away more of the surface in between printing each color. After drawing the outline of the image on the woodblock, first any areas that are to remain the color of the paper are carved away and the first color is printed. It is critical to print more sheets than you think you will need for the planned edition because you will undoubtedly have several mishaps (that’s where the suicide part comes in). After the first color is printed and the block is cleaned, the artist carves away any area that will remain that first color. After printing the second color, the steps are repeated. In the final cutting, usually all that is left is the key or black line, which brings the whole composition together.
 
Shellabarger used the reduction method but in a slightly different way. The woodblock has the various layers of image cut away by the artist walking on it with sandpaper-soled shoes rather than by carving in the conventional manner. For this walking performance piece, there were multiple boards laid out on the floor and walked upon. After each board was printed, after every walking session and every different color printing, the prints pulled from each board were assembled into accordion-fold books. When fully opened and unfolded, the book reaches eighteen feet.
 
Before beginning to walk, Shellabarger took the boards to Spudnik Press, a cooperative printshop in Chicago, printed the first color, the dark red, ending up with a flat red on each sheet. After walking for a period of time (at least four hours), Shellabarger printed the second color, the dark blue. He repeated the process, wearing away more and more of the blocks by sanding them with his shuffle, and printed each successive layer: green, then medium blue, then finishing with light blue.
 
I included Shellabarger’s book in my exhibition at the BMA called On Paper: Spin, Crinkle, Pluck, which was on view April 19–September 20, 2015. Each of the objects in the exhibition was indexical, meaning the image was the product of its own making. The action verbs in the exhibition title refer to three of the works in the show: spin for Trisha Brown’s softground pirouettes in Untitled Set One, 2006 (BMA 2007.336–338, and the subject of an earlier post); crinkle for Tauba Auerbach’s Plate Distortion II, 2011 (BMA 2012.198); and pluck for Ann Hamilton’s warp & weft I, 2007–08 (BMA 2009.128). We lacked enough room in the gallery to install Shellabarger’s book on the floor, which would enable viewers to really grasp how it was made. Instead, we installed it running up the wall, which brought it into a very nice conversation with the Trisha Brown prints on the adjacent wall.
 
The museum made a video about the work for its 100th Anniversary celebration, BMA Voices. Here is the link to that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU4pAdE2z2Q.
 
Stan Shellabarger (American, born 1968)
Untitled, 2011
Accordion–bound volume of six–color reduction woodblock print
Book: 381 x 559 mm. (15 x 22 in.); sheet (unfolded): 381 x 5588 mm. (15 x 220 in.)
Baltimore Museum of Art: Print, Drawing & Photograph Society Fund, with proceeds derived from the 2012 Contemporary Print Fair, BMA 2012.190