Magical Secrets

Art 40 Basel

2009-07-01T15:46:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, Valerie and I flew back from Basel, Switzerland where we spent twelve days at the Art Basel fair, where Crown Point had a booth. Crown Point Press has participated in fair for the past seven consecutive years; we had a booth there previously, during the late ‘70s, when the fair was a more modest event. Now Art Basel is one of the preeminent art fairs and the oldest one. This year there were 300 galleries showing 2,000 artists, and 65,000 visitors came over a five-day period.

This year most gallerists were not sure what to expect because of the downturn in the world’s economies, and so the positive headlines after the first day of the fair (in The Art Newspaper) were a relief to many-the general take from gallerists was that though there was not the same sort of buying as in previous years, the market was not completely depressed. We noticed after walking through the fair that many galleries had brought work by their tried and true artists, there was not much experimentation with installations, and most booths were very elegant and low key. Per usual there were many European collectors and visitors to the fair though noticeably not very many Americans, at least this was our estimation based on those who visited our booth.

Valerie Wade, Crown Point’s gallery director, designed a beautiful booth this year-the configuration of walls and entry ways made the booth feel open and airy. We debuted new prints by Chris Ofili, Mamma Andersson and Susan Middleton, and we hung some early prints by Sol LeWitt, Barry LeVa, Jannis Kounellis, and Robert Ryman all together on one wall. Vito Acconci’s 20 Foot Ladder for Any Size Wall, 1979-81 climbed a central pillar in the booth, inviting passers by to stop in, curious to see perhaps where the ladder led. (The print is a photoetching of an aluminum ladder, and is comprised of eight sheets, each sheet individually framed and the whole piece hung vertically.) Included also in the booth, among others, were prints by Mary Heilmann, Edgar Bryan, Julie Mehretu, and Jockum Nordström.

During the five-day long fair, the Art Basel organizers host special evenings for collectors and exhibitors. A highlight this year was the theatre production Il Tempo del Postino, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno. The curators's intention was to present a group show of work by artists that would occupy time rather than space and they wanted to bring the exhibit to the viewer, rather than the usual, where the viewer goes to the exhibit. Artists were invited to each create a work that was time-based, and each work was displayed sequentially onstage. The piece debuted in 2007 in Manchester, England. The artists who contributed to the production were Anri Sala, Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, Tacita Dean, Trisha Donnelly, Olafur Eliasson, Liam Gilick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordan, Carsten Holler, Pierre Huyghe, Koo Jeong-A, Philippe Parreno, Tino Sehgal, and Rirkrit Tiravanija with Arto Lindsay. The production in Basel was directed by Obrist, Parreno, Anri Sala and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

In Basel the production was presented for two nights, and Valerie and I went the second night. We were admittedly tired from a long day at the booth, and we had rushed over earlier in the evening to the Kunstmuseum to see the Van Gogh show, which we unfortunately had to rush through. At the front entrance to the theatre, I wondered whether I could manage a 2-1/2 hour production. When we got our seats, a greater measure of insecurity and panic set in, because though we had wonderful seats, they were dead center in a row of chairs that stretched without an opening to either side of us for what seemed a quarter of a mile in each direction. There was no escape! We were committed to the entire evening. I scanned the playbill and noticed there would be an intermission. I breathed a sigh of relief and settled. I cannot possibly explain each piece in this blog though though I will share with you a few of my favorites. Tacita Dean’s film was titled Merce Cunningham, First Performance of Stillness (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’ 33"- with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007. In the movie, we see Merce Cunningham sitting in a chair in a dance studio that is empty. His back is to the long wall mirror and in the reflection we see the camera man, Trevor Carlson. The only sound we hear are the ambient ones in the dance studio: the city street noises coming through the windows, the faint piano from another dance studio. Cunningham sits quietly, not moving except for three different moments, when he shifts his weight in his chair. The film was very moving and intimate, and I felt that really in essence it was a love story.

Carsten Holler made a very funny movie called Upside Down People. He had found an old film from the ‘30s of an experiment where a man wore a device over his eyes that made him see the world upside down; he lived for two weeks with the upside down world, and the documentary followed his progress at adaptability. Holler edited in his own film, of contemporary young (Swiss?) people wearing new devices, and their management of their upside down world contrasted with the older film. (There was not much difference between the two, so I didn’t see much of a point of the newer film.) There were very funny moments of physical comedy, though it stopped there for me. Pierre Huyghe’s piece, Hola Zombies, was presented in three acts, interspersed throughout the entire evening’s production. Two characters were on stage, one a tall Snufalufagus-type creature, with long, yellow hair, and the other was a rat-like creature. The stage was dark, and the rat-like creature and the yellow fellow sat around a small cake with one candle in it. The rat-like creature sang happy birthday and blew out the candle, though the candle kept relighting and the creature would sing the song again. After about three times, he gave up, and both creatures fell over and that was it. The other two parts of the piece were similar, a dark stage, and the two creatures, though the large yellow creature died in the final act, and the rat-like creature cried by its side with a bouquet of white flowers. Initially I wasn’t sure if I liked looking at the creatures, and it all seemed creepy but then they became familiar and the end was comical though also tragic since it too was a love story.

I also liked Rirkrit Tiravanija’s piece with Arto Lindsay; the former prepared a dinner onstage while the dinner guests sat at a long table, talking quietly, and Arto Lindsay played loud and cacophonic though strangely melodic electric guitar. I did like the guitar though it was a little abrasive, and it seemed to all make sense--to have music drown out the dinner guests conversations; the music acted like a mask, distorting the evening while simultaneously making the dinner party and its conceit mundane in contrast. (Tiravanija’s preparation and presentation of the food was secondary to the guitar piece.)

Doug Aitken’s piece, The Handle Comes Up the Hammer Comes Down was a big hit, with me and with the audience. There were about eight Mid-Western animal auctioneers in the audience, and they alternately and then simultaneously called out numbers, and eventually the calling out became a song, and the rhythm of their voices crescendoed and reverberated throughout the theatre space. That piece of course was very tongue in cheek. I could mention a few other pieces that I enjoyed very much though this blog very well might never end. I will not take the opportunity to say which ones I didn’t like suffice it to say two were by very Big Name Artists, and neither of their pieces were particularly interesting. At intermission we drank Moet Chandon champagne out of small bottles with funny plastic things attached to the mouth of the bottle so no one needed a glass. It was a funny sight, to see very well-heeled art people drinking out of bottles. After the performance, I walked back to my hotel, following the tram line, passing blooming roses and ancient homes. It was an evening well worth spent.

The next few days in Basel we busily spent at the booth. There were many new people we met at the fair, and great interest in the prints that we showed. On our last day, after packing up the booth, Val and I walked along the Rhine to find a restaurant a fellow exhibitor had told us about. As we walked, we finally saw how swimming in the Rhine was accomplished. Since the river flows so quickly, it is not possible to swim upstream but only to float downstream. Along the bank was a low sloping brick bank, and on it chains. It seemed that this was a spot for getting out of the river, where you would drift to the bank, and grab the chain and pull yourself out of the current. There were a couple of small beaches were one could easily walk into the water; some swimmers had their clothing in water-tight bags that floated alongside them. It looked wonderful to be in the water. The day was nearing its end, the air was still balmy and a few thunderclouds loomed dark east of us. Val and I pledged that the next time we were in Basel, we would make sure to swim in the Rhine. In order to get to our restaurant (Veronica it is called) we took a ferry across the Rhine, and the ferry was in fact a small boat with a wire attached to another wire that stretched across the river. The ferryman charged us 1 franc each, and we sat down and drifted across. It was lovely, quiet and perfect. (There was one other passenger.) Our restaurant had dining outside only, with a roof over our heads and no walls. The place jutted out over the Rhine, the whole edifice was a giant deck, with steps leading down to the water. At Veronica you could eat, drink beer, and rent out lockers to stow your stuff while swimming! There were even showers. As we ate the thunder clouds burst above us and the rained poured down, sheets of it falling into the Rhine all around us. The rain stopped just as we were leaving, and we waited for the tram across from a magnificently green park. Basel the city is an idyll, and the fair is an exciting, invigorating experience, one that is hard to forget.
-Sasha Baguskas

Global Implications: Southern Graphics Council Conference 2009

2009-04-02T16:56:00.000-07:00

Early last Wednesday morning, Crown Point master printer Emily York, and I headed out to the airport to catch our flight to Chicago for the annual Southern Graphics Council conference. This year’s theme was global implications, and Kathan Brown, founding director of Crown Point Press, had been invited to give a keynote address. The talk, “Go with All Your Heart”, was given on the first morning of the conference, to a full-house at the Hilton Hotel’s ballroom, and it was about Kathan’s travels with artists to China and Japan during the Press’ woodcut projects, and to the island of Ponape, where artists’ talks were recorded (and which later became a three-record set, Vision 4: Word of Mouth, published by Crown Point.) Kathan’s talk was a success, with many conference participants remarking on it throughout the next few days.

At each SGC conference, Crown Point sets up a booth during the Product Fair, to promote the Press and our summer workshops, and to sell books which include our Magical Secrets series, and printmaking supplies. This time around we debuted the most recent addition to the Magical Secrets series, Magical Secrets about Chine Collé, by Brian Shure. Brian is a former Crown Point printer, and luckily for us, he was attending the conference to be part of a panel discussion, so we were able to have him hang around the booth to take Q & A’s about his new book, and to help Emily out with her chine collé demonstration, which was being presented during one day of the conference.

Emily and Brian’s chine collé demonstrations were a highlight, in addition to Kathan’s keynote talk. Originally there were two demos scheduled, but the demand was so great that Emily had to add a third, though abbreviated, demo. She worked tremendously hard that day, talking and printing and collé-ing to an audience of over three hundred people, for five hours (nearly straight!) I held down the booth at the Product Fair, selling books and supplies, and meeting new and interesting printmakers from all over the country. During these conferences, it is invigorating to be surrounded by so many who are devoted to, and passionate about, printmaking, and it is always wonderful to be reminded of how many people there are out in the world who love etching as much as we do here at Crown Point.

Emily came and helped out at the booth on the second day of the Product Fair. She is a great help, and fun to be with. During our nights out, we explored a bit of Chicago, visiting the neighborhoods of Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, and Lincoln Park. One day, the sunniest and warmest, I was able to visit the Art Institute, and to see the amazingly blue Lake Michigan. We were staying at the Hilton on Michigan Avenue, so were lucky to have the park in front of us, and we caught a glimpse of Agora, Magdalena Abakanowicz’s sculpture, (once at night, the other time layered in snow!) Unfortunately, we missed seeing Cloud Gate, Anish Kapoor’s sculpture in Millennium Park, because of our ignorance to the proximity of it!

The last day, Sunday, our travel day, it snowed. There was a funny sort of marathon out on the avenue, people running in the cold, wet slosh of snow, their legs burning red in the cold. We marveled at their endurance and commitment. I suppose one could say the same sort of thing about printmakers and the process of printmaking: it does take commitment, and endurance of mind and body to succeed.

Crown Point Weekend Workshops: Alumni Special

2009-01-31T12:00:00.000-08:00

Master printer Ianne Kjorlie prints with workshop participant Roberta.

On a recent Saturday, six alumnus of Crown Point's summer etching workshops gathered in the Crown Point studio. They were participants in the first of a series of weekend workshops the Press if now offering. Because the alumni were already familiar with the etching studio, they were ready for action the minute they walked through the door. There was experimentation with a string and sugar lift aquatint. One participant honed her skill at drypoint and another produced a four-plate etching. It was remarkable how much was accomplished during the day, said Emily York, Crown Point master printer and one of the teacher-printers for the day. Chine collé was also experimented with, and master printer Ianne Kjorlie (the other printer/teacher for the day) remarked that it was nice to see that all of the workshoppers were working on their skills learned during past workshops.

Workshop participant Kate experimenting with string and sugar lift aquatint.

One of our goals as an etching studio and gallery is to pass on what we know to the world outside our walls. Through education we hope to keep the medium of intaglio alive and appreciated and loved and used. We offer these workshops so that a range of people can experience first-hand how etching works, and what it has to offer the artist, the printmaker, the novice. Our next workshop in our weekend series is called the Process Diary Workshop, on February 28. This is the perfect workshop for those new to the etching medium, who have either done a bit or none at all, and would like to learn about each of the processes. Check it out on our workshop page of this website…. To learn is to live, and to live is to learn.

-Sasha Baguskas

The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art

2008-12-24T15:13:00.000-08:00

I attended The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art, a social gathering hosted by Tom Marioni at SFMOMA. The gathering is an artwork that is part of a current exhibition The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now.

Tom Marioni, a Bay Area conceptual artist, pioneered using social situations as art and has hosted free beer salons as social artworks at his studio, in museums, and in alternative spaces for over 35 years. A sculptural installation related to Marioni's 1979 salon at SFMOMA is also on view as part of the exhibition.

The current Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art is taking place at the SFMOMA Koret Visitor Center every Thursday through February 05, 2009 (except December 25, 2008, and January 01, 2009) 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. The beer salon features guest bartenders and readers- artists, writers and friends of the artist. Marioni kicked-off the series reading from his book, Beer, Art and Philosophy.

I had a lot of fun. The gathering was lively and there was free beer! Afterward, I walked upstairs to view The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now. The exhibition was engaging because unlike many other museum shows, it invites you to directly participate in the art-making process. It highlights the historical context of direct participation in art, covering nearly 60 years across a wide spectrum of genres and media: restagings of important installations, as well as new commissions that change as you and others participate.

Come drink, meet people, hang out with friends and be part of a social artwork. Then walk up to the fourth floor and participate in the exhibition, it's great.

-Javier Briones

Chatting with Torrie Groening, Print Collector & Fan of "The Morandi Effect"

2008-12-03T16:03:00.001-08:00

I sat down with San Francisco artist and printer Torrie Groening to talk about her print collection. She is a Crown Point Press fan, and has been since the late 80's. Her husband Stephen Melvin shares her enthusiasm for prints and all kinds of art.

Q: How did you first hear of Crown Point Press?

A: It was back when I started my own printshop, Prior Editions in Vancouver, that I heard Kathan Brown speak at a Tamarind Institute conference (filled with huge-armed lithographers.) This was in the late 80's. I was interested in her way of bringing out the best in artists. I did think about Crown Point during that time ...there is a lot to be said for giving an artist and their work total respect and attention. I remembered and reminded the printers to fully focus on one artist at a time, and to please not mention another artists work. "We love all the artists equally!" was our mantra.
Q: How did you begin collecting art?

A: I started acquiring art by trading with other artists in art school and later at the co-op print studios I worked at in Vancouver and Toronto. I should have kept that Janet Cardiff!

Q: Do you and your husband agree on everything?

A: I’d have to say that Stephen is more interested in conceptual work than I am. I find myself most attracted to objects, images of objects. Something solid.

Q: Like still life?

A: Like Morandi. So, I love William Bailey, and Wayne Thiebaud. If I could have anything it would be either the Thiebaud Eight Lipsticks or Cherries. The one thing I'm still kicking myself for is not buying another Marcel Dzama way back when. I do have a a collaborative drawing by Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber (of the Royal Art Lodge) called "Animal Hospital" that I bought in Vancouver in 1999. It was two hundred dollars!! It doesn't matter if it has gone up anyway - I've never sold anything, or bought on speculation. We do this for love and these are things we live with. We have donated quite a few pieces to museums in Canada, a lot of those were prints from Prior, and we were glad to be able to do that.

Q: Do you have a philosophy of collecting?

A: With almost everything in our collection, there is a personal connection there, either we know the artist, or it was something I printed, or a work I traded for.

A little while ago we had a group from the Achenbach Society come to our home. That was a good opportunity to get some things framed, and really go through and see what we have. It’s so expensive to do framing that it gives you a chance to think hard about what you want to put up and how everything relates.

Stephen actually bought me a print as an engagement present. That made me say, "I think I should marry this guy!" There were other reasons, but that was my big rock. It was a print by a Canadian artist, Tom Hopkins. It was something we had seen together but he contacted the gallery on his own and bought it while I was out of town. I bought him a Tom Hopkins print as a gift too. We have those two displayed together in a special recessed space in our dining room. It’s something we share. When I was working in the gallery myself, selling prints, I’d always cringe when someone would say, “I have to talk to my husband," or "I have to talk to my wife.” I’d think, well, there goes that sale! But it really is something you do together.

I'm finding now, collecting art with my husband brings a different appreciation and possibility of discovery. I'm more emotional, he's more analytical and inclined to research the artist. We will see something together and by the time I get to my computer, he has sent me links to the artists work. For instance, today he sent me a link to Tom Marioni.

Wayne Thiebaud Eight Lipsticks, 1988
Published by Crown Point Press
Wayne Thiebaud Cherries, 1983
Published by Crown Point Press

Q: What do you want absolutely the most for your collection?

Any Morandi, of course, and Thiebaud's Eight Lipsticks. When you look at those paintings (Giorgio Morandi's) there is nothing you would add or take away. I call it the Morandi effect. I wish that happened more often. I never know what I'm going to be taken by, though. I fell for a a piece this year, A Deborah Oropallo that was out of my usual area of interest. It's a portrait, but the piece is dead on. Sometimes it is love at first sight.

William Bailey, Urbino, 1998
Published by Crown Point Press

Read the New York Times

2008-10-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

Acid Line Up, Mary Heilmann 2006

This is just a little poke to read Ken Johnson's review of Mary Heilmann at the New Museum .

In Memory of Terry Fox

2008-10-24T12:25:00.000-07:00

Pendulum Spit Bite, 1977

We are very sad that Terry Fox (1943-2008) died in Cologne on October 14.

Fox made works for many years related to the form and idea of the Labyrinth. He first visited the Labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral as a young man. An essay by Constance Lewallen (which you can read in its entirety here) discusses Fox's sincere and persistent exploration of the sacred maze.

"The labyrinth, which Fox encountered in the summer of 1972, was to dominate his thoughts until 1978.

The labyrinth is made of blue and white paving stones set onto the stone floor of the cathedral. It is a unicursal path winding in thirty-four turns through eleven concentric rings to the center. It is 12.87 meters in diameter and has 552 steps following its course from the entrance to the center: Although it exists physically, on the floor of the cathedral, it is not really an object at all; it is a metaphor (Terry Fox: Metaphorical Instruments, 1982).

The unicursal labyrinth dates from ancient times and, unlike a puzzle maze, which has dead ends, it is undeviating: The center is reached inevitably. Medieval worshippers are presumed to have traced the 180-foot path of the Chartres labyrinth on their hands and knees until they reached the center, thus symbolizing the difficult progress along the path to Heaven. For Fox, the labyrinth’s metaphorical implications were stunning:

This labyrinth was a revelation to me in many ways. I had undergone cycles of health, sickness, health, sickness, with attendant hospitalization, release, hospitalization for eleven years. The thirty-four turns leading to the center of the labyrinth also corresponded to these cycles. I had just gone through a major operation that finished once and for all these cycles, and seemed to have reached the center of the labyrinth. My energies up to this point had been involved in reaching this center; and I decided to reverse this process and work my way out by basing all my future work on the labyrinth at Chartres (Terry Fox: Metaphorical Instruments, 1982)."

Listen to Fox's sound piece: The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Different Cats.

You can see more of his works at Ronald Feldman Gallery, MOMA, and Gallery Paule Anglim.

Crown Point Benefit Brings in 10K for Obama

2008-10-08T10:54:00.000-07:00

Last night, Crown Point Press held a debate party to benefit the Obama Campaign. We moved some couches and the giant TV into the gallery, we even ordered cable. We brought up delicious food from Two. It is much better to hoot, cheer and scowl at the screen as a group rather than home alone, and this way we raised $10,000.

We raffled off a print (winner's choice) from our current show, Abstract Mash-Up. Gary Garrels, senior curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA was the winner. He picked Amy Sillman's sweet/tart triangle composition, R&E. Garrels is the curator of Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstraction at the Hammer Museum in L.A., which includes Sillman and will open in November, so he's glad he came. This may have been the super-bargain of his collecting career, at $300 a ticket.

Amy Sillman: R & E, 2007

The event was hosted by Kathan Brown, Connie Lewallen, Tom Marioni, Susan Middleton, Gay Outlaw, Valerie Wade, Angela Williams and Griff Williams. Thank you to everybody who came out to support the campaign. It's not over yet. Call your relatives in swing states tonight. If you missed out, you can plan your own event!

Together Again! 871 Fine Arts & Crown Point Press

2008-09-10T14:28:00.000-07:00

Crown Point Press and 871 Fine Arts are neighbors again!

871 Fine Arts (bookshop and gallery) takes its name from its original address, 871 Folsom Street. Crown Point Press shared the same address until the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake wrecked the building and kicked everybody out. Since then, 871 Fine Arts has anchored at 250 Sutter Street and 49 Geary Street. Adrianne will open downstairs at 20 Hawthorne in mid-October. See Kenneth Baker's Chronicle review of the final show at the 49 Geary location here.

Your blogger looked in to see how the unpacking was going and met the proprietor Adrienne Fish's sister who was here from New York to help put books on shelves. She has an art history degree herself, and was taking just an occasional peek between the covers.

The first stack that caught my eye had Mark Rothko, Isamu Noguchi, Barnett Newman, Gerhard Richter, and leaning temptingly on its side was a charcoal cloth bound volume on Yoko Ono that I am going back to see, and maybe buy, later. You can preview the collection at the 871 Fine Arts
website.

Look at all those shelves.

Blogger Amy Ione took note of the move on her interesting blog about cognitive research and art. Yelp.com denizen Barb B., of San Jose, CA said, "This place is a gem! Every time I go in here, I come out with at least 3 books. We came out with six (!!!) tonight! I had been looking for books on avant-garde artists from Japan (Gutai) and lo and behold...of course this place had some. I had been looking for this old book on triptychs as well and there it was!!"

Make time to come see this gem for yourself.

2008-07-16T16:47:00.000-07:00

Crown Point Press Etching Workshops Summer 2008

This is the last week of summer workshops. It's been a busy season, with more classes than ever! We have had participants from Ireland, Australia, and Canada, as well as Cincinnati, and Seattle, and many spots in between, including Oakland.

Oakland based printmaker Kate Van Der Riet went to bed on Monday evening of her workshop feeling (about etching) "Oh, it's all just so easy!" She woke up on Tuesday morning with with the bliss wearing off a little. She realized before long that there is just a ton of work ahead if she is to successfully apply what she has learned. At the end of the workshop, though, she has some concrete revelations to pack up and take home with her. These are the big ones:

1) I know now (but still can't believe it) that I can get a total black from a single aquatint.

2) The deburring tool is going to change my life.

3) Mirror finish copper, see above.

4) I can grind fresh rosin for the aquatint box every single time I use it.

5) I will never paper wipe a plate again.

6) This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Crown Point Press printer Ianne Kjorlie working on hand wiping with Anna McKee from Seattle.

Success!

Leigh Wells, from Seattle, was surprised that she gravitated towards some techniques more than others. She really wanted to try spit bite, but found herself more sucked into making lines -- which let her to realize "I'm a line person, not a tone person." She draws all the time, but didn't notice this until she had to commit a plate or two to an etching technique. Here is Leigh at work, with Barbara Stikker:

Master Printer Emily York and student Tom Cottrell basking in the acid glow:

Ianne helps Betsy Goodman take a plate off the press:

Emily and Nina Zingale (Seattle) monitoring the rate of the etch:

Patricia Weiss is thinking:

Ginger Talonen, deep in the process:

Pat Hayashi models proper safety attire. I asked Pat if he had any technical breakthroughs. He said, " Breakthoughs? I had breakdowns!!" (They were productive ones.) After an adventure with spit bite that proved the aphorism from Emily York's new book, "Tooth is tone," Pat is excited to try a print that with two plates with color escaping the plate mark.

Marin County printmaker Joanne Coffino who took the Photogravure workshop came back to pick up her prints, and a few things at the bookstore. I asked her to tell me about her experience.

"My biggest worry is how am I ever going to go back to another place to print?? How am I going to get along without that beautiful sprayer contraption for chine colle?? I feel honored to have had the opportunity to work with Asa [Asa Muir-Harmony, Crown Point printer], who is brilliant. I feel more confident with the whole wiping process now. The number of people in the class allowed for quietness and space to concentrate. There was just a very good feeling."

We hope the classes were inspiring for all the participants, and you will share what you've learned with your friends. Keep in touch!

Crown Point Press at Art Basel, by Sasha Baguskas

2008-06-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

A crane maneuvering Roxy Paine's silver root at the Art Basel Fair in Basel,Switzerland.

This year was the seventh year that Crown Point Press has had a booth at the prestigious Art Basel fair, where nearly 300 dealers from around the world show the work of over 3,000 artists. Crown Point’s booth is located in the Editions section of the fair, along with other print publishers such as Gemini GEL, Pace Prints, Paragon Press, Two Palms, Borch Jensen Editions, to name a few. Kathan Brown, founder and director of Crown Point, showed prints at Basel in the 1970s. Valerie Wade, along with Kathan, has been at the fair for the past seven years.

On Friday, May 31, Valerie and I traveled across the US, the Atlantic and part of Europe to land in the fair city of Basel, Switzerland. We landed mid-morning on Saturday, and spent the day separately, adjusting to the time change. I walked around the Old City, and managed to get caught in a quick thunder shower. I hovered in a doorway till all was clear.

I ate some herring at my hotel, in the garden, and then promptly fell asleep, which is not recommended for the jet lagged, but I really couldn’t help it. In the evening I met a friend at the Kunsthalle beer garden, a popular spot for drinking with the Art Basel crowd. You can see a Tinguely fountain and a Richard Serra sculpture from the garden bar, though sadly the Serra sculpture has graffiti all over it.

The following day was the first of two installation days. We arranged to have the crates unpacked upon our arrival, so we were all ready to hang the art. Valerie had figured out in advance (on the plane? in her sleep?) how the framed prints should be arranged in the booth, and with her usual alacrity and aesthetic expertise, the design of the booth went smoothly and seemingly effortlessly.

Installation Day

We brought with us the three new etchings by Swedish artist, Jockum Nordström as well as two new prints by Julie Mehretu. Amy Sillman’s suite of four etchings paraded across an outside wall; these are not technically new releases though are new to the Basel crowd. Basel is the place to debut anything new.

Jockum Nordstrom's new prints are to the left.

We displayed our books, and premiered our newest Magical Secrets title, Magical Secrets about Aquatint, by Crown Point master printer Emily York. The books were a success, and helpful for explaining intaglio processes, especially to a crowd whose first language is not English. The Vision journal is always popular with Europeans, as is John Cage Visual Art, by Kathan Brown, and Tom Marioni’s, Beer, Art and Philosophy.

Our book table, by Pia Fries and Ed Ruscha prints.

Valerie in our booth.

The opening day, the Vernissage, was Tuesday and it lasted from 11 in the morning til 10 at night. The Vernissage is open only to those with a special invitation; the days following are opened to the paying public.

Here I am, all ready!

Most visitors to the booth commented on how lovely the prints were, and often people made mention of how our booth was an oasis of calm. One visitor exclaimed that the booth “had personality!"

More booth, with Peter Doig, Laura Owens, Fred Wilson, and Alex Katz.

Opposite our booth was a large and colorful piece by the Danish cooperative SuperFlux, (FREE BEER FREE BEER!!!) which, depending on one’s mood, would lead you to our booth, for the quiet contemplation of Tom Marioni’s Walking Drawing.

Tom Marioni's Walking Drawing.

The Old City of Basel is medieval with many small streets winding up and down hills, fountains brimming with fresh Swiss glacial water (I am guessing), and lovely painted details on the houses.

Basel streets.

Painted buildings!

Adjacent to the fair is the Unlimited, a huge space where 70 artists are represented by one work each. The artists are selected by the Art Basel Committee, and this year they were in colloboration with curator Simon Lamuniere.

Unlimited, from above.

Daniel Buren's striped escalator at Unlimited.

Sol Lewitt sculpture at the side entrance to Art Basel (during de-installation)

During the de-install day, the cranes were out, taking away the outside public art works.

Two workers puzzled about moving Ugo Rondinone's clay heads.

We had a wonderful time, we met some great people at the booth and saw great art. There are more stories, of course, but hopefully this gives an idea of how it all went.

Julie Mehretu

2008-05-21T10:46:00.000-07:00

Julie Mehretu was in town for the "Cosmos: A Group Exhibition" reception at Crown Point on Friday night. Her new prints, The Residual, and Unclosed are the centerpiece of the exhibition. She signed prints in the afternoon, and when that was done signed there was time to talk and nibble.

A girl could get lost in these prints.

It looks like Kathan Brown is tossing pixie dust, but she's showing Julie Mehretu's lovely sister, Neeshan Mehretu, Tom Marioni's Taking Flight.

If anyone is in Williamstown, MA, you can catch Mehretu's City Sitings at Williams College Museum. City Sitings started out in Detroit - it's a chance to see 11 of her monumental paintings at once. This is just one of them:

Grey Space (distractor), Julie Mehretu 2006.

If you can't make it that far, come back and see the new prints again and watch the video interview , which is great.

Crown Point Press Hits the Midwest

2008-04-30T16:19:00.000-07:00

Our gallery associate, Tiffany Harker just got back from Minneapolis, where she was representing Crown Point Press at the Minneapolis Print and Drawing Fair, hosted by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in this lovely building:

She brought work from Ed Ruscha and Amy Sillman, and...

...Wayne Thiebaud, Pat Steir, and Richard Tuttle and others. Dorothy Napangardi's works seemed to excite everybody there. There were books, including the NEW title in the Magical Secrets Series, Magical Secrets about Aquatint: Spit Bite, Sugar Lift and Other Etched Tones,
by Emily York, which is being shipped here as I type this - for everybody who pre-ordered it and everyone who wants to run in to the Crown Point Bookstore sometime after May 5.....

Many of the other exhibitors at the Minneapolis Print and Drawing Fair deal in Old Master prints. Some visitors who are already in love with the kind of touch evident in historical etching were interested in the “Look Ma, no hands!” quality of techniques like sugar lift and spit bite, used by our artists, as well as the idea of a connection between new art and very old art through the process of etching.

Tiffany visited the Walker Art Center (which she has a crush on) where she was thrilled to see Transcending: The New International, Julie Mehretu's epic 2003 painting.

She was really impressed by the education and outreach efforts of both the Walker and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Thursday evening, she went to a panel discussion on the exhibit "Next Exit: The Shifting Landscape of Suburbia" which brought together a developer, a designer and a journalist. She was all ready to dislike the developer, but he turned out to be working earnestly on developing city centers and mass transit planning, Surprise! She found the talk made her want to go back and see the show again.

A sculpture by Sol Lewitt, another Crown Point Press artist, was presiding over the Walker's cloud-menaced roof garden.

Come see Crown Point Press at the BookExpo America in Los Angeles May 30-June 1, and at Art Basel in Switzerland, June 4-8. we are everywhere!

All photographs (except the one of the MIA) by Tiffany Harker.

The Cosmos

2008-04-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

A new group exhibition is going up at Crown Point Press.
The Cosmos: A Group Exhibition runs April 10-May 31, 2008.

The newest work is from Julie Mehretu's second project at Crown Point Press.

The Residual, Julie Mehretu 2007

Unclosed, Julie Mehretu 2007

In quite a few of these works, I keep referring to my favorite John Ashbery line, "Holes are blobs of darkness." Holes are voids and objects, and who knows what is in them along with the darkness? Individual marks can do so many kinds of things. Mehretu has talked about giving each of her marks “individual agency,” and several of the other artists in this show want that too.

Holland Cotter once called Mehretu's work a "conceptual version of history painting." The marks in The Residual and Unclosed are advancing on each other like armies converging, but they are soothed by sanding down and soft fogs of color. Some of the color might refer to glow from distant explosions but it looks so gentle.

Dorothy Napangardi's Sandhills uses individual marks that evoke movements over time (her work involves the Australian Aboriginal concept of Jukurrpa or Dreaming which describes the travels of ancestors and maps the location of living spirits.) It has such a different mood than Mehertu’s operatic orchestration. Each dot could be somebody's footprint, or a whole year spent in one place.

Sandhills, Dorothy Napangardi 2004

Fred Wilson's Bang also traffics in discrete marks. The drip pattern in Bang might refer to the Big Bang, cell division at conception, or deadly bacteria booming in a petri dish, but I like to think of the individual tiny bangs of each drop hitting the page. It's like the bottom of a liquid hourglass. They preserve the time that they took to fall on the page. You can almost hear them. They are very loud.

Bang, Fred Wilson 2004

There is more noise coming from Tom Marioni's Taking Flight, which is a woodcut the artist made by having friends throw darts at a piece of wood. The dart marks look just like silver stars, but once you know how it was made you hear each one hitting the wood. Stars are usually so quiet.

Taking Flight, Tom Marioni 2000

Come see the show, the reception is May 15.

Crown Point Artists Influential at Whitney Biennial

2008-03-12T16:17:00.000-07:00

Crown Point Press artists, John Baldessari, Robert Bechtle, Mary Heilmann, and Sherrie Levine, are in the Whitney Biennial this year. Holland Cotter identified Mary Heilmann and John Baldessari as "influential elders" of the show in his New York Times review.

Mary Heilmann, Spill, 2007.

John Baldessari, Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), Etc.: Elbow (Blue) with Desk, 2007.

According to Cotter, Heilmann is holding sway over younger artists Karen Kilimnik and Rachel Harrison, while Baldessari has given grist to a bunch of young artists including the collaborative entity New Humans, Patrick Hill and Joe Bradley.

Our gallery assistant, Lauren Karas will be there later this week. She'll tell us what she thinks.

The Biennial has a blog, too.

Oliveira on Valentines Day at CPP

2008-02-15T13:35:00.000-08:00

Nathan Oliveira's show Rocker II opened on Valentine's Day at Crown Point Press. The house was packed.

The work sparked lots of lively debate...

Oliveira was willing to consider all the angles...

And everyone came dressed in their Valentine's day finest.

This project was printer Ianne Kjorlie's first as lead printer.

Oliveira worked hard, but made it look so easy.

Come by and see this beautiful work -- the show is open through April 5, 2008.

Coming Soon! New Magical Secrets Book

2008-02-06T15:43:00.000-08:00

Crown Point Press master printer Emily York’s new book, Magical Secrets about Aquatint: Spit Bite, Sugar Lift & Other Etched Tones Step-by-Step is due out in April. If you would like to pre-order, email sasha@crownpoint.com, or give us a call at 415.974.6273.

I caught Emily for a few minutes between printing tasks to ask her about the new book and what she learned writing it.

KLB: If there is one common error that you hope people will never make again after reading your book, what is it?

EY: Over-melting the rosin. It’s something I did in college, and I was always trying to correct it in the printing, but it’s actually a mistake people make right at the beginning of the process.

KLB: When you were researching the book, what work did you fall in love with the most? I remember you getting excited about Tony Cragg.

EY: I only knew some of the artists in the book through the prints they made here before I started the research. It was really great to find the connections between their outside work and the prints. Tony Cragg’s sculpture was one of those surprises.

KLB: What is your favorite technique to explain?

EY: In terms of aquatint, something spontaneous that people like the idea of right away is spit bite. You’re etching the plate directly, by painting with acid on a plate prepared with rosin. The mark you make on the plate is the mark you see printed, so it’s conceptually the easiest. It’s really easy to grab onto and jump right in. A lot of people like the look of it, plus it has a quirky little name.

I kept thinking, “Oh, this chapter’s going to be easy, it’s just spit bite!” But there are all these things that you do without thinking. There is a lot more information than I thought. In the first two chapters those little things are especially important because they make the foundation for every other technique. That’s what I was excited about sharing, because the easiest little changes can make a huge difference.

KLB: How would you like your book to change the way people think about printmaking?

EY: For me, the most important thing about this book is the opportunity to relate the techniques to contemporary artists who are working now. I like to see artists discovering new approaches to these techniques all the time, the back and forth between their prints and other studio work. I like to be able to say to people, “You should try this too!”

--Kim Bennett

Amy Sillman at SFAI, Crown Point Press

2007-11-07T13:52:00.000-08:00

O & N, Amy Sillman 2007

Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman gave an artist talk at San Francisco Art Institute Monday night and on Tuesday night, her show Amy Sillman: New Etchings, opened at Crown Point Press.

There were ecstatic fans, like Jarrett Arnest, pictured below in his own homemade AMY SILLMAN t-shirt (complete with glitter) who said, "If people show up for Britney Spears in their fan shirts, somebody better do it for Amy Sillman."

Jarrett Arnest at the San Francisco Art Institute Lecture

Between the talk at SFAI and the new work at Crown Point, Sillman has offered San Francisco a well lighted window into her process. In her choice of slides at SFAI (and she did use slides) Sillman showed everything. She was kind of on fire - she offered us extra large helping of her interests and influences. For influences she mentioned David Hammons, Jean Arp, Joan Jonas, Louise Bourgeois, Phillip Guston, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Rachel Harrison, Martin Kippenberger, Jutta Koether --

She said, "You know how sometimes you're at a party and somebody says something that effects you for the rest of your life? Well - this guy said 'At the end of the century things get smooth and fussy and at the beginning everything gets chopped up and rough.' I was like YEAH I wanna be part of that!"

The opening at Crown Point Press on Tuesday was packed, and the visitors were thrilled with the unusual opportunity this show offers to see proofs as well as finished prints.

Visitors: Artist Julie Mehretu and San Francisco Art Institute's Brett Reichman

Linda Geary and Mari Andrews with Amy Sillman's working proofs

Since this is a blog post, I should mention that Sillman was emphatic in her talk that painting must be encountered in person. She said "IT - WON'T - GO- THROUGH - THE - INTERNET." So come out and see her work IN PERSON. The show at Crown Point Press runs through December 29, 2007.

Tom Marioni at Gallery Paule Anglim

2007-10-17T13:11:00.001-07:00

Tom Marioni

Crown Point Press artist Tom Marioni's show, Out-of-Body Free-Hand Circles opened on October 4th at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco.

The colored pencil drawings and one hand colored etching are collections of circular motions made by the artist's extended arm. Some of these produce unruly circles like an armful of hay (#48 Revolution, 2007) and some of them follow neatly together like a tiny wake in a stirred cup of tea. One of the drawings is called #64 Cup of Tea, 2007. Marioni has been concerned with performative drawing for thirty years. His unique thinking about moving and marking produced the effervescent project, Flying With Friends, printed at Crown Point in 1999.

#28 Fire in the Hole, 2007
colored pencil on paper
2 1/4" x 22 1/2"

In her essay in the show’s catalog, Marcia Tanner explains the idea that inspired the work: "Marioni’s project was inspired by Giorgio Vasari’s story of how Pope Benedict XI sent an envoy to Giotto requesting samples of his work. Giotto dipped his brush in red pigment and, using his arm pressed against his side as a compass, with one continuous stroke painted a perfect circle. On seeing it, the pope instantly recognized his genius and hired him."

The opening was full of circle gazers, including gallery assistants Monica la Staiti and Jenna North, who proclaimed 2007 "The Year of the Circle."

Monica la Staiti and Jenna North

In the back gallery, Marioni's good friend Masashi Matsumoto is showing a group of eleven electric blue door paintings, with luminous keyholes which seem very Alice-in-Wonderland-like to this blogger. The doors are basking in the blue light of a neon sign that reads "Gallery B."

Go see it if you haven't already! The show is open until October 27 at:

Gallery Paule Anglim
14 Geary Street
San Francisco, CA
415.433.2710

Summer Workshops: Etching and Gravure

2007-08-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

Master Printer Catherine Brooks and workshop participants

This is the last week of workshops at Crown Point Press. Once a year the studios are opened to all artists to study and experiment with our printers. This year the topics on offer are Etching and Gravure. Spots are awarded by lottery. The workshops are limited to 10-12 people in etching, four in Gravure. One workshopper commented that winners of the lottery must have some psychic ability because the randomly selected printmakers have made such a harmonious working group.

Students from all levels can sign up, from professional printers to people with curiosity about prints and just a little etching or darkroom experience. Everyone works at his or her own speed. The more experienced people cookan get more done, but everyone benefits from observing everyone else’s progress.

John McCaskill takes a moment out from the photogravure workshop with master printer Emily York to talk to me. He’s impressed that the workshop creates an atmosphere where you can learn and get a lot of work done. Some workshops feel like lectures, he says, but here there is space created for people to really concentrate on their own projects as well as listen to the demonstrations. He says he’ll never get over “how involved the photogravure process is – but the final product is so beautiful. I may never get a chance to make another one but now I know.”

Workshop participant John McCaskill

Leslie Andelin is working on a geometric fantasy in the etching workshop. Right now she's printing with a palette of greens and blues. She has been coming here as often as she has been able to get in (through the lottery process) _ since about 2000. She told me she has collected some prints from Crown Point Press: "I have a Chuck Close and some Wayne Thiebaud sketches. It’s wonderful to be able to own works by such important artists.”

I ask Leslie how the printmaking process affects her regular work as a painter. She says, “The printmaking really helps with my painting _ the ability to change colors. I just explore color and then I bring that back into my studio. You have to be able to take risks; you are forced to because of the nature of the reversal process. You just have to let go. I was working on a Venice boat scene, it was all red, yellow, blue, you know, beautiful daylight, and I flipped the colors _ same colors different order _ and suddenly it was a night scene and it was so beautiful! You can’t do that in painting.”

Shari Deboer and Jenny Olsson share a large table in the etching workshop led by master printer Catherine Brooks. I ask Shari how the workshop has been for her so far, and she says,”I thought I had come with an idea of what to do but after the first hour I just threw that aside. She showed us one print and I decided I just want to do THAT technique. You don’t need a plan!”

Jenny Olsson came here from Sweden. This is her first time in the United States. She misses her little son at home, but she is having a fine time experimenting. She has not done etching since college. Her eyes get very wide and she tells me, “I HAVE to try everything that you have here _ just get all of it. I’m using small plates, you see.” She shuffles her copper plates like a lucky poker hand. She’s etching gentle drips and blots on her plates. She says “I love the spit bite! I’ve tried the hard ground and printed that on top. I want to try the soap ground too.” She has three more days to get it all in _ I’m sure she’ll manage.

Workshop participant Wendy Kahle

Charles Stinson is working on a colored pencil sketch. His work area is giving off a beehive-like energy. I ask what he’s up to. He is making some psychedelic botanical images (more Lewis Carroll psychedelic than Pink Floyd) with aggressively primary colors. He calls them his "very weird flowers." I ask what techniques he’s using. He explains, “I’ve never done color separation using soft ground techniques, or rather when I have used soft ground before I’ve had terrific failures. I had to use those plates for other purposes. So this has been a big success for me.”

Carolyn Dodds is cutting up some Bay Area crusty bread for lunch. She tells me, “Irish genes require a lot of starch, and we have terrible bread in Australia !” It is her first time in the States. She is a printmaker who has been mostly relief prints because it didn’t require a studio but she was originally trained in etching. She always wanted to try photogravure. “I’d been fishing for a few years," she says, making inquiries about where she should go to learn. “Because this isn’t something you could just learn anywhere. It’s a lifelong ambition.” Crown Point press was recommended to her and here she is. She tells me that the studio experience here is special because of the design of the studio. “I find that American prints are always technically superb, but working here there a lot of practical things about the way the studio is set up that you constantly find yourself thinking, why didn’t I think of that?”

Paule Kraemer wrote in her post-workshop evaluation from the session last week: “All of my bad habits have been corrected.” We hope so, but just in case some of them persist, there’s always next year. Applications are due in March!

-Kim Bennett

Southern Graphics Council Conference

2007-05-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

We’re Back! Sasha and I were in Kansas City, MO for four days attending the 35th annual Southern Graphics Council Conference.

On Wednesday afternoon we landed outside Kansas City at at the regional airport. The land all around us was mostly flat, with bare trees dotting the occasional hill. As we reached Kansas City proper, our taxi driver drove us past the what seemed to be the old downtown, with small brick buildings, BBQ restaurants, pubs, and churches. The Hyatt Hotel where the conference was being held some 1,000 printmakers including us, were gathered, for the conference. We found our community. It was a welcoming sight to be greeted by groups of artsy people catching up and discussing their conference materials.

We checked in and registered for the conference immediately and after dropping our bags, we hit the swimming pool and hot tub. After our splash, we went back to our rooms to get ready for dinner. Sasha and I each had nice room with a comfy bed and a poster reproduction of the same Diebenkorn painting on the wall; we felt right at home.

We set out on that first balmy night to find authentic Kansas City BBQ and happened to end up in the (supposedly) number one barbeque restaurant in the country, Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbeque. After eating some ribs and burnt bits, cheesy potatoes and cheesy macaroni, we took a taxi four blocks back to the Hyatt for a nightcap. On the 40th floor of our hotel we found the Sky’s Lounge, a bar that rotates 360 degrees, so we were able to sit and slowly spin around, seeing the entire city laid out before us. What we saw from our vantage point were wide, empty streets as far as the eye could see. Sasha remarked that she’d never seen so much parking. There weren’t any cars out on the streets, and not a soul to be seen.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday we worked at our booth in the Product Fair, and greeted fans and friends of Crown Point Press. People were excited about my book as well as the other Crown Point titles and products we had for sale. (This conference was the first time that we brought with us printmaking tools, hand creams, and aprons to sell. We are expanding our bookstore to include most items that a printmaker might need in their studio.) I really enjoyed meeting students, teachers, and other printers from around the country. It was fun hanging out with former Crown Point printer, Paul Mullowney who now is the director and master printer at Hui No’eau Press in Maui. The three of us spent each night taking a tour of the local galleries after happy hour!

Surrounding the product fair were performances, games, and portfolio exchanges in addition to workshops and panel discussions. Digital media was a hot topic as was non-toxic printmaking techniques. Despite these new innovations being made in the field, I felt that our old process of etching was still vital, and being surrounded by other printmakers was invigorating. It was great to be part of the printmaking community, representing a great place, making new friends.

-Catherine Brooks

Dena Schuckit goes to London

2007-03-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

Dena Schuckit has been a printer at Crown Point Press since 1995. Since coming to work here she has become Senior Master Printer. Now she is going to London to pursue an MFA at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design. She won’t be out of touch, she is working on a new printmaking advice column for this website, “Ask Dena” which will be up the second week of April. Get your etching questions ready. She is also writing a forthcoming book in the Magical Secrets series, "Magical Secrets About Gravure: Photogravure and Direct Gravure Step By Step".

I asked her to describe some of her favorite experiences working with artists at Crown Point Press over the last 12 years asked her to boil down her experience into a few words and she said, “I guess I’ve just learned so much about making art here, it’s basically a whole different language – each artist comes in with their own language, and I have learned to adapt to working with different languages.”

Her introduction to printing at Crown Point was working with Tom Marioni, who she has worked with many times since. Her first two week project was with Anne Appleby, who has a methodical approach to image making.

Dena said, “She’s just so in tune with nature and her color sense is so complex. I learned so much about color. If we were working towards a red color then we’d start off with a bright green. We had to figure out how to build the colors that she was looking for.”

Anne Appleby
WINTER, 1999
Color Aquatint

Later she worked with David Nash, which was a faster, messier ride. “He was grabbing these new materials, using the tree rosin in big chunks – just wanting to get his hands in everything.” If each artist has a language, Nash’s language seemed to be spoken faster than Appleby’s.

David Nash
SQUARE CIRCLE TRIANGLE: black in light, 1998
Aquatint reversal

Dena worked with Richard Tuttle first on “Mandevilla”, a project from 1988. She said,
“Working with Richard Tuttle was always a search, an exploration that would happen as we were making the plates. He would sit down and start telling me a story that was one really long and circuitous route. I would just do my best to follow it and eventually we would wind up right back where we started. The projects were kind of like that too.”

Richard Tuttle
Mandevilla 5, 1998
Color aquatint

I asked Kathan Brown, founding director of Crown Point what it has been like working with Dena Schuckit, she said, “We’ve relied on Dena for a long time. She’s such a pleasure to be around as a person. The artists all really adore her, and of course there’s nobody better as a printer. We’ve just been lucky to have her.”

Dena is excited to see how these varied experiences helping artists with very different methods and approaches achieve their goals in etching will translate into her own MFA work. We are curious too. We look forward to reading “Ask Dena”, and "Magical Secrets About Gravure: Photogravure and Direct Gravure Step By Step", and wish her well in her English adventure.

Pia Fries at Crown Point Press

2007-03-01T16:39:00.000-08:00

The studio has been busy with activity as we just completed a two-week artist project with Pia Fries. During her stay she created four vibrant etchings. Pia was born in Switzerland but she has made Germany her home ever since attending art school at the Kunstakadedmie in Dusseldorf, where she studied painting with Gerhard Richter. This was Pia’s first time making prints at Crown Point Press as well as her first time making etchings. It was an exciting project for me as the master printer in charge of the project, as it was the first time I lead a project in which the artist was totally fresh to etching.

When Pia arrived Monday morning we began by looking at our current Winter Group Show in the gallery so that she could get a sense of the possibilities of intaglio printing. For anyone who is a printmaker or who has tried etching you know how daunting and complex some of the processes can often seem. It was my job, as the master printer, to make the processes as accessible and easy to understand as possible so that Pia could find an approach to etching that felt natural and akin to her way of working in her own studio.

Prior to Pia’s arrival we had been in contact about including photographic elements in her prints. For her paintings, she photographs sculptures she makes with such materials as thick paint and paper, and then she silk-screens these images onto the canvas. Her work is well known for the way in which she incorporates these sculptural photographic images into the larger composition made of layer upon layer of thick, visceral oil paint. The week before Pia arrived I made photogravure plates of the photographic motifs she wanted to work with while she was in our studio. (Photogravure is a way etching a photographic image into a copper plate.) With the photogravure plate as the framework for each print, Pia built up the image using just about every technique we had to offer her.

When we began work in the studio Pia was happy to get her hands dirty and really see what each process was about. When Pia works on her paintings she uses many tools that are conventionally not intended for painting, or printmaking for that matter! It was so much fun to work with her to find ways of working with these tools in etching. She and I both had to be rather inventive in our approaches to the medium and open to trying something new. In the four prints she created you can instantly see the joy and spontaneity that went into their making.

Crown Point Press at CAA

2007-02-18T07:56:00.000-08:00

Greetings from New York City! We just made it before a great winter storm hit; we landed in the snow and sleet, and the airplane skidded on the runway as we touched down!

Now we are here, warm and dry, at the CAA Conference in the Hilton Hotel on 6^th Avenue at 54^th Street. The CAA (College Art Association) holds its annual conference in a different city every year, and what luck that this year it is in the Big Apple. In addition to academics (and artists) giving keynote speeches, there are seminars and a job fair as well as a book and trade exhibition where (book) publishers and art material suppliers sell their wares. This year is the first time Crown Point has attended the fair, and we have a table set up, displaying our books, and we are hard at work promoting the Press and our Magical-Secrets book series and website.

We have received many accolades about the new books, and people are impressed with our other publications. Visitors to the table have been printmakers, curators, artists, teachers and students. Some know who we are; others don’t but everyone is excited to see the new Lines book, and to meet Catherine. Many are already familiar with Kathan’s Magical Secrets about Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of Life, since its release last year. It is particularly wonderful to be able to say that the two of us with Kathan and Javier have produced these books all on our own.

We are having a great time in the Big Apple. Tonight Sasha is going to a Broadway musical, the first time she has been to a Broadway show since she was nine! Thursday evening Catherine went to the opening of the show, “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-1975” at the National Academy Museum. It was a surprise to run into both Pat Steir and Mary Heilmann; their paintings were included in the show along with Richard Tuttle’s.

There are some art luminaries at the CAA; Faith Ringgold has a book signing, Betty Woodman gave a keynote address, and June Wayne is also here to promote her catalog raisonee, We are working on having the public address system announce a book signing at the Crown Point booth, on Saturday morning, from 10-12. Just have to convince the organizers to use their powers with the broad announcement medium.

Review of Magical Secrets in the Mid America Print Council

2007-01-16T14:38:00.000-08:00

In the Journal of the Mid-America Print Council this issue there is a lovely review of Magical Secrets by Deborah Kelley-Galin of the Pueblo Community College Southwest Center in Mancos, Colorado. I've copied and pasted it below. Take a look!

It had been saved by a group of artists during World War II, and though it was never melted down, it sat for years - dismantled and abandoned - in the yard of a Scottish boarding house. When it was offered to Kathan Brown, an art student studying the British Arts and Crafts movement, she accepted. And though the press's first owners hoped it would see better times, none could have imagined that a determined young woman would take it on a two-month trip by freighter through the Panama Canal to California. From there, Brown launched another phase of the machine's epic journey, one that would scure both a place in the annals of American art history. Inspired by historic photos documenting the collaborative efforts of Crown Point Gold Mine employees, Brown's new workshop bore the name Crown Point Press.

Magical Secrets about Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of Life is a continuation of Brown's interest in collaboration, this time reaching beyond the physical confines of the Press's San Francisco facilities to meet the artistic community at large. Magical Secrets, its associated DVD, website and online blog condense forty-four years of experience into 13 "Secrets," each highlighting elemental turning points that enabled artists, assisted by Crown Point staff, to bring their artistic aspirations to fruition.

Those who may be intimidated by Crown Point Press's astonishing success will be surprised by the author's honest and open writing style. Brown began printing the works of artists who attended her regular figure drawing sessions; the later iconic success of Crown Point Press was due in part to the influence of New York's Parasol Press Ltd. While preparing his Parasol Press portfolio Seven Still Lives and a Rabbit in 1970, artist and long-time friend Wayne Thiebaud convinced owner Robert Feldman to include Crown Point Press etchings. Although Feldman considered etching to be a passe art form, he acquiesced to Thiebaud's wishes. Brown and Thiebaud did indeed produce colored, multi-plate etchings for Parasol; Crown Point Press and New York's Parasol Press subsequently joined forces for a number of years.

Although they were at the height of their careers, many of the artists invited to work at Crown Point Press had little or no knowledge of printmaking. Brown and staff were first presented with each artist's final goal: "Collaboration" was often the process of problem-solving - guiding each artist toward this goal while initiating him/her into the methods and techniques that could facilitate success. Part of the book's charm is the author's willingness to share uncomfortable moments when artists and staff encounter frustration, mirroring the struggles we all, as artists, confront in our work. Brown stops short of revealing any major catastrophes, however the atmosphere would surely have been fertile grounds for amusing disasters.

Magical Secrets is also interesting for its art historical value. Artists and their work are defined within their contemporary "art world" context. Secret #4, for example, "Have an Idea: Thinking about what you are doing," provides a broad-scope view of the meaning and motivations behind conceptual artists and the pieces they create. When choosing artists to invite to the Press, each one needed to fit Brown's criteria: How important will this work be in the next century? Quoting John Cage, "The way you could have enjoyed life in, say, 1200 is different from the way you enjoy it now. And that accounts for the changes in art." Brown initially chose artists whom she believed were "in the forefront of those changes." Although the first artist she worked with, Richard Diebenkorn, forewarned, "The marvelous possibilities of painting seem to me to be more complex than thought..." Brown found a substantial foundation in "The conceptual artist's... idea to try for something bigger to begin with, to reflect the scientific universe, the natural world, or human nature." Additionally, Brown found that her conceptual collaborators usually fell into three categories: those who use language, systems, or action to attain their goals. Secret #4 guides us through the works of Tom Marioni and Sol LeWitt, paying particular attention to Marioni's color drypoint Flying With Friends and his approach to soft ground etching.

Equal thought, however, is given to representational artists and the evolution of realism. Consideration is given to image sources in Secret #9, "Use Every Source: Using sources of images and ideas as if they were tools." The merits of anonymous historical works and modern art are given equal respect here. The cover of Magical Secrets displays a soft bite and soap ground aquatint with soft ground etching by Laura Owens. Untitled (LO270), 2004 features an elegantly colored chicken precariously spanning a gnarled tree branch. Its subject matter and style are based on a "two-hundred-year-old brocade of uncertain origin, probably Japanese." Another Owens work, Untitled (LO273), is a rendition of a nineteenth-century scrimshaw piece - primitive drypoint ships and whales float beneath a stormy, aquatinted sky. Several of Owens's other pieces were derived from early American needlework. Brown admits that she likes "thinking about an anonymous needleworker long ago choosing the subject to work on for a long time, probably in her home."

Although Magical Secrets was written to appeal to a broad range of creative thinkers, printmakers will be the primary beneficiaries. Each will undoubtedly find a chapter whose "secret" and examples resonate on a personal level. The book also includes biographies of all of the associated artists and a comprehensive glossary of printmaking terminology. For strictly visual learners, there is also a DVD included inside the book that includes artist interviews and views of the studio settings. The DVD is excellent material for anyone teaching a college level printmaking course, giving students the opportunity to see artists accomplish their individual visions through a variety of techniques and in doing so, a bit of the Crown Point spirit of camaraderie rubs onto them. The Press has also set up a new Magical Secrets website geared towards developing a 'real time' dimension to the project. This is the place to go if you want to register for your regular food-for-thought, the "3-Minute Egg."

Magical Secrets is the small embodiment of a huge effort. Once engaged, you may have a major revelation, or you may just solve a nagging mystery. Even the hopelessly 'blocked,' or those otherwise immune to inspiration, can learn much from Kathan Brown's problem-solving sorties.

- Deborah Kelley-Galin

Sycamores

2006-12-19T15:05:00.000-08:00

Last week there was a geosciences convention at the Moscone Center, a large conference center just a block from Crown Point Press. Among the conferees was a geophysicist who, in 2002, had been on the same trip to the North Pole by Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker as Kathan Brown. (The trip would later inspired Kathan’s lovely, eponymous book, published by Crown Point in 2004.) Since he knew Kathan, the geophysicist stopped by to say hello and to see our current exhibition, which includes prints by John Chiara. I was here at the front desk when he emerged from the gallery, waving his arms and talking a mile a minute. He was so excited he’d gotten completely disoriented, and forgotten which way the exit was! While I retrieved his bags and jacket for him, he followed me through the office telling me what he’d loved so much about the work.

John Chiara, 24th at Carolina (left variation), 2006. Photogravure on gampi paper chine colle. Paper size: 32-3/4 x 27-3/4"; image size: 23-1/2 x 19-3/4". Edition 15. Printed by Dena Schuckit.

“It’s a sycamore tree,” the geophysicist said, referring to the foreground of Chiara’s beautiful San Francisco landscapes. The scientist knew a lot about sycamore trees. Did you know that the word sycamore doesn’t refer to a specific tree, but is just a general word that refers to a type of tree? That there is in fact a sycamore that grows figs? That the first British-designed helicopter to successfully fly was called the Bristol Sycamore? He told me that in their natural habitats sycamores require a lot of water, and so often grow in the rich soil near rivers, streams or lakes. I supposed this made Chiara’s chosen tree particularly strong, as it stands far from an underground water source, on the top of Potrero Hill.

This reminded him of another, stronger sycamore. “Do you know about the fake sycamore in Central Park, in New York?” he asked. A fake sycamore? “Sure, I used to walk by it on my way to work,” he said. “It was made out of steel. It was beautiful. But the ends of its branches tapered off into points, and looking up at it, I always half-expected a squirrel to jump into it and get skewered.”

The tree’s name was Bluff. It was constructed by the artist Roxy Paine and commissioned by the New York Public Art Fund in 2002. The website for Bluff reads, "Roxy Paine's Bluff was a fifty-foot high tree made of brilliantly stainless steel. Bluff's heavy industrial plates formed a two-foot-wide trunk that supported more than 5000 pounds of cantilevered branches, welded together from 24 different diameters of steel pipes and rods. Its gleaming frame remained unchanged as its environment shifted from winter into spring. By announcing its grand manmade artifice rather than attempting to blend in with the surrounding real plants and trees, Bluff was a cunning reminder that Central Park is itself an artificial sanctuary, a product of city planners as much as Mother Nature."

I recently moved to a neighborhood 5 miles from Crown Point Press, San Francisco’s Sunset district. Most days, I bike to work through Golden Gate Park, a spacious, lush public park born in the 1860’s in response to New York’s Central Park, which was also taking shape at that time. Blue Gum Eucalyptus was imported from Australia and planted alongside native Monterey Pines and Monterey Cypresses to thicken the 60,000 tree forest that holds together the California sand dunes underfoot. To keep it alive and thriving, processed and recycled water, called effluent, is pumped in from the city’s sewage treatment plant. The park is such a beautiful success that John McClaren, the proud gardener who saw its construction through to completion, lived in Golden Gate until he was 90 years old. McClaren died just a decade before the introduction of artificial detergents in the 1950’s would cause billowing piles of foam to form on the creeks that connected its artificial lakes. The foam blew onto the paths and roads of the park, blocking traffic and killing wildlife. Talk about an “artificial sanctuary” — the toxic overflow must have been more like a sanctuary of the artificial.

Tom Marioni, New Growth, 2006. Color drypoint with flat bite etching. Paper size: 22 x 20-1/2"; image size: 13 x 12-1/2". Edition 20. Printed by Dena Schuckit.

Learning about the construction of the park made me think of the Crown Point gallery itself as a kind of 'sanctuary of the artificial.' Here we have two artists, John Chiara and Tom Marioni, who have each created their own series of conceptual 'landscapes'. Critic Thomas McEvilly has written of Marioni's works that they "demystify, diminish, and bring down to earth the solemnity of the sublime." Because the artists have created what they depict (Chiara moved his hand in front of the lens of his camera to get the exposure he wanted; for New Growth, pictured at left, Marioni accumulated visceral dig after dig in his copper plate), their landscapes, though artificial, are more human than landscape itself.

- Rachel Lyon

Notes on John Cage

2006-12-06T13:38:00.001-08:00

"What I'm proposing to myself and to other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before."
- John Cage, 1992

A couple of days ago, I was selling books and sitting in the audience of an event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: Kathan was on a panel speaking about John Cage, and afterward there was a concert of his Sonatas and Interludes. As Crown Point and John Cage enthusiasts alike might know, Cage did a series of etchings here at Crown Point Press between 1980 and 1992. His time here was the catalyst for Kathan Brown's book, John Cage Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind. "The book is in three parts," the press release for this publication reads. "The first is a text written from Brown's own experience. In it, she often uses Cage's words to describe particular works, and she reflects upon how the art can be used in the world. The second is a detailed section that illustrates 'scores' that Cage created for his printers, and explains his use of what he called 'chance operations' in making his work. The third section of the book is pictorial. Cage told Brown that the purpose of art is 'to sober and quiet the mind, so that it is in accord with what happens.'"

GLOBAL VILLAGE 1-36, 1989. Aquatint, roulette and drypoint on smoked paper. 38-1/2 x 26-1/2", on Roma Fabriano Brown paper. Edition: 15. Printed by Crown Point Press.
I thought, since I was at this event, I'd record some of the notes that I took during hour-long series of Cage's musical musings, performed by the remarkable pianist (and Cage specialist) Julie Steinberg on a prepared piano that had bolts, screws and stones, as well as dry-erasers and other objects attached to its strings. I haven't edited much, just thrown down most of what I wrote, in the hopes you enjoy them. As always, feel free to comment - discussion is the root of invention!

1. Human beings need structure.

2. The challenge to the pianist is to try and find the plot in these plotless segments. Cage's widom (in part) was to divide the plotnessness he came upon through chance operations into segments that are at least small enough to be digestible (at most, pure enough to be intelligible).

3. For the [same] sake of clarity, he often repeats a phrase more than once. This is an improvisation trick I also learned from Steve Mackey, who used to tell his improv students (myself included), "when in doubt, do it again," a musical version of the pep talk pointer and 13th Magical Secret, "Own It." Repetition makes sense, in both senses of 'make.'

4. Once in a while an old, familiar form shows up, too, by accident. An example: the weird, little musical formulation that sounds like the bit in the score for "The Wizard of Oz" that belongs to Glinda floating down in her bubble. But reference is certainly not enough, and repetition is only half the battle - it is Cage's organization of these snippets (and the wells of empathy in Steinberg's performance that lend them plot/emotive structure) that keeps the rapt audience rapt. Cage organizes his musical phrases like stones in a Zen garden: each rock is just a rock, devoid of meaning - it is one's own movement amid them that lends them power.

5. It's a question of memory. My own thoughts tend to cycle - a genetic, maybe, or cultural, a sex-linked, nurtured, common, or God-given quirk, who knows. Whatever the reason, while I listen to Cage I find my go-to way of listening is insufficient. Traditional Western music, (take Beethoven for example, or Sufjan Stevens) is constructed for the neurotic. While listening, you can put your mind on temporary auto-pilot, go back to any one element, and be satisfied that it is meant to be a part of the whole: whatever has happened was necessary to bring about whatever is happening now. In Cage's work, though, the music is organized in a totally egalitarian way, that renders this kind of jumping back and forth between memory and immediacy meaningless. I get the unsettling yet somehow deeply comforting feeling that whatever has happened could have been anything else. Although there's no epiphany, like in a great symphony or a really satisfying song, there is something very much like peace.

- Rachel Lyon

Kathan Brown at Adaptive Path

2006-11-20T11:32:00.000-08:00

We recently received a link to the conversation Kathan had with Janice Fraser at the Adaptive Path conference, User Experience Week. The CEO and a founding partner of Adaptive Path, Fraser has worked in high-tech media for more than 15 years as an entrepreneur, interaction designer, and editor. Her current work focuses on leadership for user experience managers and the role of user experience in the changing landscape of product innovation. I thought our readers might like to hear the podcast of their conversation, available here. It's so fun to hear responses to the Magical Secrets from so many different areas of expertise! Fraser uses the Magical Secrets to talk about issues of leadership, cooperation and collaboration.

The Man Who Had Power Over Women

2006-11-07T14:19:00.000-08:00

In my last email to the Magical Secrets list, I asked people who have blogs about making art to send me a link to their sites. I got some great responses! One was an artist named Randel Plowman who lives in Northern Kentucky. On Randel's blog, "A Collage A Day," he posts images of collages he makes, one for each day of the year, and sells them for $25 each. He's been doing this since August of 2006 and is still going strong. I liked his collages so much, I bought one myself. Here's the one I picked. It's called "Birthday Boy."

I think this collage is so strange and pretty. There's definitely a menacing undercurrent in the words he uses, but the cut-up watercolor keeps it light. I like how the size of the text subverts its meaning: the man is the one who has the power, but "WOMEN" is the largest word in there.

If anyone else wants to share the site of their blog with us, please do in the comments below. Crown Point Press is committed to our community of artists and art-lovers. The more dialogue we have, the better!

Columbus day parade in NYC

2006-10-20T14:35:00.001-07:00

I went to New York last week and happened to be right by Rockefeller Center on Columbus Day. There was a huge parade going on of all types of New Yorkers, and I had the opportunity to look into Anish Kapoor's new monumental sculpture, Sky Mirror, while I watched the crowd and the floats.

I say look into because it wasn't at all an experience of looking at. The image you see here was taken from the other side of the mirror from where I was standing while watching the parade down 5th Avenue. (If you were standing where this photographer were standing at the time, I would have been where these tiny people whose heads are in the sun are standing.)

The text in the pamphlet that's distributed by Rockefeller Center reads: "This optical object changes through the day and night and is an example of what Kapoor describes as a 'non-object,' a sculpture that, despite its monumentality, suggests a window or void and often seems to vanish into its surroundings." It says s sculptures "recede into the distance, disappear into walls or floors, or otherwise destabilise our assumptions about the physical world." (text and photo courtesy of the New York Public Art Fund)

Here is an image of an etching Kapoor did at Crown Point Press in 1988. I like it in relation to the Sky Mirror because to me it cconveys the same idea of the strange in-between that happens when a reflection presents a new space to the space that it's in. These little bean figures are the same shape as the giant Cloud Gate sculpture he did in Chicago's Millenium Park in 2004. In quality, though, it makes me think of Sky Mirror, because of the way it depicts two voids that somehow fill the space between them.

Anish Kapoor, Untitled (4), 1988. Color spit bite aquatint. Paper 23 x 18-1/4", image18 x 14", Edition 20. Printed by Crown Point Press.

- Rachel Lyon

The Big Truth

2006-10-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

Sylvia Plimack Mangold, The Nut Trees, 1985. Color woodcut, 16 1/2 x 24", edition 100.

I am helping to put together a series of biographies of artists who’ve done projects at Crown Point Press, and most recently I’ve been working on one for Sylvia Plimack Mangold. Lucky for me, Kathan Brown wrote about Plimack Mangold in her 1999 book, Why Draw A Landscape. In the first couple of pages, she says,

Sixty or seventy years ago, before the Great Depression and World War II, people in our grandparents’ generation were pretty confident that truth existed. They believed it was possible to understand the world as it is, always and forever. . . . Now, I think we have a different idea about the world and about the nature of creative work. This idea is not entirely a new one. Shakespeare phrased it poetically: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” What’s new about the idea is that it has become pervasive.

A few days later, I read an article in the New Yorker about the current state of string theory. In it, critic Jim Holt describes a change in attitude among physicists. The great dream of science has always been of breaking through to one, unifying Theory of Everything. Evidently, though, there are some recent problems with this, one being that since the 1990’s versions of string theory have just been proliferating. Many recent developments in the field are more reconciliatory than groundbreaking—instead of proving each other wrong, theorists have been expanding their versions of string theory to allow for other physicists’ versions, and the universes those versions imply, to exist side by side. (“Physicists who believe in such a ‘multiverse’ sometimes picture it as a cosmic champagne glass frothing with universe-bubbles.” Holt explains.) He writes, “the theory formerly known as strings remains a seductive conjecture rather than an actual set of equations, and the non-uniqueness problem [i.e. allowing for other universes] has grown to ridiculous proportions. At the latest count, the number of string theories is estimated to be something like one followed by five hundred zeroes.” If ideal scientific progress can be pictured as a clean and steady stream toward Truth, string theory is more of a heavy downpour.

Einstein discovered physical relativity, the idea that objects behave the same whether or not they are moving, and regardless of how fast, seemed to put us on a steady track. String theory, though, uncovers a sort of perceptual relativity. The idea that we could all be right, that there would be no one key to understanding the universe, reminds me of the parable of the blind men describing the elephant. Since they can only feel, and not see it, the men who touch the elephant’s head describe the animal as being like a pot. Those who feel its ear says it’s like a basket; the foot, a pillar; the tuft of the tail, a brush, and so on. Like these blind men, physicists are feeling around for the truth, and without proving each other wrong they are describing different aspects of it. What’s more, each discovery (the universe is a glass of champagne! the universe is a bunch of vibrating threads!) leads to more, detailed discoveries (the champagne glass froths in more than one directions! the threads are one-dimensional! etc), instead of broader ones. (Holt mentions a theorist named Karl Popper who believed that there will prove to be no end to the succession of deeper and deeper theories.)

Like artists, by presenting their different perspectives on truth, the string theorists Holt writes of are making the world more, not less complicated. Like a work of art, each version of the theory is complete and functional, containing its own, personal yet universal approach for understanding the very world it describes. Reading this article made me wonder: if the role of scientists is changing from the noble pursuit of the same objective Truth our grandparents and great-grandparents sought, to the formulation of countless, more subjective truths, is the gulf between science and art gradually closing? “The idea that ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’ may be a beautiful one,” Holt notes, “but is there any reason to think it is true? Truth, after all, is a relationship between a theory and the world, whereas beauty is a relationship between a theory and the mind.” When it becomes difficult to pin down the difference between the world and the mind, beyond beauty the big Truth falls apart.

- Rachel Lyon

(Source: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/061002crat_atlarge)

Ed Ruscha at Crown Point Press

2006-10-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

Hi,
This is Javier, I am the webmaster and videographer at Crown Point Press. I made this video! I am here to announce that all of our videos can now be seen at google video! Just go to www.video.google.com and type in Crown Point Press in the search box. Please feel free to comment on this video.

I had the pleasure of meeting Ed Ruscha a number of times at Crown Point Press, most recently and at the opening of his new show called "Signs+Streets+Streets+Signs" now on view in our gallery through Novemeber 4.

Here are some photos from the reception for the artist:

Visitor admiring L.A.S.F. #1, #2, #3

Director Valerie Wade with Artist Ed Ruscha

Crowd at the reception

New etchings by Ed Ruscha

This is a fantastic show! Please stop by the gallery Tuesday through Saturday from 10am - 6pm. If you would like to see new works by Ed Ruscha click here.

Language and Maps

2006-09-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

I have been going through our old “View”s (the artist interviews that Crown Point used to put out with each exhibition). I read one not long ago that was an interview with Christopher Brown. In it, he summarized the language theorist Piaget, saying “you cannot have ideas that are any more complex than your vocabulary.”

By coincidence, in conversation over lunch the other day a friend brought up that theory again. We were talking about the importance of education, especially vocabulary. “Vocabulary and intelligence go hand-in-hand,” he was saying. “You can have the best ideas in the world, but if you can’t articulate them, no one will know.” His idea of intelligence reminds me of the old question, of the tree in the forest no one hears fall: if your ideas cannot be told, are they really there?

We have customs and sayings to keep us all in some sort of agreement. From phrases to metaphors, names to numbers, verbs to adjectives, all of language is a symbolic map of our thoughts. Language allows us to tell each other, in a million different ways, who we are, where we’re going, how we see, and what we stand for. (“I am happy,” you might say to a stranger, and the stranger, knowing absolutely nothing about what makes you happy or what happiness is to you, will have some idea of what you mean.) But if language is a map of concepts, concepts themselves are like the constantly evolving surface of the territory a map describes. We call concepts by name for the same reason we plot the shifting, quaking crust of the earth into countries and regions: for everyone’s convenience. From ‘irony’ to ‘delicious’ to ‘art’ to ‘fun,’ concepts are colored differently for everyone, but for the sake of getting on with things, we all agree on a general region of truth for each one. Most of us share this mental map, where, say, ‘fun’ and ‘getting kicked in the teeth’ do not live on the same continent. (Those who don’t share it are probably lost.)

In some ways, then, the function of the artist is to be a sort of conceptual cartographer. The artist explores an idea past the limits of language, only to bring it back again. Some change our landscape by offering us new maps and with them new ways of looking at it. Christopher Brown, who calls painting itself a “complex language,” and says “I was playing around with what things could possibly mean and how paintings could contradict each other,” is a good example of one of these. Others, like Marcel Duchamp, who famously stuck a bicycle wheel in a gallery and called it art, change our maps by making earthquakes in the very surface they describe. On the map Duchamp made, the country of ‘art’ took over the provinces of ‘bicycle wheel,’ ‘pipe’ and ‘urinal,’ and world never looked quite the same.

- Rachel Lyon

Apples and Art

2006-08-21T14:21:00.000-07:00

I had a strange moment here a couple of weeks ago. It was already a surreal day. For one thing, it was a Monday, when the gallery doesn’t come in, and the printers weren’t around, so it was mind-numbingly quiet For another, it was a cold day in the middle of July, which to me is always weird enough on its own. (Sometimes I think it’s the totally unpredictable weather that keeps San Franciscoans so much more youthful than the New Yorkers I know—you have to be ready for the most drastic changes; you can’t settle into the comfort of expecting the seasons). So when a man named Terry wandered into the gallery with a friend, asking questions I didn’t know the answers to, I was caught off-guard. After wandering through the gallery and then back out into my bookstore area, he commented about a piece of my lunch that was sitting on the shelf behind me, “That apple is better art than anything in the gallery.”

Not simply, “better.” Not, “more beautiful.” Not, “more tasteful” (but that would have been funny). “Better art.”

“What is art?” is a tiresome question that has been asked too often for it to have an answer—too often to have just one, for sure. My thoughts were more along the lines of “what could he have meant by that?” So it was with some (small) consideration that I gave my lame little joke of a response: “Too bad God isn’t an artist represented by Crown Point Press.”

It’s a dumb comment, but it reveals a difference between the way Terry (who, I later found out, is a mathematician at MIT) and I think about art. For Terry, art can exist in the world without being consciously created, a product of someone’s thoughts. For me, art has got to be the product of a thought, a feeling, a style, and something left up to chance. It’s a constant balance of meant-to-be and something an old teacher of mine used to call “the happy accident.” It is about setting up a situation with the best of intentions and then watching what happens, allowing yourself to have a give-and-take conversation with your work of art, where you listen to what it needs to say and allow it to go where it wants to go, but where you ultimately get to choose who gets the final word. That apple was pretty (it was a Pink Lady: my favorite kind). But it was certainly not the product of any sort of process like that.

...Or was it? Let’s give Terry’s offhand remark a little credit.

Pink Ladies are the product of a 1979 tryst between 2 apples named Golden Delicious and Lady Williams, at the Stoneville Research Station for a company called Apple and Pear Australia, Ltd., located near the Margaret River in Western Australia. High-maintenance as their name suggests, Pink Ladies require 120 days of pure sunshine in a temperate climate to get the blushy color they are bred for. In fact, all Pink Ladies fall under the category of Cripps Pink apples (named after their inventor, John Cripps), but only 45% of Cripps Pinks meet the marketing requirements for Pink Ladies, which are quite strict.

Terry probably didn’t put that much thought into a jaded comment about my lunch, but if he had, he could have argued, maybe, that my apple is what art is all about: some unsung apple geneticist (not John Cripps, it turns out, who just picked the first Pink Lady out of its litter after it was born) saw the opportunity for the conjunction of two great ideas: the Lady Williams and the Golden Delicious. What’s more than that, this person had to have known that the Golden Delicious has a recessive gene that, when it’s bred with certain other varieties, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, causes its offspring to be pink.

Whoever invented the Pink Lady must have taken the time (Secret no. 2: Use a Lot of Time) to understand what he had to work with. He tasted the parent apples (no. 1: Cultivate Sensuality) and was struck with a great idea (no. 4: Have an Idea). Then he must have experimented over and over (no. 3: Get into the Flow). He set up a situation where there was room for experimentation, saw what the apple ‘wanted’ to be, and guided it toward a lovely, purposeful product

But at the end of the day, the Pink Lady is not art. It’s a delicious apple. It’s pretty. It is an impressive experiment in marketing: at www.pinkladyapples.com you can see the tireless efforts of Apple and Pear Australia, Ltd. to make Pink Ladies “the UK’s fastest growing apple brand,” including recipes, games, tee shirts, even a competition to win your own ice cream maker. But however original the idea of promoting an apple as if it were a candy bar, however skillful the breeding of the apple in the first place, however beautifully and delicious it turns out (and I am a huge fan of these fruits!), the apple itself is not art. It can be seen as symbolic, but its meaning will not change over time. You might enjoy eating it, but it won’t “move” you. And you can think about it all you want (excessively, even), but it won’t change anything about the way you think. “Art is a speculation of possibilities,” writes Kathan Brown in her Magical Secrets, and I have to agree with her: the only art about that apple was contained in the moment that Terry responded to it, and I responded to him. With his comment, which really meant next to nothing except, maybe, that that he was jet-lagged and jaded, Terry opened up an avenue of speculation for me, a new possibility, changing ever so slightly and suddenly the way I think. The art of the apple was in the moment.

- Rachel Lyon

Coincidences

2006-06-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking a lot about coincidences.

Last weekend I was in Chinatown with a friend. It was around 5 on a cold, grey Saturday afternoon. As we walked, chatting and window-shopping, we couldn’t help but notice a man in front of us. He looked normal at first, but he was weaving back and forth on the sidewalk, and as we got closer we could hear him muttering about lesbian parents and artificial insemination. “Damn them and their splitting eggs,” he spat at us. To avoid him, we ducked into a bright, glossy furniture store.

Inside it was a monumental palace of tiered chandeliers, king-sized beds, and enormous bronze and marble statues, rip-offs of famous paintings in heavy (handed) gilt frames overwhelming the walls. On a display table near the front of the room, there were seven or eight fist-sized, bejeweled eggs, each split open to reveal a ballerina or a flower, maybe a dancing bear. That’s funny, I thought. Splitting eggs. The coincidence may not even have caught my attention if I hadn’t just been reading a book on the same subject, Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body (by Frenchman Armand Marie Leroi), and at the time been toughing it out through the chapter on conjoined twins, literally all about the splitting of eggs. A strange zeitgeist, but it seemed to mean something...

Back at Crown Point, we’ve opened a new gallery space downstairs for private parties, “By the Sea,” where we’ve hung about 14 prints. I spent much of last week writing short, three-sentence blurbs on each print in the new space. The paragraph that gave me the most trouble was the one on Tuttle’s: Naked I (2004). It’s hard to talk about Richard Tuttle because his work is so abstract and his process is so personal and cerebral. After working on it for a day or two, I was more lost than when I started. Deceptively simple at first, Tuttle’s work seemed to get more complicated as I looked at it and thought about it.

Richard Tuttle, Naked I, 2004

Color soft ground etching with foul biting and hand staining printed on white Hosho

27 x 21”, edition 10, $4,500

For help, I turned to master printers Dena Schuckit and Catherine Brooks. Dena has led all of Tuttle’s projects since she came to Crown Point Press in 1995, and Catherine has assisted on many. Tuttle completed his Naked series two years after another series he called Costume, 2002. Working on Costume, he was concerned with the concept of costume versus clothing; in Naked, nakedness vs. nudity. Dena and Catherine told me that while he was working on Naked he would often take walks in the area. On one of these walks he found a flower, which he brought back with him to the studio and used to mark the surface through a soft ground on the plate of what would become Naked I. They described how mindless the decision to use the flower seemed, but how after he had done it, it came to mean something quite theoretical.

In the 2005 Overview for his Naked series, Tuttle wrote about how nudity “is a part of the Greek solution” for nakedness. I think by “Greek solution” he is referring to the Greek ideal nude, marble and perfectly proportioned, so unlike our own flawed bodies that are constantly changing and decaying. We replace naked with nude in the same way that we replace the stars with groups of constellations: because the proportions and rules of nudity are clear, it is more easily conceptualized. “The nakedness we seem loath to accept/ Because it hurts or is painful may be/ Just the sign of a material dilemma,” he writes. Nakedness is vulnerability. And when we feel vulnerable, we have (fortunately!) language and concepts to smooth our thoughts into familiar paths. Of course Tuttle’s work was the hardest for me to write about— it was the least familiar, the most personal, the most “close to the bone.”

One thing I learned about Richard Tuttle (though I’m not sure how much of this is rumor) is that to make decisions he uses a something called “muscle testing” or “applied kinesiology.” Imagine a printer asks him what color he wants in a certain print. He’ll make a ring with the thumb and forefinger of one hand and use the index finger of his other hand to tap the spot where thumb meets finger. If the force of his index finger is strong enough to break the connection, he’ll choose red, say; if the ring does not break, pink. Based on the concept of internal energy fundamental to traditional Chinese medicine, muscle testing is supposed to evaluate the body’s imbalances and assess its needs. The idea is to tune into the needs of the body over the wants of the mind: sometimes we need to turn off our thoughts to realize what we most deeply know.

In the first days of the life of a fetus, its cells begin to organize themselves by type. The way they ‘decide’ to become, say, spine or skin, is by responding to signals from ‘organizer’ cells. From either end of the little proto-fetus, cells will receive Morse code-like vibrations. From one end, these vibrations will signal them to become spine; from the other, skin. “In a way,” writes Leroi in Mutants, “the embryo is just a microcosm of the cognitive world that we inhabit, the world of signals that insistently urge us to travel to one destination rather than another, eschew some goals in favor of others, hold some things to be true and others false; in short, that moulds us into what we are.”

In a way, every decisions we make is a negotiation of the pulls we from different directions. I really think all you can do is be open to receiving them all, and let yourself go in the direction that pulls the strongest. If I had not already been thinking about coincidences and decision-making, the split egg affair that seemed like just a strange, funny coincidence last week might have led nowhere. As it was, it ended up taking me to a totally unexpected, but welcome conclusion.

- Rachel Lyon

Art as Cure

2006-05-01T14:28:00.000-07:00

In the introduction to Magical Secrets, Kathan writes that she’s gotten her inspiration from “artists who’ve spent their entire lives finding strategies for creating miracles.”

The other day I was talking with her about an article by Randy Kennedy she read in April 17th’s New York Times about the growing number of humanities classes in medical schools. Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan has a new requirement that students there take an art appreciation course. “This year,” he writes, “for the first time, the course is required for third-year students, providing them not only with a blinking-into-the-sun break from medical rotations but also... a lesson about how important, and underrated, the art of looking is to the practice of medicine.” Medical students learn this ‘art of looking’ to help them hone their skills as doctors: observational and interpersonal alike. Kennedy quoted Rebecca Hirschwerk, the art educator who helped to create the course, as saying “I can’t think of many places outside art where you can be in a moment, and just look, for as long as you can take it.” Like artists, these med students are finding strategies to create miracles of a different kind.

Later, I came across an article about a miraculous development at the city gallery in Limerick, Ireland. Fans of the Munster rugby team started leaving notes, prayers, and Munster memorabilia at the foot of a 300-year-old portrait nicknamed Stella (attributed to Irish painter Charles Jarvis) after rumors circulated that the painting was ‘charmed.’ One report had Stella healing both a tuberculosis sufferer and a cancer patient after a doctor’s assistant sent them to her in the 1950’s. Another tale told of an injured Munster player, who was cured when he went to see her a week before Munster won the 1978 All Black’s match. The artists Pierre Coinde and Gary O’Dwyer, who credit themselves with discovering the painting’s mysticism, are quoted as saying, “Feelings of powerlessness can lead people to invest art with unverifiable qualities and extraordinary myths, hoping that it is not just a dead, inert thing.” To prove the point, one card placed at the foot of the painting in Limerick reads, “Thank you so much Stella. I said a wee prayer to you and you have helped me no end. It has been difficult but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. Thank you again.” Looks like Charles Jarvis created a miracle-making miracle.

'Portrait of Stella' by Charles Jervas (b 1675 Ireland - d 1739 ,London) Oil on linen, 76 x 63.5 (acq. 1948)
'This lady looks out at us with confidence and no little pleasure at the company she finds herself in…' LGCA collection catalogue. Image courtesy of the Limerick City Gallery of Art

But the curative powers of art go above and beyond kitschy spiritualism. At Mount Sinai, an anonymous student who’d taken the new art appreciation course wrote empathetically of a couple she was working with, a healthy wife whose husband had Alzheimer’s: “It was clearly taking a toll on her, and she was close to tears several times during the interview. Her husband sat next to her apparently oblivious to her distress. He was distracted, quietly picking a piece of tape with his name off his cane.”

This student will probably not go on to find the cure for Alzheimer’s. But the understanding that she shows her patient gives her the broader understanding that will fuel a more intensive search. Maybe it was (as I’m sure Rebecca Hirschwerk would like to think) partly because of her new visual training that this medical student picked up on the detail. For a moment, this student understood life as if it were art. The removal by the patient of his name from his cane is a symbolic gesture, an unconscious metaphor for how his identity is peeling away. This is what is meant by the art of looking: extending a moment, taking a lot of time to let all its levels of meaning filter through.

- Rachel Lyon

The Effects of Place

2006-04-04T14:37:00.000-07:00

I spent the last week of February with Kathan in Boston for three events in honor of the book’s launch: the annual College Art Association conference, a reception at the Miller Block Gallery, and a series of events at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. It was a great week. Not knowing Boston well, in my time off some nights and over the weekend I had a blast exploring the freezing cold city and visiting with friends and family who came up from my hometown of Brooklyn, NY. But there wasn’t much down time. The first day, Kathan and I set ourselves up at the Prestel Publishing booth at the College Art Association book and trade fair, which was in a massive, windowless exhibit hall in the Hynes Convention Center. here we sold advance copies of Magical Secrets to printmakers and teachers who’d come from all over the country. It was our first time introducing people to the book who hadn’t previously known of it, and it was a lot of fun to gauge their reactions and talk with them about some of these ideas.

That Friday night, we had a very nice reception at the Miller Block Gallery on Newberry Street. Kathan gave an informal talk over wine and cheese, and we showed some Crown Point prints that we’d shipped out there for the occasion. The company seemed especially taken with Local Calm, a beautiful print by Julie Mehretu that watched over the evening from its place of honor on the gallery wall. Warm in the gallery as frost bit the windows outside, I couldn’t help but think of the print’s title, and the title of Mehretu’s whole series (Heavy Weather), in a new light.

Julie Mehretu, Local Calm, 2005
Sugar lift aquatint with color aquatint, spit bite aquatint, soft and hard ground etching and engraving on gampi paper chine colle. 35-1/2 x 46-3/4", edition 35

The staff of the SMFA were truly thoughtful. One of the teachers lent me a cozy pair of purple fleece gloves for my treks back and forthfrom my digs at the Sheraton to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, which came in handy as, packing my suitcase in California the week before, I hadn’t really remembered how cold winter on the East Coast could get. The first night, they all welcomed us with a pot luck dinner. Being new to Crown Point, I enjoyed listening to the printmakers in the room, many of them former Crown Point printers, reminisce with Kathan and Tom over bowls of homemade chili. All of the events at the school were well-attended, and the visit went off without a hitch. I left Boston pleased with the whole week, and almost entirely out of books.

All of this travel is a lot of fun, but it’s also a reminder to me of how glad I am to really be putting some roots down in this city. I’ve still only been in San Francisco a few months, but as I get more settled at Crown Point it’s feeling more and more like home. Appropriately enough, we are in the midst of hanging a new exhibition: the new show of Mary Heilmann’s etchings will be opening on April 6. A native Californian who returned here after many years in New York, Heilmann’s work is distinctly West Coast. In her memoir/catalogue “The All Night Movie,” Heilmann wrote that early in her career her artwork’s style became its content. I think that says it all: the stuff is straightforward and engaging without being reductive; it’s colorful and tasteful and a lot of fun. Heilmann grew up all over California, in San Francisco, LA and Santa Barbara. She swam often, was on the high dive team, and on family vacations in Catalina, she surfed. In this winter’s Overview, our director Valerie Wade writes about Heilmann’s love of surfing: a youth spent half in water kindled her bright, open style. This is art that speaks clearly of a deeply local connection to a place that I am just beginning to call home.

Mary Heilmann, Weather Report, 2006.
Color spit bite and sugar lift aquatints on gampi paper chine colle. 21 1/2 x 17", edition 10.

A month ago, spending a snowy Boston evening with Julie Mehretu’s Local Calm changed the work for me. It didn’t change anything fundamental; it certainly didn’t change what was already there. It was a subtle yet irreversible unlocking of a door I had never seen. I’d gotten to know that print in its place of origin, here in San Francisco. Coincidentally, the opening of Heavy Weather had taken place just after Hurricane Katrina. Because of this timing, our cultural climate made the sense of wind and catastrophe pivotal in our understanding of the work. But to me, the environmental climate had little relevance to the work’s meaning until I experienced it in a new place.

Like Mehretu’s, Heilmann’s prints Clear Day and Weather Report are not landscapes, but their titles do refer to our local setting, and as Valerie wrote, they are “like neat rows of waves breaking in succession.” After re-settling on the other side of the country, I have been thinking a lot about the role of site and atmosphere in our understanding not just of art, but of ourselves. What would it mean, for example, for Clear Day, a silvery aquatint inspired by San Francisco in February, ‘06, to be kept year from now on a living room wall in Hancock, Pennsylvania? (What does it mean for a girl born in Chicago and raised in New York to understand something as Californian?)

There can be any number of answers to these questions; one that I’m settling on for now was inspired by the words of Joanna Burton in her 2005 Artforum review of Heilmann’s show Heaven & Hell. “Heilmann,” she wrote, “has consistently leaned on notions of the self-contained, reduced object, coaxing siren songs from rectangles, circles and squares.” How much does an artwork’s environment add to its meaning? (And how much does a person’s home define her?) Maybe one answer is: it all depends on how self-contained it is, and on how clearly it stings.

- Rachel Lyon

Welcome

2006-03-01T14:51:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Crown Point Blog. This is a place where you are invited to read and write about what’s going on here at Crown Point Press and in the world at large. I’m Rachel. I came to Crown Point Press a couple of months ago, in December ’05, a month after moving to San Francisco.

Everything was buzzing when I got here. After the landmark of Kathan’s 70th birthday, old titles were shifting. While Kathan still wishes to maintain a strong role here at the Press, she is now focusing more on writing than running things, so Valerie’s role has been changed from Gallery Director to full-on Director. Kathan altered her own title from Director to Founding Director. Javier’s title was modified from Administrative Assistant/ Publications Coordinator to Publications Technician/ Webmaster. I got a slash in my title, too: after a month of working here, a “/ Deputy Editor” was butted up behind my original title of Administrative Assistant. Now that I’ve got the slash, I’ll be supplying most of the text for the new Magical Secrets website, including this blog. After all of our names were changed, our workspaces were altered, too. I took Javier’s old desk; he took Mari’s; Mari set up shop in the shipping area; Valerie moved to the front, where she has an office of her own; Tiffany took Valerie’s old desk, and Tiffany’s old desk was taken by our newest staff member, Gallery Assistant and Shipping Manager Patrick Sinclair (or, as the staff referred to him when he was still just an abstract need for another man around the office, Spartacus).

It’s an experience working at Crown Point. Not since working in the snack bar at a Unitarian conference center on an island off the coast of New Hampshire have I had such a mouthful of a job description. “I work at a gallery, etching studio and fine arts publisher,” I say. I get a lot of different responses to that. The other night a woman I was talking to said “You realize you have the sexiest job in San Francisco.” I don’t know about that, but it is definitely a good place to be. For one thing, everyone who works here pitches in with everything that goes on around the office. Even though I’m new, it was clear from day one that I wouldn’t be fetching anyone coffee or doing their photocopying. Kathan isn’t the kind of boss who breathes down our necks, maybe because of her own work experience: Before founding Crown Point Press, Kathan worked as a typist in a ‘typing pool’ for an insurance company. As one of a roomful of young ladies tapping away at typewriters for eight hours a day, she sat under the constant watchful glare of a woman whose exclusive job it was to make sure none of the typists left her machine.

Far be it from Kathan to run a business like that. In fact, she has already given me more experience and responsibility than I was expecting. For instance, a couple of weeks ago I accompanied her to a talk given at SFMoMA by the artist Kiki Smith, who was working with us for a couple of weeks in January. Nibbling dates, pistachios and blue cheese and sipping wine, I listened to Kiki’s interview by Madeleine Grynsztejn.

I’ve long been a big fan of Kiki’s, but the interview really struck me with some new thoughts. Her speaking style, for instance, is almost robotic, and her mechanical intonation as she described a childhood of assembling geometric structures for her father (Modernist sculptor Tony Smith) in a minimalist city apartment empty of furniture, her attraction to the decorative and the bodily seemed all the more poignant. Through a deep, reactionary belief in the physical manifestation of a spiritual world, she cultivated her interests in bodily functions, decorative painting, and the visceral power of Catholic crucifixion imagery, to name a few. She read Gray’s Anatomy. She volunteered as an EMT. She became deeply interested in the work of the artist Leon Golub, whose use of body language sent a clearer message about the use of violence and gender dynamics, and was often more powerful than spoken or written words. “Figurative work inhabits a similar psychic space as people do,” Kiki remarked. Later in her career she has become ever more interested in the mimesis by which we understand animals. The myth, the narcissism and the anthropomorphism that characterize our relationship to the animal world can be a more powerful sign even than body language for our relationships with each other and with ourselves.

But perhaps what struck me more than even Kiki’s alien-like attraction to the human is her innate language of metaphor. One thing that has always been striking about Kiki’s work to those who write about it is her use of materials: she’s made pelvis out of porcelain, skin out of paper (which she described beautifully as being permeable like the atmosphere). But one story really struck me. Her first male assistant, Carl Fudge, began working for her rather late in her career. To him she assigned the task of making sperm out of glass in her basement. She laughed as she told this anecdote, seeming to see this assignment as totally appropriate, and of course it was. I think it is her acknowledgment of these irreverent proprieties that makes her art what it is.

In addition to Kiki Smith, since I’ve been here we’ve had artists Mary Heilmann and Julie Mehretu in the studio, which have been equally exciting. My desk is right by the door, so when anyone comes in I’m the first thing they see. Kiki, Mary and Julie were all very nice, and it was a pleasure having them here. When Mary left on Friday, printers Catherine and Emily told me they were sorry to see her go. It does keep things interesting though, as every artist has her (or his, I expect) own effect on the atmosphere of the place. Like Kiki said, it’s permeable; the attitude and outlook of whichever artist is here at one time does tend to filter through to the rest of us.

- Rachel Lyon