Turnbull in Carmel

Turnbull, Dot Studies I, 2013

Richard Turnbull grew up in a hard-resist world, as anyone who explores his website can verify.  He's gone through a checklist of varnishes, putties and lacquers and mucked up an assassin's satchel of knives, blades and other weapons, all in an effort to harness that wild bronco that is the chemigram.  More often than not he's been successful, but that's not been enough.  His restless spirit has drawn him back to more innocent beginnings, to those first steps in chemigram class where they teach you about soft resists - the glues, the syrups, and the tapes.  A lot of professional chemigramists ignore the soft resists but it is here that, for the time being at least, he has found a home, and where he is producing some amazing art.  Arthur Danto, the late philosopher, said there will be no more linear progress in art as a continuity because we're at the end of it: you do what you want, go where you want to go.  Richard Turnbull is a fine case in point.

Dot Studies I, shown above, was picked by the jury at the prestigious Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California, to hang in their main hall during the annual show which runs until March 1, 2014.  It's made with dot labels, the stick-on kind, and with tape; Rich roams the streets of New York looking for new kinds of tape and labels since each, he says, has a characteristic stickiness, and an associated chemistry.  Under repeated assaults of fixer and developer the dots and tape eventually detach and lift, leaving behind a signature of the last chemical they were in contact with.  Different materials produce a different randomness and present the artist with different choices of when to block or snatch - technical terms of the chemigram trade that refer to an act which terminates a chemical attack.  He's also drawn to stick-on materials for their ability to generate hard and relatively precise lines which, after a good pummelling by chemicals, become little islets of stability and order in a sea of disorder.  Isn't this the beauty of chemigrams, after all?

Rich will offer a workshop in chemigrams at Manhattan Graphics Center on February 22, 2014.  Plan to be there.  In his spare time he teaches art history at F.I.T. and lectures at the Metropolitan Museum, and is also - this must be a sideline, or is it? - an accomplished cook of south-east Asian cuisine.

The Herbert Matter we like best

figure 1

Herbert Matter (1907-1984) is not much remembered today by cameraless artists, yet he made standout contributions that are worth reconsidering.  In his time he was best known as a graphic artist and designer; trained in Europe by people like Léger and Le Corbusier, he immersed himself equally in art-world currents of the time - dadaism and especially constructivism - and paid close attention to the work of El Lissitzky and Man Ray.  He absorbed his lessons well.  By the time he came to New York in the 1930s he had developed techniques of photomontage and typography as a visual art that revolutionized American advertising (that is not too strong a word) and which served him as a calling card throughout his life.  Just one example: for many of us, the logo he created for the New Haven Railroad became one of the iconic emblems of mid-twentieth century America.

In 1938 he married a beautiful young painter named Mercedes Carles, who had been a student, then lover, of Hans Hoffmann and a cellmate of the young Lee Krasner - later the wife of Jackson Pollock - when both were arrested during political demonstrations.  Soon his circle expanded; he befriended sculptors Alexander Calder and Alberto Giacometti, eventually photographing their work for publications, as well as painters Franz Kline, Phillip Guston, and others.  Between jobs for clients like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, he became an adept of the darkroom; when he shared a space with photographer Robert Frank on West 37th Street he would work up to 12 hours without a break - too bad for you, Robert.  A personal body of work began to emerge: Mercedes nude on the dunes of Provincetown, then landscapes, then abstract closeups of treebark and rocks - great memes of the day - then more Mercedes, dancing, hair in the wind.  He probably thought you couldn't do better than take pictures of Mercedes and he's close to being right.  But then one day he found a great new subject: light.

Following cues from Moholy-Nagy and others, he began using a penlight as a paintbrush to draw on photo paper directly in the darkroom, often using the paper-negative method to end up with whitish lines.  He also tried experimenting with liquids of different miscibilities and viscosities, resulting in the chemigram-like 'ameoba forms' in figure 2, which today we would just call a glassprint.  This was 1941, 1942.  By the next year, the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York gave him his first show.  Some critics have suggested that during this period he might also have influenced the breakout work of his friend Jackson Pollock, just then developing his drip technique, although I don't buy it.

figure 2

figure 3

figure 4

But by the following year, 1944, Herbert must have realized he was really a designer at heart, and although he now knew he could execute a broad range of graphic, arty things with considerable ease, he and Mercedes decamped for Southern California where he took a conventional job with Knoll Furniture, photographing chairs by Harry Bertoia, Eero Saarinen, or by Charles and Ray Eames, and probably earned good money doing it.

Still, he couldn't totally elude the demon of experimentalism.  He'd seen the photographs by Gjon Mili who had used flashlights and long exposures to illustrate movement, and he wanted to try it himself.  Here's Herbert taking off his pants and jacket with open shutter, around 1945:

figure 5

Later, he may have been inspired by work coming from the Chicago Bauhaus when he hooked up an electric circuit and made this:

figure 6

The problem we have with Herbert Matter, and the reason you don't find him in the histories of alternative photography, is that he wasn't sure what he wanted to be, artist or designer.  He was perhaps too gifted a designer to allow himself to become an artist as such, to let himself go in that irrevocable way, into the terror and joy of it.  For us that's a loss, all the keener the more we look at figure 4 or figure 6, two of my favorites.  He had more things to give us.

After his California sojourn, he spent the last twenty years of his life teaching design at Yale.

The photographs above come in most part from the library of Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.

Chemigram to photogravure (for printmakers)

figure 1

(Franco Marinai sends a guest post)

I do my chemigrams on 8x10" high contrast orthochromatic film, not on photo paper, since I will port them to photogravures when I'm finished. I use undiluted Golden varnish, bleach, Dektol, fixer, warm and cold water.  The transparency of the film allows me to reproduce the chemigram on a copper plate and ultimately ink it, wipe it, and print it on a high-pressure press as an intaglio print, thereby giving me the three dimensionality and subtle tactility of an etching.  But I will do this following the more demanding photogravure process, which is best known for the elegance of its continuous tone reproduction and its exceptionally intense blacks.  This will ensure fidelity to the mesmerizing graphic qualities of the chemigrams.

Fig. 1 shows the final rinse of an 8x10" chemigram on orthochromatic film.  I use hard water, rich in magnesium and calcium cations, from the well in the square outside my studio in Serrazzano, Italy.  Serrazzano is a small medieval village on a hilltop 25 miles south-west of Volterra.

figure 2

Here (fig. 2) the transparencies have been cut and masked in preparation for the gelatin exposure in the vacuum frame.  The chemigram of the one on the left was started with immersion in bleach, while the one on the right started with Dektol.

figure 3

After the gelatin has been exposed, transferred to the copper plate, and developed in warm water, the plate is covered with a fine layer of rosin (aquatint) and readied for etching (fig. 3).

figure 4

The plates have been etched for twenty minutes in ferric chloride (fig. 4) and cut to the size of the transparencies (7x10").

figure 5

This is the first proof of the two plates: Side By Side (2013).  Typically I print an edition of six plus an artist's proof.  Here are a few more photogravures, all printed from individual plates and produced using the same technique.

Marinai, They Do Not Think The Same, 2013

 

Marinai, Comics, 2013

I can be reached through my website, www.marinai.com, or you can post comments below.  For a detailed discussion of the photogravure process, visit Lothar Osterburg's site.

                                                                                                                       - Franco Marinai

Chemigrams in Prague and Brooklyn

Collins, Colorchart, 2012

If you were in Prague this fall and found yourself along the embankment called Smetanovo Nabrezi near the Charles Bridge, you could have taken a moment to drop in to the Hollar Gallery to see the New York printmakers show, which ran from Sept 18 to Oct 13 2013.  One of the works on display was a chemigram, Colorchart (2012) by Douglas Collins.  While there are many different ways to make a chemigram, this work is a good place to start in trying to understand some of the standard chemigram methods and strategems, as least as practiced by myself, a few but not all of my colleagues, and a number of my students.

The pictoral space here is organized as a grid, for simplicity - not a requirement but that's just how I often work.  My goal was to generate a random sequence of colors by allowing the chemistry in my trays, fixer and developer, to chip away at the tiny silver halide grains in the emulsion, changing the ways these grains refract light and thus selecting for certain wavelengths.  Since I knew we were going to generate an array of colors (geeky is good, but for a refresher look up the Mie effect on your own: it would take us too far afield in this post), what better way to think of it than as a color chart?  We're half way done.

The photographic paper I chose was Ilford FB warmtone and I coated it with MSA varnish by Golden - undiluted in this case, although dilutions are certainly permitted and can lead to different results.  (Actually everything is permitted but that too is another, quite wonderful, story.)  Once dry I incised in it a set of boxes, using a small blade, taking care not to go through the paper and prematurely end with tatters.  These boxes would become my color swatches in the finished work.

Next I proceeded with the 'dance of the trays', passing the prepared paper from developer to fixer to wash and back again - and again and again.  Did I say that all this can be done in daylight?  The basic chemigram method does not demand darkness, it's only in hybrid practices involving stencils, drawings or photo negatives that you may need to work under safelight, or in pursuing solarization effects or other variants; Christina Z. Anderson's book is a useful review of these methods.

After a certain time, when you start to think you screwed up and nothing's going to happen, things do happen.  Bits of varnish start to lift, at corners usually.  After a few minutes more will lift.  You can intervene here with a pair of tweezers and pull the rest off - or you can leave it to desquamate on its own.  If you decide to let the sections of varnish shed by themselves you will soon receive a bonus: the loose ends of varnish, flopping around on their tethers, generate a wispy color of their own, a kind of imprint of their brief existence.  That accounts for the strange outlines around some of the boxes in Colorchart and adds to the overall character of the work, a lyricism maybe, I'm trying to be modest.

Finally, when you feel the colors are right you plunge the paper, not without trepidation, into fixer for a last time, but be attentive here because the fixer may squelch everything, all the vibrancy you thought you had: some bypass this step and go directly to a long wash.  (See the post on Jeff Robinson, January 2011.)  Then you dry and you're done.

Nikolova, untitled, 2013

A very different way to make chemigrams is by using the so-called soft resists, materials that disintegrate or lift off almost immediately.  Eva Nikolova makes surprising use of some of them found in the local delis of her uptown Manhattan neighborhood, and in doing so has extended the expressivity of chemigrams in unforeseen directions.  "I draw," she says, "mostly with peanut butter and guava paste (a Dominican favorite), using pieces of mat board and credit cards, alongside the customary sticks and Q-tips.  The guava paste behaves exactly like honey except it has a stiff granular texture and doesn't spread, so it's easy to control.  What you are seeing is just the interplay of simple additive and subtractive drawing transformed by the chemical process."

I have to stop here: this is too astonishing.  To build the ruined cities that continue to haunt her, these fragments torn from dreams - go see the rest of her work on her website - with the most humble and ruined of tools gives the whole enterprise an unexpected pathos.  It is consummately eloquent.  It makes one think of Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons or maybe one's own nightmares, and yet it's a chemigram.

Piranesi, from Imaginary Prisons, 1761

Eva is showing some of her new work at the New York Foundation for the Arts, 20 Jay St, Dumbo, Brooklyn, until Jan 17 2014.

The medium and the message

Turnbull, Untitled, 2013

On returning to the Manhattan Graphics Center darkroom in New York after the standard summer wanderings and inner retreats, I did what I usually do after an enforced absence: inventory the mysterious bottles and containers that have accreted on the darkroom shelves since Doug Collins and I first began our chemigram investigations (2010 for me, I think 2009 for Doug) and wonder what on earth some of this stuff is and what it does. In the Endless Quest for Usable Resists, Doug and I have sampled many varnishes, gel media, glues, honeys and Ominous Gloppy Substances and eventually limited ourselves by process of elimination to those potential resists that offered the possibility of hard lines and at least some control over the results (though as always with chemigrams, control is never absolute and quite often not desired). Many substances did not pass the test and were left to rest peacefully in their containers at the back of the shelf until the Elder Days end and Them That Were Here Before Us return to rule what was once theirs.

One of our early experiments, probably suggested by Nolan Preece, was a bottle of Pledge Floor Care Tile and Vinyl Floor Finish with Future Shine, a mouthful of a floor care product that in Nolan's capable and practiced hands produced some fine and intriguing results. Our bottle of Pledge Etc. has sat mostly unmolested for over a year and a half now, since neither Doug nor I was able to make much sense or use of it. After meeting Nolan and seeing some of his Pledge-work first hand earlier this summer (several accounts of the World Congress of Chemigramists can be found in posts below), I felt the urge to return to this hitherto misunderstood material, but this time I had the assistance of e-mailed instructions from Nolan himself, who outlined several important considerations. Nolan suggested spreading a thin coat of the material on the surface of a taped down piece of photo paper with a foam brush, then applying textured objects to the surface and weighing them down while the Pledge dries (about ten minutes). After this, remove the textured objects and blow dry the paper's surface for 5-10 minutes. Process as you would any chemigram. The image above was processed in just this manner; I used a piece of crumpled paper towel as a textural surface. Nolan warned me that things happen fast in the developer and fixer, and indeed it seems like Pledge Etc. acts more like a soft resist than a hard resist and that to preserve white areas the chemigram is best first dipped into fixer for a few seconds (but not too long, or you won't get much in the way of darks once you move on to developer).

Turnbull, Untitled, 2013

This next image was processed on the same evening as the Pledge experiments but this time I applied a coat of Windsor and Newton Acrylic Gloss Medium (also orphaned on our darkroom shelf), a thin, milky medium that I used undiluted. It dried in about half an hour, with the help of our faithful darkroom blow dryer. I drew a quick freehand grid on the surface of the dry medium with an Xacto knife and processed in the same way as the Pledge image, i.e. a few seconds in fixer, then developer until the "desired results" were achieved, then back to fixer and then a water wash. What's interesting here is the way the developer attacked the carved lines and produced small visual eruptions along the lines, as well as the mottled areas of color that formed between the lines themselves. The paper here, as in the Pledge image, is an RC paper called VC Select. I'm assuming that the RC paper is responsible for the muted though elegant palette in both these chemigrams, and that FB papers would show a greater and brighter range of colors.

I certainly wouldn't claim either of these chemigrams as anything more than an experiment, but they were important in their own way. Many of us find particular resists and working methods that produce results we enjoy and admire, and I think we often tend to work within fairly narrowly defined boundaries. Here's a case where I went back to two materials long abandoned (for reasons neither Doug nor I can remember clearly, other than at the time they "didn't work") and discovered a kind of fresh potential. I look forward to revisiting other early "failures" and finding out what other potentials I may have overlooked.

A treat for the dog days

Preece, Chemigram Texturology, 2013

It's the end of summer, the dog days they call it, but here on the Monterey Peninsula these are glorious days, hardly a cloud in the sky, perfect temperatures for humans on earth.  The sea churns on the rocks at Point Lobos as always, and if you peek through the pines you can just catch sight of whiskered sea otters bobbing in the waves beneath the cliffs, sometimes joined, incongruously - but there is so much of that it seems natural - by a seal or a kayaker.  Further inland in the mountains where I live, the red-tailed hawks glide on the afternoon thermals in the canyons, their magnified silhouettes skittering darkly over chaparral.  At sunset a great horned owl appears and below, a bobcat or a skunk slink about to claim the meadow where earlier had grazed deer and turkey.  My neighbor Mike has called his goats to their pen and his chickens to their coop.  Soon the first evening stars will appear but it's not toward Pegasus in the east that I'll be drawn tonight - that's easy pickins - but to Arcturus and Spica low in the west, where with luck I'll see not only Saturn but Venus too, goddess of love, the bright queen of the sky of the Babylonians.  She'll be low on the horizon so for that I'll have to climb the ridge.  Dog days indeed.

Yet this will ease my conscience at not doing any cameraless photography this month, and I will not hide my excuse: the bees have established a hive in the old shed where I keep my workbench and I am prevented.  I think I should go down the valley to visit Bobby Bashir or Jeff Robinson to fire my enthusiasm and remind me of what I miss.  Or Martha Casanave, who met me at the Portola the other day when we talked about her new book, Trajectories, which continues, in the months I've had it, to leave me with an uncanny tang of absence (strangely biting and attractive if I can speak like that), the absence of others and of ends to stories.  An aching, extremely beautiful book.

And then a gift arrived from Nolan Preece, a new chemigram.  Here it is, up above.  "Eee-gads!" cried Martha.  It's a sort of cavalcade of his own favorite chemigrams from recent years, woven into an elegant grid of chemigramic portals.  The whole affair seems destined to open a new chapter in what a chemigram is and can be.  We'll get the details from Nolan another time.  For now enjoy, it's the end of summer.

Pierre Cordier & Gundi Falk at Von Lintel

Cordier & Falk, CH 17/9/11 Pair-Impair, 2011

Pierre Cordier and Gundi Falk have been collaborating in Brussels on new chemigrams for nearly two years, and now are presenting a selection of them in the group show called Unique, at the Von Lintel Gallery in New York until July 12, 2013.  In keeping with the theme, all the works exhibited are one-of-a-kind - there is no editioning here, no labels saying archival pigment print.  Whether that is a good thing or not is debatable, but one thing is certain: it serves to keep prices high and the collectors' interest still higher.  Indeed, the two Cordier-Falk pieces in the main room were sold to a major midwestern collector before the show even opened.

 Cordier & Falk, CH 20/9/11 Impair-Pair, 2011

What can we say about these new chemigrams?  That they harken back to the best, most vigorous Cordier style of grid-based work of 30 or 40 years ago?  This is true.  He is a master and a master is entitled.  But there are other rewards.  If you look closely (and what chemigram doesn't demand that?) you will see the delicate nuances and sly choices that gives his work its special character and make it vibrant and seem so very new.  When to stop a bubble from growing?  What shape must a line have?  How many squares are enough?  Momentous questions that lead to the meaning of art perhaps.  One also feels a muted, defining presence of Falk in this but it is hard to be more specific; how these two coordinate responsibilities reportedly varies from project to project and yet, to my eyes, appears seamless.

Cordier & Falk, CH 27/4/13 Musigramme contemporain, 2013

Cordier & Falk, CH 9/11/12 Musigramme contemporain, 2012

It's an important show to catch for the chance to see the Cordier-Falk collaborations, really for the first time in America.  Let us hope there will be more.

Pierre and Gundi taking a rest on 23rd Street, 2013