What: By Hand: Discard-able / Collect-able: The Life-Cycle of Ephemera When: through Sept. 20 (call 974-3200 for information) Where: UT’s Ewing Gallery, 1715 Volunteer Boulevard

Five printmakers push the limits of their medium

by Heather Joyner Spica

Is the pen really mightier than the sword? Does a lack of journalistic integrity, insight, or depth in the present media indicate that words aren’t as powerful as they once were? When it comes to politics, maybe the spoken word spoon-fed via sound bites has lowered the written word’s standards. When it comes to printed words found in works of art, the above may well be irrelevant; in art, words tend to play another role entirely, i.e. referring to popular culture or challenging the strictly visual.

In any case, the printed word still projects a certain legitimacy, no matter what’s said, where it’s said, or who’s saying it. And an exploration of our responses to the printed word (and how those responses influence what we see) more or less drives the art on view this month at UT’s Ewing Gallery.

Featuring works by Laura Berman, Kevin Bradley (of Yee-Haw Industries fame), April Flanders, Mo Lebowitz, and Aaron Wilson, the show is titled By Hand: Discard-able/Collect-able: The Life-Cycle of Ephemera—not quite acknowledging that words are significant elements in the art presented. According to the gallery brochure, the exhibition investigates “choices that inform permanence, or the lack thereof,” and its artists “all consider the print as an ephemeral object in some capacity, be it a poster or a site-specific installation.” Which is just a fancy way of saying that some things are intended to “matter,” even if the form they assume is considered disposable. Words again. So, what’s the big deal with all these words, anyhow? Simply put, the visual language of the show is often inextricable from language itself.

Given that graphic design is a communications art, its use of words is relatively straightforward. Lebowitz’s displayed work—however artful—is pure design, and therefore doesn’t really correspond with the rest of the exhibition (although it best suits the show’s title). However, it does represent a variety of letterpress applications throughout a long, much-lauded career in New York. Having just handed over his private press fonts and other equipment to Kent State University, Lebowitz may now be freer to savor the yield of wineries he’s made famous through his package design. Examples of that work and numerous other pieces provide a glimpse of the Lebowitz oeuvre.

The other exhibitors present art in both straight printmaking and installation formats. An example of the latter, Berman’s “I can’t cook but I can make food” is screen-printed directly onto a large portion of the gallery’s south wall. As such, it’s her most recent site-specific piece following ones created in Missouri (where she heads the Kansas City Art Institute’s Printmaking Department), Louisiana, and North Carolina. And it’s all words. In grade school colors, they spell out “floor,” “ceiling,” “window,” “pantry,” etc. and are clustered to form the shapes of the things they represent. Berman’s ersatz reality thus blurs the distinction between the signifier and the signified. But, as any smart politician might acknowledge, our appetites are satisfied by symbols without substance for only so long.

Speaking of politicians, Knoxvillian Bradley rips them a whole new you-know-what in his six-print series of fictitious American Conspiracy magazine covers. His artist’s statement in part reads, “My experience is that you don’t find the conspiracy, it finds you...war, rigged elections, corporate fraud, special interests, mafia, etc....from the left to the right, we are all feeling the heat. Information is power, power is money, and money is the mother’s milk of politics. Who can believe anything these days?”

Bradley’s star-eyed good ol’ boys are each accompanied by loads of manipulative verbal bile that, once amassed, is overwhelming. He says, “It’s my job to tell the truth, even if it’s all lies and made up facts.” That’s a tall order, but it’s one that students collaborating with him throughout the month should find stimulating.

Based in Canada, Flanders is an artist with a calling. Reflecting her concern about environmental issues is a 60-foot tapeworm installation titled “Diphyllobothrium latum”—meant as commentary on consumerism and its cost to society. Crafted from delicate paper in attached sections incorporating shopping receipts, the worm is hung from thin wire like a massive decorative swag or Chinese kite. Within its shadow is propped a handmade book detailing a tapeworm’s development alongside banal journal-like entries from the artist’s daily life.

Flanders’ complex arrangement and use of materials suggests not parasitism but what I call “first-novelitis” (a condition in which too many truly good ideas are forced to dance naked on the head of a pin). Personally, I’d rather her installation be a tapeworm made from receipts only, not complicated by other text. Her book could be something else altogether.

Having too many good ideas is also problematic for Wilson, although his “Parlor” installation manages to strike a balance. Presented as a sort of living room, “Parlor” combines creepy animal figures (like a black dog wearing headphones and a trio of other dogs sporting cutaway faces) with a settee and hanging T-shirts printed with slogans like “Bros Before Hos.”

Orange wolves, their heads merging, adorn a mantel beneath phrases such as “Fear No Evil.” In fact, a whole column could be devoted to “Parlor”’s numerous meanings. An art professor at the University of Northern Iowa, Wilson says he’s “interested in primal consciousness...the animal aspects of contemporary culture.”

So, words like those used by Berman, Bradley, and Wilson may well become ephemera. Again, the exhibition has me wondering: Has modern culture eroded the power of words or confused their meaning? Dare I say

September 9, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 37 © 2004 Metro Pulse