Multiple monotypes
Modern art, art critics, and bad artists, are
obsessed with the ‘new’. What else is there? Well, there’s the history of
techniques, for a start…
Riccardo Angelo’s art is extremely accessible, at one level, where he paints
identifiable figures and poses, but extraordinarily inaccessible at another,
where surrealism and private thoughts take over the imagery. I know there’s a
theory, popular amongst critics of literature, that the author is dead—meaning,
generally speaking, that we do not have access to the intentions of artists.
It’s a theory that attempts to dislodge artists from the centre of their own
work. It may be an effect of that displacement that art sellers—auction houses
and galleries—encourage us to think of artists as in or out of fashion and,
themselves, engaged in a struggle to stand for a while at the head of advance
guard. It’s to everyone’s advantage that some artists appear to be at the
cutting edge of taste, where investments will show a good return, and it is
also completely irrelevant to the artwork.
‘Nothingness’, ‘gender’, ‘identity’, ‘post-colonialism’, and a long list other
words, get trotted out to support critical claims to seriousness, and often
before such claims to seriousness are warranted. Artists learn it at art
school, and most never get out of the habit of obscuring what they know with
what they learned.
It is a curious thing that the art world, the public language of visual
artists, is saturated with artistic "intentions". "What I mean
by this is..." "In this picture I was trying to achieve..."
"This is a painting about..." "So-and-so is trying to..."
We lap up the intentions of painters in a way that we would find intolerable
with, say, novelists.
However, I can’t reconcile this effect with the knowledge that no artist I know
talks to me about their art that way. (This, I have to admit, may simply show
how I made the world I live in!) The more closely I get to know an artist, the
less the conversation is about the apparent content and motive of the work than
about the struggle to make it—about techniques, methods, materials, errors,
frustrations and experiments.
This all amounts to saying that the artist’s history of art is very different
to the art critic’s history of art. This is a fact worth noting. To an artist,
the history of art is principally the history of the mastery of techniques and
the struggle with materials: what is passed on, what is forgotten, what remembered,
what can be seen or inferred from the surface of a painting and what must be
imagined, what is discovered and what has to be re-invented, what he can do and
what he cannot do. No-one who has spent any time with artists, listened to
their conversations, and shared their practical daily concerns about their
work, could deny that this is a basic truth about being an artist.
In this context, I think that Riccardo Angelo’s Nineteen monotypes
exhibition was a litmus test of how to look at art, since its subject was not
only the familiar figures that filled up the white space of the paper the
monotypes are printed on, but also the technique itself. The nineteen monotypes
were made specifically to draw attention to how they were made, and to the fact
that the process of making them involved various, sometimes unexpected, stages
of work.
The monotypes
Monotypes, as the name implies, should be one of a kind. Ink is applied to a
plate that can be made of metal or glass, and may be flexible or rigid. The ink
may be drawn on the plate; or painted on; or painted on, then rubbed and
scratched off to make negative details. Plate and paper come together,
sometimes, though not necessarily, in a press (a burnishing tool will suffice
for some variations of the technique). The paper is peeled off the plate to
reveal the image. The plate is wiped clean and the process starts again. Degas
was a master maker of monotypes and he invented several distinctive variations
of the technique, including making further images off the already used plate
and hand-colouring the fainter second impressions. The beautifully luminous
dancers’ tutus in Degas’ monotypes were made by first rubbing solid black ink
on the plate and then rubbing away the ink with brushes and cloths to leave a blank
area in the form of a white dress.
Riccardo Angelo’s nineteen monotypes were exhibited at a small, fine art
gallery in Melbourne in September 2005. Angelo has made hundreds of these
monotypes, usually in groups of about six to twenty. They are all organised by
date. They do not have titles. The titles of the nineteen monotypes, taken
randomly from superficially appropriate passages of the book of Genesis, were
added to the monotypes at the request of the gallery director. The dates tell
the viewer that some of the nineteen monotypes were made months before many of
the others. Most, according to the dates, were made on a few days around the
middle of December 2004.
First impressions: the meaning of ‘monotypes’
A monotype is one of a kind. However, the technique of making them encourages
an artist to experiment with how the ink is applied and removed, repeating
patterns, shapes and content in evolving sequences. Almost all monotypes are an
instance of an evolving process and, of course, sometimes, failed prints are
thrown away.
Here are the monotypes in the exhibition:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevejwilliams/sets/1675984/show/
Many of the pictorial elements of the whole exhibition are in these first
monotypes, made in August 2004. Birds. Wings. A squatting child. A snake. Two
figures kissing. A figure kneeling, legs forming the shape of an inverted 'V'.
In exhibition, the prints are not presented in any particular order. The first
impression is confusing. Few viewers appear to spend more than seconds in front
of each of the prints. You may look at the details of any print and become lost
it its suggestiveness—the ‘drawing’ that forms the basis of the prints is
apparently wild, undisciplined, free. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how it
would be possible to control the materials to produce a fine effect: the viscous
ink, brushes and glass are not ideal instruments with which to draw. Angelo is
an excellent draftsman, but his abilities don’t appear, at first viewing, to be
on show here.
It is only when viewing the prints from a distance and as a group that
revealing patterns begin to appear.
Techniques and variations
Why do many of the monotypes present us with a figure that has fallen to its
knees to form an inverted ‘V’ shape with its legs? Man, woman, dog, and
creature—they are all the same—all reduced to the same pitiful position. The
supplicant, bowed shapes of all living creatures in this world, Angelo seems to
be saying, should tell us about something they all share. It is hard to pin
down what he might be referring to. Most of the monotypes have some explicitly
sexual content, but they are definitely not erotic. It is not even, really, a
human theme. In the world of these drawings, man and dog suffer in the same
way, men and women are equally exposed, and all nature becomes part of the
muddled, expressive, psychological moment of the work and of the exhibition.
Then there are the groups of two or three monotypes that belie the
individuality of the print process. It is clear from these prints that Angelo
does not always clean the glass plate he uses before beginning work on the next
impression. He reworks an image he has already made by making new layers of ink
stick to the half-dried layers underneath, and he adds new details.
The monotype process produces unique prints, but Angelo has rediscovered
something that Degas knew: the plate, whether flexible metal or inflexible
glass (other materials can be used), becomes an anchor that keeps the work on
theme. The plate remembers the structure and some of the details of the
drawing, and always provides a useful departure point for the next drawing, if
one is needed. The process itself is also telling us that the work is not
random; not as random as we first thought.
These three prints demonstrate something different. Between one print and
another the details may change dramatically, but the underlying structure of
the picture can remain the same. On the right hand side of the three prints
there is a group of trees, or a tree. On the left hand side: a much larger
tree, a female figure (perhaps like a sphinx), and a child's face with its
mouth open, crying. Of course, there are birds, beaks, animals and snakes
everywhere, making it difficult to see these figures. Look at the prints for a
while and you begin to realise that deep patterns have repeated themselves.
The next two prints reveal another variation in the technique.
The second print is a reverse print of the first. This means that the second
print must somehow have been printed from the first print, or the image reversed
on the plate and re-printed.
What does it all mean?
One
of the reasons I wanted to write about this exhibition, and why I wanted to
publish a permanent record in print of these nineteen monotypes, is that it
allows me to discuss an unresolved question about the relationship between
artists and their critics. I include in 'artists' all kinds of artists, though
I realise that, increasingly, it is used to refer only to visual artists.
So much of what one reads about art is shallow, ideological or self-serving. Is
there an appropriate way to write about art at all? I'm not really sure. I
would align myself with Susan Sontag, if anyone. I'm not interested in
producing another interpretation, but in what I see and in transmitting some of
that excitement about what is visible.
This is, itself, a philosophical manouevre, of course. An 'interpretation'
cannot avoid being, at some level, an attempt to master and comprehensively
remake the art it is talking about. Interpretations come to stand for the works
of art themselves. There's nothing intrinsically wrong about that. In fact, in
life as in art, an interpreter is exactly what we need sometimes.
However, it is undeniable, I think, that certain critical 'positions' or
theories seek to remove artists from a privileged relationship to their own
work. The effect is strange. The public discussion of art is carried on as
though art itself were an 'effect' or by-product of the history of ideas.
Artists are made to line up while an -ism is pinned to their lapels. At some
point the unreality of it may strike you as itself meaningful.
Riccardo Angelo's Nineteen monotypes exhibition invited us to view
ourselves in the act of looking, and to notice how many of the artist's
intentions and meanings could be traced from one moment to the next. Some of
these meanings and traces have been described here, but not exhaustively.
Stephen J Williams, 2005 (See other reviews by this writer)