Documention of the panel,"Prints in the Present Tense: Collaboration Across Cultures," presented at Global Implications: Southern Graphics Council 2009, March, 2009.
Prints in The Present Tense: Collaboration Across CulturesChair: Vanessa Vobis
Panelists: Craig Dietrich, Anita Jung, Melanie Yazzie, Malgorzata Malwina Niespodziewana
Location: Columbia College, Hokin Annex, 623 S. Wabash Ave, 1st Floor
Date: Thursday, March 26
Time: 11:30 am - 1 pm
This panel seeks to define new printmaking values by considering tools, cross-cultural collaboration, and demonstrative ideas.
The edges of prints—if there are such definable edges anymore—have blurred. Printmakers have an abundance of tools to create prints and reach communities across the world. Many of these tools are online. As printmakers, we're routinely online in social communities creating an International web of ideas. This increased ability to collaborate and share information necessarily changes the landscape of art practice.
When we say "print", many think of objects. Now prints can be dispersed digitally and are no longer tied to the physical to retain their artistic stamp. Passing ideas and images digitally over the Internet, the use of high speed communications, cheap travel, and the use of new tools create the unique opportunity for International collaboration. This implementation positions printmakers to be leaders in the changed globalized landscape. 
What are the core values of printmaking in the 21st century? A noted international collaboration is the team Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. "Land Mark" from 2003 is a participatory performance on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, to protest against U.S. Military's use of the island as a testing ground for bombs and other weaponry. The artists worked in collaboration with local residents, carving shoe soles and stamping thousands of footprints onto the beach. Months later, military presence ended on the island and bombing stopped.
In my presentation, I would like to address two issues discussed in this panel, namely thinking of printmaking as an open idea and searching for interactive communication (not only via the Internet) based on my experience as a printmaker.
Malwina Niespodziewana is an artist living in Krakow, Poland. She received her MFA and Doctor's degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. She is also a co-founder of the MaMa Group and a member of Group 13. Malwina's interests lie in the body, gender and trans-culture problems in art.
I would like to stress that, as a printmaker, I do not ask the question "What is printmaking?" but "What else could printmaking be?" I ask the question not just because of contemporary techniques of producing print reproductions. I ask the question having in mind the potential of printmaking, specifically the potential of its multiplication and, consequently, the possibility to reach the largest public at different latitudes at the same time.
Therefore, I decided to take prints out of its traditional form (to step outside its traditional size, to find it some new space), to deprive it of the aura of mystery, and to engage into beyond-European, intercultural dialog when in search of a new essence (here, my trips to the Far East came in handy). Naturally, I'm saying this from the perspective of a printmaker who carries the baggage of the history and traditions of the Polish printmaking.
It was the intention of one of my print projects untitled Lovers to implement an artistic idea which could come to life in the real world. And so, within this project, I addressed one of the fundamental functions of life "" coupling up. Lovers is about love, passions, emotions, and about relations between people. The project is sufficiently universal to be able to spring up in a multicultural world and to be understood.
The anatomical heart was made in the linocut technique, hand printed on cotton t-shirts. Heterosexual and homosexual couples as well as single persons chose the set at their own discretion.
I wanted this project to be located in a different than a typical gallery setting. My intentions could become a reality thanks to one3 venue, an independent, non-commercial gallery whose assumption is to create a space for dialog, discussion, cooperation between artists from all over the world, and to present contemporary art to the public at large through the gallery's nomadic and hybrid character. The one3 venue gallery is five cubes of 80x80x80 cm which are located in Japan, Denmark, Scotland, Egypt and France. After one month in one location, an artist's work travels to the next location. Consequently, within a year and a half, it will have been presented in five countries. It is worth noting that the gallery has an open character. In 2003, Japan and Denmark cooperated and by 2008 three other countries joined the project. In this way, 63 exhibitions of artists from all over the world have been presented.
The other intention of the Lovers project was to reach as many people as possible (during the first stage of the project, one3 venue satisfied this assumption) and that each person could have the print object. The public could purchase my work over the Internet or directly during the presentation of the project, and use it as an article for everyday use. And so, dressed in t-shirts with imprints of anatomical hearts connected by red threads which formed a kind of a common bloodstream "" literally and metaphorically speaking "" people appeared in the streets of Poland, Denmark, Japan, and Austria.
In this case, the multiplication of the print took on a new meaning: it could function simultaneously in a given point of time or outside of it, globally or locally, as a signature work of art or an ordinary object. Lovers became a translocation project where the cooperation between the artist and the public was of fundamental importance. For me, it was very interesting to observe the demand for the printed heart. In Austria, the highest demand was for the male couples' t-shirts. In Poland, the demand was for individual women's t-shirts. The women-men's t-shits were especially popular around the Valentine's Day. I also made a special shirt with an anatomical heart for the distinguished Polish cardio surgeon "" professor Zbigniew Religa. His shirt went for an auction at the Foundation of Cardiac Surgery Development in Poland. The heart, as you can see, carries all sorts of universal meanings.
Finding a new language for printmaking was at the heart of another of my artistic projects "" a project about Katarzyna Kobro, a Polish sculptor of Russian descent who worked in the first half of the 20th century. I was inspired not only by her life and works but also by her innovative approach to sculpture. In 1929, Kobro wrote, "A sculpture is part of the space in which it exists. Therefore, it should not be separated from its space. A sculpture transcends the space and the space transcends the sculpture." So, I asked myself the question whether it was possible to show a traditional print on paper that enters the space and that interacts with its recipient.
I studied documents on Kobro, I read studies about her works, I drew sketches. Next to the studies lay children's books I read to my daughter, among others some pop-up children's books from the 1970s, the construction of which I referred to in my work on Kobro and her daughter Nika.
In my work untitled Kate and Nika 1936-51, I discuss a strong relationship between the mother and her daughter, presenting it in the form of a comic book. Kobro's life was so rich in such tragic events as the war, hunger, ethnic problems, poverty, cancer and finally death that, at times, it was difficult to believe in all these. It was like a fairy tale gone wrong. The fifteen years they spent together open with the birth of Nika and close with Kobro's death.
The pop-up book technique made it possible for me to think of printmaking as a medium which is integral with the space. Still, I wanted to bring about an interactive participation of a recipient in the process by setting its individual elements in motion. I wanted to break the pattern of treating print as a piece of art which, when exhibited, may not be touched. The book form was intended to remedy the situation and encourage such interaction. So far as the interaction in Kate and Nika takes place face to face between the audience and the print object, in the work The Black Box K-S it was my intention that the audience enter the very middle of the print installation and become a witness to the events which took place in the past and which I could reproduce, recreate with the use of a photocopy of already existing documentation. In this particular work, I could not use the video technique as it is impossible to reconstruct the literal past if there is no such earlier film record. Therefore, I used the idea of a film camera recording indirectly (although I didn't use it physically) by showing individual scenes in a stop motion animation [frame-by-frame].
The Black Box presents the breakup of Katarzyna Kobro's marriage to her husband Wadysaw Strzemiski, a painter. The installation consists of many black cardboard cubes which form a kind of a tower, a pyramid or a structure whose form is open and which changes constantly. My inspiration were kirigami , the Japanese postcards I received from my friends. At this point I wish to stress that my contact with the culture and traditions of the Far East has had a fundamental impact on my creative work in general. Working with handmade paper, with its outright biological structure, made me see the created prints in the same way. I gained this experience when participating in the Mino Paper Art Village Project in Japan, an international project for artists, and also during my own journeys as well as thanks to the exchange of information with artists living in different parts of the world.The two presented print projects are the effect of experiences of an artist seeking a new language for printmaking. With its open character and despite oscillating around a material rather than virtual work, the search is oriented towards cooperation with the recipient and on winning over a new space regardless of its geographical location. The projects also draw inspiration and experience from other cultures. This meeting and cooperation is best defined in an African proverb:
Mountain and Cloud
when they meet, they will not separate when they separate, they will not meet
www.niespodziewana.go.pl about my artworks
www.et4u.dk - about one 3 venue gallery
http://kobro.art.pl about Katarzyna Kobro
Anita Jung is the co-chair of the printmaking area at the University of Iowa. She is the past president of the Southern Graphics Council and participated in IMPACT conferences in Posnan, Berlin and Tallinn. Her impressive works are exhibited throughout the United States in juried, invitational and solo exhibitions.
I am going to present ideas of Collaboration through sharing two recent projects. The first project is a collaborative printstillation created and exhibited in Tallinn during the 2007 IMPACT conference. The piece was made with a cast of other artists, the core group being; Laura Berman, Vanessa Vobis, Aurora DeArmendi, students from Estonia; Juhan Teppart, Britta Benno, Andra Aaloe, Kadri Toom, Eleriin Ello, from China; Yang Li and Victoria Carrascosa from Spain and guest appearances by Melanie Yazzie and Teresa Cole. The second piece is an out growth of that project through an invitation to collaborate with Jenny Schmid's amazing students in Minnesota.
In the Estonia project the piece evolved somewhat spontaneously through a rhizome/grass root paradigm. It was a collaborative interaction, artists responded to contact with each other's work and ideas. The prints took shape around the perils facing the world and a hero emerged, Rabbit. This idea, called out during a brainstorming session was more of a Dadaist dare, a pop surrealist challenge than a serious proposal. Laura and I loved it! From the projects, earliest conception it asked; what version of history do we accept from each other? What do we reject? What social/ecological/financial/ political issues do we share? What values/beliefs do we share? Are our differences or our similarities more evident? How does this manifest in the experience of making art? Can art ease the suffering of the world? What is the developing role of art and in particular the print? Who will save the world? Rabbit, of course.
Artists spontaneously joined and left our merry little group and prints compiled as fodder for the ensuing installation. We sat in a little, little room. Artists responded independently to the concepts, and moved from working singularly the first day through collecting rubbings from the city, to printing random images on paper. Stacks and stacks of prints; lithography, frottage, stencils, screenprint, intaglio, relief, and letterpress compiled, reams of paper were printed, maps, magazines, newspaper, books. There was only one rule; no rectangles allowed! The week progressed and artists began to move toward more collaborative thinking. Discussing elements as finished or collective problem solving over what needed to happen next. We ferreted out each other's work and broke through the barriers of authorship. At times horrifying one another as scissors came out and cut disrespectfully across the practice and surface plane of tradition.
The entire project took five days; an entire day was devoted to installing the work. The first order was getting hundreds of pieces of paper off the floor onto the walls. Things distributed into a helter-skelter fashion, taken down, reassembled, reconfigured, cut, taken down, and reassembled, over and over again. Towers of books were built, collapsed, and rebuilt. Adventures spawned, perils lived, antagonists took shape, and protagonists barely squeaked on to prevail good over evil. Tape maps extended across voluminous space connecting one thing to another, creating a city center for Rabbits drama.
Surprisingly, minimal planning, minimal talking took place. Artists fought against their comfort zones, preconceived ideas, stereotypes and process inclinations. Egos were suspended. No single individual was necessary for the projects' success and everyone who participated was essential to the projects' success. Everyone invested; we formed a collective and morphed into a single artist, a cacophony of cohesive voices, a single piece made with bits and scraps. Last minute adjustments, and more forms made from printed matter were cut to connect thoughts, flocks of magazine birds flew across walls with pop culture messages, here now! On Kohal! A world with a story, a message, a cautionary tale emerged, "Rabbit Saves the World."
Jenny Schmid emailed this past fall and asked if I would come up to Minnesota and conduct a similar collaboration with her intermediate print students. After playing movable dates, we finally settled on a time, a short time for collaborating. We scheduled the event to take place on site over three days! We brainstormed via email; what are you thinking about? I have been thinking about really sad fairytales, I mean really, really sad ones, like Bambi. That will work, that fits into some of what my students have been thinking about and drawing. Okay? Okay. There was our plan.
When I arrived in Minnesota there was, this amazing dry erase board filled with a mind map of iconic word/images for sad fairytales. There was a plan to move from scarcity to claustrophobic, normalcy to the surreal and bizarre. Jenny had been sick and her TA Josh had stepped in (someone in my life with organizational skills and a dry erase board!). These artists had taken the idea and started running. It was funny working in a great big studio versus the teeny tiny wee little studio in Tallinn. It was magical; life size big bad wolves magically appeared as well as a castle, this was a fairytale after all. It turns out that the artist building the castle was an art history student interested in masonry architecture so of course he would build the castle. The process was different from Tallinn. The printing was not as layered yet the installation was more theatrical and dimensional. The repetitive ability and placement of the prints became the interaction. Artists once again came in and out of the project. Some were invested others only mildly interested. Thursday the group met in the space (unspoken panic began to arise) the Opening was Friday at 6:30 pm, we brainstormed and began to work in the space. They introduced me to the magic of colored tape. Some students were going to build trees and make rocks out of twisted crunched up brown paper. Jenny and my mantra became, "it's gonna be, what it's gonna be." Jenny said that Tom Drucker told her that if something isn't working you should glue on googly eyes. In frenzy, I began gluing googly eyes, Tom was right. Make it big, make it red and glue on some googly eyes.
Once again, the essence of collaboration took hold and there was not a clear delineation of single authority or authorship over the piece. The content evolved. A path set out the journey, complete with woods, swamps, rat glitter (shiny nails, if you are not in the know) and lookout points carefully designated and marked along the way as photo opportunities and scenic views not to be missed; surprises of gothic proportion available only for the curious willing to peek.
Currently, we are living through an era of the Emperor's New Clothes, the old stories by the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson; Snow White, the little match girl, and fairy godmother/witch become contemporary metaphors for current events, and disillusionment. These collaborative projects are not pure fun or play in the mythological or cultish sense of these concepts. Fun and play are work, hard work. They are as difficult as sitting meditation or staring down the wall, a great deal of an artists' time is spent looking, just looking. Fun and play demand incredible focus, a concentration of will, listening to the spoken and unspoken, an openness of spirit and trust to suspend desire, and self. It is acceptance of where you are. After all it's gonna be, what it's gonna be.
My earlier collaborations or art interventions as John Hitchcock might call them, were more introverted though they too metaphorically and physically ended up belonging to the viewer. My work and what I consider my work continues to change, part of the luxury of being an academic artist. These new projects feel more open in many ways, more collaborative, less didactic, more generous and engaging. A friend once summed up being an artist as, "We were all just little kids who liked to make stuff, and now we're all just big kids who still like to make stuff." Perhaps over simplified, yet fundamentally true. I like to make stuff, and I make my best stuff when I engage my mind as a beginner. Collaboration takes me out of my head and forces me to be a beginner. Inevitably during the course of an art students' study they will become stuck, frozen with indecision at the possibility of making a bad or wrong decision. My response to this is usually something along the lines of reassuring them that regardless of their decision, they will still get to have a birthday, Christmas will still come, and we already know the ending, we are going to die. Perhaps this sounds harsh, maybe insensitive but it is not. It is a perspective, a point of view that negates polar thoughts. Fear of death is a huge problem that constantly is confronting the human race making us do all kinds of crazy things, like kill each other, being too impatient to wait for nature to take its course. I find it comforting to know I will die; it puts making a bad piece of art in perspective. I am not interested in objects being the external lingering evidence of my worth. Collaboration, suspension of my artistic self, process and interaction allows me to act upon the beliefs and feelings I value. It permits me to cross cultures defined by age, ethnicity, ancestry, and to create an inclusive culture of improvisation. In the end, I do not want my art or my life to be about me as much as I want it to be about being or perhaps about the process of becoming.
Craig Dietrich is an artist, software engineer, and staffer at USC's Vectors Journal where he teams with scholars and designers solving information challenges. He is also an Assistant Professor of New Media at the University of Maine, where he develops culturally sensitive software and teaches project design.
Craig will discuss born-digital cultures brought together by the creation of new publication tools. Expanding on printmaking's roots in democratic distribution, new cross-cultural notions in digital publication will be demonstrated.
In printmaking, like many mediums, two or more elements are placed together, whether paper and print, pencil and pen, or challenging issues such as war and humanity. The elements are consumables used to make art: wood or paper, string, TV monitors, electricity, or chemicals. Just like the consumer culture dictating the processes of the modern Western World, art is driven by the resources made available to artists.
We've seen what can happen when resources are managed poorly. Amidst the current economic collapse, global warming, 90% World-wide poverty may, and heavy metals in our landfills we've become pretty good at placing Band-Aids on the problems and forging ahead in the name of commerce.
We've also seen the powerful results of effective resource management: in this case, the terrorists managed a sophisticated set of media resources. No accident, the second American Airlines plane flew into the WTC while all the global media had their attention on the first tower. 
Not limited to the columns of World news, closer to home we deal with resource consumption. Our computers, studios, and chemical factories are powered by places like this, the University of Maine Steam Plant, where UMaine Creative Hypertext students are taking a tour. We learned on this tour that the workers at the plant spent much of their time -- and invest a lot of pride -- in efficiency. As one forman mentions, if there is any color to the exhaust of the smokestacks, they stay late to correct the problem.
The UMaine Steam Plant points to a type of resource management that produces a positive outcome. Though tied to fossil fuels, the staff at the steam plant take care to make sure they are running as efficiently as possible, The responsible use of resources leads to a sustainable future in all fields. And, digital technologies offer a model for positive consumption: one that gives as well as takes.
Interestingly, in digitally-mitigated collaboration, the resources aren't necessarily items such as paint and paper, but fields, such as writing, designing, and programming. Unlike oil which promotes its resource-guzzling shipment across oceans to beachfront refineries, digital collaboration promotes the exchange of ideas centered around productive values.
The democratic Internet provides a wealth of positive values in action, whether social network sites or citizen journalism. Though, when we participate in born-digital networks, we scratch our heads and wonder why these values are reflected in the rest of society. How could we get in the mess we're in now?
Sustainable living has a model, in Native American communities and Aboriginal cultures across the globe. The West bundles its capital into the hands of the elite and decision making to special interests. Meanwhile, there are many references to Native culture's ecological sustainability, but they also practiced a sustainable form of social governance via layer networked interactions, like we see today in Web 2.0. Rather than clustering the decision making in an elite few, like Aboriginal communities digital collaborations require a flattening of hierarchy in order for various fields to come together on mutual ground.
With the coming of the digital revolutions, Net citizens are racing to participate in this "new" society.. Not limited to the Web, learning from Native cultures demonstrates that these notions can be applied not just to digital technologies but all aspects of society in a sustainable way.
A program that puts networked, folksonomic notions into practice is the Dynamic Backend Generator (DBG), produced by USC's Vectors Journal. The DBG incorporaties new elements created by the Vectors team built on top of the open-source database, MySQL. With the potential to promote collaboration across many disciplines, MySQL, a database used by a majority of dynamic websites, has a pretty high technological ceiling to overcome for novice users. With some front-end development, the DBG provides this ease-of-use to exploit the relational database as a sharing tool.
Relational data is different that traditional forms of writing in an important way: traditional writing is linear—top down—while relational databases are three dimensional, linking data along multiple axis. We found at the Vectors Journal that many scholars were looking for a way to translate their linear writing to something "digital". Rather than place the writing online in a linear way, we created this tool and encouraged scholars to break up their writing into bits and pieces, creating a 3-D web of data. Only after the data was worked with in this way would we proceed to create look and feel of the front end.
The DBG looks a lot like a typical spreadsheet—because it is. Though, unlike many database tools or spreadsheets, the program creates on-the-fly relationships between data from various tables. This enables the user to overcome technical hurdles while also not masking the relationships in such a way that the value of the relationships is lost.
ThoughtMesh is a tool that puts digital democracy and folksonomy into action. Learning from existing models of scholarship that relogate ideas to copyrighted, single author wherehouses, ThoughtMesh promotes connections between documents and ideas through a layer of user-generated tags. These tags allow navigation to sections based on the intents of authors, not keywords pulled out of texts.