NYAB Event - "So Be It: Interventions in Printed Matter" Exhibition

"So Be It: Interventions in Printed Matter" Exhibition

Andrew Roth

This event has ended.

“So Be It: Interventions in Printed Matter,” which explores the diverse, and subversive, history of artist’s interventions. The show includes work by modern pioneers as well as younger artists—all of whose works infiltrate, manipulate, or pre-empt existing printed material and hijack them for a new, often contradictory purpose.
While less sensational or provocative than its performative cousin (for example, Brian Eno urinating in Duchamp’s The Fountain in 1995), the act of print intervention is often a subtler, sometimes invisible, affair. Some artists have insinuated their works into the pages of other magazines: Dieter Roth used a free local advertising bulletin to print short aphorisms so baffling that readers called the paper to have them stopped; and Scott King used the pages of UK magazine Sleazenation to publish images of a football riot, with attention to the rioters’ clothing labels (“jeans by LEE”), as if it were a fashion shoot. Other artists have used printed material—in the form of books, posters, magazines and even napkins and press releases—as the canvas on, or against, which to present their own works, from British group The Bank’s “Faxbak” project, to Robert Heinecken’s overprinted magazines, to Martin Kippenberger rubberstamping the word “TOT” (German for ‘dead’) on every page of a Robert Mapplethorpe catalog. Still others have simply taken a printed work’s format and content and scrambled them completely, as is the case of Aleksandra Mir’s feminist mishmash of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Martha Rosler’s confrontational collages, or Collier Schorr’s Jens F., for which Andrew Wyeth’s The Helga Pictures provided a template for revisionist photography.
The intervention, and the print intervention in particular, traces its history back at least to the Cubists and their incorporation of newspaper into their compositions. The collages of the Surrealists carried the work into more subversive areas, which culminated in Marcel Duchamp’s mischievous, mustachioed interpolation on La Gioconda, titled L.H.O.O.Q. The print intervention began to find its footing in earnest as Conceptualists and other artists began to work more innovatively with language and the printed word, and it has only continued to grow in its popularity and usage. As Matt Keegan’s “I’ll be your beard if you’ll be my mirror” and its Duchampian echo make clear, artists working today are willing to apply interventionist principles to any object from any facet of modern life.

Media

• Photography
• Prints

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