Pressure and Resistance: Gray's Art in a Post-Consumptive World
I know the shallow clicking sounds of writing on a computer -- the disembodied connection of striking individual letters and their emergence in the enigmatic space of the computer screen. Perhaps it is a nostalgic indulgence, but every now and then I sit at a typewriter to write a brief note. The endangered typewriter offers an impressively different experience and encounter with writing. Keys striking paper held firmly in place release series of crisp, emphatic explosions. If the typewriter offers some near obsolete satisfactions, unlike with the more agile computer, errors made are often obdurate and difficult to fix. A cranky technology justifiably replaced by personal computers, typewriters perform the application of ink under pressure and the sonorous physicality of thinking and writing. What does this have to do with an artist who makes prints?
Ken Gray's work resides intentionally, critically, and often awkwardly in the ubiquitous world of printed matter. He collects, alters, transforms, and makes printed materials. Gray's attention moves to and from merchandising catalogues, textbooks, administrative manuals, and fine art prints. Fastidiously, if paradoxically, perpetuating traditions and disturbing conventions of the field, his work investigates daily encounters with and a globalized environment of printed matter.
Recently examining their relationship to their field, architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio described architecture as a target and weapon. Architecture is both a critical site, as well as the instrumentation deployed for conceptual assaults. It strikes me that Gray has a similar engagement with the field of print. His unerring aim on the target of printed matter is manifest in visible concepts congealed under great, often repeated pressure. His basement studio bears the signs of discursive activity, affection, attention, criticism, and involvement in a field he has worked in for more than two decades. There are the usual press, papers, tools, and other apparatus of the print studio, but there is a restive presence of intellectual inquiries and aesthetic insurgencies that might erupt under applied pressure at any moment.
This productive unrest is most palpable in Gray's intellectual and physical embrace of the extremities of print. In his workspace, as in his artwork, there is a calibrated dissonance between the historical traditions of virtuosic printmaking and the banality of printed materials that intrepidly invade our homes and lives. Gray has the tools, resources, and expertise to make stunning and striking prints (and he does), but his observations, collections, and politics invariably take aim at other issues of "the print." How the print both supplies and subverts capitalist production may be at the heart of his practice.
At about the time that I took my one high school typing class, artist Vito Acconci performed "Trademarks" (1970). Seated nude on the floor, the artist repeatedly bit, with painful pressure, parts of his body he could reach. His teeth left deep impressions on his own flesh. Unlike prints that generally aspire to longevity, Acconci's impressions gradually disappeared as the skin recovered and reinstated its taut, smooth form. It would be a critical miscalculation to attribute Acconci's performance solely to an investigation of the print. "Trademarks" should be understood within a range of body-oriented interventions of artists of this period. But the work insistently and disquietingly demonstrates the extremes of physical, emotional, social, and aesthetic pressure of the artist as mark maker. As he continues to do in his recent architecturally based work, Acconci subversively manipulates conventions of art, expectation, production, and duration. I thought of Acconci's legendary performance when I first saw Gray's series of prints entitled "Biting" (1996).
An earlier series of monotypes produced by Gray at the Daumier Atelier in 1993 offers background on his "Biting" series. Caress, stroke, pinch, poke, punch, pound, and rub. "Personal Pressure" includes seven four–sided images of pressure created with the hand and press. Each folded print combines evidence of an intimate physical activity with a narrative and aphorism. Several years later, Gray bit, chewed, and slid his teeth on a piece of carbon paper (doomed evidence of a prosaic printing process) to make prints on paper. Acconci clenched his own skin between his teeth to make impressions. He did not use ink and the marks, if first vividly raw and exposed, disappeared during the denouement of the performance. Deploying the processes and pressures of the field of print, Gray created a series of monotypes with his teeth. The carbon paper created more enduring impressions -- marks of his trade that exist as a boxed portfolio. By bringing his own body directly into the printing process, Gray's commonplace exercise explicitly confirmed that every print is a residual of purposeful, "performed" pressure.
While Gray's practice is an ongoing examination of the discursive form and role of prints, these discipline-based, conceptual inquiries are coupled with the questions about printed material as genesis and detritus – the site and consequences -- of a post-consumptive society. Most children learn the fine art of erasure early in their lives. A favorite intervention on our household was the obliteration of the tone and color from people's eyes and mouths in The New York Times Magazine. Irises and pupils, lips and teeth were erased, creating enigmatic and empty volumes. Robert Rauschenberg brought a high visibility to erasure when he created "Erased de Kooning" (1953.) His painstaking assault with more than forty erasers on one of de Kooning's pencil, graphite, crayon, and oil stick drawings brought an enduring notoriety to de Kooning's drawing that it may never have acquired. Rauschenberg engaged in enhancement through disappearance -- something that Gray well knows.
Gray's acts of erasure take on other susceptible and ubiquitous targets. An abundance of merchandising catalogues arrives at many homes. I periodically take armloads of these ignored and overlooked publications to recycling. In contrast to my periodic trips to the town dump, Gray pursues far more imaginative, critical, and subversive activities with this stuff. In "Gourmet Meat" (1993-4), Gray strategically applied solvents to modify the pages of a merchandising catalogue. Dazzling pictures of delectable beef and other animal products were washed around the page leaving a deadpan, purposefully derivative abstraction. Erasure is slightly misleading. Actually, the printers' ink is not entirely removed; it is skimmed and redistributed. Occasionally, Gray has left one or two catalogue images unaltered and adrift in a melting field of consumer products. Gray also has ripped out the pages of mail-order catalogues and compressed them into tight spheres to construct mosaic landscapes or abstract "paintings" that smartly challenge the hierarchical traditions and distinctions of prints and paintings.
If merchandising catalogues aim to seduce and stimulate desire and consumption, one of Gray's recent series of prints exploits another ubiquitous material in this pre- and post-consumptive cycle. He takes the protective sheets of bubble wrap used to ship consumer products and applies these as plates or surfaces to make prints. Different inks and applications create dense fields of irregular spheres. Utilizing the operations and conventions of an intrepid, invasive material culture, Gray brings a subtle humor and critical bite to the print.
Mail-order catalogues, bubble wrap, and shrink-wrapping are too commonplace to engender meaningful associations. But Gray brings another perspective to the phenomena of expendables and obsolescence, rejection and refusal. Consumption suggests purchase and use, but we have become post-consumptive in the sense that materials and objects are rarely consumed and used up. We tire of them as they show signs of deterioration and age. They are "replaced" by new objects and styles. Things are not consumed or lost as much as they eventually are ignored, rejected, or abandoned. They don't cease to exist (like the consumables that Hannah Arendt describes in The Human Condition) but they are no longer needed or desired. Gray has made a series of compelling, often disturbing works about this frenetic, insatiable, post-consumptive world.
In 1992-3, Gray printed photographs of discarded and abandoned domestic items left on the street on old dinner plates and platters. One plate has an image of a mattress discarded on the sidewalk. Its floral pattern (and haven't you ever wondered about those patterns on mattress covers?) corresponds to the domestic decorations on the ceramic plate. Other photographs of old furniture, abandoned refrigerators, stoves, and other appliances on "rescued" plates instate an indelible "doubleness", as if these domestic objects are twice refused. Gray's exhibition of this body of work at a "functional" dinnerware show had a quirky irony. Like everything else in this commercial venue, Gray's plates were for sale but not for "use."
While there is palpable tension in Gray's work between his prodigious investigations of the print and the objects of a post-consumptive society, his print projects based on old or discarded books produce other vivid convergences. Whether manuals, textbooks, or an eccentric tome entitled The Bizarre Sisters, these printed materials become both the instruments of and surfaces for prints. In "Wonderful World" (2001) the cover of an earth science textbook sits in the middle of a grid of prints that are impressions of the book. The folders in the large piece narrate a sequence and history of the printing process. Prints beget prints in a layered geological register of the printing process.
"Democracy Today" (2001) is grid of mounted and printed book covers. The blue areas are covers from an expired textbook entitled American Government Today. Just off center in the grid of prints and objects, the wooden covers of a religious text form a vertical, faith-based column. A "unifying" character of this piece is not only the intricate layers of prints that is central to Gray's work, but the thicket of holes cut into the surfaces of each book. If not directly disruptive, the little craters form a field of indiscretions that break the surface to reveal other printed layers. It is a disquieting piece on the rhetoric or church and state, the rigidity of ideology, and the frustration of partial knowledge.
As a printer understands and exploits, there is never pressure without resistance. The traditional print records marks and impressions as materials of rigidity and viscosity are forcefully applied against each other. It is the evidence of calculated – and sometimes accidental -- activity. In all of this work, Gray uses the idea and form of the print to examine his, and ultimately our, relationship to venues and objects of information. Moving between historical prints, consumer circulars, and lost, discarded, and found texts and objects, he performs critical, printed interventions. How a print is made influences what it does. Deploying methodology as concept, Gray's process-based investigation illuminates what a print is, as it interrogates what it may mean.
Patricia C. Phillips
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