Art

Raftery, Andrew. “Suit Shopping: An Engraved Narrative,” 2002-2003.

by Sarah Liu

Wesleyan University’s Davison Art Collection has one of the most robust print collections of all American universities. Home to over twenty-five thousand works of art, their print collection spans from woodcuts to lithographs to monotypes. But Pruzan Art Center’s newest exhibit, “Engraving after 1900: A Technique in Its Time,” spotlights a method of printmaking often caught in the crossfire of the push towards modernism and the avant-garde. Innately laborious and practical, engraving has historically been associated with metal workmanship and seen as a craft or skill, not fully afforded the prestige of the more conceptual and personal
fine art. 

Comprised of five subsections and a sixth larger one themed around sugar, “Engraving after 1900” showcases the work of two dozen artists, a sizable portion of which practiced at Atelier 17, a print studio founded in the 1920s by Stanley William Hayter (who himself has two pieces in the exhibition). As the exhibition’s accompanying publication outlines, Atelier 17 functioned as a venue for many “canonical figures of twentieth-century modernism” and encouraged its artists to follow their specific artistic sensibilities rather than conform to one movement or style. This principle comes through in this exhibition in the range of work by Atelier 17 artists — Norma Morgan’s shadowy landscapes, the architectural eye evident in Armin Landeck’s angular lines, and the abstract figures of Dorothy Dehner. The only requirement was to afford appropriate respect and dedication to printmaking as an art form, to “[take] it seriously.” 

It would come as a disappointment, then, that “Engraving after 1900” fails to impart that very idea on its viewers, mainly because of the context of the gallery space itself. While the philosophy of Atelier 17 as an organization was to promote engraving as an art form, so is the exhibition — the gallery introduction text and exhibition publication both emphasize how engraving has long been overlooked and underappreciated. But the absence of descriptive labels for the engravings themselves and inventive ways to convey the labor of the process make the exhibition fall flat to the average university student. 

The Pruzan Art Center is a small nook in the Center for Public Affairs building. While Pruzan is open to the public, the entire building is predominately used by students. Hundreds of students — all studying different subjects — flock to the building every day to attend class, study, and drop into professor office hours. As such, the vast majority of visitors to Pruzan are students, and they’re students who aren’t necessarily into art. So the question arises of how to make engraving, of which many visitors most likely have a rudimentary understanding, accessible. Better yet, compelling. 

There are some parts of “Engravings after 1900” that shine: the five subsections are topical to the exhibition’s examination with engravings’ role in modernism (particularly “New Directions” and “The Natural World”), and some pieces are adequately contextualized. James Louis Steg’s “Self Analysis” (1948) employs linework narratively and beautifully, etching a portrait of a man stoic and resigned. Its accompanying label informs the viewer that Steg served in the U.S. army during World War II, part of a tactical unit comprised of “artistically inclined soldiers…tasked with devising creative methods of confounding the enemy.” This added context renders the engraving in subtext; we begin to imagine the shading on his cheek as not a shadow or facial hair, but possibly the vestiges of war. The laborious and innate violent nature of engraving adds another layer to the heavy connotations of war — we then understand the work’s cruciality as an engraving print, rather than a lithograph print or painting. 

In contrast, Andrew Raftery’s set of four engravings, titled “Suit Shopping: An Engraved Narrative” (2002-2003), is only labelled with the standard information of a gallery label: the piece’s title and the artist’s name. While the prints are meticulous, engrossing, and wonderfully lucid — one could argue their complexity warrants the lack of context — they would be enhanced by more information. Or at least some description that tied the suit-shopping action portrayed in the print to the sociological and how that impacts engravings’ conversations with modernity. 

A more dynamic way to draw novice visitors into the art form of engraving is to invite elements of the process into the gallery, alongside the art. While the prints are the finished product, the process is arguably as important in a form as physical as this. As Hayter said while defending engraving’s relevance to modernity’s preoccupation with the unconscious, the labor of engraving is a reciprocal “exchange between the work and the person doing it. What the plate is doing to you and not what you are doing to the plate only.” So, why not highlight the labor itself? Physical burins and copper plates should be displayed, videos or live demos of the etching and ink transfer processes could be played, and a step-by-step visual guide foregrounded, in a physical manifestation of the “The Engraving Process” section of the exhibition publication. Not only would these changes demystify the engraving process to students (again, the average viewer in this context), but they would also make it tactile and interactive. 

The most disjointed element of “Engravings after 1900” is its sixth and final section, “The Fascination of Sugar.” Tonally dissonant and physically removed from the other five sections in a semi-separate room, this section is also artistically divergent from the others, incorporating color prints for the first time and comprised of prints in a more pop-art style. While there is a historical explanation about sugar’s “enticing” and “enthralling” qualities, it is unclear why sugar was chosen as the theme for this last section, which makes it read as random and a possible half-hearted attempt to appeal to a younger audience. To make engraving interesting to undergraduate students means portraying it in all its complexity, not cheapening it with a topical gimmick. Ultimately, I’m not suggesting a degradation or oversimplification of the exhibition form, but merely an adaptation of it for a university student population.

Würth, Anton. DürerÜbung II Nemesis. 2017.

By Sylvie Pingeon

Maybe it’s the compact walls of the Goldrach Gallery, or maybe it’s the show’s refusal to be firmly chronological, but “Engraving After 1900: A Technique in its Time” reminds me of a carousel. A little dizzying, nice to look at, self-serious but also fun. 

Only a glass wall, embossed with the exhibition title, separates Pruzan Art Center from the outside world. At midday, this title doubles, as the sun casts the words in shadow on the center’s walls. The gallery space does not have this light, of course. Its dim lighting and pale wooden floors are almost cozy after the stark openness of the lobby. Blocks of texts loosely categorize the pieces: “At Work, At Rest,” “The Natural World,”  “Built Environments,” “New Directions.” These labels float a couple of feet above the highest wall-mounted prints. The words hover near the art, suggesting categories but not imposing them. There’s no clear cut-off between one label and the next. The borders between categories meld gently. The prints are arranged anachronistically, but the labels loosely suggest the passage of time, marking a seemingly natural progression. The natural world shifts into a built-up landscape. Eventually, this growth shifts in new directions. The engravings turn experimental, avant-garde.  

Supposing a viewer follows this clockwise trajectory, they oscillate between decades: the thirties back into the twenties, a rush forward to the fifties, a push back into the twenties again. Up and down, up and down. A pony on a mounted pole. The exhibition trends towards more recent pieces as one moves left to right across the room, but this trend is not a rule.  

The first print seen upon entering the exhibition is Stanley Anderson’s Reading  Room. The 1930 engraving depicts an old man poring over a book with an expression that the accompanying text dubs “quiet reflection,” but to me, it seems charged with energy. His lips are pursed, his brow furrowed. In the background, another man bends over a book, his eyeglasses slipping down his face, with his mouth slightly agape. Across from him, a different man slouches over his books, perhaps asleep or perhaps in quiet despair. 

The label “At Work, At Rest” reads a little on the nose for this piece. But I don’t mind because the words are far away and easy to ignore. I like Reading Room aesthetically. It’s shaded softly, a gradual scale of light to dark. It holds the suggestion of a drawing, of a carving, of so  many mediums other than its own. 

Anton Würth’s DürerÜbung II Nemesis, dated 2017, is the final print encountered in the exhibition. A two-colored engraving, the wall text alleges, but I only see muted grays. This piece is sparse. A singular line, curved and thin like string. A symmetrical spread of isolated rectangles with faint squiggles placed around them in an almost-grid. A column of six flat, vase-like shapes divide the print into two halves, framed by chess pieces on either side. Technically, this piece is advanced because it has curved lines, though you wouldn’t know that at first glance unless you know engravings. This print is meticulous but also odd, slightly off-putting. All its details present themselves instantly, yet I want to keep looking. Miya Tokumitsu’s curation choices elevate this piece. It’s the last one we encounter. It’s on the cover of the pamphlet. I feel its importance in its sparseness. It doesn’t need to ramble to convey its message. Its lines are all distinct, separate. It presents as though it has nothing to hide, but all the empty space signifies something inscrutable lurking beneath the surface. I feel there is something I don’t understand.

This exhibit tells a story of progress, but it also refuses linearity. It refutes the notion of art as constantly moving forward into new methods, innovative looks. The arrangement of this exhibit reflects this refusal. On the one hand, the space beckons to be traversed in a circle, clockwise, left-to-right. On the other hand, the categorizing labels are so missable, the gallery walls so close together. It’s easy to move backwards or in a jumbled route, easy to determine that this show has no progression, no order, because the order is not neatly chronological. 

The titular wall text comes in the middle of the exhibition. This text is bizarre enough to prompt examination in its own right: “In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the titular prince declares time to be ‘out of joint’ after a visit from his father’s ghost–an event that sets off a cascade of moral and psychological crises. But knowledge from the past is not always an unwelcome intruder.” Here, the text calls on a past text and contradicts its message to argue that information from past works of art is important. Time blurs in this exhibit; it is “out of joint.” The exhibition welcomes out-of-jointness. Perhaps it even argues that engraving as a form disrupts the linearity of time. An engraving entitled “Portrait of Félix Vialart, Évêque-Comte de Châlons” sits next to the wall text. It shows a seventeenth-century portrait which was reworked first in 1867 and then again in 2021 by Anton Würth, who added polka dots and other playful embellishments to this very serious portrait. In engraving, one can ink a plate again and again. One can rework a plate again and again. These centuries become one, direction becomes meaningless—until you step forward a few feet, read “New Directions” on the wall, and wonder if that means the other directions must be old.  

This exhibition values tradition but also innovation. It does not try to undo this contradiction but rather revels in its ambiguity. Miya Tokumitsu’s curatorial decisions appreciate the strength of time’s pull forward but also embrace the fickleness of time, the ways it can also pull us backwards, can twist us out of joint. So we inch along, up and down, moving ahead, glancing slowly back and forth, watching the world and its art change in ways that are not always progressions. Up and down. Round and round.

“Egg, Earth, and Essence” and its Peculiar Placement in Smith Reading Room

By Arlo Kremen

There is a point in a given economic and cultural production model defined by excessive consumption where the objects we produce result in things closer to what we are fed. It happened a couple of decades ago. The plastic of mass consumerism leaked into the water supply. The objects of our lives, no matter how organic, pass through our anal glands not as pure gut waste but as something littered with artificialities, and thus, the environmentalist art of today takes a mimetic turn. 

Bright Ugochukwu Eke thinks of his eggs like an ecosystem, interconnected by roots and sprouting plants, evoking the historical conflation of fertility, life, the future, and the never-entirely-knowable biological mechanisms needed for growth. Plastic plants and vines, once commonly seen slapped onto the walls of TikTokers across the country, spill out of cracked eggs and sprout from thick tubers, which bind the cumbersome objects into an ecological web. A few plants sport paper blossoms; others hold onto tags from the stores where they were purchased. Debris on the paneled ground—dirt, rocks, wood chips, and branches mingle with the vines. Though it is fair to assume these materials are true to nature, one can never be too sure without touching. We live in a new age of artifice where the real and the fake are growing harder to discern with each passing day—reality is not what it once was.

And this has always been the case. From AI and the internet to the creation of the printing press and urbanization, our realities are in constant flux, and with each next incomparable change, the Earth will change with it, reacting in whatever way it sees fit—even if such reactions beget a climate crisis, which, needless to say, it has. These are the ideas at work in Eke’s Egg, Earth, and Essence. A metaphysical examination of life’s cyclical mechanisms and the disruptions of such by mass production and, thus, global capitalism.

The eggs themselves were built with farming materials: chicken wire to construct the initial forms, then burlap sacks, and finally a ménage of different colored wood chips to constitute crusts or shells. Creases wrap the centers where the two halves can be attached to form the sculptures; the eggs betray their precariousness, signaling the prescience of being taken apart or slashed at. Some eggs are ripped, bleeding dirt and exposing burlap threads and creaked wire. In the two truncated eggs, analog clocks metamorphose into yolks, surrounded by dirt and vines, perhaps standing in for viscous white slime. Frozen in time, the eggs’ embryonic clock is interrupted, eaten up by plastic intrusions or other external interventions—or both, since they are practically identical.

The spread of “forever materials” over the biological is still a horror beyond many American imaginations. The natural world as we know it has begun to collapse, or, to frame it in the language of the piece, to transform. There is no end in sight for plastic production and fossil fuel mining, and immediate consequences have begun for countless animal and plant species, and, of course, human beings. These developments have been ongoing in a dramatic fashion since the 1980s, and art reacted to them even before then. Eke’s work, which tends to have a didactic edge, tends to focus on the importance of water as well as other natural components. In this case, the eggs hone in on Earth itself, reckoning with humanity’s relationship with nature and the social, cultural, and economic forces that mediate such relationships.

For the most part, Eke’s work falls in line with the history of environmentalist art, hardly cleaving any new ground in conceptualizing the humanities’ earthly bond. There can only be so much to say about it. It feels familiar, like I’ve seen it countless times. My first encounter with his artwork was in Los Angeles at The Broad (shockingly, I remember). Along the tall white surface, bottle caps, tin cans, or something in between maneuvered across the wall’s scale in uninterrupted orange. I was twelve or thirteen, I think—pre-Greta Thunberg and the year or year after Trump’s inauguration. I cannot find the artwork now; I very well could be misremembering it, but what I know for sure is how it touched me. It was as if the artwork grabbed my head, vomiting weighted meanings into my mouth like a mother to her unthinking chicklet. Now, as we enter into a second Trump presidency, a work of this kind feels dated, regurgitating a naive belief that art can change the world. At a school like Wesleyan, it’s politically safe at best, and at worst, its partial polemic on late-stage capitalism doesn’t warrant a second consideration, ingratiating itself with the #Resistance liberal politics many Wesleyan students were reared on. It’s so familiar it just reads as another loose hem in a breaking social fabric. I can see it sitting in a reception area for a UN Climate Conference, greeting attendees to an event posing as world-altering regardless of the UN’s ultimate powerlessness.

Its placement in the Olin Reading Room confuses. No student practicing active spatial observation would install a sculpture of that size in that room. The Reading Room is deeply anthropological, combining its intended purpose of studious rigor with the social and sexual peacocking of a large room filled with hormonal students. One does not go to the reading room only to study but, as with most other actions, to perform studying. Eyes shoot to analyze, compare, se/de-duce, and/or intimidate whoever passes through its doors. Choosing the table at which to study is another socially political event, as is how you sit down, how loud or quiet you are, or any other minutia of body language. The reading room is ripe with sexual tension, which either attracts those who enjoy the show or repels students unable to endure the distractions. 

Why would an environmentally concerned artwork be shown in a room where its erotic functions appear entirely antithetical to intellectual and emotional contemplation? Probably because, in the eyes of an institution, rooms are simply spaces to fill, and the people who use them are abstract, unable to alter or twist the space’s purpose to their needs. Its placement feels thoughtless and unconcerned. Thus, the sculpture is overcome with institutional flavor—something to be enacted onto the students rather than to engage with us. I do not know the details of how the space was booked, whose decision it was, or why it was placed here. Maybe the artist and professor/curator Nwafor spoke about it at the artist talk or wrote about it in the exhibition guide—I wouldn’t know as I failed to attend the talk (lazy) and haven’t read the guide (forgot to bring it on winter break), but as most students who engage with the work on a day-to-day basis, I find neither failure particularly damning. What I can say is that, alongside other actions on the part of the administration, such aggressive behavior towards the student body is not surprising. Students occupying a North College room were arrested by Middletown Police officers, and new surveillance cameras have appeared around campus to address crime and vandalism, with one (maybe two) conspicuously hovering over where the encampment organized by Students for Justice in Palestine once stood. In a navel-gazing Op-Ed in the Times, President Roth babbles about how he wants a more political campus, but it seems that is not the case, for expanding the security state onto the campus inspires insipid political discourse. He fails to take his students seriously, once boasting, allegedly, in a meeting with a student committee about how he managed to not dox students supporting Palestinian liberation despite his base instincts. 

One might wonder what the purpose of installing this sculpture is at Wesleyan, a school that operates in part via a Board of Trustees, many of whom are directly responsible for the climate crisis. Eke and other environmentalist/political artists show in institutions internationally funded by similar means: people responsible for a degrading Earth (private equity investors, bankers, and a McKinsey partner), staggering poverty (CEO/President of the Greystone Slum Lord Corporation), and, often, genocidal freaks (Mark N. Casper—the Uyghur genocide, and John A. Shapiro—the Gazan genocide). What does this say about the functioning politics of Egg, Earth, and Essence? Might it be that the university wanted to bring in an environmentalist artist to deflect from its own political and moral failings? Unfortunately, the work cannot help but feel like a virtue-signaling sleight-of-hand trick by the institution, which has been a common occurrence since October 7th. When handling its complicity in several controversies, whether it be genocide or the sexual harassment of a student by a member of the board, Wesleyan launches a flurry of empty speak to maintain a visage of social acceptability.

This could have been done differently. A temporally inclined environmentalist artwork could have used the library well, even if it couldn’t speak to all the particularities of the Reading Room itself. Students waste countless hours a week studying and writing for classes, which, in the grand scheme of life, will ultimately be entirely negligible; the climate crisis is just as its name states: a crisis. Existential dread has filled the halls of my life. I grew up among forest fires and ashen skies every autumn—the air tastes different every year, unbreathable all the same. Visual artists have been one of the great chroniclers of how it feels to be alive today, and I can say for certain that exploration of the metaphysics and poetics of the Earth is not how I spend my days. I spend them in fear and self-hatred, flailing for quick, decisive action. At the risk of LARPing, it feels as though the only art worth being made of the subject today would have you listed on the FBI’s most wanted.