The Print Perspective

This is the first part of a two-part article focusing on Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, both printmaking faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

            Nathaniel Stern is an intensely kinetic artist.  While listening to him talk it was almost possible to feel the ideas as they swirl in his head, and being a slower-paced thinker myself, I felt like I was caught in a whirlwind.  Stern has the ability to rapidly make many far-reaching connections in his thoughts and inject all this information into his work in a way that makes sense, resulting in some unique pieces that are loaded many layers of concepts to consider.

            Originally from New York City, Stern’s background is about as far reaching as his ideas.  After earning his undergraduate degree at Cornell in upstate New York, he returned to the city to earn a master’s in computer art at NYU.  “While I was there I met a woman and harassed her until she finally agreed to date me, and continued  harassing her and followed her home to South Africa,” he joked about meeting his wife.  This led to him living there for six years.  During this time he helped start the first digital arts program at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, earned gallery representation from Gallery AOP, and forged many other deep ties to the region.  “Because of the family that we still have there, and the good friends that I have there from the years that I lived there, we go back probably every two years or so,” he said.

            Following his years in South Africa, he spent two years in Ireland at Trinity College Dublin, earning a PhD with a dissertation about critical evaluations for interactive art.  Most, if not all of Stern’s work, is interactive in some form, and he wrote his dissertation in reaction to feeling that most art criticism was based on visual evaluations. “This work is performance based, and so we need to look at contemporary theories and embodiment and performance studies in order to break down and criticize that work,” he said. 

          An example of one of Stern’s earlier interactive installations is a piece called “Stuttering,” in which a movement tracking computer allows the viewer to interact with what he described as an invisible Mondrian painting.  The screen is arranged in a grid of rectangles like a Mondrian painting, but the rectangles are instead filled with animated text and spoken word that is activated when the computer senses the viewer’s body moving over them.  “It winds up having this inverse relationship where if you move really quickly in front of it, it triggers every single activation point, and the piece itself stutters.  And if you, instead, move very carefully and very cautiously, you can hear the piece but then you end up stuttering with your body.”  

            “Stuttering” is a good example of most of Stern’s work by highlighting the importance of bodily action in creating the work and having several ideas inform each aspect of the work.  It looks at the relationship between language and the body, and while language typically exists in text and words, the act of creating these requires an action of the body.  “Stuttering” shows the body’s relationship to language as being entwined, but it exists in the larger context of other similar works.  “Enter:hektor” is an earlier language/movement piece where instead of the viewer moving towards fixed areas of text, the icons move away from the viewer and they are forced to chase them down.  “It’s like, what happens if you literally turn a page, or reach for the end of a sentence?  And how do you encounter both yourself and the language that you use?” he said. 

            Stern said the inspiration for a lot of his work comes from philosopher J.L. Austin, who proposed that language is not only descriptive, but can actually do things to the world.  Two examples he gave were that when a person says “I do” at their wedding, they are transforming their identity from a single person into a spouse, or that with a declaration of war someone can eliminate a state of peace. 

            Interaction is an inherent part of Stern’s computer installations to the point that in essence the viewer completes the work by interacting with it.  Without that interaction a major part of the work is missing.  But Stern felt like not everyone understood this.  “I would often encounter critics who would stand aside in the corner with their arms folded and say ‘this is really interactive, this is performative, this is cool’.  To me, the work isn’t the idea that it’s interactive.  You don’t experience the work by looking at it, you experience the work by interacting with it,” he said.  This experience inspired him to produce more visual work while still retaining the performance element, ultimately leading to the creation of work that he jokingly called Compressionism.            

A Compressionist image by Nathaniel Stern

          In Compressionism, Stern hitches a customized computer scanner to his body, then moves through a space as the scanner is recording, resulting in a visual record of his body’s movement in relation to the space.  The movement of the scanner causes objects to be pressed together into a small space, hence the name Compressionism.  He also takes the compressed images and stretches them back out so that the whole motion can be seen in a detailed, panoramic form, and he refers to these pieces as being Decompressionism.  There are a lot of variables in the couple minutes that he moves the scanner over the landscape, but he says that he has learned to adapt to the scanner.  “It’s very similar to how Pollock would say ‘the paint taught me how to move, and how to perform it’, the scanner has taught me how to perform these images and what comes out of them,” he said.

          He references other artists in these works, with one Compressionist work being named “Jo’burg Boogie Woogie” in reference to Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie”, and a recent installation he’s working on is based on Monet’s famous water lilies triptych.  And even many of the ideas from his interactive pieces tie into his Compressionist works, and vice versa.  He has several scans of bookshelves that directly relate to his interest in language, and hearing him talk so fluently about all of these ideas I got the sense that all of his works are individual representations of the same interconnected web of thought.  At the center of this web is his belief in the visceral presence of art in life, that the act of him showing me pieces in his studio is every bit as artistic as a painting or sculpture in a museum.  

            Stern considers his Compressionist works as being in reference to all of the traditional printmaking media at once in the sense that he is performing a mark-making process, and he also sometimes takes the images or parts of them and uses them to create prints through traditional processes.  “It definitely changed the way that I work,” he said of translating his digital images into traditional prints.  Producing his images traditionally is another aspect of referencing the history of art, which he does often, and he said he is more conscious of considering how the compressed image might transfer into other print media.  “I’ve come to think of myself as a new-media printmaker,” he said.  And as we will see in his collaborations with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, he takes part in pushing printmaking to a new level.

            Meuninck-Ganger has come to be an art teacher at UWM through a very different path.  She originally started out by double majoring in art education and printmaking at Ball State University with the goal of teaching art at the high school level, which she did for six years before going to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for an MFA.  During the time she was at MCAD, master printer Cole Rodgers was starting up the Highpoint Center for Printmaking, which was run in conjunction with the school.  She was able to see the more traditional side of printing happening at Highpoint, and at the same time was also being exposed to technological ways of working from the interdisciplinary philosophy of the school, and also book arts through her mentor, Jody Williams.  “All of these diversions from the traditional print shop I was forced into, so I feel like I came out of my education where it wasn’t technique driven, but concept driven, and I just had to take whatever technique would best support that,” she said.  “I think that’s why I connect so well with Nathaniel, because we speak the same language as we come up with the concept.”

          Before she started her works with Stern she was working on a large-scale book project that uses a combination of etching and lithography.  Rather than using the processes traditionally to produce multiples, she used the print processes to make assemblages of printed images that were one-of-a-kind.  “I haven’t editioned since grad school,” she laughed.  The examples she had hanging in her studio were at least eight feet tall works with images of faces in different expressions and arrangements on both sides.  And instead of being displayed in a typical book format, these pieces were meant to be hung in an open space where the viewer can walk around them, and also handle them if desired.

            The pieces are in fact personal journal pages which she made for public view.  She started working on them during a time at MCAD when a lot of big things were happening in her life.  “My father in law passed away, my grandmother passed away, I had my son, just all these personal things were happening that seemed larger than me, so I wanted the scale to be large.  And although they were very personal they were universal in nature.  We all go through these transitions, so my journal didn’t seem right to be a private work anymore, I wanted it in a public space,” she said.  While making these journal pages she wanted to incorporate text into them, but thought that words would fall short of expressing her emotions.  So instead she relied on the expressions of the faces to instill a sense of what the journal was saying in the viewer.

            While Stern’s interest in interactive art eventually led him to printmaking, Meuninck-Ganger’s interest in printmaking eventually led her to interactivity in her work.  “I recognized interactivity with the artist’s book and being able to manipulate it, and picking up time-based works,” she said.  “I just wanted to push the idea of the print, push the idea of the book, push the idea of new media and interactivity.”  Initially she resisted the inclusion of new media in her work, but later realized that it offered a new dimension that she had trying to achieve through traditional means.  So she began using new media to push her printmaking into a new area, and at the same time pushed the new media into a new realm, and working together with Stern made a very compelling body of work.

          Some artists agonize over a single piece for weeks or even months, fine tuning everything right down to the smallest detail, only to go back and toil over minute changes that are almost imperceptible in the final product, but in the mind of the artist are the difference between perfection and failure.  Then there are artists like Waldek Dynerman, who seem to turn out two finished works before lunch and three before dinner.  He is not an outwardly frenetic person. Rather, he was very leisurely in sifting through mounds of paper to show me work in his studio on the south side of Milwaukee in Bay View.

          It seems Dynerman is so prolific in his work because it is a constant process for him.  “I work quick, but I work long.  This was done in three days, and in three days if I decide it’s done, I leave it alone,” he said, referring to a sculpture of a carousel horse with a mechanized doll’s head.  Some of his projects take as long as six months to complete, meaning on any given day he could have several projects to work between, with some becoming finished products and others left to be completed.  An admitted pack-rat, he has plenty of materials on hand.  All about his studio are toys, boxes of junk, piles of paper, and traditional art materials, all waiting to be turned into something. 

          Many of his works include parts of dolls and mannequins, which was something he started doing in the early 80’s in his home country of Poland.  “The system was not nearly as oppressive as people may think,” he said of growing up under communist rule.  He said that for the most part people were able to live their daily lives without fear of being harassed by the government, but there were also plenty of problems to deal with.  Basic living supplies could be hard to come by, with some years being worse than others, and occasionally worker protests would lead to massive riots, once resulting in a state of martial law in 1980.  “An interesting thing is that the government wanted to provide some sort of a safety valve, to not allow too much pressure to build up, so they tolerated artists.  Artists were what was sort of put in the window display of the state,” he said.  

          He was able to take advantage of some of the offers the government provided for artists, getting a cheap studio space and attending the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art, where he received an MFA in painting in 1974.  In 1983 he came to the United States with the intention of only staying for a few years.  He found a job teaching at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design to support himself during the stay, and his projected few years in Milwaukee has continued on to today.

          Dynerman first became seriously interested in printmaking during a sabbatical from MIAD in which he returned to the Warsaw Academy to learn intaglio and lithography.  He began teaching lithography at MIAD in 2002, and since then has incorporated different printmaking processes into his repertoire for creating his works.  One process that fits well with his style of working is collograph, which is a form of printmaking his studio partner Rina Yoon, also a printmaking teacher at MIAD, often works in. 

          Collograph is a very immediate and versatile method because it involves creating different textures on a surface to create different tones, and it is typically done on Sintra board, a PVC-based board that can be easily cut and manipulated.  “So with the idea of recycling and just not being very structured, I started actually cutting my collograph plates and building new plates that were locked together like a jigsaw,” he said.  “It’s the process that I like because cutting it is like drawing it, and I also like this idea of recycling imagery.” 

          Dynerman works print elements into his pieces the way he does all of his works, being very experimental in grabbing different components and bringing them together to create imagery with a lot of visual conflict.  His pieces are activated with energy by bringing disparate components together and forcing them to intermingle with each other, and his tendency to squirrel away everything he comes across is part of his process in finding inspiration. 

          I was interested to know what his concept was in his work, because there is a definite sense of separate forces working against each other in each piece he does, but with the wide range of approaches he tackles the same aesthetic through it is hard to draw a singular conclusion from his body of work.  Looking at his work reminds me of a famous William S. Burroughs quote which reads: “This is a war universe.  War all the time.  That is its nature.  There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.” 

          However, the message that he tries to purvey seems secondary to the actual making of the work.  To hear him explain his concepts it seems like the more important concept is the act of creating the work than coming up with a meaning for each image, and his website underlines this by not providing an artist statement, but an invitation to create a meaning out of the work presented.  “You see it when you look at the work,” he said of his ideas.  “It’s always about some sort of trauma to the body, which has a lot to do with my memory of the war as related to me by my parents.  My father was a holocaust survivor.  I’m half Jewish and I have a strong Jewish identity, and I didn’t realize how much that weighed on me for years,” he said. 

          Dynerman works his pieces in a way that nears a universal understanding of the strife and conflict in our world.  In addition to his swift, spontaneous marks there are typically pieces of human forms worked into the composition, either directly or abstractly.  The act of Dynerman making these works is part of a process that helps him make sense of a world where these things can happen, and each piece becomes a glimpse into this process.  The fact that he draws on so many outside sources of imagery enhances the sense of conflict in his work by removing part of his control over the work.

     A current work I saw on his wall actually contained artwork that was not even his.  “Before I left for Poland I pulled out several drawings from garbage cans at MIAD because there were nice pieces of paper.  I actually drew on those, so you see that those ink layers are actually somebody’s drawings that I don’t even know who made them,” he said.  In Dynerman’s world, any material or object has the potential to become art, all it takes is his vision to make it so.   

          Rina Yoon, a printmaker who shares the studio space with Dynerman, was out of the country during my visit, but she had several print editions out on the table that I was able to see.  Dynerman said she does not normally edition work, and didn’t know why he had decided to make multiple copies of these images.  Like Dynerman, her work often involves the figure, and lately she has been using photo intaglio processes to make her images.  “These started as photographs and then they were turned into transparencies, and then she would draw on those transparencies, trying to create an image that relies on some sort of photographic material but does not feel like a photograph,” he said of her prints on the table.  He said her imagery tends to revolve around ideas of the body, both personally and symbolically.  With she herself being transplanted to Milwaukee from Korea, some of her images deal with the idea of cultural identity, and others move into the realm of dealing with the body metaphorically.  Since she wasn’t there to talk about it herself I can’t say much about her work, but hopefully I’ll be able to talk to her in person about it soon.

          The two of them combined produce an amazing amount of work.  In the back of their studio are two rooms the size of my one-bedroom apartment so packed full of work that it’s hard to walk in, and that excludes the work that was seen in the main studio area.  Milwaukee has made some forward strides in becoming a cultural center within the last ten years, and it is hoped that prolific artists like Dynerman and Yoon can help enhance the scene.  “It’s better compared to when I came,” he said of the Milwaukee art scene.  “There are a few galleries in town that seem to be more interested in discourse in the arts rather than selling decorations for living rooms,” he said.  Dynerman’s work is the type that really forces viewers to think, and hopefully he can help push the Milwaukee art scene in a positive direction.

Dynerman’s website can be viewed here.

          Since graduating from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2004 with a degree in printmaking, Kim Weiss has devoted much of her time to starting a community print shop, which she did in conjunction with RedLine Milwaukee and the help of fellow classmate Kari Couture.  Between her volunteer work there and her job of creating window displays for Anthropologie, her production of personal work has slowed.  “I feel like I’m more of a printmaking facilitator now” she said.  But she still occasionally finds time to add some new pieces to her unique body of work.

            A running theme in her work has been the use of animals, particularly dead ones.  Her interest in animal images comes from their aesthetic and metaphorical qualities, and she is drawn to the idea of using dead animals because of the contradiction they can present.  “I think of in Baroque still lives when they have game animals, and they have pictures of the kills and stuff like that, but it’s supposed to be a beautiful still life,” she said.  She said she tends to be drawn towards morbid images, but she approaches her subjects in a way that is not at all grotesque, and quite often beautiful.

          Her senior show at MIAD featured many large-scale woodblock prints of herself interacting with a swarm of bees in various ways.  Some of the prints are ‘safer’ images, such as her holding a bee in a jar behind her back, but many of them use imagery that if rendered differently could make the viewer cringe.  Images of a beehive emerging from a split in her back, her arm emerging from a swarming beehive, and her face obscured by a cloud of the insects would be unsettling images if it weren’t for her ability to show them in a less sinister light.  Her color choices and the graphic quality of her woodblocks create an effect that is like looking into a surreal world where we are able to also see the positive side of things that would normally make us uncomfortable.

            And really, when you think about it, there is nothing overtly gross about a dead animal most of the time.  Just the fact that it is dead causes us to avert our eyes, and Weiss has found her muse by looking at what most people look away from.  “Whenever I’d see a dead bird on the sidewalk I was taking pictures of them.  And as part of my thesis I think I had, like, 50 monotypes of dead birds,” she said.

            I was unable to see any of these monotypes, but she did have some more recent prints available to share.  The style and size of these prints was very similar to her earlier bee images, but she has removed herself from these prints and placed more emphasis on the fact that the death of these animals is part of the natural order.  At least that is what I picked up from seeing flowers sprouting out of a rabbit’s side and eggs laying next to a dead bird.  These animals are gone, but we also see that it is part of a process that happens every day.  And maybe that is why we look the other way when we see a dead bird by the side of the road – because subconsciously we know that we are a part of that process too.  But Weiss’s prints can remind us that dying is not an end, but a completion.

            The last pieces she showed me were very inventive uses of printmaking.  In two oval frames were clusters of rats, which looked nice by themselves, but when she showed me pictures of them installed I saw that this work was actually more about what was happening outside of the frame.  The clusters of rats continued out beyond the limits of the frame, making it a small vignette of a much larger, uncontained cluster of rats.  There are no dead animals in these prints, but they achieve the same conflicted reaction from the viewer by approaching something gross in a decorative way.  Like her dead bird prints that were done from observational photos, these pieces were somewhat inspired by real life events.  In her high school feeder rats were bred as part of an environmental education class she was in.  “I used to be kind of the person who took care of the rats because everyone else was too grossed out by them,” she said.  “But it wasn’t managed very well by the teacher and the rats would overpopulate.  They’d be in these little cages and there would be so many of them, and it really disturbed me,” she said.

            Weiss has a real knack for taking on disturbing images and turning them into something fascinating.  So if you get a chance, go down to RedLine in Milwaukee and encourage her to keep making prints, because she is too good to be just a ‘facilitator of printmaking’.

Kim Weiss’s website can be viewed here.

"Blood Bunnies"- Butcher's blood on watercolor paper

Weiss's thesis show in 2004

A view of downtown Milwaukee from across the Milwaukee River, at a site not too far from RedLine.

            But now Milwaukee feels alive and energized.  Walking down Farwell Avenue on the East Side I took note of how improved the businesses and properties were, and how many buildings I didn’t even recognize.  It was as if some madman had gotten hold of a set of condominium blueprints and built as many as he could before being apprehended.  This growth was not limited to the East Side either.  New and renovated buildings ran all along the river down to the Third Ward.  Even the dingy little area I used to eat lunch in down south in Bay View had been reformed into a respectable looking place.  People were finally putting some of these forgotten areas to use, and it was exciting.

            Among the new developments in Milwaukee is RedLine, a community arts organization that has taken root just north of downtown, in a building that only two years ago had been jam-packed full of restaurant equipment.  As an organization, RedLine was first begun in 2008 in Denver by artist Laura Merage with the mission of being a center for integrating the community and the arts.  Then one year later artists Lori Bauman and Steve Vande Zande co-founded RedLine’s Milwaukee branch in conjunction with Merage’s organization under the same ideals, and remodeled an old building near the Milwaukee River to provide space for several artist residents, classes, art installations, and creativity of all types – including a printmaking studio.

            The building itself doesn’t stand out at all in the area, but I easily found it by the stenciled mud images on the sidewalk leading up to it.  RedLine’s printmaking operation is run by two volunteers, Kim Weiss and Kari Couture, both 2004 graduates in printmaking from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.  They had both planned on starting their own print shop coming out of school because the city lacked a printmaking shop for non-student use, and after hearing about Bauman and Vande Zande’s plan with RedLine agreed to team up with them and head the printmaking operation.

          Weiss said it was difficult in the beginning it was difficult to start the shop because they had no startup capital and equipment donations were hard to track down.  Some of the initial funding came from asking their friends for work to auction off, but since then acquisitions have been coming easier.  “Once you have a building and you’re running, people want to give you stuff,” she said.  Recently they didn’t have enough money to buy an intaglio press from an artist who was moving out of the country, and through a few emails found enough donations to make the purchase.  She said they now get calls from people who just have old equipment and supplies that they never use anymore and want to donate, which never happened early on.

Kari Couture, left, and Kim Weiss, right, in the RedLine press room

          Currently RedLine’s printmaking shop is fully equipped to do screen printing, intaglio, and relief printing.  Although they would like to offer lithography and have the space to do it, Weiss said it’s not likely to happen soon.  “It’s a whole other set of equipment,” she said of lithography.  “We’re prioritizing letterpress right now, so that’s probably going to be the next thing we try to get in here.”

          Weiss took me on a tour of the space and I saw that although RedLine is currently hosting about 15 resident artists and hosted several functions, it is still in many ways just getting started and has plenty of room to grow.  Just when I thought I had seen everything on the floor she would open a door to reveal dozens of computers or three kilns.  They also recently installed a paper-making station, which can be a great asset to the printmaking area.  Anyone who has been involved in printing knows that it can lead to an insatiable interest in paper, and the ability to make your own paper opens the door to a new dimension of what can be attained on the press.

          Not everyone that works at RedLine gets that serious about it though.  She pulled out some of the work that was made at an “Iron Printmaker” even held there recently, but unlike most competitions that have the word “iron” in them, the contestants were newcomers to the event.  Three teams of lawyers, teachers, and baristas competed in an event where they were shown several printmaking processes, then were given different challenges in which to use them.  “The lawyers were really funny.  They would talk about their print for a long time before they actually started making it.  The professors kind of tried to show off the whole time, trying to show all the processes they could do, because they kind of cheated and had taken some classes beforehand.  And the baristas were just like ‘BLAH!  Let’s get this done!’” said Weiss.  “They definitely got the most drunk” she added.  The works the teams produced may not have been masterpieces, but she said the event was a lot of fun and achieved the goal of getting new people involved in the creative process.

Kim Weiss looks over some of the creations from the Iron Printmaker competition

A set of large drawings by a resident artist hanging in a back hallway of RedLine

An installation in the RedLine gallery by a resident artist

Some of the studios available at RedLine

Coming up next, a look at some of Kim Weiss’s personal work.