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There Will Be Printing, Printing In The Street
If Johannes Gutenberg, father of the printing press, was gazing down upon the modern fruits of his 15th century efforts, I would especially want him to witness steamroller printing, a form of large-scale outdoor community printmaking that a handful of universities and artist collectives have performed in recent years. This is a type of relief printing in which an immense slab of plywood or particle board is carved by hand and then covered with lithographic ink, paper, and carpets or blankets. The image is printed by the action of a multi-ton industrial steamroller traversing the layered setup forward and backward. Many able hands are then required to lift the delicate print off of the block for drying.
Such an event entails hiring a piece of heavy-duty construction machinery to roll over a prepared plate of epic proportions. The end product? A street-sized image on street-sized paper. Such an event would have satiates both my desire to peacefully disrupt major transportation patterns and an obsession with excessive, large-scale mechanical reproduction. The meeting of hands and hearts, sloppy ink, a sheet of rag paper longer than I’ve ever seen, and a pulsating mass of raw steel barreling over asphalt.
I will offer you three examples of artists who have laid the foundation for all my plein-aire printing dreams.
1. Haig Demarjian - The original plate was carved from plywood with a drill, jigsaw, and router. The steamroller printing was an event hosted by the printmaking department of Montserrat College of Art where Demarjian teaches. The blocks of the various artists in attendance ranged from four to eight feet square, with one participant purportedly printing a design carved into a sixteen foot kayak! Demarjian’s print was exhibited briefly in a solo show at Winfinsky Gallery of Salem State College. His four-year-old son assisted in the creation of this piece. Visit his website for process images.
2. ARTORG, a Minnesota community arts group, in collaboration with Latino art collective Grupo Soap del Corazon, produced a 100-foot-long print for Northfield, Minnesota’s first community Dia de Los Muertos Celebration on November 1, 2006. Plywood blocks (4′ x 8′ each) created by a local artists were laid end to end in a parking lot and steamrolled. Printing continued for two days. The prints were exhibited in ArtOrg’s “Moving Walls” Gallery, a community space with repositionable walls. Check out a clip from “100-foot-long Steamroller Print”:
3. Drive-By Press - Gregory Nanney and Joseph Velasquez are on an extended University of Wisconsion grad school road trip, operating a press out of the back of their van. The two classmates hit the open highway in 2006, making pit stops at schools and art community sites to give demonstrations and sell t-shirts and prints made fresh from an ingenious press setup that slides in and out of the van trunk on tracks. The Drive-By Pressmen visited Space 1026, a Philadelphia-based printmaking collective and gallery space, in October for the group print show Pumping Killmud Down the Drillpipe. I helped them print myself a sexy Hello, Kitty t-shirt out in the middle of the street on a Friday night. Tickled, I was.
And so with faint nostalgia and perpetual enthusiasm, I bid you visit the web homes of these guardians of public printmaking.
Written by robin on 11/30/2007 in Blog | Printmaking
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