Fur And Feathers In Litho And Lino
The Age
Thursday November 8, 2007
MERCE CUNNINGHAM
Untitled - Melbourne 2007, Australian Print Workshop, 210 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, until November 17 www.australianprintworkshop.com JOSEPH BEUYS Multiples, BlockProjects, level 3, 34-36 Block Place, city, until November 17 www.blockprojects.com JAZMINA CININAS The Girlie Werewolf Project, Centre for Australian Printmaking, 67 Cambridge Street, Collingwood, until November 10 THERE is a lot of pleasure to be had from animals, known and imaginary, in these three shows, which also have in common the use of mechanical reproduction. Let three lithographic drawings by Merce Cunningham that commemorate this "free-wheeling" American choreographer's recent visit to Melbourne set your mood.Untitled 1, the first of three black-on-grey lithographs printed by Martin King and Simon White from aluminium plates that Cunningham drew on in New York, features a pointy-nosed bird. According to King, when asked what sort of bird it was, Cunningham had replied it was an intelligent bird that had made a mistake but didn't know what. There may be more of a story in those few words than in Cunningham's corpus of famously non-narrative dance works, and the looseness of his line may, paradoxically, here describe a body capable of creaky flight at best, but what comes across is Cunningham's practice of drawing as an everyday activity. Did Cunningham's German contemporary Joseph Beuys ever dance? Certainly he performed. In a 1974 "action" (I Like America and America Likes Me), Beuys and a coyote shared the confined space of a New York gallery for three days, the artist having been delivered there, covered in felt, in an ambulance from the airport. As a protest at the hegemony of US art and at the war in Vietnam, Beuys had wanted to see nothing of America but a coyote, representative for him of indigenous cultures. (He left the US without having touched American soil, it is said.) In this handsome show of 15 works (on paper, card or felt), it's not a coyote that represents pre-history but an ochre-coloured lithograph of a dribbly, brushed-on drawing of a hind, standing at weightless ease, as in a cave painting.Beuys' life-long interest in folklore and myth is shared by contemporary Australian-Lithuanian artist Jazmina Cininas. The Girlie Werewolf Project: Heretics and Hirsute Heroines is a huge undertaking. Along one wall of this splendid new print centre is shown just how much work is involved in a reduction linocut. (You ink up the block with the palest colour first, print from it, then cut from the block the areas that you want to remain that colour in the final print, ink the block with the next colour, and so on. With the aid of paper stencils, you can produce multicoloured - as many as 17 here - prints from one block.) The hirsute Ann of Meremoisa 1623, whose charm, Cininas tells us, was evident to horses and small animals, might not appear out of place in some households in Thornbury, say, but would certainly raise plucked eyebrows in leafier suburbs. But girlie werewolves have never been respecters of real estate: "Despite her obvious skill, the Meersburg folk did not much care for Else's wolf-riding" (Else of Meersburg c1450). These wickedly good images offer a hair-raising ride through feminist precepts and popular prejudices.
© 2007 The Age
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