Over the course of about 20 years, Los Angeles publisher Edition Jacob Samuel published 43 print portfolios made by the likes of John Baldessari, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor and Ed Ruscha, just to name a few. In doing so, he was able to show the successes, failures and in-betweens that are produced when artists force their work and practice into a predetermined medium and format. Such is the case at “Outside the Box," an exhibition at UCLA’s Hammer Museum which showcases the newly acquired Edition Jacob Samuel archive.
I happened into the exhibit through the exit, so I was lucky enough to end on a high note with Marina Abramović’s Spirit Cooking with essential aphrodisiac recipes (1996). Not only do these 39 prints showcase Abramović’s use of and obsession with natural elements (One print reads “breakfast ROSE QUARTZ lunch OBSIDIAN dinner TOURMALINE"), but they also speak to both her process in creating and implementing performances and concern with keeping performance alive through others. She turns daily actions such as looking in a mirror and intercourse with one’s lover into duration pieces to be practiced at home. Even the making of the prints, literally embedded with her DNA, is a signature Abramović performance in itself; her spit was mixed with the ink and the pressure of her fingers and fingernails were used to create all of the images.
Another portfolio that acts as an extension of the artist’s body of work with a 2D twist was Gabriel Orozco’s Polvo Impreso (Lint Book) (2002). With his usual focus on the every-day object, Orozco glorifies a waste product which we generally destroy and throw away but which also contains, as the opening print points out, “leftovers […] from our bodies: they contain human skin and hair.” In addition to small fragments of humans, lint also contains dust, a well-known enemy of printmaking. Though usually abhorred, Polvo Impreso makes lint something to be studied carefully and mounted behind glass, something that is beautiful in its fragility and messiness.
Though there are a number of works, such as the aforementioned, that fluidly tie in the process and format of printmaking with the oeuvre of certain artists, this exhibit also houses flat-out the failures that showcase the inability of other artists to turn the prints into works that stand on their own. The two that stand out on this end were Dan Graham’s Two-way Mirror/Hedge Projects (2004) and Andrea Zittel’s Rules of Raugh (2005).
While Graham’s piece is fairly informative, it is simply a collection of his diagrams and photographs of his already well-known work. Text is utilized only to describe the projects in the most basic terms possible. The diagrams are messy line drawings of an aerial views of the installations followed by photographs of the same works taken from a ground perspective. This creates the exact opposite of what makes Graham so great; instead of the playful guess-work that goes into interaction with his installations, the prints are boring, sloppy and tell you exactly what you are looking at.
Though the title of Zittel’s portfolio references her Raugh furniture, it turns out to be a series of sketches of wooden furniture, small shelters and lone structures in the middle of the desert that seem to exist in direct opposition to her Rules of Raugh, which are spelled out in the opening print. Again little more than visual representation of work either already or easily created by Zittel, both this and Two-way Mirror/Hedge Projects made Google searches and show catalogues look like more informative, more interesting and significantly less pricey alternatives.
Though slightly disappointing (and a little exciting) that such big names can’t all make work that tests boundaries at all times, those disappointments become just as interesting and informative as the truly wonderful. By showing what such varied artists produce when working in the exact same medium, "Outside the Box” provides a snapshot into each of their brains, contextualized by their individual responses to the request to publish a set of prints.
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