Stones, by Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara
“The Collaborative Spirit: Prints, Presses & Deluxe Artists’ Books”
Harry Ransom Center, through Oct. 3
I was in a pretty good state of mind when I visited “The Collaborative Spirit: Prints, Presses & Deluxe Artists’ Books” at the Ransom Center galleries. It is a terrific show, a collaboration between Ransom curator Peter Mears and Flatbed Press co-founder Mark Smith that spotlights the Center’s collections of printed artists’ books combining image and text from the last half of the 20th century.
Splashed across the soothing gray walls and cool glass vitrines is the human spirit at play: celebrating, interpreting, interpolating, exploring, pushing, prodding, treading new ground. Especially in the art from the heady 1950s and 1960s, there is an exuberance, a freedom, an iconoclastic stance a creative and a particularly American spirit at work.
After a quick look around, I felt my mind relaxing and thought, “What a relief art is!” Great art is a mind-altering experience, but this was an immediate reaction. I had not yet ingested the show. Just what did I need relief from?
Unconsciously, I realized, the ongoing war in Iraq was affecting me. We see art within the context in which it is presented, yet that context can be psychological, too, and the contrast between these anxious, anguished times and the exuberance and true freedom of an earlier era in our shared American experience was underscored by the works here.
After all, this is a show about collaboration, the time-honored process that, until recently, was a necessity for this country to take part in if it were to even consider engaging in a war. These works would not exist without visual artists collaborating with writers, and that team collaborating with master printers.
While the show set off this reaction about the state of the world, specific works evoked a more personal response, such as the playful seriousness of Stones, a deep and rewarding collaboration between Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara that is a portrait of kinship as well as moment. Within a spare and dense cartoon-y milieu, a handwritten scrawl avers,
“Poetry
Belongs to Me, LARRY, AND
Painting to you
That’s what G said to P and …”
On another page of the nine displayed, it becomes clear that G is Gertrude, as in Stein, and P is Picasso. On these pages the artists are not just placing themselves within the context of the previous generation, they are also setting the tone of their lives down on stone to create these lithographs. The pages expand and collapse: On one page, the artists set the stage of their era in few words and loose imagery, observing “poetry declining” and “painting advancing”; on another, we see and hear the personal moment: a particular mood on a particular day at a “Melancholy breakfast” in which “the elements of disbelief are very strong in the morning,” acknowledging despair while allowing for hope.
In Stones and elsewhere in the show is tangible evidence of the spirit of a time that seemed to come to a close with the actions of 9/11. But that spirit is personal and individual, as well as collective, and it is in its practice that it lives. Allowing for despair, this art reminds us not to give up hope.
