colin self: Objects of our times
Printmaking Today, Vol.13, No.4, Winter 2005
In 1963, at the Slade, Colin Self made Bomber No.1. It was first of his groundbreaking multiple plate etchings and was made using the metal end plates of an electric motor scavenged from a rubbish dump near University College. Self’s tutor, Anthony Gross, fearing that this radical new technique - which involved laying the separately inked plates onto the bed of the press - might damage the expensive equipment, made him print on a little unused press which stood outside the etching room, a gesture emblematic of Self’s reception within the art world ever since.
Self had previously made conventional etching studies, for example the beautifully drawn Margaret in a Chair (1963), but Bomber No.1 stands at the beginning of his innovations in printmaking. A snub nosed beast with a surprisingly delicate fuselage and tail, it heralds the beginning of his use of images of warfare, specifically the bombers that he feared would be the agents of imminent nuclear annihilation, the central theme of his work of the 1960s.[1] Not only made using a startling new technique, the print was unconventional in other ways. It was printed in an ‘Edition of 5 or 6 varying prints.’ (the variations were produced not only in the positioning of the individual plates but by the application of model-kit transfers of the military insignia of different nations to the wings) thus subverting the notion of a print as a standard and repeatable image. This willingness to see a print edition as a means to explore a set of variations on an image is something that Self has continued to embrace.
Self remains one of the most consistently inventive and idiosyncratic artists of his generation. Often positioned within the Pop Art movement Self's work is more complex and critical than the label implies. In the 1960s he showed frequently in the UK and internationally, but in the 70s and 80s he dropped out of the public eye, becoming something of a cult figure, an ‘artist's artist'. In recent years his profile has begun to rise, a fact confirmed by recent displays at the RA, Tate Modern and Tate Britain, and his inclusion in a number of shows revisiting Pop Art and the 1960s.[2] Perhaps best known for his highly charged, intensely detailed pencil drawings - which in the 1960s often contrasted images of cold war militarism with animal aggression and contemporary consumerism - and hybrid sculptures, his work was and continues to be extraordinarily various; encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, graphics and ceramics.
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Self’s early experiments with multiple plate etchings and torn paperplate editions were all printed opportunistically on the presses at the Slade (where he studied) or Norwich Art School (where he occasionally taught). So when, in 1968, Joe Studholme invited him to make prints with Editions Alecto he embraced the opportunity to work in a professional studio and the chance to explore a variety of techniques. Over the next three years he made three suites of prints in collaboration with Maurice Payne, Dan Black, James Collyer, John Crossley, and Lyn Haywood at Alecto: Out of Focus Object and Flowers (1968) (three prints in editions of 75 plus a number of trial proofs and unique variations); Power and Beauty (1968) (6 prints in the main suite in editions of 75 plus some variations); and Prelude to 1,000 Temporary Objects of our Times (1971) (9 etchings in editions of 60, plus proofs).[3] The first series was a prize winner at the first International Print Biennale in Bradford in 1968, and the latter was selected to represent Britain at the XI Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1971. Self’s extremely successful collaboration with Alecto is characterised by exploration; each group of prints represents a departure, each utilises different techniques and each addresses different themes.
The three Out of Focus Object and Flowers etchings are about ‘nostalgia and memory, about trying to reclaim a golden age’ (perhaps a pre-nuclear age of innocence?), the Out of Focus Object itself ‘symbolising some significant thing in one’s past, affecting one, but unrecollectable.’[4] The fragile images were made by pressing flowers – in themselves impermanent - against soft and hard grounds and as such represent a conscious effort to remove the ‘calligraphy’ of the artist’s hand.
In contrast Power and Beauty is an exploration of scale and the ways in which it can transform an image. Self had kept certain haunting photographs that he felt to be ‘complete, impregnable’, since the 1950s. Now, rigorous cropping and use of carefully calibrated colour washes enhanced their authority and strange power. The series includes five animals – a cat, a dying whale, a peacock, a charging bull elephant and a malevolent cockerel - and a single image of a man-made object, a custom car. Parallels are suggested, connections established. With Self’s treatment the car ‘…becomes elephantine, sinister and oppressive’ and, hinting at the larger theme his work of this period was addressing, ‘more menacing than nuclear warheads.’ This was the first time Self had employed the classic pop trope of found photographic imagery – printing the images using photo-etching (for the car) and screenprinting (for the rest), and the result is a set of prints of unnerving power. They are perhaps the closest Self came to ‘pure’ Pop – in method at least - although they, as with all Self’s work of the period, are washed through with depths of darkness and the threat of violence.
While more subtle and restrained in character the suite Prelude to 1,000 Temporary Objects of our Times is perhaps on one level even more disturbing. The series appears to document a civilisation in the process of vaporisation; all that is left are traces which recall the thermal shadows made by the bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within the series are images that appear to be abstract and yet this assumption is overturned by the concrete relation they actually have to real objects in the real world. The subjects – including a dead blackbird, shoe trees, a nude - were pressed against the plates and then sprayed with acid resist (so that only their ‘shadows’ printed). These haunting prints serve as both summary and suggestion of the breadth of the related series of 1,200 aerosol spray studies, made between 1964 and 1972. This is perhaps Self’s most ambitious work, an encyclopaedic record of the nuclear years and what he calls ‘a visual consensus of our age’.
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Through the 70s and 80s Self worked prolifically and continued to make prints. He experimented with lo-fi DIY techniques including potato prints, aerosol stencils and black and white Photostats made at his local garage. Always looking out for original techniques he now embraced the new technology of laser copying, producing editions based on collaged works. Throughout the 1990s he also worked on an extraordinary series of frottage drawings, representing the imaginary journeys of The Tourist - a figure taken from a printers block found one night on a rubbish dump - in which the boundaries between editioned print and unique work were again blurred.
Despite the amazing variety of techniques Self has explored, etching has always been his preferred medium for printmaking. He has said ‘I love the pressure in etching. The believability of 25 tons per square inch.’ Even Self’s most archetypically Pop suite, Power and Beauty, contains one work in this most traditional of mediums. More recently, since March 2000, Self has returned to this medium, working with printer Linda Richardson on an extended, open-ended series of multiple plate etchings, The Odyssey/Iliad Suite. Revisiting a technique he developed almost 40 years earlier they are made ‘from my own life experience, printed from the sea of detritus found by me on a different odyssey.’ Self had been collecting material - ‘anything remotely possible to print’ - from dumps, jumble sales and car boots sales for years but had not had the facilities to make the large scale prints he envisaged.[5] Now, working with Richardson, he has been able to conceive and make prints of unprecedented complexity. Whereas Bomber No.1 consisted of just six separate plates, some of the Odyssey prints contain over 100 individual plates. Producing such ambitious images is an extremely painstaking and labour intensive process: each element is individually inked and then arranged by Self on the press, for each separate pull of the edition. As before, there are variations. As the full edition is not printed in a single session, but over an extended period some images inevitably develop. Self describes them as ‘each one a growing happening.’
It is a process fraught with problems. The time involved in inking and laying out the plates means that a day’s printing can sometimes result in just one or two impressions. There is also the question of how to run through the press a set of objects of varying thicknesses and materials - including large and tiny metal engine and watch parts, coins, vinyl records and cardboard - without damaging either them or the press. Nonetheless, for Self the problems are worthwhile. The clarity of the resulting images is striking, and the method encourages experiment and change, thus offering a more exciting prospect for the artist than an edition of fixed and static images. The result is a series of large scale, complex pictograms in which meaning is layered. The Stealth Bomber I (2002) (Self’s twenty-first century update of the original Bomber No.1) is made from razors, the blades of knives and saws, the chassis of a radio, and incorporates Soviet Airforce buttons depicting MiG 19 fighters. The objects are both themselves, and elements within the picture.[6] Thus both materials and method contribute to the richness of the works.
Self uses Homer’s Odyssey as a conceptual framework in which to situate these new prints but two more useful points of reference are perhaps Goya’s print series, specifically The Disasters of War (which as a student Self saw on a daily basis, during his visits to the refectory at University College), and Picasso’s Suite 347 (made in the year he began his collaboration with Alecto, and which he remembers seeing on a visit there). Like both precursors Self’s Odyssey is a loose, expanding series of works which revisit events from his life, themes and subjects from throughout his career. The images are ‘freeform, lateral, independent equivalents’ for the events of the narrative, but are not illustrations. Some prints refer directly to events in Homer’s story, such as The Return to Ithaca (2002) or The Cyclops (2002), others such as Dollar Symbol (2001) and Euro (2000) are more oblique, perhaps referencing relationships between politics, taxes, military power, war. With over 40 images completed so far but a lifetime of image-making and Self’s own continuing ‘different Odyssey’ to draw on, the series could potentially extend almost indefinitely.
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Printmaking has perhaps remained important to Self because, paradoxically, he doesn’t assign it a special status within his practice. His prints are not secondary to his drawings, paintings or sculpture (and many are, in fact, essentially unique, despite being editioned). He believes that ‘art is simply the result of the questions one asks.’ By working in a range of techniques, making work in small editions, exploring variations and, crucially, rejecting the notion of a signature style, Self’s printmaking has remained vital. His work remains as powerful and fascinating now as when he was turned away from the Slade’s main press, and made to work in a corridor outside the etching room, over 40 years ago.
[1] See my essay ‘Colin Self and the Bomb’ in Art & The 60s, exh cat, Tate Britain 2004.
[2] Pop Impressions Europe/USA, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1999; As Is When: A Boom in British Printmaking 1961-1972, British Council 2003; Pop Art UK: British Pop Art 1956-1972, Galleria Civica di Modena, 2004; Art & The 60s: This Was Tomorrow, Tate Britain 2004. More recent work was included in Colin Self: post 1990 works, James Colman, London 2004.
[3] For further details see Tessa Sidey Editions Alecto: Original Graphics Multiple Originals 1960-81 Lund Humphries 2003.
[4] Unless specified quotations are taken from correspondence and conversations with the artist, Summer 2004.
[5] Self relates this technique to his fascination with the artefacts of industrial history and the development of the mass production of interchangeable components. ‘It is etching reinvented for the age of waste, industrial society, mass production, glut, built in obsolescence…’
[6] Self likens his use of such materials to Orlando Gibbons’ use of London street cries on his music. In working this way he ‘believes in and elevates to fine art common objects and history’s army of unsung artists…’