Why Shaped Paper?
Back, back, back 40,000 years and earlier the activity called cave painting took place in the furthest reaches of a cavern, often half a mile deep into Mother Earth. Here the making and maker were in solitude. What was created was visible only to those intimately involved in this endeavor. After thousands upon thousands of years artists stopped drawing on cave walls and started marking on other surfaces. Art making and art seeing evolved into an elaborate cultural activity heavily anchored in formula and tradition. Periodically art and other human ideas are reexamined and overturned. Artistic conventions are not absolute.
Artists in the sixties and seventies, like artists across the ages, were participating in widespread examination of the why and how of our forms and formulas. What makes this art and that not? I liked the concept that the answer is always there, but just needs to be rediscovered.
I had fallen in love with the making of prints. I loved using the techniques of lithography, woodcut, etching, and screenprinting for art making. There is also a core evolution to the processes that talks about hierarchy. This core evolution made me want to explore on a smaller, more personal scale the low esteem granted to prints. How might my prints rise beyond the low value and stature they were relegated to by the greater art world?
Art, as a visual language, had lost a battle long ago to visible language: writing. Of all the art forms that have developed over the eons, printmaking gives the greatest evidence of that loss and of being subservient to the visible word. Printmaking was adapted from the sculptors craft, and became a slave to printed words. Prints would augment the ideas on the pages of books, illustrate them, decorate them. Whether in a book, as a loose leaf in a portfolio, or as a broadside; those objects we call prints bear characteristics relating them to book format. The traditional attributes shared by printed art and printed words are being rectangular and having a margin. Paper is made in rectangular sheets. Why do printed text and illustrations have margins? So you don’t cover words with your fingers when you are reading your prayers...... To allow for holding, handling, and displaying of the printed page and to act as a pristine border to separate the printed area from the "real" world. So, when is a printed artwork not just a printed image accompanying a text and how can printmaking techniques be freed from old conventions? This seemed a respectable question to ask.
Like any number of artists, I recognized that the margin on a print was not only dispensable, but had to be addressed. Painters didn’t hold paint back from the border of a canvas. So, like a few others, I printed, bled my ink to the edge. Still, I was held in the grip of the window illusion due to the rectangularity of commercial paper. My prints, regardless of the medium or technique were still book shape. During a visit to Cranbrook, in 1969, I witnessed paper being made by hand. Why were they making paper? "Because it’s cheaper than buying it", I was told. Not a good enough answer. A few years later the same question and answer was handed to me in Detroit, where Aris Koutroulis had set up a papermill. I had been tearing paper into shapes, but the result was unsatisfying. This time, I considered that there may be a better answer than "cheaper than buying paper". I imagined it was probably possible to control other things than just money concerns. That was my personal breakthrough. I could control color, texture, shape, size, thickness. Paper could be more than a support for an image.
More than anything I wanted to make paper that wasn’t suitable for books. From 1974 to 76 I made dozens and dozens of shapes, traveling between Oberlin and Detroit for marathon papermaking weekends. I made many different free form shapes. I tried to make shapes that had no possible associations and a few that did. The geometric ones were disk and fans. I knew that Twinrocker, a pioneering handmade papermill, had made some disks for Alan Shields and I was lucky to pick up a few sheets. I actually printed first on Twinrocker paper to break my reluctance to print on my own paper. I screenprinted, lithoed, and etched; printing up a storm on my paper. I become free enough about the use of my paper that I could obliterate the fact that it was even paper. Handmade paper became part of the mix and was no longer precious. My paper satisfied my needs and broke any bonds with books.
When I first showed the shaped pieces I was pleased with the response. However, one reaction to an early shape shocked me. A collector bought a piece called "Dutchman", shaped like a pair of Dutchman’s pants, but had it tipped on an angle within the frame so that to her it would look like a horse’s head! It didn’t look like a horse’s head to me and I most certainly never intended or considered it as a possibility. Regardless of how free form the shape and what the image or pattern, some people would see things that were not intended or desired. I had forgotten how powerful Rorschach Blots and spotting star constellations are to humans.
In reaction, I tried to direct the viewer by creating more specific shapes, thereby limiting unwanted projection from the viewer. Most of these new shapes had connections with non western art, and were valid bearers of imagery already. My goal was to introduce the format as a motif for western art. These shapes came with their own set of associations, but none of the unexpected Rorschach surprises. The three shapes I focused on were the elongated oval, dramatically seen in African shields, the fan, and the open, displayed, kimono. I wanted to make the ovals vibrate with color and tilt on their axises, removing them from the usual western use of the oval for polite portraiture or Easter egg allusion. The fan was already well know as a motif used by Gauguin and many others.
My first kimonos were a series of one hundred variations on a simple motif. I had appropriated a very famous and recognizable Japanese Noh costume and reduced it to its graphic essentials. I reduced the scale and made a linear engraving on two abutted zinc plates. I made four hundred sheets of paper in two basic forms, the right and left body/verticals and right and left extended arms/horizontals. These papers were various colors. Each kimono form was assembled by weaving four sheets together and giving them to an assistant to join on a commercial sewing machine. After assembly, the forms were imprinted using uniquely inked plates. Finally the already varied pieces were handcolored using four pouchoir stencils. The results were a series of one hundred, related, but unique pieces. I intended to show the pieces together, but succeeded in only showing a portion in Minneapolis and later in Liechtenstein.
The kimono format was perhaps on the verge of breaking loose within the Zeitgeist, on its own. Shortly after my first showing of the kimono forms in 1978, kimonos and kimono inspired artworks seemed to be everywhere. One day my New York dealer called to ask if Miriam Shapiro could have permission to borrow a few of my pieces to take to her studio. While I was flattered, this phone call combined with the proliferation of kimono imagery was enough to make me back off the kimono bandwagon. Kimonos, for me were not about the human form or about designing fabrics or clothing. They were, until that point in time, an untapped shape worthy of use.
However, I did continue to make kimono shaped pieces, in three foot and full size formats, but used a hybridized imagery to merge unrelated cultural motifs together, such as repeated Southwest Mimbres pottery designs on an architectonic kimono. I have continued to view the format as viable and wander back to it from time to time, but always with the concept that they are a thread in a continuing series that will never be exhausted.
One thing I have learned again and again is that a viewer will open unexpected baggage onto an artwork. Sometimes that can be a pleasant surprise, but not often. I have had viewers who had confused the kimono shapes with human forms. These are not even kimonos, only kimono shapes bearing imagery and certainly not stand ins for humans. Shaped paper formats can prove to be problematic.
The least problematic shapes I continue to produce are the wedge shapes. They have become my favorite format. The wedge shape has a quality of Power, Strength, and while it has stability, I have made it asymmetric and banner like. It permits a more limited range of interpretations, but is still potent in it’s rich possibilities.
Of late, while I would not consider moving back to putting my prints into a position lower than a book, I have relaxed about using machine made paper, at least when I’m feeling lazy. Fortunately,
I’m not quite so lazy and prefer to go through the process of making my own paper, even if it is now rectangular, and letting it show that it isn’t beholding to any text.
Sandy Kinnee
September 16, 2002
Note: Shaped pieces in various museums. Kimonos are in the Metropolitan Art Museum, NYC; Portland Art Museum; New Britain Museum of American Art; Madison Art Center, etc. Oval in the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Free form piece in Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College.