"Time and Time Again"

In an art market where the most desirable real estate is often a collapsible booth at an international fair, a work's ability to draw the eyes of distracted passersby is more important than, well, almost anything. Due to their small size and often subdued, if not monochromatic palette, prints have historically been challenged in this regard. But some contemporary publishers—notably Paragon Press, Two Palms Press, and Editions Jacob Samuel—have turned increasingly (sometimes exclusively) to producing portfolios that, when hung side by side, possess considerably more "wall power" than individual prints.

Now, an exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles provides some historical perspective on the form. Drawn largely from UCLA's Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts, “…And Then Again: Printed Series, 1500-2007” features fifteen works that span the history of printmaking, from Albrecht Dürer’s late 15th-century illustrations for The Apocalypse, to recent portfolios by Mona Hatoum and Christiane Baumgartner. The exhibition, which opened on March 23 and runs through July 13, defines the genre broadly—multiple images conceived as a single work—including both narrative and non-narrative examples.

While the show documents persistent and widespread artistic interest in the storytelling and aesthetic possibilities of the form, it doesn't necessarily explain its enduring appeal. Exhibition curator and Grunwald director Cynthia Burlingham's approach was to present a wide-ranging selection of works as a way of posing questions, not only about the historical significance of visual sequencing in printmaking, but about how we perceive and understand it. The works she has selected encompass wildly divergent subjects. Still, amid this diversity, a unifying thread emerges. The show makes visible the ways in which serial images represent the passage of time.

In the most obvious instances, changing descriptions of a landscape are used to convey a sense of time unfolding. Dutch artist Jan van de Velde's etchings “The Twelve Months” (1618) form a pictorial calendar in which each image presents a different exquisitely observed, seasonally appropriate view of the countryside. Hiroshige's classic woodcut series, “The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road” (1832-33), is essentially a travelogue of views along an approximately 300-mile journey from Edo (now Tokyo) to Kyoto. Focused on pilgrims, laborers and tourists—instead of the grand processionals of feudal lords for whom the road was built—the prints pay the same exquisite attention to the individual character of bridges, roadside inns, and teahouses as they do to dramatic vistas of Mt. Fuji, snow-covered mountain passes, and torrential rainstorms. The road winds through the fifty-three prints, ending at a point overlooking Kyoto and the Kamo River's "Great Bridge," the traveler's final passage into the city.

In their ability to tell a story through images, printed series have much in common with their cousins in popular media: comics and graphic novels. In his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, artist and leading comics theorist Scott McCloud defines the form as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence,” a description that applies equally well to narrative or sequential portfolios, in which individual images serve a similar purpose as frames within a comic. Art Spiegelman, author of the groundbreaking graphic novels Maus and In the Shadows of No Towers, describes an explicit correspondence between temporal narrative and physical space. “Most definitions of STORY leave me cold,” he writes in Breakdowns: From Maus to Now, An Anthology of Strips by Art Spiegelman, “Except for the one that says, ‘A complete horizontal division of a building.’” Like comics, printed series organize time in the same way that a building structures space.

Although “…And Then Again” doesn't explicitly deal with or even refer to comics, its installation perhaps unintentionally evokes a comparison. Many of the series are installed not in linear sequences but rather in grids reminiscent of the stacked frames of a comics page. Burlingham admits that such arrangements are due in part to limited wall space, but she also told me that she was inspired by the way grid layouts encourage the viewer's eye to move through and across the works in unpredictable ways. For example, she grouped the eighty etchings of Goya's “The Disasters of War” (1863) in four tight, horizontal rows of twenty images each. While she realizes that the layout might make it challenging for viewers to focus on individual prints, she notes that it does allow them to perceive more than one moment at a time. One’s eyes take in adjacent prints, both above and below, that represent the past as well as the future.

McCloud addresses this head-on in Understanding Comics, and he rightly recognizes that this enhanced perspective gives viewers a certain power. They can advance or retreat simply by shifting their gaze, something they can't do when watching a film or video, in which it is always only “now”. Artists who work in series may set up the story's framework, but they can't necessarily predict what paths their audience will take.

In some cases, temporal confusion is the desired effect. In her analysis of No Towers, Spiegelman's highly personal record of post-9/11 trauma, scholar Hilary Chute describes how the artist conveys psychic breakdown by disrupting the conventional structure of the comics page. “Often, the reader does not know where to go next,” she writes, “…at certain moments in No Towers one comes to a narrative juncture in which one may read vertically or horizontally, without being instructed which to do first…unhinged images float over and under frames, disrupting narrative movement; and frames break out of their erected rows.”

Some of the portfolios in "…And Then Again" also convey a non-linear understanding of time— albeit in a different way from Spiegelman's spatiotemporal distortions—when they use serial imagery to explore multiple versions of a single idea. While the comic artist's unruly frames thwart our expectations of narrative, and even temporal cohesion, portfolios that present variations on a theme, image, or idea often seem almost independent of time: the images could represent separate moments in the artist's thinking, or they could also be understood as different, simultaneous views of a single moment.

Mona Hatoum's “hair there & everywhere” (2004) embodies the first notion. Each of its ten prints was created by pressing tangled strands of the artist's own hair into a soft ground. The resulting etchings read as abstract squiggles or, alternately, simply as clumps of hair. Here, concerns about narrative progress seem beside the point. Each image could represent a single day's collection, but then again, might not, and it's unclear why there are ten prints, and why some are “hairier” than others. But this indeterminacy is part of the series’ appeal. The viewer keeps searching for clues, comparing the various compositions, seizing upon and then losing the suggestion of figures in the lines. While the images form a sequence, it's possible to get lost in them to the point that time, in a sense, comes to a standstill.

Time stops in a different way in Chris Ofili's “Agony in the Garden” (2007). Taking a Biblical story as his subject, the artist created eleven highly subjective visions of the same pivotal moment: Judas’s kiss. Presumably each image reflects the viewpoint of a different apostle, from serenely chaste to explicitly sexual. United by flowing lines, recurring plant motifs and the artist's signature “Afro-head” imagery, the lyrical black and white prints suggest not only the complexity of Judas’s betrayal, but the multi-faceted, unfixed nature of the Bible itself.

“Agony” is essentially anti-fundamentalist, and it is this ability to both structure and question our experience of time that gives serial imagery its power. In the hands of a van de Velde or a Hiroshige, it can give order to the world. But as seen in works by Hatoum and Ofili, it can also poke holes in that understanding. To return to Spiegelman's example, serial images transform time into metaphorical buildings in which we move—forward, backward, or sideways—at our own pace and under our own power. Or they dispense with the building altogether and come up with a new structure, perhaps chaotic, multi-vocal, yet potentially liberating. As such, serial images simultaneously give shape to history and invite us to participate in its telling.

This feature originally appeared in the May/June 2008 issue of art on paper. Reprinted with permission.

< back to art