On The Work Puberty After Munch

Letter

The work Puberty After Munch was created and exhibited in 2011. The materials are printing ink, graphite and beeswax on paper. The format of the piece is based on the dimensions of my own hands; the black rectangle corresponds to the space created when I lay my hands flat in front of me, thumbs touching and the rest of my fingers pointing straight ahead. The gesture may echo scenes in films where a photographer, or an artist, or some other visually apt character uses their hands to frame a distant landscape or a face. The work Puberty by Edvard Munch is the background for the work. And maybe there is some correlation between puberty, the gesture, the image and the staging. Who knows.

Puberty After Munch is part of a series of a total of 16 appropriations. The term appropriation is familiar: for example, a piece of privately owned land might be appropriated by a government that needs to build a highway right there. The landowner is forced to sell the land to the government — the land is appropriated.

I appropriated six works from five artists. The works were located right where my route needed to be built. The artists were Paul Cézanne, Andy Warhol, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon and Francisco Goya. And not only did I appropriate the works! I also copied, reproduced, de- and reconstructed, dissolved, wrote on, and quite nearly eliminated paintings by that handful of artists.

It was by no means an expression of my aversion to that five-leaf clover. Quite the opposite, in fact: I did it because I have learned from them on my journey as a visual artist, and because every generation needs to go out into the world with an open mind and have their own experiences.

By overwriting and eliminating our role models, we wipe the slate clean and in my experience, a clean slate is a vital precondition for being able to create new ones. Puberty seems relevant here. Instead of fleeing from the painfully embarrassing, the pubescence of not really being able to yet, willfully repeating the process of puberty can be useful later in life, for example when the plate (or slate) is too full.

“When I sit down to write, nothing has ever been written.”

Inger Christensen

When I work, I often use numbers to propel the process. I find that minimizes the risk of intellectual obstacles arising in the middle of my work flow. In Puberty After Munch, the process reached the number four. The image field is divided into four sections. The figure, taken from a Munch painting, is (unlike the original) repeated four times.

I used a combination of techniques in Puberty After Munch: the internet, which I used to locate a digital version of Munch’s painting, then a computer program, with which I created the new collage. Next, I sent the image to prepress at an offset printer, where four metal plates were printed with my motive and image fields, now divided zero, one, two, three, four and five times, respectively.

The motive and image fields were then printed with black offset printing ink on paper that was otherwise destined for layouting or the waste bin. Some of the sheets had the light imprint of words from brochures the printer had just finished. More than a thousand sheets were printed four times each with black ink. Reused and overwritten. I stopped the machine many times to pour solvent on the plates. Thus, the resulting motives are increasingly faded.

At home in my studio, I chose 16 images from the over 6000 prints. I then treated the 16 images by hand using graphite and beeswax. First, I applied beeswax to the image and paper. I used razorblades to press the cold beeswax into the paper until the surface is smooth. Then, I used a hard rectangular graphite pencil to work the graphite into the beeswax. When a graphite pencil is ground forcefully and insistently into beeswax on paper long enough, the friction creates warmth, causing the graphite and beeswax to melt together. When the material cools, the surface is sealed, a black film. Then, using the razorblade again, I scraped the wax to a thin layer and worked the surface with graphite again, but this time with controlled and calm movements. I wanted to be able to control the surface’s transparency, how much was revealed and concealed, and also to leave tangible traces of my hands work with the materials.

That’s how the work Puberty After Munch came to be. A new image is born.

Yours truly, Michael B. Chang