ANALIA SABAN IS BROKEN
A N A L I A S A B A N AT G E M I N I G . E . L . Mechanical Drawings (One-Continuous Line)
Broke n Va se s Fin g e rp rin t 2016
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hen we witness the clicks and whirrs of machines, in either their analog or digital incarnations, we often sense in them a sentient, human quality.¹ These engines and devices are essential companions in our twenty-
first-century lives. And when they break down, one can feel sincere emotions at their demise: profound loss, or existential betrayal, as if part of one’s body or self were now missing. Analia Saban has frequently incorporated technological methods into her working process—from traditional tools to modern contraptions such as vacuums and laser cutters—using them to conflate conceptions of the “handmade” and “machine made” and to push materials to their breaking point. The resulting fractures, failures, and slippages exude mixed feelings of humor and pathos, no doubt because they offer metaphors for our own inevitable collapse.
Considering printmaking’s reliance on a careful negotiation between tools, technology, and an artist’s
hand, it is not surprising that Saban has repeatedly gravitated to the medium. Her recent print series, produced at the studios of Gemini G.E.L., explore the viscera and processes of machines, embracing them both as subject matter and as collaborative entities. In keeping with much of Saban’s practice, her prints also ask: how is it exactly that we assign meaning and value to particular objects, perceiving some as commonplace and others as art? And when they disintegrate, do they become something else entirely?
Each of the five etchings that comprise Saban’s Mechanical Drawings (One-Continuous Line) series depicts
an ordinary household machine: a watch, a blender, an electric toothbrush, a television, a recliner. Their basic outlines form the center of each print, while a constellation of cranks, gears, sprockets, springs, washers, batteries, and gaskets radiate outward, giving the viewer an exploded view of the gadgets’ internal parts. Though the subject matter may be banal—Saban has purposely mimicked the look of a technical diagram—there is a chaotic force to the crisscrossing lines that connect these disparate components, lending them a distinct sense of animation.
As the title of the series suggests, in fact, there is only one unbroken line that gives form to the whole of
each monochromatic print; the single beginning and end points are visible at the platemarks’ edges. Saban produced the original drawing using an industrial laser cutter, which she rigged to draw rather than to burn out its designs, and whose mechanisms generate a continuous line. The artist thus operated within certain of the machine’s constraints while pointedly manipulating others. Moreover, she worked with Gemini’s master printer Case Hudson to incorporate an extensive etch with aquatint so as to achieve as robust a line as possible in the finished print. Saturated with ink and raised substantially from the paper, the network of intaglioed lines mirror, in reverse, the subtractive bite of the laser cutter that has been a frequent companion in Saban’s artistic practice.
All of this labor and energy stands in ironic contrast to the objects the artist chose to portray in
Mechanical Drawings (One-Continuous Line). These domestic machines are meant to make life smooth, easy, and
automated, and they form a loose narrative of a lazy morning that progresses from being woken up, to making a smoothie, to electronically brushing one’s teeth, to flipping on the TV and sinking into a comfy chair. The continuous line that delineates them echoes this lackadaisical quality, never managing to pick itself up off the page. Though this line may be unbroken, the engines it depicts are fully broken down, caught in a state of inert supernova and unable to perform their quotidian tasks.
Breakages are also the focus of Saban’s Broken Vase monotypes, which the artist devised while working in
Gemini’s studio, intrigued by another high-powered machine. The hydraulic Hoe press, designed for blind embossing (creating an image from an impression, without ink), has the power to exert multiple tons of pressure onto whatever material is placed within its hold. Beginning in 1968, twelve years before Saban was born, Jasper Johns experimented with the same machine at Gemini to produce a group of three-dimensional reliefs. The paper he originally employed tore continually under the Hoe’s intense force, so Johns decided instead to use lead as a sturdier and more forgiving support for his embossed designs of flags, bulbs, and numbers.2
Saban, on the other hand, was intrigued by these outward signs of failure, as well as by the transformation
that the paper underwent within the hydraulic press. To produce the series, the artist instructed the Gemini printers to stencil acrylic matte gel medium into the shape of five vase forms inspired by ancient Greek vessels, which the artist encountered in her readings at the Getty Research Institute. Once they are partially dry atop their paper support, the acrylic forms are loaded into the Hoe. Under the machine’s pressure, the paper is crushed against the vase’s raised outline, and it buckles, wrinkles, and splits in the process. What results is a beige, earth-toned surface that looks uncannily as if it were made from clay, with bumps and cracks that suggest ancient, hand-molded vessels and centuries of use.
Though the Hoe applies its pressure evenly, the unconventional manner in which Saban uses it generates
different and wholly unpredictable results with each unique imprint, no matter how many rounds of trial and error. The machine effectively becomes an actor and collaborator in Saban’s artistic process as it generates the vases’ particular fissures and crevices. Part print, part sculpture, these vulnerable bodies take on individualized, anthropomorphic qualities that draw the viewer in to learn what histories their wizened, skin-like surfaces might reveal.
Skin and the human body play a direct creative role in Saban’s Fingerprint, in which a single oval smudge
punctuates an inky black rectangular void. Along the work’s stark white border—the area of a print usually kept utterly pristine and free of marks—a matching fingerprint reveals itself as the smudge’s culprit. Saban pokes fun at the formal protocols of printmaking. Compared to the generally complicated steps needed to produce many fine art prints, Fingerprint uses a deliberately simple process of inking, swiping, and imprinting. With this winking gesture, Saban
joins a rich history of artists in Southern California toying with printmaking traditions.3 Working with Tamarind— another prominent Los Angeles print studio in the 1960s—the artist Bruce Conner used his thumb to subvert what he saw as the studio’s strict standards.4 Not only did he decide to apply his fingerprint to each of his works in lieu of signing, he also produced Thumb Print (1965), in which a solo fingerprint floats amid a large, spare lithographic sheet.
Where Conner’s Thumb Print was largely a commentary on the notion of authorial identity and intent,
Saban’s Fingerprint, particularly in light of her other series with Gemini G.E.L., suggests we consider the body itself as an artistic tool or machine. The fingertip is made of ridges and indentations, and much like a woodcut, the raised areas catch ink to transfer its whirled designs to paper. The fingerprint testifies to a person having been present, and to their body having interacted with the printing press, blending body and machine for however brief a moment.
Saban has consistently examined the internal makeup of both art objects and the technologies that
have produced them, with an eye towards complicating viewers’ relationship to the tangible materials they see and the intangible feelings those materials elicit within them. In the age of drones and Siri, we tend to think of our devices as semi-conscious beings that might have independent thought—even if we know, deep down, that their innards are merely gears and algorithms that can fail as easily as we can. Saban’s work makes clear that these perceptions are not only natural, they may be what makes us most human.
—Claire de Dobay Rifelj
1
This essay has benefited from discussions in June 2016 with artist Analia Saban and Gemini G.E.L. master printer Case Hudson. The author would like to thank the artist, Suzanne Felsen, and Joni Weyl Felsen for their input and work on this publication.
2
Jane Kinsman, The Art of Collaboration: The Big Americans (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia; London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 20–21.
3
Since the reemergence of fine art printmaking across the United States beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, artists have played with the concept of what constitutes an editioned print—many of them under the auspices of Gemini G.E.L.—including Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Rauschenberg. For an in-depth look into Southern California’s role in this development, see Leah Lehmbeck, ed., Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California (Los Angeles: Getty Publications; and Pasadena: Norton Simon Museum, 2011).
4
For more on Bruce Conner’s experience working with Tamarind, see David Platzker, “Reconsidering the Fine Art Print in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in David Platzker and Elizabeth Wyckoff, Hard Pressed: 600 Years of Prints and Process (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2000), 27–28.
Mechanical Drawings (One-Continuous Line) 2016 A series of five 1-color aquatints Editions of 18
Pocket Watch (One-Continuous Line) 54 ½ x 41 ½" (138.4 x 105.4 cm) AS15-3540 Blender (One-Continuous Line) 54 ½ x 41 ½" (138.4 x 105.4 cm) AS15-3541 Electric Toothbrush (One-Continuous Line) 54 ½ x 41 ½" (138.4 x 105.4 cm) AS15-3542 Combo Television Unit (One-Continuous Line) 54 ½ x 41 ½" (138.4 x 105.4 cm) AS15-3543 Massage Recliner (One-Continuous Line) 54 ½ x 51 ¼” (138.4 x 130.2 cm) AS15-3544
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Broken Vases 2016 Acrylic matte medium and crushed paper constructions Five forms, each a series of 20 unique works 28 x 20" (71.1 x 50.8 cm)
Broken Vase No. 1 AS15-234 Broken Vase No. 2 AS15-235 Broken Vase No. 3 AS15-236 Broken Vase No. 4 AS15-237 Broken Vase No. 5 AS15-238
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Fingerprint 2016 1-color monotype, 13 x 11" (33 x 27.9 cm) A series of 38 unique works AS15-233
Above: Oliver Dewey-Gartner, Case Hudson and Amy Jo Toucey Right: Kenny Srivijittakar with Analia Saban
Design: John Coy,
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Photography: Douglas M. Parker Studio, Sidney B. Felsen, Luna Imaging Printing: Lithocraft Company
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