Roundtable: New York Graphic Workshop
Lyle Rexer in conversation with Luis Camnitzer and Liliana Porter
The New York Graphic Workshop (1965–70) was founded in Greenwich Village by three Latin American artists—Luis Camnitzer, from Uruguay; José Guillermo Castillo, from Venezuela; and Liliana Porter, from Argentina. Their intention was to develop an alternative vision of printmaking, based on ideas of seriality and reproducibility rather than on the traditions of fine-art printing. “The concept of making an edition takes priority over working on the plate,” they wrote in their originating manifesto. The Workshop developed approaches that were conceptually innovative; they held exhibitions by mail and printed on the side of a ream of paper. They also sought to develop alternatives to the conventional marketplace mechanism of sale and distribution.
After the trio disbanded, Castillo went on to a career as a cultural administrator and gallerist. He died in 1999. Camnitzer and Porter became two of the most important artists of their generation to emerge from Latin America; their work continues to be influenced by the ideas developed in the Workshop. On the occasion of a major exhibition about the Workshop at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas (September 28, 2008 to January 18, 2009), artonpaper invited Camnitzer and Porter to visit the magazine’s office for a discussion with contributing editor Lyle Rexer.
Excerpt [for the full interview, read the print edition]
Liliana: We said, “We are artists, not printmakers. The important thing is not the technique but whether that technique is consistent with what we want to say.”
Lyle: The manifesto you wrote in 1965 was very interesting because it is about printmaking as a medium. You wanted to be “printmakers conditioned but not destroyed by our techniques.” It’s not about politics at all, though most accounts make the Workshop seem very political.
Luis: It depends on how you define politics. We shifted the definition of printmaking from contact of a plate with pieces of paper or media to the act of making an edition. At some point I said that sending a rocket to the moon was a manifestation of edition-making, where each time you set up the conditions and let the serial process take over to get a repeatable result. That was opposed to the idea of the original, the one of a kind, and that was a political statement. It’s not the narrative content of politics we were interested in but a changed society.
Lyle: Yet as I look at the work, I detect very different currents going on in this group.
Luis: We had contradictory aims. One was to make it in the market, and the other was to create a utopian society. A symptom of that was our mail exhibits. We were not aware of Ray Johnson, although we later became neighbors and friends. We were Latin Americans, we were printmakers. We were aware of being segregated from the mainstream. One way of breaking that was making our own venue. And the cheapest, easiest venue was the mail. So we created our envelope gallery and mailed it to our audience. We were making a market and at the same time disputing ownership, disputing preciousness. Some pieces were mailed to names from telephone books, some pieces were to friends, whom we hoped would pass them on, some pieces were stuck in bathrooms and elevators. It was very chaotic.
Lyle: It also disputed the notion of a gallery that has walls and that controls an audience. Is that what was behind the FANDSO [Free Assemblage Nonfunctional Disposable Serial Object]?
Luis: No, we talked amongst ourselves. What were the conditions we wanted to accomplish? We wanted to create an object that fulfills such and such needs. So we worked with words and reshuffled some things to get the idea of the FANDSO. Above all, it had to be serial, and serial for us meant both making a formal series as well as an editioned series so that neither form nor object were unique.…
