Election season, when a man’s heart turns to thoughts of Gemini G.E.L. fundraising print portfolios. Or at least it used to.
Fortunately, longtime greg.org hero/reader Terry Wilfong emailed a keen observation about Richard Serra’s Afangar Viðey series prints that momentarily distracts from the genocidal, climate, and fascistic calamities afoot. Like me, Terry missed out on getting any little Viðey etchings, and was drawn to the print Serra made at the same moment for the Harvey Gantt Portfolio. [Gantt was the Black opponent to one of the Reagan era GOP’s biggest bigots, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.]
Terry noted that this print, titled F*** Helms, looked similar to the Viðey etchings, but it was a screenprint. It was not an etching, yet it had an embossed plate mark like an etching. What was going on there?
Fortunately, the Gemini G.E.L. catalogue raisonné at the NGA includes documentation of the printing process of the “1-color screenprint with embossing”, where a black screen was followed by embossment with a blank copper plate. “No cancellation proof exists,” because no plate needed canceling. “The screen was washed out at the completion of edition printing.”
So while working on tons of Icelandic prints with deep, textured, almost sculptural plates, did Serra try to keep a screenprint from being too flat? [I bought the fundraising screenprint he made for Film Forum right before that, and it was definitely flat.] Was this screenprint/emboss hack a thing?
From what I can tell, the only other artist to use this combination at Gemini has been Bruce Nauman. In 1997-99, working with James Reid (the same printer as Serra), Nauman created a screenprint/embossed edition as part of his Partial Truth project. Nauman made four inter-related works: a hand-carved PARTIAL TRVTH edition in black granite; a blind embossed edition from that stone version; a screenprint positive of the stone with an embossed plate border [above, left]; and a negative etching of that print [above, right].
In their description of the pair of prints, Krakow Witkin make it sound like the series questions what’s true about what it appears to be. But honestly, the only one with any process/visual trickery is the screenprint/embossment. Everything else seems pretty linked, or contingent, on another work, so maybe the whole truth is only available when the parts are taken together.
What’s unusual is that of all the examples of F*** Helms I’ve found online, only the RTP (Ready To Print) proof at the National Gallery has a clearly visible plate mark. Did the simulated embossing process not work as planned? Is it just visible in person? Did it fade over time? Was it only meant to last through the campaign, and then be forgotten?