Printmaking is an artform that gets frequently shafted (just think how often artists’ prints act as footnotes in their shows). But here it’s a main event. And it’s a big one. Huge. Think Superbowl, think Hollywood.
The show’s jumping-off point is the work of 1960s US ‘pop’ stars who took hold of the medium like kids with a new train set. A postwar boom gave the likes of Roy Lichtenstein easy access to printmaking studios, and art-making moved from a solitary activity to a group sport. For many, the repetition of screenprinting offered a means to express the exhaustive commercial fiction of the ‘American dream’.
You’re hit by the big guns the moment you walk in: two sets of Warhols mounted on blood red walls (the next room is blue, see where they’re going with this?). On one, a haunting series of Sing Sing Prison’s ‘Old Sparky’ electric chair in pop pastels. The other: the technicolour faces of Marilyn Monroe seen on so many tote bags since. Later, Jasper Johns’s flags are given space to evolve from stars and stripes to a blackened screenprint. And in the bright concentric circles of ‘Targets 1968’, he shares his fixation on ‘afterimages’, the optical illusion that occurs when you’re hit with a strong visual, and its ghost remains when out of sight.
In the cool-orange Made in California room we escape the political angst of New York to rot our teeth on the sweet Americana of Wayne Thiebaud’s linocut gumball machines and recline in the heat of Ed Ruscha’s West Coast gas stations. Make time for the video installation here, where footage cherry-picked from retro American TV is shown side by side with relevant prints.
If you’re looking for a narrative thread to the show, this is where it starts to bunch around the needle. The amount of work is so vast that it jumps from abstraction to figuration, from pop art politics to sections on HIV/Aids to feminism over five decades. There are prints exploring America’s history of slavery with impressive works by artists Kara Walker and Willie Cole, but it all just feels too hurried, brushing past subjects that deserve exhibitions of their own. It’s a common British Museum problem, a lack of focus.
The whole show’s a bit of a visual ambush, but the ‘afterimages’ will stay dancing in your retinas for days on end.
by KATIE MCCABE