Black Heart Press

Handsome Boy Press
Samuel Seger & Patrick Wagner
Lithography, Kiel 2009

(Left side of the face: Patrick, shared nose, right side: Samuel - not the crispest print we ever made..)

When I drove to Berlin some weeks ago, I phoned a printshop there, Keystone Editions, and asked if I could drop in the next day – which didn’t work out, they had a printing run sheduled and no time for nosy visitors, understandably.
While I haven’t been there yet, it’s still a safe bet to say that Keystone Editions is an amazing place to go if in need of lithographic competence: run by printers Sarah Dudley and Ulrich Kühle, it is -to the extent of my knowledge- the only lithography printshop in Germany with printers trained at the Tamarind Institute. Ulrich Kühle also recieved years of training from the Kätelhön printshop, a landmark in the german printmaking world due to their wonderful book

„Die Radierung: Erfahrungen einer Kupferdruckerei“

The beautiful Keystone Editions workshop is equipped with two Karl Krause (Leipzig) presses and one Erasmus Sutter (Berlin) press, charismatic old presses, I’m personally very fond of presses by Sutter.
So: if in Berlin – go check them out!

While I was browsing the Keystone Editions website, I found among their new editions a suite of prints by Thomas Eller,

„using Vaseline as his drawing material, and his body as the mark-making tool“

I don’t even need to link the images, you already know what this means: a 100% chance of some guy printing his ass and scrotum. And you shall not be disappointed.

While it is most probably deeply rewarding to sell skillfully printed impressions of your vaselined wiener squeezed against a lithographic stone, it is also the oldest and most boring trick in the book, timelinewise usually situated somewhere in the first year of art academy. Samuel Seger and I did arm wrestling on our earliest stones, others their faces pressed against stone, norwegian girls covered stones in kisses, the list is endless.

During my drive towards Berlin I had a couple of hours to think about these prints, and why they annoyed me so much. There is probably more material about the art historic use of the body as a drawing tool, the symbolism of aboriginal hand-prints on cave walls, the cleverness of Yves Klein and his blue-painted frolicking beauties than one could care to read. It’s a veritable, returning theme that just won’t die – nor should it, really. And as we all know, it doesn’t matter if it has been done before, what matters is how it differs from the thing it is similar to.
Cruising at 140km/h it suddenly hit me – my own bigotry – in form of the realization that I most probably would have reacted differently were the marks on the stone not the folds of Thomas Eller’s wrinkly balls, but the delicate labium of an emerging female artist. Damn. Of course the concept would still be equally boring, but connotated according to my orientation, triggering a voyeuristic impulse. Shouldn’t be that simple, or?

Coming to the following conclusions:

• I am a sexist, despite all my efforts to not be one.
• sorry Thomas, I just don’t see it. It’s your thing, I know, THE Self, but still.
• all this amazing skill – hopefully the next Keystone Edition project will rock my socks off. This far into the text I probably need to write another, really positive article before I get invited to do a studio tour.

Further reading:

Die Radierung: Erfahrungen einer Kupferdruckerei
Henner Kätelhön
3rd revised Edition (1998)
ISBN: 978-3000039829

Die Radierung: Erfahrungen einer Kupferdruckerei
Sigfried Fuchs
earlier Edition (1972)

*edit:
see? http://lithoshop.tumblr.com/post/5018305311/vito-really-likes-litho-stones (go follow that guy, btw.)