Garner Tullis and the Art of Collaboration

by David Carrier
New York, NY, USA, 1998.

Reviewed by Fred Andersson


David Carrier, philosopher and art critic, has written a book about the printmaker Garner Tullis. This is, in many respects, an unusual achievement. You can find a lot of books about printmaking, but very few about printmakers. During his academic career, professor Carrier has widely studied the discourses of art criticism, and the impact of criticism in the world of art. In his book about Garner Tullis, he makes a comparison between the art writer and the printmaker, saying that their work deserves more attention in the present-day art world. The artwriter is often regarded as a mere journalist, and the printmaker is similarly reduced to an artisan or technical assistant. But writing adequately about art often demands a keen knowledge of both the emotional and technical aspects of artistic processes. Likewise, being a good printmaker is no doubt different from the traditional role of the artisan. Being a good printmaker requires the creativity and sensibility of an artist, and a lot of artistic training.

In his book, David Carrier acknowledges this fact, describing the life and art of a printmaker who once was the student of such major figures as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and David Smith. The son of a wealthy businessman, Garner Tullis was born in Cincinnati in 1939. In 1959 he did his first painting in the style of Pollock (whom he is reported not to have heard about) and in 1961 he joined an arts program at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1963, he was thrown out of a printmaking class for making prints that were three inch deep. And in 1964, when he applied for a Fulbright Fellowship in printmaking, he got one in sculpture instead. Carrier quotes Tullis as saying that "printmakers has always considered me as a sculptor, and sculptors has always seen me as a printmaker".

In the end, the sculptor David Smith proved to be a more important teacher than those who couldn't accept Tullis' three-inch-deep prints. Smith told him to make prints that were even deeper -- and so big that one shouldn't be able to put them in a drawer. Whilst studying sculpture and casting in the USA and in Italy, Tullis used his experience of three-dimensional techniques when developing his experimental printmaking. He had to make his own paper in order to make his deep, embossed prints. He also had to use a flatbed print instead of a cylinder print. Later, after opening his own printmaking studio, he had to construct his own equipment in order to achieve certain goals. The technical innovations of Tullis, for example the 240,000-pound press that he built during his collaboration with Sam Francis in the eighties, is one of the major topics of Carrier's book.

Of course, Tullis was a part of a general movement of the sixties, a movement that indicated a paradigm shift. Shaped by the movement of American abstract expressionism, Tullis belonged to a generation of artists that developed the performative, process-oriented and material aspects of abstract painting, thereby sometimes getting into a borderland between sculpture and painting, between the spatial and the temporal, between object and process. This is the borderland that was condemned by Michael Fried when he said: "everything between the arts is theater". This is the borderland of Rauschenberg's combines, of performance and happening, of Serra and Smithson -- and perhaps of the experimental printing of Garner Tullis.

This is not to say that Tullis explored this borderland in a very determined way, neither that he was generally very interested in erasing the borders between the arts. It seems that much of the various experimental activities that was in sixties didn't interest him that much. His aim was that of a man who wanted to free printmaking the way New York School Painters freed painting in the 1960s.Tullis has also said that printing in the fifties was at the same level as painting was in the thirties -- and it's obvious that he measures the development of printing according to the standards of the New York School painting.

Printing, being basically a reproductive and 2-dimensional technique, had to become more productive and experimental in order to come up to those standards. Unlike Warhol and Rauschenberg, Tullis wasn't interested in the reproductive and 2-dimensional mode of printing as way of mimicking the seriality and superficiality of mass media and consume society. His approach has always been distinct from the favoring of the reproductive mode, being a main component of postmodernism. Working in the reproductive genre par excellence, namely printmaking, his main concern has been to explore the possibilities of a printing that isn't merely reproductive, but close to the ideas of experimentation and uniqueness associated with action painting.

Ever since he opened his first studio for experimental printing in San Francisco in 1967, major artists has been his customers and collaborators. His whole business is based on the idea of mutual collaboration -- the artist and the printer splitting up the work in equal shares after a project is finished. Abstract painting -- expressionist or more geometrical -- has dominated the work carried out in Tullis' studios. The many full color illustrations in Carriers book represents works by older artists such as Sam Francis, Emilio Vedova and Richard Diebenkorn, continuing with Sean Scully, David Reed, Paul Osipow and other "neo-abstractionist" of the eighties, ending with younger figures such as the Austrian Martin Beck. Carrier writes illuminating about the artists and their collaboration with Tullis, using a rich material of interviews. Is text is illustrated by remarkable black- and white photographs from Tullis' studios in San Francisco, Santa Barbara and New York. Most of them are taken by Tullis' son, Richard B. Tullis junior, who is now the owner of the Santa Barbara studio. These photographs really makes it easier to imagine the creative spirit that Carrier writes about. Carrier's account of Tullis' process-orientation is also very revealing as a general account of visual thinking.

Significantly, Tullis tells David Carrier that it was a sculptor, the Italian Arnaldo Pomodoro, that in the mid sixties learned him to "clearly conceptualize the inherent ideas in art objects as if going in reverse from the object back to the idea to read its initial premise". And, Tullis continues, printmakers are also trained to "see and think in reverse". This is actually a description of how to view art in process-oriented way, paying attention to the structure and the question "how is it made?" more than to the final object. What Tullis also learned from Pomodoro and others was to treat printing as something that could be like sculpture -- like something that is built from inside out, rather than merely a 2-dimensional surface. In this way, printing could as well become a way of thinking differently about painting.

What if a painting is done in reverse - the first brushstrokes being actually the visible ones? This is the case of the monotype - the technique that has become the very specialty of Tullis^ö. What first strikes the average audience about monotyping is perhaps its apparent meaninglessness. A monotype is not a print in the traditional sense of the world - i.e. an array of reproductions made from an original plate. A monotype is painting that is executed ^ðin reverse^ð on a plate which is then pressed against a paper.

The importance of this technique in the practice of major contemporary printmakers such as Garner Tullis is interesting. The monotype may be regarded as merely a way of trying to renew the old concept of abstract painting by ^ðdoing the whole thing in reverse^ð. In Carrier^ös book, many of the artist that are interviewed do agree that monotyping helped them finding new ideas for painting. But the book also shows that monotyping shouldn^öt be reduced to a secondary tool. Monotyping really is something else than painting, and with technological innovations Tullis has increased its possibilities. This technological aspect is interesting indeed.