Tate Modern is currently showing an extraordinary group of works by the British artist Joe Tilson, as part of its exhibition The World Goes Pop. The works in question are from a series entitled Pages (1969-70), which was the summit of Tilson’s contribution to Pop. At the core of this series are a group of works – of which Tate Modern is showing five, each almost two metres tall – that use screenprinting, that quintessential Pop tool, to mimic the covers of magazines and newspapers.
In the Sixties Tilson had experimented with making works using shallow wooden structures, and Pages extends this exploration, employing wooden trays to mimic columns of newsprint, and screenprinted canvas sacks to reproduce printed content. A variety of contemporary radical publications – including Black Dwarf and the International Times – are evoked in the works, which are filled with text and images relating to the events, personalities and fixations of the decade just ending.
Pages offers a grand statement of one of the core premises of Pop: the centrality of mass media within the contemporary construction of reality. However, the series also reflects the radicalisation of many people in the late Sixties, Tilson included. The artist pours much of his experience of the decade into Pages, creating a moving and encyclopaedic work. Moreover, Tilson’s use of the grid is striking, standing in as it does not only for the printed page, but – as it has done throughout Tilson’s career – for ordering systems in general.
Image above: Joe Tilson, Page 9: Black Dwarf, 1969, 187 x 126cm. Included in The World Goes Pop, which continues at Tate Modern until January 2016.
Last week I was in New York to see the Whitney Biennial, the long-running survey centred on new work and emerging trends in American art. One of the projects to catch my eye was by Lisa Anne Auerbach, an artist based in Los Angeles who describes herself as running “a modest publishing and propaganda empire.”
Auerbach’s propaganda is based on a mixture of utopian and personal messages, while her do-it-yourself publishing has most famously taken the form of slogans incorporated into knitted garments. Auerbach's exploration of the language of transformational change is also evident in a recent project that draws on her interviews with Californian psychics.
The latter texts are compiled into the second issue of Auerbach’s American Megazine, on show at the Whitney: a five-foot high publication, at the limits of what the artist can make with her own hand, and that operates as a kind of monument to the zine movement with which Auerbach’s improvised and idealistic productions have so much kinship.
Images: American Megazine #2, 2014 (above); American Megazine #1, 2013 (below).
