By Frank Bures
From The Isthmus
June 17, 2004
One day, at Tandem Press, David Lynch turned to master printer Bruce Crownover and asked if there was any way he might get some chicken heads. Not live ones. The director of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive didn't want anything killed on his account. Just dead ones. Just the heads.
Bruce took this in and rallied the collective intellectual resources of the employees at Tandem Press. They made some phone calls and, this being an area where lots of chickens are killed, Bruce set out and soon returned with what he described as a "warm baggie of chicken heads."
This reporter was assured no chickens were killed in the process. These were salvaged heads, because it's always a shame to waste a good chicken part when you can make it into art. And a chicken head makes a surprisingly beautiful, surreal impression when smashed into a half-inch-thick paper with 40,000 pounds of pressure.
This wasn't a usual day at Tandem Press, but it wasn't necessarily unusual either. Since artists from across the country cycle through the press all year round, there isn't really such thing as a usual day. For the past 17 years, Tandem Press has sat in its own little warehouse district on Dickinson Street, where it has quietly hosted an array of world-class artists like Lynch, Judy Pfaff, Art Spiegelman and others whose names you haven't heard because they're not dead yet. To date, more than 60 artists have disappeared into the white building, only to emerge with a series of prints to sell for thousands of dollars, which is how the university offshoot has sustained itself since it was founded in 1987.
"It's an unbelievable setup," Lynch told me from his California office. "They've got all kinds of presses. They know what they're doing. For printmaking, it's state of the art. If you get an idea for anything in the print world, that's a great place to go."
"He's my favorite printer here. Absolutely," says Judy Pfaff of Lynch's work at Tandem. "He's got a brilliant organizational mind for the image and the text. It's fabulous." Pfaff is one of Tandem's most regularly visiting artists, having come to work there for the past eight years.
Nearly every year, at least once, the New York-based artist and will roll up in her truck to the old white brick building that houses the press. Her truck bed will be full of what some might mistake for junk, but which she will make into art--and great art at that. In her head is the mental equivalent of what's in the back of her truck: Images. Ideas. Visions.
"I dream about it," Pfaff says, "I think about it. I've got lots of sources. But it's all sort of floating. When someone asks me what I'm going to do, I always say I don't know."
She may not know exactly what she will do, but she knows some new fusion of strands will come out of her time at Tandem, which makes each trip here a leap of faith: In herself, in the artistic process, and the people at Tandem.
So Pfaff just comes and unloads her truck full of abstractions. For days on end, she will works with master printers like Bruce Crownover, Andy Rubin and others at the press (most of whom are artists in their own right). She also works with UW students studying art, art history and arts administration, who rotate through the press. This educational aspect was part of the press's original threefold mission when founded by the UW's William Weege: education, research and outreach. This noncommercial dimension is a big draw for Pfaff and other artists.
"If I need to do something, like photogravure," Pfaff says, "they'll hire someone to come in and teach the printers how to do that. And I think that's because it's a university press, and is teaching a kind of creativity and a kind of openness. It's not so money-bound."
The artists who come to Tandem have almost complete creative license, which is what keeps them coming back year after year. This lets Pfaff work in her own style, one the New York Times described as "planned chaos."
"When Tandem was set up," says Tandem director Paula Panczenko, "it was set up to be experimental. And [Pfaff] really embodies that. She's always pushing the boundaries."
Panczenko is the animated Irishwoman at the helm of this ship and has been for steering it for 15 years. She loves art so much she even incorporates it into her eyeglasses, which can be any array of colors. And after a decade and a half, she still describes her work with the enthusiasm of a newly minted intern. "I just love working with artists," she says. "They're so interesting." She's even married to Russell Panczenko, the director of the Elvehjem Museum.
Panczenko has been rightly pleased to see the press attain national recognition. "At this stage," she says, we're definitely attracting blue-chip artists." Now she wants to see Tandem's work bring international recognition to what she considers one of the art world's more venerable mediums.
"It's an age-old tradition," she says. "Printmaking hasn't really changed since it was invented."
It's also different from other mediums in the amount labor that goes into it. To make a single plate, the artist draws a design on paper. The printers, and sometimes the artist, then copy the image onto (usually copper) plates using inks, acids and tools. Some artists work directly with the plates, or use other materials. The results go under the press and, after a set number of prints are made, the plates are destroyed in an abrupt end to the creative process.
This all makes printmaking a more collaborative medium than others, and puts a great deal of weight on the shoulders of the printers.
"When you work with master printers like the ones at Tandem Press," says Gronk, a Los Angeles-based multi-genre artist, "their job is to actually go inside your head and understand what you really want. And that takes a while. It takes years of development to actually understand the artist's process. Well, there [at Tandem] it was instant."
For 10 years now, Gronk has returned to Madison, usually in winter, doing different kinds of printmaking, including woodcuts, linoleum blocks and lithographs, as well as forays into other areas. One year, he did a performance piece with the Kronos Quartet, conducting them with his brush as he painted, which had a microphone attached to it. Sometimes he works with high school students and loves this community aspect of the work at Tandem. He still stays in touch with several UW students he's met here, which is one way his Tandem work lives on. There are others as well.
"I did a show at the San Jose Museum," says Gronk, "and part of it was the work I did at Tandem Press. So the work is seen beyond Madison."
This month, Gronk will be in town for the annual Tandem Wine Auction on June 17. He'll do a painting that will be auctioned off, and prints by Tandem founder Bill Weege will be given to attendees.
"I've always enjoyed my experiences there," Gronk says. "Every time I'm asked to go back, I usually say yes. It's a testament to the quality of the work they do there."
This month is a busy one for Panczenko and the others at Tandem. In addition to the Wine Auction, there is a show at the Milwaukee Art Museum of Judy Pfaff's and (Madisonian) Gregory Conniff's work. Meanwhile Pfaff is returning again for more work, as is Sam Gilliam, who was the first artist ever to make prints at Tandem.
"It's such a great place for me to work," says Pfaff. "I really kick this place around. It's a physical shop. This shop was designed by an engineer, Bill Weege. That's why you have huge presses. Print shops don't look like this usually. They're usually demure, and they have lovely little presses. They were big guys and they wanted a big-guy shop. And that suits me to a T."
It suits many other printmakers as well, as can be seen in the growing collection of prints in Tandem's catalogue, from Susan Caporael's estuaries to Robert Cottingham's letters to Philip Pearlstein's nudes. And of course, David Lynch's smashings.
"I put a lot of different things on that press," Lynch told me. These include baby dolls, pliers, sponges, dead flies, sticks and other things.
Lynch raves about the custom-made paper at Tandem. He raves about the ink. He raves about the people who work there. He raves about the equipment. He seems to love everything about it. "It's really a great experience making prints down there," he says.
But what, we're left to wonder, does it mean, all this smashing? Like so much else in his oeuvre, it seems to teeter on the edge of implication. I put the question to Lynch: Why chicken heads?
"I like organic phenomena," Lynch said enigmatically, noting that he also took photos at a local slaughterhouse on his last trip to Tandem. "And I've always liked chickens. You can ink up different things and get the impression off them with this machine. So a whole world opens up.
"I don't think many people are hip to the thrill of printmaking," he says. "It's one of those things where you lose time."
