What is your name?
Ethan Green
Where are you from?
Brooklyn, NY
Who are your favorite printmakers and biggest inspirations?
I appreciate and love prints for different reasons. I am drawn to the communal nature of the print shop and the social, possibly subversive, potential of the multiple. And because of that, some of my favorite prints are not necessarily pieces of art I love, but pieces that take advantage of those social aspects. I’m thinking of Amos Kennedy Jr. who will drive a letterpress around in his truck to make prints at fairs; or Guy De Cointet’s ACRCIT, which was a multiple in the form of a newspaper that was distributed via free newspaper stands around LA. Ukiyo-e prints are some of the most beautiful pieces of art I’ve seen in person; and the portfolio Capitalist Realism was an exciting discovery for me; but I don’t focus on them being prints or not. Although knowing that a Hiroshige print is made with woodblock is astonishing.
What was your first job as an artist?
I worked a couple of days a week for Louis Lieberman, who invented Aqua Resin and runs the business out of his studio. I would go there and we would experiment with resin and pigments and fiberglass. A lot of the time I didn’t know what to do or what I was doing, but I liked hanging out with Louis. He invented Aqua-Resin out of necessity: as a non-toxic alternative to the polyester resin he was using to make sculpture. It’s a remarkable material that only exists because Louis wanted to keep making art without poisoning himself. Working for him was a soft landing for me into the world of art/ art- adjacent jobs.
Where did you discover printmaking and how did you get into it?
I took a printmaking class when I was 17 and I appreciated it as an alternative to painting and drawing, which is all I was taught in high school. My former undergrad professors, Karen Savage and Oli Watt (I see Frontline Arts had recently interviewed him!), had a big impact on me. I had a lot of epiphanies in their classes about what print could be; or what art could be that used print processes; or however you want to think about it. Even though I don’t consider myself a printmaker, I constantly find myself using material in printmakerly ways: searching out processes that allow for chance and accident. And I tend to make art that I can’t fully see until it’s “finished”; like the equivalent of laying down the last layer of color on a print. Getting through that final step in a process and stepping back to see the finished product has afforded me many moments of joy, and alternatively disappointment.
What is one tool you could not create without?
X-acto knife.
I know you mostly as a print artist, Ethan. What other mediums, if any, have you also made art with?
At root my art is collage, in a broad (and hopefully broadening) sense of the word. I like how collage plays with meaning: the control and lack thereof that ensues when you combine existing material, images and text; and the contradictions and syntheses that occur. Recently my work has been all collage on paper. But I’ve used materials like fabric, rubber and books to make collages— often fusing materials together through sewing. I love to sew.
I’m very interested in your ‘Mimetic Alphabet’ piece. Can you share some details and your thought process when you worked on it?
Those alphabet pieces started off as a proposition: the shapes of the alphabet are institutionalized forms that we mimic in our bodies and in what we build. So I was exploring the idea that letters have meaning beyond signifying sound. Their shapes give them meaning and consequence when brought into relation with something else— a body, for example— that shares their form. Equating a letter and a body seemed to invert their meanings: the letter was filled with an excess of meaning beyond itself, while the body was drained of context and relegated to its form. This inversion felt violent to me, and it’s something I’m continuing to think about.
I’ve also learned that you’ve participated in a Residency in Shenzhen, China. Would you like to share that experience?
Barbara Madsen, my former professor at Rutgers, hooked me up with the Guanlan Original Print Base in Shenzhen. She had done a residency there and wanted to bring the print shop in Shenzhen and the print shop at Rutgers into partnership, so to speak. So I went there as the first phase of that exchange. I had a team of people making print editions for me. It was insane. I hadn’t made an editioned print on paper since I was in undergrad, so it was challenging and very intimidating. Looking back it seems pretty surreal that I had that opportunity. But Barb Madsen makes things like that happen.
How has this pandemic and current events changed your life as an artist? What has stayed the same?
I didn’t make much during the stay at home order. I worked on one small piece from March until June. It felt good focusing on one thing for an extended period of time, rather than trying to produce a body of work. I generally hate the idea that I should always be producing, although that feeling can be hard to shake. The incentive to make art has changed for me for sure. It’s hard to have studio visits and hard to see art, so there is a definite fracture in my relation to the art community. With this shift in incentive comes a question of why I’m trying to get a body of work together so fast, or at all. So I’m trying to see this as a chance to slow down and pay attention to the details of what I’m making and what I intend to do with it.
For more information, visit: www.ethangreenart.com
Interview by Hugo Gatica August 2020