Ken Campbell

British Art, a walk round the rusty pier

by Julian Freeman

Southbank Publishing
21 Great Ormond Street
London WC1N 3JB
tel/fax: 01252 783636
www.southbankpublishing.com

Julian Freeman talks of KC’s works here and there:

Quote

From 1975 … Ken Campbell (has written) and illustrated twenty books, extended poems, hand-printed and published in limited editions, set against, and increasingly within, his own images, all suffused with wordplay and meaning. The different titles transform subject-matter from myth, history, reality and every type of allegory into sensory, spiritual, sometimes knuckle-hard text. Undoubtedly, his is one of the most important, uncompromising and self-critical talents within this medium in British art today. With A Knife Romance, Campbell’s work began to integrate word and image more fully, and to use different strategies to surprise and enhance the reading and viewing process. Divorced from their parent books, the beauty of Campbell’s individual printed pages renders them compelling, enigmatic artworks: their visual differences, evident in their individual, cannibalised base-boards, begin to do the rest, and as often deploy computer technology in their evolution as found artefacts of all kinds. From p216 on…

In between, an altogether different artefact offers future possibilities: the artist’s book. Sculptural, yet not a sculpture, three-dimensional, and still capable of unfolding in alternative ways, by individuals or in coalition, the handmade, hand-printed, constructed, and not-necessarily-too-de-luxe text has come a very long way since William Morris. In tactile terms the elasticity of The Word offers massive potential in conventional hard and soft format, and can combine with photographic and three-dimensional media to make narrative something that earlier generations of scribes and printers could never have envisaged. At the top end of such activity are artists such as Ken Campbell, whose breadth of vision and activity, as a painter, poet, sculptor and letterpress printer, combine rich sources of imagery to transform the act of turning the pages into something unnerving, often terrifying, spiritual, in the sense that, in the course of his texts, running backwards and forwards, often interlacing ideas and changing forms with colour and type, the future is both tantalising and fraught with possibility. All this is a long, long way from Kandinsky, and it needs to be, but we still need to have travelled to gain something from expressions such as Campbell's books, and those by others like him. From them, new possibilities emerge for human responses to things, to matters, to experiences that we suppose to be beyond our grasp, but which are in fact much nearer to hand than we may think. p156 on…

Although some of Richard Hamilton’s own suggestions for the definition of a new ‘Pop’ art (1957) do appear appropriate to printmaking, especially ‘popular (designed for a mass audience) Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business‘,161 suggesting a visual equivalent of fast (even junk) food, embodied in particular in screen-printing and lithography, the truth is rather different. Yes, screen printing is here to stay: myriad practitioners throughout Britain can attest to the fact, inspired by the likes of Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Howard Hodgkin and tens of others. But other media are just as important, and their use dates from the same period. Any exhibition of contemporary prints will confirm that anything continues to go in printmaking, where contemporary artists, alive and dead, old or young, execute work using everything from fine etching and every other engraving technique, through lithography and monotype to photocopying. The outcomes can be in single sheets or in multiples, editioned or in veritable books. Lisa Milroy, Chris Ofili, Gillian Ayres, Ian McKeever, Ana Maria Pacheco, Julian Opie, Helen Chadwick, Ken Campbell with hundreds of others, make multiples that, by reaching more than one person, make a difference to the visual experience of Great Britain. That similar experiences can be encountered everywhere else in Europe makes the business of printmaking no less a national phenomenon in the UK, no less capable of accounting for much that we would take for granted within the continuously-changing and multi-layered sub-culture of our odd little islands and no less capable of providing that connoisseurship that cannot be confined to the plan-chest or the bedroom. p215 on…