Andrew Lamprecht's ulterior motive
by Margot Saffer
'Alterior' is an exhibition of Xerographic prints. The title is a neologism, fusing the words and ideas of ulterior and alter. It is the nature of conceptual art to have an ulterior motive. Merging this with alter, one is unsure whether Lamprecht is taking a jibe at himself, merely giving adjective to the mathematicians on show, or standing the exhibition on the outside of the printmaking world as a whole. He stresses that his intentions are secondary to viewers' interpretations, even if - as the case may be - they see the exhibition as a practical joke.
'Alterior' arose from a request. The Bell-Roberts Gallery wanted a print exhibition to run concurrently with the Impact! International Printmaking Conference, which was held at Michaelis School of the Arts at the beginning of September. What they got was a commentary on the genre disguised as a print exhibition.
Andrew Lamprecht's exhibition is concerned with self-reflexive mocking. The exhibition was held in the printing area of the Bell-Roberts' premises, with machine gulps and sneezes coming from the back room. One of the print machines used to produce the works on show stood whirring in the exhibition, producing perfectly graded colour copies of faces and smiles. This was deliberately not the pristine white gallery space.
'Alterior' was presented in two areas. The back room and the opening night's bar housed four larger-than-life montages. Each of these was of one image, enlarged onto numerous sheets of A4 paper and reconstructed, the parts of the whole image shuffled around in reconstitution. The front space had coloured walls onto which Lamprecht glued the 16 A4 artworks at horizon-level. It appeared as if white golden rectangles had been painted onto the coloured walls and tiny prints (no bigger than the screen of a digicam) have been made via a painstaking process directly onto the wall.
But these were simply photocopies made on paper purchased in cheap reams. Adhered to the wall like wallpaper, the act of taking the works down inevitably meant destroying them. The comment Lamprecht was making about the printing pr(oc)ess was echoed and underlined by the content of the work. Each of the maths experts exhibited argued against the perceived purity of mathematics. Whether via chaos theory or the impossibility of 3-D space, each of their points blurs the calculated edges of their field. This is what Lamprecht is doing with printmaking.
Lamprecht is snubbing the pedantic nature of printmaking; the purity of hard-edged precision. He uses cheap white typing paper as opposed to handmade Fabriani. He Xeroxes instead of getting his hands dirty as part of the process. Even 'Alterior's' photocopied, smudged catalogue, displayed in the exhibition space, offered a wry commentary on the lavish catalogues and books being produced by the background noises.
In Lamprecht's work the layers are not aligned. This is where I see the entrance of irony: how much precision did he have to exude in order to get the print just perfectly wrong? When asked about the value of this 3-dimensional comment, Lamprecht explained that the exhibition created "a site of opportunity"; a place for friends to gather, drink, visualise, contemplate, philosophise and discuss. For me personally though, the most exciting aspect of this exhibition was that Andrew Lamprecht was finally exhibiting. He was the anti-hero, not the sidekick.
August 29 - September 12
