Printmaker Rides The Highs And Lows

It’s a transfixing stare, made more intense by the medium. A woodcut hearkens back to an earlier time — and, in German Expressionism, an earlier mode of expressing anxiety. But Allan Greenier’s much more modern piece makes a strong case for the old medium’s abiding ability to create arresting art. He also gives it an interesting spin, in that the face in the picture is that of Boris Karloff, best known as the monster in 1931’s Frankenstein.

This mixture of cultural touchstones and concepts appears throughout ​“Prints from the Underground,” a show of works by artist Allan Greenier running this month at the Mitchell Branch Library in Westville. ​“Allan Greenier has been a printmaker since 2010. To put ​‘bread on the table’ he enjoyed two careers: 20 years as a pre-press employee in printing companies, and 30 years as a software developer. Both careers inform his printmaking practice,” Greenier writes in an accompanying statement.

He offers another angle on his pieces as well: ​“As a younger man Allan wrote, drew and published ​‘underground’ comix. He continues to publish zines and prints as The Useful Knowledge Press. He enjoys all printmaking techniques — wood engraving, woodcuts, etchings, silkscreens, lithographs and monotypes. He likes to combine these techniques.”

“When we impress ink onto paper we are taking part in an ancient form of communication. I still get excited at the ​‘reveal’ of a print, when we peel paper off the plate and see our creation for the first time,” Greenier writes. He traces getting into printmaking with seeing a show of M.C. Escher prints at the New Britain Museum of American Art in 2010. ​“I visited the exhibit five times. During one of those visits, I thought: ​‘I need to think of a subject that can be expressed in black and white.’ Then I looked down at my Converse sneakers!”

The print of those sneakers is included in the Mitchell Branch show, and like the print of Boris Karloff, makes clear Greenier’s fondness for popular culture, and deeper than that, the various subcultures that in previous generations got labeled as ​“underground,” whether that was weird comics and noise rock, skateboarding or punk. Greenier’s Converse-clad feet are firmly planted there, and there’s a pleasure in seeing printmaking applied to playful subjects. 

There is, for example, Julie, an exquisitely rendered print of actress Julie Newmar in full regalia as Catwoman, from the deliciously campy (and quite queer) 1960s TV series Batman, before Frank Miller’s and Christopher Nolan’s deadly serious takes on the characters. There is also a lovingly rendered print of Philip K. Dick, an author recognized during his lifetime as a great science-fiction writer who posthumously turned out to be hugely influential, as one story or novel of his after another was made into a movie or TV show, from 1982’s Blade Runner — released four months after Dick’s death — to Amazon Prime’s series The Man in the High Castle, which ran in the 2010s.

Greenier’s art reminds the viewer of just how much the dynamics of popular culture have changed in the past 50 years. As recently as the 1990s one could have spoken cogently about the tension between the mainstream and the underground, between dominant culture and subcultures. Today that dichotomy is fuzzier. The most mainstream cultural figures champion ideas that used to belong to the underground, while many artists in subcultures have made it a point of pride to go hard for widespread recognition and financial success.

But the subculture that Greenier came out of, whether it’s called ​“underground” anymore or not, also is still very much alive, as artists continue to make things by hand, or work at a smaller scale, making personal connections with people in their communities a priority over finding recognition from people they may never meet. That impulse appears all over New Haven, whether it’s in community-grounded R&B shows, the zine scene, or folk-punk gatherings. Greenier’s art shows that part of what draws artists to it is a certain vitality, a mode of expression that can feel immediate and powerful in ways that art designed for more widespread appeal can’t. 

Much art, and many artists, have responded to the U.S.‘s current fragmented social and political situation. Greenier’s piece The Center Cannot Hold — explicitly referencing W.B. Yeats’s apocalyptic poem ​“The Second Coming,” written during a time of intense political upheaval in Ireland — aims straight at the heart of it, getting at the foreboding sense of chaos approaching, at pent-up energy maybe about to explode, while we have little choice but to wait and see what happens, and few options to react to what may happen outside of holding on, or letting go.