Page 10 - the Noise February 2017

JUDITH BAUMANN WRESTLING WITH ART
Images, from top: Her Eyes on Randy color pencil drawing (detail), and original drawn portrait of one wrestler’s attentive wife; From The Top Rope, screenprint; Dead Wrestlers: Their Words, fanned lithographic pages in artists book.
BY JEN TURRELL
T he first question I had to ask Judith Baumann about her work when we met was, “Why wrestlers?” Much of her past work centered around images of dead professional wres- tlers from the 1980s and 90s. Having grown up in rural Arizona most of my life, I had no per-
sonal reference point for this subject and needed to know more. Ms. Baumann explained. As a kid in the 1980s Ms. Baumann went to live wrestling matches with her father and brother in Buffalo, New York. This was back before wrestling was openly acknowledged as a fake sport and before the category of Sports Entertainment had been created. It was presented as a real sport. Sure, there were scripted events and rivalries, planned speeches with carefully written boasts, brags and threats, but the inherent athleticism seemed, and
in many ways, was real.
“It was a blue collar, dirty, and kind of mysterious experience.” She has been fascinat-
ed ever since. “Few things exemplify classism in our culture as much as wrestling, except maybe auto racing. In my work, I try to portray both the reverence and repulsion I felt for wrestling and all that it meant to me growing up.”
So, what exactly did it mean to her growing up? “I’ve been working with and research- ing professional wrestling as archetypes for the past 6 years. Professional Wrestling, as an artistic subject, addresses ideas of classism, pop culture, racism, misogyny, consumerism, gender roles, and I believe, generally serves as a sort of cultural indicator of our society’s socio-economic-political health.”
Last year Ms. Baumann created Dead Wrestlers: Their Words. It is a limited edition lithograph- ic and letterpress artist’s book printed while she was studying at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The book features eight 4” x 6” enlarged portraits of deceased pro- fessional wrestlers scanned from sports trading cards collected between 1984 and 1992.
The portraits are hand-printed cyan-magenta-yellow-black (CMYK) plate separations of the original CMYK-offset printing press process, manipulating the halftone plate into a translated copy of itself. The reverse of each card features a handset letterpress transcrip- tion of promotional interviews given by the wrestlers, via analog video sources uploaded to online digital media content providers. Through the act of media translation and tran- scription, the play between old and new technologies, Dead Wrestlers addresses commodi- fication, classism, and fame — and its oftentimes deadly repercussions in the profession. The book questions our inherent role as consumers of popular culture, ultimately forcing us to shoulder the consequences of our collective actions.
Ms. Baumann received her undergraduate degree from Alfred University and contin- ued her graduate studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She later attended the Tamarind Institute’s Professional Printer Training Program where she studied collaborative fine art lithography from one of the few places in the world to offer such a program.
Ms. Baumann taught Printmaking at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington for 9 years and has been teaching Foundations Studies at Northern Arizona University for the past year and a half, as well as teaching printmaking at Yavapai College for the past two semesters. She has also taught workshops in letterpress throughout the Pacific Northwest.
My own experience with printmaking has mainly been through the type of screen print- ing that goes along with record covers, band t-shirts, and tour posters for bands. Ms. Bau- mann has a shared interest in and history of the DIY Indie music culture.
“In 2008 I helped found a well-respected local non-profit, all ages art and music commu- nity space in Olympia and for five years, I served as Gallery Director where I curated, orga- nized, installed and promoted dozens of monthly exhibitions of local, regional and national artists. This project was an integral part of my creative practice for seven years; I strongly believe that art and community are intrinsically entwined and alternative, experimental art spaces are necessary for the arts to flourish and grow.”
Ms. Baumann’s work has been shown nationally in Richmond, Chicago, Knoxville, Port- land, New York City, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. In 2005, she was the recipient of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship in Printmaking. This upcoming March, she has a solo exhibition scheduled of new screen prints and lithographs at Murray State Uni- versity in Kentucky. She has also been invited to lecture about her work and collaborate with students there in the making of an original print edition. In April, she will be working with students at the University of Alabama-Huntsville creating a collaborative lithogra- phy and letterpress artists book.
One can find out more about Ms. Baumann and her work at JudithBaumann.com 10 • {online at thenoise.us} FEBRUARY 2017 | the Noise