Michael Miller: Graphic Pantomimes
Michael Miller finds his images in the vastness of our visual record. He is a scavenger
and recycler not only of available images and ideas, but also of processes and his own
inventions. A Professor of Print Media for forty-plus years, within the body of his printed
oeuvre, Miller has employed traditional as well as photomechanical methods of
printmaking, but also produced singular works on paper that are combinations of these
processes. Indeed, his career trajectory parallels the greatest expansion and acceptance of
print vocabularies in history, making his hybrid objects which commingle traditional and
industrial technology mirrors of what is possible in and expected of works on paper
today. Most recently, in his Voices series seen here, he has combined various media
without regard to foregrounding traditions of printmaking practice. Yet, at the same time,
the present work references historical styles of artists whose work often was disseminated
in the popular press—satirical artists and political cartoonists such as Saul Steinberg,
Robert Crumb, and especially the great editorial artists of the late-18th and early-19th
centuries, whose work appeared in the early manifestations of a daily newspaper.
Like his exemplars, Miller finds his subject in the power struggles that exist between
classes of people—authority—as well as those that exist internally—imagined, or
constructed, but based on lived experience. His tools reference common drawing
techniques, such as hatched and crossed-hatched linear patterns (Angleheads), grids
composed of dots which ground the compositions, and repetitions of lines in arabesque
that he uses to create hilarious parodies of mental states (Headchain, Loopman, and
Yellowheads, for example).
Moreover, just as Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein fetishized the look of half-tone
dots used in reproduction, Miller shows here that he is a connoisseur of line qualities. The
artists who he admires employ lines to define their subjects’ appearance, mental state, as
well as poke fun at or criticize their attributes or presumed status and authority. In the
Voices works, what appear to be hand-drawn, autographic lines are often cut, scanned,
copied, or otherwise resized from an original mark. This imparts various twists of
meaning from a tentative, vulnerable state to a sarcastic, self-parodying exposé.
Perhaps even more devastatingly witty is Miller’s use of corporate graphing concepts to
organize the compositions in Bubbleheads and Headstring. Often used to mind-numbing
effect in lectures by people who know less about the subject than those being lectured to,
one can well imagine that the artist has suffered through countless meetings in which
charts of this type are used to quantify ineffable ideas. Sadly, in today’s world, most of us
can relate to this terror in the conference room experience. Thus inspired, in Voices,
Miller has created a suite of sarcastic yet appealing visual equivalents for painful
commonplaces of contemporary life—in the workplace, and in the mind.
Mark Pascale
Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings
The Art Institute of Chicago