Ken Aptekar

In his own parlance, Ken Aptekar (b. 1950) investigates the nature of spectatorship. In that pursuit, he is firmly committed to the “beholder’s share,” a concept that references the viewer’s experience of the work of art. “The beholder’s share” ideated in art theory, first intimated by late 19th-centruy art historian Alois Riegl and developed in the early 20th century by his storied acolytes, psychoanalyst Ernst Kris and art historian Ernst Gombrich. According to Riegl, the viewer and the artist partner in the creative process. The full fruition of a work demands viewer participation, based on sensory reaction, imagination, and memory. On that basis, art is dynamic, elastically reforming from individual to individual—the more open-ended, the larger the “beholder’s share” is. Kris boldly asserted that a work of art’s greatness lies in its ambiguity.

Despite Aptekar’s allegiance to the “beholder’s share,” he seemingly avoids ambiguity with a reliance on text and appropriation. His work resounds with specificity as he openly “re-creates” historical paintings then overlays the imagery with calligraphed phrases. But these self-described “mash-ups” defy the literal. The superimposition of words over pictures does not congeal into an objective narrative. Quite the contrary, the abrupt juxtaposition sparks a visual dissonance that cajoles the viewer to subjectively construct their own narrative, prompted by the image-text combination. In ceding autonomy of interpretation to the viewer, Aptekar invites the beholder to share.

As Aptekar explores viewer interaction, he develops the intricacies of medium and technique. A native of Detroit, he earned a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute in 1975. Early in his career, Aptekar reverentially and assertively re-created iconic works of art. He approaches appropriation not as a painter but as a conceptualist who “uses” painting. His action engenders a “dialogue” with established artists through which Aptekar can discover and convey his own immersive experience while he brings the viewer into the conversation. To enhance the conversation while challenging standard technical processes, he bolts plate-glass surfaces inscribed with text onto the plywood substrate of the re-created oil painting. Often startlingly incongruous, the counterpoint of the linguistic and the visual inevitably challenges and seduces the viewer.

This provocative hybridity is the basis of Aptekar’s 2024 publication print for the Print Club of Cleveland, Hit Parade. The print’s matrix began as a 2020 illuminated manuscript created by the artist in his improvised “scriptorium,” a walled-off furnace room in his home in Burgundy, France. The project consumed Aptekar during the forced isolation brought about by COVID. Working in gouache with tiny brushes, gold leaf, and calligraphy pens, he mastered Textura typeface, a complex black-letter script harkening back to the Gothic era. Coincidentally, Aptekar came upon an essay emanating from a recent retrospective of the art of Philip Guston. The collision of Textura and the controversial Abstract Expressionist Guston catalyzed the trigger that Aptekar relishes in his creative process. He readily repurposed Guston’s Scroll (1978), a monochromatic oil painting in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection. Scroll is ostensibly an expression of Guston’s hidden Jewish identity. Aptekar miniaturized the painting’s monumental confession as a simulated Instagram post on a smartphone screen, which he reiterated for the superimposition of text articulating his own perplexed reaction to Scroll. He has expounded on his visual “conversation” with Guston:

The mix of techniques and visual tropes associated with illuminated manuscripts and with social media posting—in this case, Instagram—provided a metaphor for the creation of a dynamic identity that develops and changes over time. Instagram gives users posting photographs various choices of color tonality, contrast, etc., each with its own name. With these picture editing tools that Instagram offers, my hybrid manuscript/Instagram post could echo the many choices one faces in crafting an identity out of one’s family history, desires, physical appearance, and experiences growing up. Guston’s choices in his early years and then many years later in making Scroll exemplify in concrete and personal ways this dynamic. If I were asked to identify what is at the center of contemporary art in early 21st-century art, I would say, “Identity.”

The Print Club of Cleveland offered Aptekar the opportunity to perpetuate the conversation with Guston in an editioned print. He ambitiously explored the possibility of combining three distinct media: digital archival inkjet, reprising the painting part of the manuscript; slightly embossed letterpress for the text; and gold and silver leaf. Adamant that the print be of comparable scale and seamlessly coincide with the concept of the illuminated manuscript interposed on the appropriation of the Guston, Aptekar collaborated with Martin Christian and Frédéric Lepetz at the Atelier du Livre d’Art et de l’Estampe in Paris, a division of the Imprimerie Nationale de France and fully operational since its founding in 1640. Very much of the 21st century, the atelier expertly employs state-of-the-art archival inkjet printing, perfecting the electronic transmission of digitized information to a printer while accommodating the letterpress and the gold and silver leaf. Christian and Lepetz were sensitive to the inherent conceptual irony effected by Aptekar in Hit Parade, his merging the age-old laborious techniques of illuminated manuscripts with the instantaneous digital of social media as either an expression or a denial of identity. The beholder, in claiming a share, decides.

For more information on the work of Ken Aptekar, visit https://kenaptekar.net/.

Hit Parade, the Print Club of Cleveland publication print no. 102 for 2024. Letterpress, gold and silver leaf over archival inkjet on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper; 22 x 22 in. Printed by Atelier du Livre d’Art et de l’Estampe (Studio for Art Books and Prints), a division of the Imprimerie Nationale de France (French National Printing Service)

Darlene G. Michitsch