Tonight We Make History (P.S. I can’t be there), Blue

Manifold Editions presents four new colourways of Harland Miller’s Tonight We Make History (P.S. I can’t be there), in pink, blue, orange and lilac. These editions are inspired by the title painting of Miller’s 2016 solo exhibition at Blain Southern, Berlin.

Harland Miller’s silver-based works are unique in his practice. To reflect this, the edition has been kept to a limited size of just 25 – also due, in the artist’s own words, to “each one taking about a million f*****g years to make”. These editions couldn’t have been achieved without Miller’s close working relationship with the print studio throughout the process, which, as suggested, is very labour intensive, layering multiple etching plates with silver chine collé and hand finishing, made over time, to evoke the sense of a worn book cover, aged over time.

Miller’s now iconic Penguin book series is characterised, more than any other aspect of the work, by the ‘Titles’, which, when he began the series, distinguished it from being merely a form of appropriation to being that of subversion. The titles break with the unspoken codes in publishing, extant to this day, that restrict what authors can – and cannot – say on a book cover.

Miller says, “Yeah, inside books, Jesus! Think what there is inside them, and yet the titles are always quite anodyne. I made the first one a quarter of a century ago but there’s an endless, I dunno, seam, maybe, or fascination with the relationship between language and imagery, and when I say imagery I’m including abstraction here. The text is always the same, but if the painting changes, that changes the way you read the text. It’s simple but kinda mind-blowing. One of the most powerful ways to effect this is through the use of colour – it can be subtle or unconscious because it’s working in a primal way. Though we might not think so, we still respond to colour in a primal way – as I said, that’s a way that you’re not necessarily conscious of. That’s what I love about this series of prints we’ve been making – these ‘Tonight We Make History’ prints. Y’know the text, people tell me, works for them on a personal level – and making the work in different colourways adds to that personal interpretation. ’Least I imagine it does. It does for me, anyway; and much as I love them, I don’t tend to make these works anymore – I haven’t for a long time actually – but I like to revisit the series through prints. Though saying that, I have no plans to make any more after this, and actually, come to think of it, there’s something in the title ‘Tonight We Make History’ that somehow reflects that.”