iPrintmaking Experience  

Interactive printmaking coming?  

Relying on industrial reports about the growth of online magazines designed for iPads and mobiles, the author forecasts making widely-read printmaking magazine with a different foundation for a superstructure of printmaking and the printmaking experience.

Today’s topic

Consumers—and, like it or not, this includes printmakers—might love reading a printmaking magazine on tablets and mobiles more than they do in their native print-on-paper. I am paraphrasing Mequoda’s Digital Magazine Handbook, a consulting group in Boston which claims to be in partnership with huge online magazines.

They say that, in FOLIO—which is a digital publishing trade magazine, Time Inc. has been researching its subscribers since it launched its app, and those readers say they return to view the same issue close to five times, and spend about 40 minutes with each tablet edition, comparable to the average for printed magazines. Condé Nast—another trade magazine—said their tablet subscribers (including those who are tablet-plus-print subscribers) are renewing their subscriptions at a higher rate than their print-only subscribers; they’re also paying higher prices for their renewal subscriptions.

Who wants an online printmaking magazine?

As I plan for publishing a niche market, online magazine, I am as tiny as a flea among a forest of giants. When I read reports such as those cited by Mequoda and other online industrial figures, I feel slightly insane. With numbers they report—readership in associations, for example, belong to 25,000 to 50,000 member organizations.

In Seattle, we have one print club with a membership of about 100 people. There are about 80 print clubs scattered around the USA, and maybe that many more scattered around the world. At this rate, I can calculate fewer than 10,000 potential readers of an online printmaking magazine like my planned PrintmakingWorld Online.

But wait! Because you are not a member of a printmaking club or workshop does not mean you are not interested in printmaking. My approach to the market size is different. I start from the inside out—from my personal experience over fifty years in printmaking, beginning with my undergraduate course I took when I was twenty years old.

When I calculate this experience and its setting—four-year college or six—and estimate the number of people who attended college-level printmaking classes over two generations, the number grows to 400,000 people in the US alone who would likely be interested in an online printmaking magazine.

Cheaper by the dozen

What I learned in college was that there were at least ten areas of concentration that helped my students advance their careers; after I left college and got deeper into the age of digital reproduction—and the internet—I added video games to the list of forms which descended from printmaking, plus a portal to reach these. There will be 12 magazines in all, all under the name of PrintmakingWorld Online.

 

Illustration: A mock-up of what the landing pages might look like—copied from a page in Folio, the digital publishing trade magazine.

Why isn’t someone doing it?

College-level printmaking courses are taught by people like me, or else these course are taught by people who were like me and are still flummoxed because we college printmaking professor were lying to our students.

I forgive myself, however, because I, too, was taught by a lying art teacher—a man who had been given the job of teaching printmaking even though his expertise was art history. He taught from a book about etching and drypoint, paper lithography using paper plates, and a sign-maker turned art teacher. As a student, I trusted my professors. I didn’t question the notion that printing became an art form thanks to painters and sculptors.

They themselves had been taught the same idea—printmaking is a cousin of painting and drawing. What else could it be? Later, teaching college, I did some digging and, thanks to some informal teaching by people like Stephen Hazel, Rolf Nesch, Stanley W. Hayter and books like those by Ivins, Hayter and Walter Benjamin, I learned that printmaking is about four degrees removed from painting and drawing, but only two degrees from performing arts, literature, theater and all the media.

Handicapper

In his story about handicappers, Kurt Vonnegut described a society where fast runners had to wear sandbags on their ankles so that their special skill at running would not allow them to outshine other people who were less adept at running. Printmaking has suffered a similar treatment in most art schools, tied to drawing and painting and, as a consequent, a minor art form. To my knowledge (admittedly limited insofar I don’t hang out with college people) there are few, if any, college art departments that link the printmaking classes to performance arts.

What I will do with PrintmakingWorld Online is to restore the connection between printmaking and the performance arts. I will invite people who work with their hands and with the aid of machines and devices to search for interesting, creativity, imagination, discoveries and inventions in time and space.

Performance is usually associated with time—repetition, for example, duration, delay and other characteristics that typify music and dance, for example. A printmaker makes a plate, then prints it, and probably prints it again. They make changes in the plate, they change the color of the ink, the paper, or some element in the procedure to build and build their experience and in some way share that experience with their audience. The printmaking engages time, in other words and, thanks to photography and digital media such as the internet, they share their printmaking experience with the world.

Printmakers are handicapped, in my opinion, by four generations (80 years!) of misconstrued meaning of the printmaking medium. However, with a potential of almost half-million users in the United States alone, the PrintmakingWorld Online magazine will work to remove the limitations imposed by the art world that venerates visual arts as if painting and drawing mothered printmaking. I will bring performance to the studio and the open air.