Friday, March 14, 2014

Life after Death  

Where printmaking springs anew  

In the afterglow of seeing his design of the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press appear live on Quirky – the social manufacturing website in New York – the author speculates on what he has witnessed and contrasts it with his view that printmaking is alive and well. 

Bingo!

One of the games I play is to start an essay—an exercise in creative journalism cum blogging—with an overview of what I have written before I write it. Call it an abstract or whatever, but a rule I made up is that this overview or abstract must be exactly 255 characters, including spaces and punctuation. The rule came from another rule I learned about in database design—that any searchable field had to be in this number, 255. It sometimes happen that I get that number in the first try. Then I give myself a “Bingo!”

Printmaking alive

In my fifty years in printmaking, I grew up with the short happy life that this art medium experienced in the 60s and 70s when there was a boom in public interest in hand printmaking. The art form had morphed from a purely commercial reproduction industry that started before the 14th Century, played a decisive role in the industrial revolution in the West and, and then, late in the 19th Century, printmaking was raised to the level of a fine art thanks to numerous painters and sculptors took up making printing plates into their own hands.
By the mid-20th Century—the time of my entry into printmaking with 25 years in college art schools—printmaking was taught all over the world as a fine art equally with painting, drawing and sculpture.
However, things changed in rapid order as technology and economics merged with artist’ studios, their gallery owners and publishers. In a corporate effort, institutions and the private sector turned art collecting into a commodity exchange niche and mass production overtook mass customization.
In my opinion, printmaking was cut off from its ties to authentic creative artistry which I feel is at its best when an artist is at once the creator, crafter, designer and producer of their artworks—in prints or in any other medium. Printmaking requires expensive resources to sustain that, in a perfect world, could be offset by the dozens of people who would buy their art.
From the time printmaking became a fine art in the hands of painters, it was often because the paintings were relatively expensive, whereas a mass customized print, produced in small, limited editions, helped put bread on the artists’ and dealers’ tables.
However, when the artist’s hand-made prints, from their hand-made plates, became commodities perceived as equal to machine mass-produced prints (such as posters, magazines, etc.), at that juncture then printmaking had a setback—about a one-hundred fifty year setback.
Most printmakers today continue to use the old methods set up by publishers to make prints more bankable—things like edition numbers and limited edition prints. Also, most printmakers follow the canon of institutionalized printmakers who were their teachers. I am both a student of these printmakers and I was also one of them as a university professor. Such canon includes large-scale prints that compete in scale and color with paintings.
Competition, too, has become commonplace—from competitive print exhibitions to winning space on art gallery walls. Competition in art is never questioned in the art world; I think the acceptance of competition in art is a result of competition for secure jobs teaching in college. These “plum” jobs—which include having the run of great printmaking facilities, salary, benefits, a retirement plan and a bountiful flow of young, creative artists—are hard to get. Winners have to compete with other faculty to keep the job and gain tenure.
This ambiance creeps into the young artist’s awareness and so it seems this is higher education, knowing what the printmaking world is all about. Woe be unto the printmaking professor who suggests that new technologies—video games, for example—are descended from the ancient days of handprints on cave walls and, therefore, video games should be part of the printmaking curriculum.

Printmaking is dead

In the era of protests in the 1970s, when printmaking was at its apogee in its short happy life as a vibrant art form and presaged the flowering of the art and technology movement, I had an epiphany as some critics declared that art was dead.
Conceptual art was the rage and I made two rubber stamps that said, “printmaking is dead.” One stamp was made the correct way, with the letters running backward so it stamped out the phrase correctly. The other rubber stamp was made (after some resistance from the rubber stamp company who made it to my order) so you could read it, but when you stamped with it, it read backwards. I thought it was hilarious, because if you could make a statement like that in multiple and thus get a larger reading audience, then printmaking was definitely very much alive.
Maybe this qualified as an oxymoron made physical, and completion required the actual stamp pad and something to print it on. My point was—and I was still a printmaking professor at the time—to show students that you can say something is dead, but in saying so, you bring it back to life.
Every time I make a plate or a print now—fifty years after my first drypoint prints and screen prints in college—I am living in the fact that printmaking is alive. However, always at my back I hear the mechanical and digital reproduction boom sounding in my conscious.

Music and printmaking

It is a dilemma in a way, and I settle the dilemma for myself by seeing how printmaking is not only related to painting but that printmaking is related to performing arts, too. By identifying myself with performing artists in any little way that comes to mind as I make plates and prints, I reconnect printmaking to what the art was severed from in college by the compartmentalization of printmaking and painting and the walling-off of the visual arts from the performing arts into separate departments.

Printmaking thus lives on in me.

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