Perfect Storm of Printmaking
Conditions for Seattle Printmaking Center
Preface
In 2000, a film, based on a book by the same title, Perfect Storm was released and the
expression perfect storm has become popular. It means any event where a situation is aggravated drastically by an
exceptionally rare combination of circumstances. It can mean, for
example, a list of meteorological factors that lead to a flood. I am using the
expression to describe a series of seven factors spanning fifty years that may
bring about a new printmaking center in Seattle.
Factor 1 - luck
While I am not the smartest person you will meet, I have been
one of the luckiest. Starting my life as a farm boy was a positive factor in my
ability to study my way off the farm and use artistic skills I inherited from
my mother. My father taught me discipline and with these i was able to get my
bachelor’s and master’s degrees and—what is factor 1—a college teaching job.
Factor 2 - naiveté
In the nineteen years that I was a college teacher I went
from a naive 26-year old instructor—the lowest rank on the academic ladder—to a
naive 43-year old full professor with tenure. In my naiveté, I carried my first
impressions of what higher education means all the way to my resignation from
the University Of Washington. It was my belief that the system was corrupted by
a few university administration people, some faculty, and some students.
Factor 3 - corruption
It is said in Sayre’s Law, that "In any dispute the
intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at
stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics
are so bitter." My bitterness in resigning was not so much the fact that
my research in art, technology, and emerging globalization was stymied by art
school politics as it was in the opportunities that were showing up all around
the Pacific Northwest. From Oregon to British Columbia, new technologies useful
to artists were inviting and open to exploration.
Factor 4 - students
In the ten years before I resigned, I had a decade to work
with students who, like me, frustrated with the art school dogma, nepotism,
male chauvinism and rigid curricula. It was the height of protest in the United
States with issues that included civil rights, the Vietnam conflict,
assassinations and government corruption. The fourth factor in my “perfect
storm” was the intellectual and ethical expressions my students were involved
in; I was swept up in their curiosity as to what the new technologies and new
artistic movements might offer them for their careers in art. They graduated
and went on to prove their point by being successful on their own terms, not
the terms of the schools of art.
Factor 5 - restraint
For ten more years I struggled to find ways to make a living
for my family by applying what I had been teaching in college. The system was
against me, however, because technology continued to be anathematic to the
existing art museum and gallery atmosphere. For awhile, alternative art
galleries gave artists some space and time—notably And/Or and COCA—but the art
medium I believe to be the root of all new art and technology developments (which
is printmaking) continued to be restricted to traditional printmaking, thanks
to the UW School Of Art, which was putting printmaking back in its pre-war
level as being a minor art.
Factor 6 - internet
The internet opened up in 1994, and my cocoon period ended
because with the internet I could apply what I had learned in college. The
globalization I witnessed when I went around the world on my fact-finding
mission of 1983 could now be realized. I took what I learned in school from my
students, who by now were successful mid-career professionals, and architected
a curriculum around printmaking as the nexus of new technologies. I put a high
value on the intellectual side of artistic creativity, discovery, imagination
and invention and made it an imaginary place I named Emeralda, referring to the
emerald region spanning Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.
Factor 7 – Halfwood PressGhost
Researching the term perfect
storm in Wikipedia, I found: “The
first use of the expression in the meteorological sense comes from the March
20, 1936, issue of the Port Arthur News in Texas: "The weather bureau
describes the disturbance as ‘the perfect storm’ of its type. Seven factors
were involved in the chain of circumstances that led to the flood." (My
italics). Seven is a good number to stop on, and Factor 7 is the press I
designed I call the Halfwood. By adding the flash memory drive so I could put
my ghost in this new machine, it is more than an etching press; I borrowed the
term platform from the digital
technology industry and I applied it to what this etching press really is—a platform
for both intellectual, artistic, learning and communal pursuits.
Bases for a Seattle Printmaking Center
Since 1966 when I came to Seattle, I have wanted to be part
of a printmaking community which had both a clearly beneficial position in
Seattle and a fluid, creative core. In that year, the Northwest Printmakers
Society was slowly shutting down—for reasons I am still not sure of but
probably because of a lack of money. That organization re-emerged in Portland
about ten years later because Gordon Gilkey—the city’s most ardent advocate for
traditional printmaking—cultivated the idea successfully.
Traditional printmaking clubs and workshops are located in
major cities—and some out-of-the-way places—around the world. However, when I
visited them in 1983, they were moribund, often empty rooms with plenty of
space and equipment but few people actually working there. Sometimes, but
rarely, I found foreign printmaking workshops were dabbling in things like
video and computer graphics and this gave me the evidence I needed to transform
printmaking back home in Seattle.
It is not only money that keeps printmaking organizations
from becoming important community centers, it is a backward-looking policy, a
fondness for hands-on, old timey crafts similar to what you see in weaving,
ceramics, and other crafts centers. Tourists visit these centers to see how
things used to be done, or clubs form around resurrecting the old days of war,
agricultural practices, and entertainment. Experience is key to the success of
these centers.
A Seattle Printmaking Center would combine the seven factors
above, which would culminate in the printing press platform for using digital
technologies to be both teacher and stage for the artists who use the
Halfwoods. The presses are gateways or portals to bigger worlds, yet they are
simultaneously a beautiful functional instrument for the art, craft and design
of printmaking for the 21st Century.
Best of all, the Seattle Printmaking Center would also be a
factory school located in a place like the Pike Place Market redevelopment where
people learn all about printmaking while they produce the cash-cow of the
center—Halfwood Presses.
No comments:
Post a Comment